Graphic by Peg Ihinger
There are two basic kinds of stretchy writing projects: the deliberate ones and the accidental ones.
The deliberate ones are, well, deliberate. The writer knows they have a weak spot, or a particular technique that they’ve never tried, so they deliberately design a project that’s going to use it. I did this a lot when I was getting started–Shadow Magic was my first novel, so everything was stretchy/new, but Daughter of Witches was a deliberate first attempt at a tight-third viewpoint; Talking to Dragons was “OK, how is first-person different?”; The Seven Towers was trying alternating viewpoint characters in a fixed, every-other-chapter structure; The Harp of Imach Thyssel was my first try at multiple viewpoint; Caught in Crystal was about figuring out flashbacks.
The accidental ones tend to sneak up on me. I have an idea for a project that is just soooo cool; I dive into it with enthusiasm…and somewhere along the line I discover that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew for some unexpected reason. (Or sometimes for an expected reason–one of the things in the “Someday Ideas” folder is a science fiction thing that’s about three paragraphs hanging in a void. It needs a lot of development before it can progress, and I’ve never been able to muster the energy to develop an SF universe and plotline, even though I really like those paragraphs.)
The very first time I ran into that was with The Seven Towers, which was supposed to be about doing two different characters as POV, in order to stretch at doing different character voices. About six chapters in, I realized that I also needed to synchronize the plotlines, which meant slowing down events in one and speeding up events in the other, so that they’d come out even. It was a lot more difficult than I anticipated. (I ended up rearranging a lot of geography to cut travel time for one character, so that he wouldn’t show up six months late to the climax.)
Accidentally stretchy projects can be hard to recognize up front. In at least three cases, I knew the thing was going to be stretchy, but I drastically underestimated how stretchy. There have been others where, as with The Seven Towers, I only realized partway through that something I took for granted as “I can do that” was nowhere near as obvious or easy as I was sure it was going to be.
And then there are the projects where I was blindsided by something that never occurred to me. The first of those was Snow White and Rose Red. I knew I wanted to set the retelling in Elizabethan England, and I thought doing the dialog in Elizabethan English would be cool. I worked very hard to get it correct. And initially, almost everyone who read it hated the dialog. The complaints boiled down to it being inaccessible. It took forever to get the balance to a point where the characters still sounded like Elisabethans, but were still acceptably understandable to most readers (and there are still some who disagree).
The moral of all this reminiscing is, first, that most of the time, one doesn’t recognize “stretchy” unless one is looking for it or planning it, and second, that even if one is looking, one may not be looking in the right place until the stretchiness comes out of nowhere and bites. At which point, one has only two choices: either figure out what needs to be done and how to do it, or set the project aside. (If the project is under contract, one pretty much has to figure it out and get it finished).
On the other hand, if one doesn’t look at all, stretchy can come as an unpleasant surprise. There’s a decided difference between “I’m in the middle of this book and nothing looks right and I don’t know what comes next and I’ve forgotten how to do this and I want to write a different shiny idea instead, AAARGH” (which is perfectly normal) and “I’m in the middle of this book and OMG, I have to do this thing, and I’ve never done it before, and I have no idea how to pull it off…I don’t think I have the chops for this.” Even if, emotionally, they feel sort of the same at first.
The earlier in a project one is when one realizes that it’s going to be stretchier than expected, the easier it usually is to cope with. Sometimes, one can tweak the project so it will be less stretchy. Other times, just being braced for things to get hard in a few more chapters gives one’s backbrain time to adjust. (This doesn’t mean it won’t still be hard, just that it’s less likely to cause panic, desperation, or depression when it does.) If one is sure of exactly how something is going to be stretchy, one can even set aside time to study the needed skill set.
The main thing, though, is accepting the facts: a) this project is suddenly stretchier than expected, b) so it’s going to take longer than expected, and c) which almost certainly means a lot of rewriting (major rewriting!) will be necessary. That last one tends to be my downfall–I hate rewriting (or cutting) scenes that, under other circumstances, would be perfectly fine (just not here/now/in this project), and I hate writing “practice” drafts.
