Category: writing

Zachary had a bit of a rough night last night and so I didn’t get to sleep until 1:30am.  Even then, I slept on-and-off until about 4:55 when, bleary-eyed, I finally got up and came downstairs.  I poured a glass of orange juice and then sat down in front of the computer and got started on Chapter 3.

I surprised myself in a couple of ways this morning.  Tired as I was, I thought I was going to slog through the session this morning, barely making the 1,667 word pace.  I needn’t have feared.  I hit 1,700 words just after 6am, passed my 2,000 word goal around 6:20am and I finished up the morning, completing all of chapter 3 which came in at 2,504 words.  For 3 days in a row I have consistently surpassed my mark.

I also surprised myself this morning by making my first significant divergence from my outline.  That is to say that while the chapter followed what I had outlined, it became much more of an action scene than I expected and the events that took place were not events that I’d covered in the outline.  And while they got me to the same place, I think they gave it more depth and realism.  And also some possibilities that I hadn’t considered.  This is one instance where the character in the scene is smarter than the writer of the scene.

I’m still not writing great prose, although this scene was less of a sketch than the others.  But as I mentioned yesterday, I am now seeing how this works, getting the ideas down on paper in a way that sounds like a story and then coming back in the second draft, once you know how everything goes, and reworking it into a thing of beauty.  However, there were a couple of places where I felt like I’d written some halfway descent lines.  I’ll supply just one example:

And now they were all dead, their blackened bodies frozen in some kind of horrible rictus.

They might not be in there after all, she realized.  If the hull was breached by the explosion, as was likely since the hatch would not open, they may have been pulled out into space, seven new satellites for Pluto, a dark menagerie of moons temporarily guided by Charon around the dark waters of space.

It’s not Shakespeare (or Malzberg or Kornbluth or Bester) by any means, but I was pleased with the lines.

Today’s session puts me at 7,261 words for the first 3 days, more than 2,200 words above NaNo’s pace, which means I could miss a full day and still be ahead of schedule.  I don’t plan on missing a day, however.  Tonight, the writers group is having a NaNoWriMo writing session and I’ll be there.  I’m still debating whether I’ll add to the novel or work on the short story.  I’m leaning toward the latter.

Here are today’s stats:

Up at about 4:45am today and I got started at 5am sharp on chapter 2 of Far Away Places.  I felt like I started off a bit more slowly today than I did yesterday, and the net result was that I wrote less today, but I still beat both the NaNoWriMo pace (1,667 words) and my own daily goal (2,000 words) with a total of 2,132 words.  I finished 20 minutes early, but it was a natural break-point (the end of the chapter) and I saw no point in starting the next one.  I can start that cleanly tomorrow morning.

I’m beginning to see that what I am doing here is like a detailed sketch.  I think I might have mentioned this yesterday, but it is becoming clear today.  The prose does flow nearly as well as my prose does on short pieces.  But I can see that I am setting up the scaffolding for what will ultimately be something that (I hope) is beautiful in the second draft.  I’m laying everything out, narrative and dialog, in a messy way, but a way that will make it much easier to clean and prune when I get around it to in the next draft.  It also makes me realize that it will be the second draft that will be the time consuming part of the project.  And possibly where I will have the most fun, since I won’t be under the pressure of hitting a mark everyday and will have prose to work off of, moulding and sculpting it into shape.

I’m also going back and re-reading the previous days writing, and while not rewriting any of it, I am heavily annotating it, inserting notes about what to cut, what to add, what narrative themes have been left out that need to be breadcrumbed sooner, etc. so that when I go into second draft, I have a decent set of notes to take with me on what I am intending.

So far, nothing post-worthy from the novel, but once I have something, I’ll pose a passage or two that I think reads particularly well for a first draft.  But I am having fun with Part I of the novel because it plays out as a kind of dual race and that gives the pacing a bit of an edge.

Here’s where things stand:

This puts me 1,400 words (nearly 1 day) above NaNo pace and 750 words ahead of my own personal pace.

I was up just before 5am and I’d written my first words of NaNoWriMo 2010 by 5:01.  The opening scene to the novel is a dark one and I’m not sure it’s as smooth or tight as I’d like it to be, but that stuff I can worry about in second draft.  I felt like I started up a little slowly, but I soon hit a good stride and before I knew it (sometime around 6:20 or so) I’d hit 1,667 words.  As I approached the number, I thought about pausing to tweet that it’d hit the pace for the day, but by then, I’d gotten so into the scene that the next time I looked, I was past 1,900 words and I wrapped up the opening scene and completed Chapter 1 of the novel at about 6:51am, having written a total of 2,625 words, which puts me on day 1 at nearly 1,000 words above pace and which is a pleasant 625 words above my personal daily goal.

