Oh Dear... Overboard?

Longtime readers will remember my days as a fierce advocate for writing by the seat of my pants. Recently, I turned a new leaf, gave plotting-ahead a bit of a go.

And like any addictive personality, I took it too far.

Or have I? Those are 80 notecards, 20 for Act I, 40 for Act II, and so on. Roughly one per thousand words of story. Working with them, I've been able to work on pacing, juggle scenes and sequels, space out character appearances/subplots/etc. so that we never go *too* long without hearing from the Duchess of Maldorff and the Subplot to Blackmail her Third Underbutler. Plants and payoffs (the ones I know I need anyway) have been inserted appropriately.

In short, all the headaches I go through in the editing stage are now happening before I write a single line of dialogue or description. If this works, my subsequent drafts will hopefully go a bit easier.

Will it work for me? I don't know. Seem worth trying? Heck yeah. I'll do just about *anything* to get these damn stories out of my head quicker, smoother, and closer to what I see playing on that Private Theatre for One...

PS. Those note cards are all filled in now, but I just had to go with this photo. Just like his siblings, Buddy is much mended and now up to the task of helping me write!

Progress

Butler is bigger.

So is my novel. As my tools have slowed down (still on the dip pen), my storytelling's speeded up. It's kind of fun writing this way, even if it is all a bit Still Life With Woodpecker. ALl the same, I hope it's just this one story.

At least the story's humming: 75,000 words, every one of them a struggle that made me feel like Jet Li's evil twin at the end of The One-- no matter how many of the bastards I beat, there's an endless swarm still coming.

That feeling's eased off a fair bit now. The characters are clear about their actions and not shy about letting me know what they are. The bad guys have been a long time in an increasingly untenable situation, and their whole dirty house of lies is about to come crashing down on them.

Oddly, I have no idea how much longer this story will go. On the one hand, I may find out that the first fifty thousand was just back-story and warm-up. On the other, my end may be closer in sight than I realize!

One thing I do know: I remain surprised. Part of it is supporting players retreating from the scenes or coming to the fore. After all, *they* don't know they're supporting; they think they're the stars and have to act accordingly. Part of it is a still-growing understanding of my leads and their own agendas.

But a lot of the surprise comes from my hero in this one. He's smart and tough, but also honest and direct. In fact, he's probably the only honest and direct person in this whole ball of wax.

When I started this story, I had in mind that a lot of his troubles would come from the deceits and manipulations of others. Instead, that direct approach to problems has been a real conflict-engine.

Last night, he went up to the viper's nest and knocked on the front door. He wants to see for himself if there's any truth to the rumors.

I can't wait to see what happens...

Bloody Sudoku Moments

Yup, it's that time again, and early this time. The old Sudoku moment.

I'm a recent convert to Sudoku, but thoroughly hooked nonetheless. Like anyone with a gambling/drinking/reading problem, I'm in it for those moments of triumph, those dizzying heights to which my soul soars when the numbers all come together and I let loose my mighty cry, "SUDOKU!"

And yeah, that can be embarrassing on public transport.

But for every dizzying high, there are the lows. You look at the field of numbers and realize that three can't possibly go there. But that means the five over here wrong too. It's not as bad as losing the rent on a horse, selling your wedding ring in a bar for more drinks, or reading the next Dan Brown novel, but it sucks.

My characters are little jabbermouths right now. My hero's turned out to be smarter than I would've thought, and the villains and schemers around him are prety crafty themselves. They're driving things along just fine without my help.

So of course, I forced a situation, and wrote myself into a corner.

I'm out of that corner now, but it did involve unraveling three chapters and going back to the last time I was on track.

We're once again up and humming...

71,000 words (not counting stuff taken out)

Still chuddling along, and happy as Larry. Except last night.

Last night, I had to un-kill a character. Now, I liked this character, and wasn't exactly thrilled to kill her in the first place. But I needed a strong 'beat' to end Act Two, and that was it.

I'm glad to have this character back, even if she can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but it meant unravelling some darned good writing. One of the better scenes in the book in fact.

Them's the breaks. And the truth is, the end of Act Two should be one of the stronger scenes in the book.

Why's she back? Did I need her later? No. It's that the three act structure shifted underfoot in the process of fixing up my altest Sudoku Moment. So out that tension point had to come, which left my character alive again.

For those who don't know, most modern fiction more or less runs in three acts. The Ancient Greeks used five, I think, as do some of my favorite operas, but most books, movies and TV use three. I think of them as The Setup, The Chase, and Endgame, and each one has its own beginning, middle and end, just like it was a mini-story all its own.

Big difference is that Acts One and Two, the climax needs to be *right* at the end, and of a nature to propel the audience into the next act with enthusiasm. Act Three, the climax comes a leeeetle way back, so that we have a couple of chapters, or a few minutes of film, to wind down a bit, decompress after all those (hopefully) strong emotions. In TV, this often involves the series characters sitting around the set and having a pointless, feel-good joke before the credits roll. That little nubbin at the end is the denouement.

In Predator, everything with the commandos being deployed, exploring the jungle, being stalked a little bit (not a lot, but a few creepy sounds and the sight of the soldiers seen through some sort of IR/UV thingy), right up to the hanging corpses of the missing troops is Act One.

The story at this point is all about framing the problem. Arnold on the field? Check. Something rotten in the South American jungle? Check. The climax is the sight of those corpses hanging like trophy kills. It's the boost the ratchets up the tension and carries us into Act Two, in which We Meet the Monster.

