Victory Lap

Finish line: crossed.

Ground: kissed.


Be well my friends, I'll blog again soon.

Saggy Middles

As the ab-tastic Olympics wind down and one's WiP races to its Act I climax, a young man's thoughts turn naturally to the Great Saggy Middle.

You've got a great idea. You've got a slam-bang opening, and a slam-bang way to end your story. But somewhere between the first 50 pages and the last 50 pages, writers have a tendency to get lost. Plotting can get heavy and bog down. Characters get lost and wander aimlessly. That slam-bang finish might lay somewhere on the far side of this swamp, but will the story ever get there?

I think in part, the Great Saggy Middle is a difficulty with infatuation. A lot of folks think they have a book in them (usually way too autobiographical and way too derivative of their influences, but that's another story) and sit down one quiet night to FINALLY WRITE. They start in a big rush of emotion and excitement, because the start of a new book is emotional. And it's exciting.

More accurately, it's infatuating. And infatuation wears off. For most, that means a 50 or 100 page fragment in a drawer somewhere, never to be spoken of again. For those of us with more stubborn than sense, it means 'holding on when there is nothing in you, except the Will which says... "Hold on.!"'

It means we have to get through the Big Middle.

To that end, here are a few tricks I've cribbed from books and movies. As always here at Full Throttle Productions, take what you like and leave the rest...

1) Subplot Climax: To help cover that wide stretch between Act I and Act II, bring one or more subplots to a climax. The resolution of the Daniel Cleaver subplot in Bridget Jones is a good example, as is Jim Carrey's realization that he's a bad father in Liar Liar. Or Darth Vader putting a swift end to Han and Leiah's plans in Empire.

2) Tentpole Action: Putting a big, vivid, splashy bit of action or sex or excitement in the middle can provide a useful distraction. James Lee Burke often throws a colorful psycho or two at Dave Robicheaux right around the middle of the book, and many a pulp writer found a good reason for a fistfight to smooth the way through. The bar Shaft is in gets machine-gunned in the original (and still the baddest) version. The protagonist in High Fidelity has a sexual encounter that keeps his journey back through his exes from turning tedious, and in Ilsa leaves Rick as the Nazis conquer Paris in Casablanca.

(For those of you with more lowbrow tastes, y'ever notice the standard gratuitous sex scene happens just about halfway through every cheap 80's action movie? Just sayin'.)

Sometimes, these big splashes can form a mini-story of their own, complete with setup, complication, climax and denoument. Casablanca's a good example, as the trash-compactor scene in Star Wars.

3) Local Color: A variation on using action to distract, but with a vivid personality instead. Just trot somebody exciting or fun on stage, maybe have a joke or fun story.

My all-time favorite example of this is Mike Yanagita in FARGO. The guy's weird, random, funny, sad and creepy all at once. He practially steals the show, and he definitely distracts from the fact that Marge really doesn't do much in her time in the Twin Citites.

4) Multi-Act: Instead of trying to successfully navigate across three acts, your story may be better told in four, five, six or more acts. There are two ways to do this:

Set up a mess of subplots and set about resolving them. Quentin Tarentino does this in Kill Bill, as the Bride works her way down her laundry list of funeral-candidates. (Pulp Fiction *sort of* does this too, with seperate vignettes jumping back and forth in time, each supporting a theme of second chances, but Tarantino likes to get complicated with structure.) Four Weddings and a Funeral has five sets of relationships to resolve on its way to hooking up the sixth.

One goal, many discrete obstacles. In The Quick Red Fox, Travis Mcgee pursues his quest through something like five acts, each as important as the last. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy does much the same thing. In pre-Daniel Craig days, the silver-screen James Bond often chased his villains all over the show.

In fact, the multi-act structure seems to work well with pursuit/quest stories. Anybody care to count the acts in Lord of the Rings?

For that matter, Shakespeare liked a five-act structure, too. His way of keeping the story from developing a Great Saggy Middle was to keep reversing the main plot. (Those kids won't get together. Wait, they might. No, they won't! Yes, they WILL! Oh wait, they're both dead.)

Anybody think of any I've missed?

And let's see... we're here at Day 16 of BURIED, and the Full-Throttle Daily-Wordcount-o-Meter stands at 17,100 words. This pleases me.

Pencils Down

That time again, at last. A *very* important day here in the Full Throttle Household: printing off my latest for First True Reading.

One of the great true stories of Kiwi ingenuity is the bloke who built the world's fastest four-stroke motorbike, the Britten V-1000, in his shed. Lacking a wind tunnel or fancy computer modeling, he built a mock-up out of styrofoam and car-body filler and tested it using soap flakes and an electric fan. Wherever the soap flakes stuck, John Britten shaved down the mock-up. When he shaved too deep, he spackled in more Bondo. When the soap finally streamed past, he was satisfied.

For the past couple months, I've been doing just that: writing draft after draft. Shaving, polishing, playing with emphasis and theme. Making this bit of symbolism more obscure and that one more clear. You know, revising.

After seven (Lucky Seven!) full reworkings and many, many, many smaller fiddles, fudges and getting-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-to-make-one-little-changes, it's time. Pencils down, step away from the work.