What’s more, I was very pleased that I was able to work off my outline and complete the entire chapter setting up more or less what I needed to setup and closing the chapter on what I hope is a good hook to bring the reader along.  The writing could be better, but again, that’s stuff I can dwell on at leisure in second draft.  The goal here is to get my first draft sketch of the story completely down on paper.  I guess we’ll see. I’m actually more excited about tomorrow’s chapter which I am already looking forward to writing.

When I finished writing this morning, I backed up to thumb drive (since the regular backup to iDrive won’t run until tonight).  Don’t forget to back up.  It would suck to lose the hard work.

Here’s my daily summary:

NaNoWriMo pace: 1,667 words (1,667 words to-date)
My goal: 2,000 words (2000 words to-date)
My actual:2,625 words (2,625 words to-date)
Overall status: +958 words over NaNo pace

So, with 4 hours to the beginning of NaNoWriMo on the east coast (and 9 hours until my first NaNo writing session), I’m pretty much all set.  The first third of the novel is outlined in detail, giving me 15 chapters which should take me through November 15, and if I stick to my daily word count goal, 30,000 words.  I expect to have the next part of the novel outline complete by the end of the week.  I actually have some of it outlined, but I wanted to leave some breathing room in case things wander during the first third.

Scrivener is all set up and ready to go.  Chapter and notes are all in place. Research for this week is accessible at a mouse-click.

My desk is clear, and my Bose noise-canceling headset is sitting next to my laptop, ready for the early morning start.

I generally don’t need an alarm to wake up, but I haven’t been getting up early lately, so just in case, my alarm is set for 5 am. The NaNoWriMo daily pace is 1,667 words. My personal goal is the same as last year, 2,000 words/day. The notes for Chapter 1 are available for me on the second monitor. I’m all set to go. Anyone wanting to follow me on the NaNo site, my buddy name is: jamietr. Or you can stay-tuned here for a daily progress update.

Good luck everyone!  See you in the morning.

I think my count must have been off in yesterday’s post.  According to the NaNoWriMo website, at the present moment, there are 2 days, 15 hours, 17 minutes and 15 seconds until NaNoWriMo officially begins.  Last night I spent about 2 hours on the outline, most of which turned into research for the science and technical parts of the plot line.  I’m spending whatever time I can this weekend fleshing out the rest of the outline so that it reads smoothly and (hopefully) usefully, like the outlines I’ve seen in Mike Resnick’s I Have This Nifty Idea….  The setting is starting to feel familiar in my mind and I take that as a good sign.  Also, several of the subplot threads are beginning to tie together and I have a vision in my head of a diagram that will show their interrelationshiops.

While I’m not revealing much about the plot of the story, other than to say it is science fiction, probably space opera, I established the time-line of the story last night.  The novel opens in 2367 and cover a time period through about 2390 or 2391.  However, I like playing with time in my stories and so I will tell you that the novel itself is story that is being told much farther in the future, probably around the year 4000 A.D. about events that took place in the distant past (2367-2391).  And while the scope of the actual novel spans about 24 years, relativity and time dilation play a role so that for some of the cast of the novel only experience about 3 years of actual time.  I suppose I might as well add that if this novel works out, I have conceived it as part one of three, leading up to an event that takes place very close to that 4000 A.D. date mentioned above.

I’m beginning to feel that excited tingle in my stomach and I’m sure that by Monday morning, I’ll be ready to go.  For those of you doing NaNoWriMo this year, how are things progressing?

With just 4 days before NaNoWriMo 2010 begins, my outline got an overdue boost last night from an exercise we did at our Arlington Writers Group meetup.  The exercise focused on thinking outside the box.  We had to bring some kind of problem with us, and my problem was that the overall plot didn’t have enough at stake; that there wasn’t enough tying the backbone of the story together.  I think I managed to get that part worked out last night, thanks in large part to the exercises we did.  I added about 1,000 words to the outline, and the first part of the novel (there are 4 parts all together) is now outlined in detail.  Even better, I can start tying this overarching theme into the rest of the novel outline, and it now makes so much more sense even on multiple levels.

Between now and Sunday, I’m also working on taking the outline and creating “scenes” in Scrivener and assigning scenes to days of the month so that I have a good idea of what I will work on, at least for that first week or two of NaNo.  And I’m identifying a few scenes that I’m excited to write and holding them back in reserve for those days where the motivation just isn’t there.

I worked on the outline in Scrivener 2.0 last night and started making use of some of the new features.  Very nice so far.  I’m going to hold off posting on the new version in detail until after NaNoWriMo because by then, I will have abused it enough to speak about it with some authority.