This is The Chase. Except instead of Holmes tracking the Hound, or Bridget Jones chasing true love with the wrong man when the right one's under her nose (the movie here -- the book used Jane Austen's original, more act-y structure, and I don't want to get into that), we've got a mysterious presence (still haven't seen the Predator yet) hunting and killing a group of elite commandos.

The commandos try to fight back. They do intelligent things, gradually figuring out (at gruesome loos of life) that their enemy has weapons and technology far beyond anything they're ready for. There's so much blood and gore in this act that the climax *isn't* more gore. It's Arnold looking at some yellow drippy bits on a leaf and delivering the line, "If it bleeds, we can kill it."

And Act Three eases the tension off a bit, as Arnold and the mysterious creature prepare for what both know will be their final battle. Even sugar-hyped twelve year olds know this is the Endgame.

And the third act should be a series of climaxes. The first good sight of that Rick James-looking motherfucker, Arnold screaming his defiant challenge, the tripwires failing, the heat-vision revelation, one hell of a big fight. One right after the other, building on top of each other until the audience is on the edge of their seats. Or hopefully, anyway.

Of course, Predator also has about the shortest denouement ever. Maybe ten seconds of film with Arnold and The Girl in a helicopter headed home. But we do need that little bit...

Plotting and 'Plotting'

or,

Why I Can't stick to an Outline

with assorted notes on Character...

70,000 words (and likely to be 40-50,000 more...)

I really have no idea how long my word count is going to be. None. I can make guesses based on my past history, but that's about it. No real idea how this thing ends, either. I know how I'd like it to end, but that's no gaurantee.

Some writers make a plot outline before hand. Lots of them even stick to it. John Ramsey Miller started as a response to these weeks of untangling messes. Fair enough. James Ellroy's plots are famous for being nearly the length of the finished book. Me, not so much.

Today I'm thinking about character-driven versus situation-driven fiction. I don't mean plotted or not-plotted, but rather, is it the setup or the actors who drive the story?

Gerald's Game started with pure situation (what if a bondage game went wrong?). Barry Eisler's Rain books and Richard Stark's Porter series both started with the mental image of a guy walking. The writers had to find out who that guy was, and where the heck he was going.

For me, it's a little of both.

I've got an escaped killer, the cop hunting him and the people he's hunting while he's out. Situation? I guess. Character? That too. I started with a sense of who this killer was (and blog readers have seen that change as I write him), a better sense of who the cop is (from the last book) and almost no sense at all of who the hell these people are this guy keeps killing.

But now I'm at the point where I understand who they are, and why he's doing it. And the victims have turned out to be nastier and more resourceful than I would have thought as well. I can't stand cardboard characters or red shirts. Part of my 'psychosis' is that I'm always looking at each player and asking "why?" I also hate it when cannon-fodder acts stupid.

Even the smallest players have to have their reasons in my work. Sometimes those reasons make them larger, sometimes those reasons keep them small, and sometimes their reasons and reasonable actions march them right out of the story.

It's easier to think of stories as found objects. The metaphor's useful, and doesn't make my head hurt.

Plot and Character

Status: 8500 words and counting

There's been a lot of talk lately at CS Harris and Razored Zen about plotting and character. Lately, I'm wondering if there's much of a difference.

The more I write, the more I come to suspect I'm a definite seat-of-the-pantser when it comes to plot. For me, there was a lot of truth in Stephen King's comment that writing is like finding a half-buried piece of colored string and following it to see where it ends. His archeaological metaphors also resonate, the point being that for me stories are things unearthed, discovered.

Which brings me to character. My more successful plots, such as they are, are where I take some characters and put them on a collision course. Viola, plot.

I'm not the first to work this way, and I won't be the last. It's just what works for me.

But not only is plot a thing discovered in my work, so is character. I've seen all the worksheets and the like, the advice about knowing what your characters had for breakfast that morning and what their star sign is. They probably work for some people. For me... meh.

I get to know my characters a little at a time, same as my friends. I'm not an 'instant BFF' kinda guy, and I'm not an instant intimacy kind of writer. By the end of the book I know my characters pretty damn well (Sarah had an English muffin and juice for breakfast. Tommy had a fistful of Benzydrine.), but in these early days they don't show all of themselves to me, and the sides they show aren't always entirely truthful.

Sometimes the characters send me off in the wrong directions, but not often. Mostly, it's me and my damn ego trying to force them in directions they don't want to go. I can be pretty damn stubborn, so several thousand words might get written before I figure it out and the story begins to flow again.

My record is forty-eight thousand. Yup. 48,000 words spent barking up the wrong tree, my hero fighting me all the way. It happens.

More often, the characters will reveal something late in the book that means going back and setting it up earlier on. How early depends on how important.

So right now I'm in the honeymoon phase. It's flowing, everything new and shiny. A month or two down the road, it's going to get rough. They'll quit talking. Or I'll quit listening. The work will slow to a crawl.

But I will finish. I learned a lot of life's lessons in my messed-up youth, and probably one of the most valuable was: You can't quit just because you're being punched in the face. In fact, that's probably the worst time possible to give up. So I know going into this that the going will likely get rough, but the book'll get done anyway.

If history repeats, I'll likely end up with 120k words or so and then trim down. POISON DOOR ran 140k before I typed 'the end'. By the time I was ready to show it to an agent, the ms came in at a lean mean 88,000.

That one's going out to editors now-ish at 90,000 words. Agent Anne assures me that the extra weight is fighting muscle, not an ounce of flab.