Sometimes, though, a “practice draft” is the only way to go, and when that’s true, it’ll happen whether you like it or not. I find it a lot easier to accept when I’m doing it on purpose, rather than struggling through the scene/chapter/section that I think is going to be the rough draft, only to realize that I’m going to have to start over again. More on that in the next post.
The protagonist of book 1 is a politically detached introvert. She knows everyday technology of her era (I think it might be around year 2400-2500) but isn’t very interested in most of it. And then the last 2/3 of the book is set on an alien planet.
As a result 95% of my worldbuilding was the alien planet and society. I called protag’s zoo the National Zoo without thinking much about it, because I was at our National Zoo when I first had the idea.
Book 2…is about whether the aliens and humans can come to terms and make some sort of peace. It did not dawn on me immediately that this requires worldbuilding on Earth even though the story never goes there. But it does, oh my gosh it does. One thing I discovered is that it cannot be the National Zoo, because “national” is a bad word. It’s the zoo of the North American Directorate, which resists being made into a nice name.
I think I knew this when Ryan demanded to know who the secret agent was working for, and I realized that even if the guy would tell, he couldn’t tell, because I had no ruddy idea! (That got me a couple pages’ backstory for secret agent guy, which I quite like; but I still don’t have a complete answer to who he’s working for.)
I need to decide things like “does mentioning AI make it sound trendy and shallow? Conversely, does ignoring it make it sound outdated and unrealistic?”
Also things like “How many Jumpships does Earth have, and how are they armed?”
Name the zoo after a significant historical figure, and work in a sentence or two of worldbuilding-backstory to go with it?
Name it after a zoological concept?
Come up with some really bureaucracy-heavy, overly-long, or pretentious name, and then shorten it to what everybody calls it? (Chicago’s “The Bean” is actually named something like “Cloud Gate”; absolutely nobody calls it that, and even the artist has finally come around to the nickname.)
For the spy, I’m fond of agencies that are off-book enough that it’s never spelled out exactly who they work for, but that may or may not work for your story.
Can you “grandfather” the name of the National Zoo in your world-building? “Yes, ‘National’ is a Bad Word, but it’s tolerated as a fossil in ‘National Zoo’ because that usage is so old.”
I’m experiencing that I don’t do or like practice drafts but this story keeps demanding them. Urgh.
I also hate writing “practice drafts” — seems like wasted effort. I only do it when it’s unavoidable. In one case, I tried writing the “reveal” scene five different ways because I couldn’t think of any other way to figure out which would be most effective. But at least it was only a single scene!
Queen Shulamith’s Ball was a gleeful experiment in using omniscient viewpoint and no scene breaks.
OTOH, come to think of it, A Diabolical Bargain crept up on me, pretending to be a novelette, before it revealed itself as novel length. It took me years to write, including years on the backburner (twice), while I mastered the novel form on other works.
No scene breaks, wow! How did that feel to write?
It was fun! Whenever one viewpoint had nothing more interesting, I shifted to something else nearby.
I’ve found in the last few years that if I don’t stretch myself somehow, I lose interest in the work and it never gets written/finished. It’s been an interesting phenomenon.
So far, my brain has not handed me the kind of ideas where I could *choose* to do things like pick single or multiple POV. I’m most of the way through an urban fantasy novel which is in multiple POV, and I always conceived of it as such. I don’t think I could re-write it to be single POV, certainly not without radical reworking. I have one half-finished sci-fi novel that I originally thought was in single-POV close-third, then realised it needed a second POV to lighten the tone (the main character is an undercover agent going slowly crazy, and letting her POV carry the whole thing would make for very depressing reading).
I’m curious about the process that lets you decide eg you’re now going to try multiple viewpoint. Do you decide that first then come up with a plot? Or is it more like considering which of several pre-existing ideas you want to write and deciding that you’ll do the one that already requires multiple viewpoint?
