John Saul writes thrillers, and I'm not familiar with his work, although I recognised some titles when I did a bibliography search. Even though I don't know the guy, and I imagine we don't have very much in common (particularly since he's published and I'm, you know, not), I think I understand that feeling of being completely inequal to the work I am about to do.
I suspect that unlike most people, I don't just feel this way about big things, like writing a 500-page novel. I feel this way about almost everything I have to do in life. A task always looks so much bigger to me before I begin it. Sometimes it looks so big that I sometimes can't bring myself to begin it.
Over the last 30 years, I have begun more novels than I care to think about. I have finished only two of them, and one of them is twenty years better than the other. That doesn't mean it's good enough to be published, and I am beginning to fear that it really may not be, but that's a topic for another day.
Sylvia Louise Engdahl, who wrote some books I loved as a teenager and then had a number of them republished a few years ago, says that the great mystery is not why she stopped writing books for publication, but why she was able to write books at all.
Over the years, with my first notebooks and then computer files worth of novel ideas, character sketches, location sketches, moved from notebook to notebook to computer to computer to PDA to computer and back again so many times, I've wondered if that wasn't true for me as well. Maybe I just couldn't write books, couldn't write novels, wasn't cut out for it, should stick to songwriting. And then one year my husband got sent to Singapore on secondment and my son and I tagged along. The secondment lasted four and a half months, and I really hated Singapore, felt exposed and foreign there, and just didn't find a way to fit in or feel at home.
On the first of May, 2005, my husband, son and I went to a used book sale at the expo centre in Singapore, and we came away with a ton of stuff. The exchange rate was so good and the books were so cheap! One of the things we left with, a book I didn't even blog about at the time, was Natalie Goldberg's Thunder and Lightning. Natalie Goldberg is a sort of writer's writer. Her book Writing Down the Bones was one of the textbooks used in my college creative writing classes, and I still have my college edition of the book, torn and dog-eared and loved and carried around for years, through moves all over the US and then the world. Writing Down the Bones is about writing practise as meditation, and it's a great creativity spark, along with a whole bunch of other things I discovered in my 20s and still use today. But Thunder and Lightning is about plotting novels. Or at least it was about plotting novels to me. There are other things one could take away from the book, but I took away the essential elements of what someone like me, who started my writing life wanting to write novels but turned into a poet somewhere along the way and then a songwriter, needs to write a book, from start to finish, what needs to happen inside a book.
You can study literature for years, read books voraciously for years, and not know what that thing is. And I don't know if I can tell you what it is. But it's something about plotting and pacing and having an idea in mind of where things are going before you get there. When you come out of poetry, or even songwriting, places where all is sometimes revealed in the all-important last line, or the bridge is your exposition, pacing is less important: a three-minute song may have most of the elements of hundred-thousand word novel in miniature, but stretching those elements without making them go on forever, making action happen without going over the top, those are things you just can't figure out without doing them.
I'm glad I wrote a crap novel in my twenties that convinced me I shouldn't be writing novels at that point in my life. I'm glad I got that out of my system and started living and learning to think of writing as something I loved to do and would love to do more of, rather than something I got to do all the time as a university student. I didn't appreciate writing time as a kid, and I almost didn't appreciate it in Singapore. We arrived in Singapore in February, and it took me until the end of May, twenty-nine days after I bought Thunder and Lightning, to figure out that what I was supposed to be doing in Singapore was writing a novel. I mean, sure, I got a lot of knitting work done, but in our last month in Singapore, I wrote twenty-two thousand words. That's thirty thousand less than you nanowrimo people, but I'm not really sure that I'd have produced anything of quality with thirty thousand more words to play with. And it was a good foundation for something that, a little more than a year later, had become a hundred and five thousand word novel, for real. With a plot and a villain and conflicts and everything!
I wrote an outline. I did. It was sketchy, but I wrote an outline. I defined my villain as strongly as I could ahead of the game. I had huge questions about how the book would end; it was almost a choose-your-own-adventure in my head. Protagonist could choose option a and get ending a, or option b and get b ending, etc. In the end, I took a couple of weeks and produced a timeline. Before long, I was sitting down to write with not a word count but a plot goal in mind. "Today, I will write until the refrigerator falls from the sky and hits Jake on the head," for (lame) example. My goal for each session was to get to the next bend in the plot road. Thinking about it, that is a good way for me to structure a novel, I think. Even if the outline is written only a few days before the story itself, it still gives a guideline. Even if the plot synopsis is sketchy, there's still a map to follow. Of course, when the first draft was finished, I had to go through and add things and edit for continuity and smoothness and all that stuff, and I've spent what feels like the last six months agonising over the first five pages, but I hear lots of people do that. Right now, in between sending query letters and sample chapters off to agents (and invariably hearing nothing, except for one very bad experience), I'm tightening dialogue and descriptions and hoping these improvements will make the book more palatable to the people who have to matter right now.
At the same time, I'm starting to feel depressed about the whole thing: why did I bother writing a whole book about such a ridiulous subject, particularly when academics on the subject can't stand the kind of thing I'm writing about? And at the same time I'm busily mulling over the plot of another book centred around the same place and characters (but not a sequel).
In a world of formulas, I suppose I need to find one if I'm going to succeed as a writer. Writing 500,000 pages fifteen pages at a time isn't a bad place to start, when you think about it. Neither, I suppose, is the ubiquitous thousand-word-a-day plan that some authors embrace. Getting focused, of course, is half the battle, and I'll tell you something else: procrastinating is part of that focus for me. Writing things like this blog entry counts as what I think of as "productive procrastination." So does cleaning up my desk, or streamlining the sweeping timeline of my setting, or finding a character sketch template I like and using it to determine who the protagonist of novel number two (yes, but we don't talk about that other one) should be.
I'm going to ask anybody reading this to outline their process for me at the end of this entry, so let me try to put mine down in words. I'll skip the germination and idea stages, since those are the things we all have in common: you look at a tree and you think, that tree looks like it has a face; I wonder what kind of a person it would make-- and then your brain just goes off. So, with an idea already in hand, here's how it went for this book.
- Identify main characters
- Identify villain
- Sketch characters
- Find villain's motivation
- Find conflict
- Find climax/crisis
- Discover how the story ends
- Make a sketchy outline of all that
- Start writing
- Refine outline
- Keep writing
- Continue refining outline
- Concentrate on writing to the plot
- Finish first draft
- Tie up loose ends
- Add colour and interest where things are sparse
- Streamline prose and tighten up loose writing
- Ask people to read
- Start sending out query letters and sample chapters.
And in my case, that's where the story ends, as nobody in the business has expressed even the slightest interest in what I'm writing, except for one extremely negative response.
What's your process? C'mon; fess up. It's not like anybody is really reading this. ;-)
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