Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger
October’s Open Mike has arrived! Chat amongst yourselves, brag, ask questions, complain about your WIPs, whatever you want. I am basking in the knowledge that I am in between the rough draft and the editorial revisions, so I actually have time for a few other things…
I have been very busy at work so all the writing is going in the small notebook in my backpack–writing mostly on buses and trains and in meetings.
Last night I thought I’d look at the main manuscript. Chapters 1-3, okay. The file labeled Chapter 4 is…a bunch of pieces of dialog, mostly, which have no coherent chronology–I think they may actually be mutually incompossible. Nothing resembling a through-line. Why on Earth did I put those in a chapter file?
The notebook is probably on Chapter 6 but there are pieces missing. I wrote one of the missing pieces last night and have an uneasy feeling that the way it came out requires the characters to take action a lot quicker than they are shown as doing in already written downstream material.
Why don’t I write in order?! I mean, I know I can, I have one novel where I did. But never before or since.
Who knows? I know of a number of writers who don’t write in order, but I myself can’t because it’s like working without a sound foundation for me.
[looks at sand crumbling under her toes]
Well, you aren’t wrong! But somehow that’s how they get written.
I had no idea what happened after the Ambassador was poisoned until I wrote those thousand or two words apparently set months later. Writing those got me unstuck. But now I have to make them link up. And I will, but some grumbling’s going to occur en route.
This is why I eventually taught myself to write in order. Which I mostly do. Except when I don’t….
Also, “mutually incompossible” is my new favorite phrase.
I’ve published again! Writing And Reflections, volume 1, my collected essays.
amazon here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FRNT6WBK
More details, and locations, here:
https://writingandreflections.substack.com/p/release-day
But if you have a favorite venue, I did go wide on Draft2Digital, so just look.
Congratulations! I’ve enjoyed reading them and think they should make a fine book.
Thank you!
Congratulations on finishing the rough draft. 🙂
Well, I finally had an idea that made my backbrain sit up and take notice. But it wasn’t a story. It was a card game. I’ve been working on that for about the last year. I’m planning to submit it to a contest that runs through October and November. Not because I think I’ll win but because a bunch of game publishers view the submissions and I’m hoping one might be interested in my game.
Also between rough draft and revisions on my second book!! Just in time for big personal life stuff that will mean not writing for a while anyway, so the timing is perfect.
Curious about people’s thoughts on natural length. Mine seems to be the novella (first work was 26k and second is just under 50k) which is awkward for doing anything with in traditional publishing (and I am not cut out for self publishing). I could keep writing them just for fun… or could try to stretch myself to write longer books? The problem seems to be that I am a pantser and, well, the plots I come up with on the fly tend to be fairly simple. Which is fine at a shorter length but I don’t seem to have the planning skills needed for a long novel. I also lose interest in writing once I know what’s going to happen, which seems not ideal for writing complex plots… my biggest strength is description and atmosphere, which suits my style of making things up as I go very well but also doesn’t seem like enough for a real book.
It took me three stabs at A Diabolical Bargain to get it up to normal novel length. (And then I self-pubbed.)
Look for subplots
Could you do 2-3 connected novellas, same setting/characters but different plots? I just finished Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, and that’s basically what it is; there’s a thematic through-line connecting the three parts, but they’re really separate stories.
I also lose interest in writing once I know what’s going to happen, which seems not ideal for writing complex plots…
Right there with you, FWIW. Been there on each of the five novels I’ve completed, and deep, deep in slogging through it right now for #6.
As a fellow pantser, I will say that complex plots may be something that comes with more experience. Seems to be working that way for me, anyway.
Rose — I’ve had some success with novellas published as e-books; the electronic format makes length less relevant than with hardcopy publication. The novella form seems especially well-suited to genre romance; the typical courtship sequence is too long for a short story but isn’t always long enough for a novel.
Personally, I mostly tend to think in terms of novel-length plots, but I haven’t actually had enough experience in writing them to have a good sense of why that is. (I don’t think my six-page first-grade “novels,” which I turned up recently in a memorabilia box, quite count. ;))
I also have. The thing is that you must make the leap to indie for that.
Also, collections sell better than short works. Even a novella and a short story.
Yay for the done draft!
My housemate is out of town for a couple weeks, so I’m having a little staycation-writing-retreat. Out of nine days so far, I have managed exactly one writing day. *headdesk* Which wouldn’t feel so bad if the yardwork or the kitchen micro-remodel or any of the other tasks had gotten done, but nooooo. Time, what even is it?
Meanwhile, I don’t see how the WIP that was 30K from the end can possibly get done in less than 50K words. Why can’t novels just say “And then these five things happened, and now on to the juicy bit at the end”?
My wife had a stroke a few weeks ago. She was completely incapacitated while it was happening, and said later that if I hadn’t been home, she probably would have died. (No hero here, I just called 911, and avoided panicking. On the outside.)
The good news is she has recovered all but completely; they got the “clotbuster” drug into her in time. She’s out gallivanting around like she always did.
Me, I’m still writing, though I’m not quite sure how. Or even why.
Oh excellent. May good things proceed apace!
Oh wow. Let’s hear it for prompt medical response!
(And not panicking on the outside is what counts. You can always have a meltdown when the crisis is over.)
It probably means I’m a horrible person, but my second thought was “That’ll be good raw material for writing a scene where….”
Thank you both.
And, yeah, it will make good raw material…someday. A little too “raw” right now, if you know what I mean.
(I did use recovery from undergoing surgery with a scope to write a scene for someone with a puncture wound. But I find my own afflictions much easier to deal with than a loved one’s.)
I am so glad the outcome was good. If writing through it helps you cope, don’t worry about the whys, just do it. Wait a while to look back at it, though. Sometimes, negative life events attach themselves emotionally to whatever you were writing at the time, which makes them feel horrible when you look back at them later, even if they’re actually pretty good.
Fortunately I had a novel draft about 80% done before it happened, so the narrative is carrying me…I think. 😉 I’ll know better when I revise it, at some point.
Meanwhile, excellent advice as always, and thank you. I try to separate how I feel about my story craftsmanship from how my life was going during the writing. I hope I can keep that up.
Random question: I was recently recommending the Frontier Magic series to a friend, and noticed that it wasn’t available on Kindle anymore; just on Audible. While I’m a fan of the narration as well, it’s easier to convince someone to take a chance on the ebook.
Are these available as ebooks anywhere? Or will they become available again?
Right now, they’re not. Hopefully, they will be again, but business contract stuff always seems to move slowly, so I don’t know when.
I hit a wall in my novel I’m not supposed to be writing that is no longer in the intended subgenre but finally hig the key fundamental character difference last night that I needed to write / revise their arc.
Practice drafts. This is the most winging it longer fiction I’ve written in ages, though it’d be a flat fail if I tried to write it in order, so I’m happy that I do the out of order thing too. The guideposts and telling characterization bits I needed do not happen sequentially up front at all.
In fact, I’ll probably write most of thd opening material last, so I know what I actually need for the setup.