Book 1 of WIP was unquestionably tight third on a single POV, and I never even considered alternatives.
Book 2, though, could have been alternating chapters of Ryan and Nithya, or at least I thought so when I started. That kind of sounded fun, and a good stretch. But I wrote a Ryan scene, and another, and another, and realized that no, it wasn’t. I try not to pick fights with my story unless I really have to. (Also Nithya’s POV is probably much harder to write, due to the ambiguity between individual and hive.)
The current WIP is definitely of the snuck-up-on-me kind of stretchy.
Some of it is simply that I’m having to be more analytical than is my wont. For example, I need a bigger cast for the ending to work, so I’m having to deliberately create characters, when normally they just wander into my head fully-formed. And I’m measuring out their introductions so that I don’t end up dumping a whole horde of people in at once Because The Plot Said So, which means I’m watching the pacing/structure a lot more carefully, when usually I’ll just do things whenever it feels right.
There’s also a lot more threads in play than I anticipated for something as surface-simple as “man survives Apocalypse”. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them all plot threads, but they’re definitely concepts in play throughout the novel. So I have to keep the theology discussions balanced against the practical necessities, and time them so that the one supports or feeds off of the other. I introduced an additional outside threat that I planned to do more with, ended up dropping, and am going to have to weave back in PDQ before it becomes a broken promise to the reader. There’s a character with a Secret, who spends the first two-thirds of the book saying things that everybody takes one way, but that the character and I know mean something else entirely. (That part’s been fun; cue evil author cackle of glee.) I’m having to do more set-up than I’m used to for the ending, because none of the characters know what’s coming so none of them are actively working toward it, but several of them are unknowingly doing things that will contribute to it. Having to hide the plot from all the characters is definitely a new thing for me.
Looking at it like this, none of these things are supremely stretchy for me (except maybe hiding the plot from the characters). But trying to do a whole bunch of moderately-stretchy things at the same time definitely adds up. And here I thought I just had a nice little trying-not-to-die-in-a-devastated-world story. (No, seriously, I thought this one was going to be relatively easy.)
It’s definitely taking longer, too. Not so much in time (I’m always slow) but in word count. I’m at 80,000 words right now; my natural length is usually 80-90,000. This sucker’s got at least 30K more words to go, maybe more, and I’ve been saying that for at least the past 10,000 words now. The more I work on it, the farther from the end I get. So the little voice in the back of my brain saying “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” is not helping.
And of course all this is coming to a head at about the two-thirds point, which is where I usually bog down on a novel anyway. I know what happens, I don’t care any more, can rocks just fall and everybody dies? This has nothing to do with the quality of the story and everything to do with the writer, but it’s hard enough to slog through even when the path forward is relatively, er, straightforward. When I have to keep jumping between multiple paths and keeping them all in sync and this is hard work, dammit, it’s awfully easy to decide the yardwork is a higher priority.
I feel this last part! My current project is stretchy on purpose (in voice) but I also always bog down around 80% of the way through. Like at this point I know what’s going to happen – so why do I have to keep writing it???
I know, right? It’s perfectly obvious what happens from here, so the reader can figure it out for themselves, can’t they? (It’s not and they can’t.)
One trick I’ve found useful is to assign roles. The Olympians are handy: this one is like Apollo, that one is like Dionysus, the other one like Zeus.
I wrote a very downbeat half-scene that starts right after a meal with the discovery that Nithya’s just been poisoned, and goes downhill from there.
A month later I wrote a very upbeat half-scene about the hatching-out of Nithya’s new sisters. It probably ends with her feeling homesick and sharing a meal with the protagonist to cheer herself up.
It then occurred to me that these two half-scenes are in fact the two ends of one scene. Followed by a visceral “that’s too mean!” reaction. I can’t remember ever having this particular problem before. Both of these scenes happen, for sure, but do they happen together like that? I don’t usually think about reader reaction a whole lot when I’m writing. But here I feel I have to. It seems to be, among other things, a love story. And that is definitely a stretch.