With 5 days left before the start of NaNoWriMo, I thought I’d outline my plan of attack this year.  I realize that many people go into this with the goal of just finishing.  I finished it last year, but did not emerge from it with a useful novel.  (That is not to say it was not a useful experience; on the contrary, NaNoWriMo taught me that I can consistently put out 2,000 words/day if I put my mind to it.)  This year, my intentions are somewhat different.  I want to come away from NaNo with a novel that I can ultimately clean up and market to agents and publishers.  While I have sold short science fiction, and completely dozens of short stories, I have never completed a novel, so in a way this is a double challenge for me.

I am working harder on the outline this year.  I have made fairly extensive use of Mike Resnick‘s book, I Have This Nifty Idea… which contains outlines from real science fiction novels.  There are parts of it that I have struggled with and am still struggling with, but I’ll still have some time to work out the details.  (Not much time, however.) Perhaps my biggest challenge is that I simply don’t know how to write a novel and I’m going mostly on instinct here and what I’ve learned from my peers, and from reading many, many novels over the years.  I know little about breaking things into “acts” and only a little on the overall narrative arc of something this long.  In that sense, I am winging things, but I suppose so is everyone their first time.

I won’t talk about the subject of the novel, other than to say that it is science fiction, that it’s working title is Far Away Places, and that my outline describes what might ultimately be a series of three books, that lead up to an ultimate event.

All this being said, here is my game plan:

Prior to NaNoWriMo

• Complete the novel outline and REVISE
• Get some feedback on the outline from first-readers
• Clear the decks on various reading projects, since my reading will be cut down drastically during November

Beginning November 1

• Aim for 2,000 words/day between 5-7 am on weekdays and 7-9 am on weekends; this puts me on target for 60,000 words in November
• Have an idea about what I am going to write every day; my outline breaks things down into 45 chapters of roughly 2,000 words each.  That means about a chapter/day, assuming I stick to the outline.
• Identify 5-6 chapters that I am very excited to write, maybe 1/week, scattered throughout the outline.  Reserve these for days in which I am not feeling motivated and then write those chapters on those days.
• Use the NaNoWriMo preview version of Scrivener 2.0. I’ve been a Scrivener user for years and this will give me the chance to play with the new features and evaluate the product in a real-life situation.
• Rely on my support network, other WriMos, friends, family, colleagues, etc.
• Avoid revising, but jot down a lot of notes where I think things aren’t working.
• Where possible, take advantage of snippets of time in the evenings to work on other writing projects, to get my mind off the novel from time-to-time.
• Try to blog every day on my progress.
• Try to encourage others that I know participating in the event.

Beginning December 1

At the close of NaNoWriMo, I should have around 60,000 words of what I’m estimating to be a 90,000 word novel.  So successfully completing NaNo for me this year is not the end of the journey.

• Continue the same schedule, 2,000 words/day, through December 15, which should get me to the end of the novel.
• On December 16, a Thursday as it turns out, celebrate in some fashion with the family.  I have written a complete novel!
• Back everything up (this is done automatically anyway)
• Set the novel aside until January 1
• Take the rest of the month off for a well-deserved rest.

Beginning January 1

• Pull out the novel and read it the whole thing, cover-to-cover to get a feeling for its flow
• Identify problem areas and begin revising
• Begin querying first readers to see if they are willing to take a peek
• Put first 3 chapters and outline up for review at the writer’s group
• Revise, revise, revise

February/March

• Begin identifying potential agencies through SFWA peer and colleague recommendations
• Start writing and sending out queries per recommendations
• See what happens

I can’t plan much beyond that, but at least, if all goes well, the process that starts on November 1 will, 4-5 months later, have me at a point where I am querying agencies on my novel and even if it doesn’t sell, I might get some valuable feedback there as well.

Last night, I decided which story I would tell in my second attempt at writing a novel.  I was debating between two ideas: the first is a kind of period piece set in the early 1970s; the second is a time travel story.  I’m super-excited about the second idea, but the amount of research it will take is enormous and I don’t feel like I have the time for that.  I need to learn how to write a novel and so I’m sticking with the first idea–which is the idea I had come up with when finishing NaNoWriMo last year, and what I had planned to do all along.  It requires substantially less research, and is of signifcantly smaller scope.  Interestingly, whereas last year I attempted a science fiction novel, this year’s story is not science fiction, strictly speaking, but instead a novel about a science fiction writer.  Like last year, I’ll start it during NaNoWriMo and then continue it through the end of the year and into next year until the first draft is done. 

Then I’ll decide what to do next.