Let the Tiny Dynamo at it.

This is not, repeat NOT, for the faint at heart. The Dynamo has a keen eye for detail, and she can spot a plot hole a mile off. She puts up with me 'always writing' for months on end. Once or twice a year, she gets to sit down and read my work. There's a certain amount of frustration built in, and she comes at my work with a fierce and critical eye.

She's the reason only one person read my second novel. She had a lot of harsh things to say about it, and they were all correct.

This, folks, is the kind of reader you want to have. A lot of my friends enjoy my work. They'll like pretty much whatever I write, and that makes it hard to improve. When I win the Tiny Dynamo over, I know I've done something right.

So far, she's found a few punctuation errors and a couple of bonehead gaffs. And made an important suggestion. Still on Chapter Two...

Sudden Seconds and Dead Darlings

So my well earned rest. Yeah.... That lasted about 36 hours.

A good day's rest, and I realized I was short one chapter in the denouement. Then I realized that I needed to give a minor guy just a little more time earlier on, to establish a relationship that comes in handy later.

And of course, there were all those small details: Character name changes, eye colors, traits that grew over the course of the book, etc.

Next thing I knew, I was back at the beginning, working on an immediate second pass.

The literature mostly counsels a long wait between drafts, but I actually *prefer* a quick second draft. Or as I think of it, a second pass. The material is still fresh in my mind, the story structure hanging in all its fractal beauty just behind my eyelids.

This pass is just about smoothing out the rough spots. Reconciling irregularites and adding the bits I left out in my headlong berserker rush to the end.

Only in writing can we rush to the climax, then go back and arrange proper foreplay! ;-)

This quick second pass has me thinking about this particular novel (working title: Crossroads Blues) and its odd, twisting genesis.

For instance, is this really the second draft? I had two false starts and numerous wrong turns finding that sweet spot where the story ripped free. The total word count in my various versions is over 200,000 words, and as faithful readers may remember, quite a few of those were paid down with a dip pen. A. Dip. Pen.

That was a *lot* of hard slogging, and looking back, I can see the problems.

#1) I tried to save my darlings.

Early on, I wrote three or four REALLY STRONG scenes. They HUMMED. You got character. You got conflict. You got plot. These scenes flew on greased rails.

They also didn't fit. For example, the big fight I wrote (in which I learned so much about the hero) pushed things too far, too fast. It was more of an ACT II climax than an ACT I intro, and it left no believable course for the characters.

#2) I wussed on my characters.

My hero is a drifter. The Minor Bastard is a narcissist. The Major Bastard is, well, he's the kind of thing children fear lurking under their beds.

But in those early drafts, the Major Bastard was too wishy-washy. The Minor Bastard was deeply concerned over the pain he caused. And the drifter?

He had an apartment.

Agh!

The trouble was, those scenes that hummed, I couldn't change the characters without losing those scenes. And I was *really* trying to keep those scenes!

Trying to hold onto those darlings almost cost me the book.

Fortunately, Kate issued her challenge, and I accepted. I started over completely: word one, chapter one, full committment. Full throttle.

The book works. At least, I think. I'll read it sometime around the New Year, but it feels good, y'know?

The darlings? Dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead.... dead.

Freedom

Yup, finally slipped my chain. Last night at about 8pm, I finished the first draft of Crossroad Blues.

I pretty much turned all the dials up to 'eleven' and snapped off the lever Tuesday and Wednesday. There were a couple-odd hours of sleep in there, and I may have eaten. Not entirely sure. What I do know is that I wrote a little less than 20,000 words in that period, including two of my favorites: The End.

As always here at Full Throttle Productions, hard work is rewarded. I had a nice glass of champagne, smoked a lovely Cuban cigar (they're legal here but this'll be the only one for me this year), had a *much* needed shower and shave and went to bed for many, many hours.

For their invaluable assistance, I'd like to thank the good folks at iPod.


(That's not photoshopped-- I got free laser engraving by ordering online!)

This poor bugger got quite the workout the last couple days. Four of my current favorites: Steve Earle's Oxycontin Blues, Tori Amos' Crucify, Avril Levigne's Girlfriend and Isaac Hayes's theme to Shaft. I reserve the right to be a man of contrasts...

Tomorrow: Simpsons fun!

Full Throttle Iconography

(A little homage to the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, there! Sorry about the flash burn - the paint is still wet...)

Where y'at, you say? Well....

The hero is isolated and alone. The Main Bastard's implicit threat is increasingly manifest. Innocent and guilty alike are suffering at this man's hands.

The hero has just made a Bad Decision. Fear overruled his better judgement, and he picked up a weapon. Things are.... about to turn very, very, *very* ugly.

Today or tomorrow maybe, he'll see this situation through to its brutal, bloody end.

I had a bit of a peek around on the net for a work-icon to describe my progress. No dice. In the end, I used one of those 'thinking up what's next' moments to whip up my own...

Sometime soon: Simpsons fun!

A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah

102,681 words

Of which, my bittersweet, favorite two:

THE END





(Bonus points for citing the source of my post title)