The White Lily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thewhitelily) wrote2006-11-15 09:21 pm
thewhitelily) wrote2006-11-15 09:21 pm
Entry tags:
Another 5K bites the dust...
I’m on 30,000, and I think I’ve finally got my second wind.
A few thousand words ago (ie. yesterday) I was really hitting the wall here.
My characters suck, my plot sucks, my whole sense of subtlety/melodrama sucks, and I keep having to herd it back from the direction it wants to twist, because I had no idea that adding a single mild torture scene would immediately make my plot head for a direct echo of V for Vendetta with all the enthusiasm of a guided missile. I don’t want it to go there, because aside from the whole plagiarism thing, the scenes that attempt to support that kind of plot direction are some of the worst I’ve got. But since I still haven’t decided why the whole conclusion happens and I’m stifling the way it naturally wants to go, the whole thing is just... stalling.
I shouldn’t have taken a day off. I mean, I should have; I needed to. I really was about to break down if I hadn’t taken my mind completely away from it for a day or two. But I knew what would happen; I knew how ugly the horse would look when I tried to get back onto it. On Monday night and all through yesterday I felt pretty much like huddling up under the doona sobbing and never coming out, ever again.
I had a good night writing last night, though, so today the benefits of having taken a break have really kicked in on my mental state.
Usually, by the time I’m this far advanced in a story, I have a plot chasm or two where I have no idea how my characters are going to get from here to there, hopefully far away from the conclusion or I’m totally stuffed, and a scene or ten that I must have written while possessed because I can only now realise how deeply horrific they are. And I’ve got all that – although my plot chasms are worryingly close to the conclusion – but usually by this time I’m also holding a fistful of spaghetti that’s just begging me to macramé every strand into place.
The thing is, I write out of order, and while at first I tried changing the way I do that for NaNo, I was ending up with a David Eddings style endless trek of bantering characters across the countryside while I’m waiting what I feel is an appropriate amount of time before I can do the next important bit. (And while there’s nothing wrong with Eddings, the point is there shouldn’t be a next important bit that we’re waiting for – it should all be not only interesting, but important to at least some element of the plot. But I don’t know how to make the intervening bits important or interesting until I’ve written the scene they’re leading to and understand what has to be important and interesting about them. If that makes sense.). I gave up and wrote “the end” after my epilogue on day three, and I’ve got most of the major plot points already written out – it’s just how to connect them that’s remaining.
Usually, each scene I add brings in another few threads for me to weave in earlier and later, to keep in mind as I go forward and backwards across the plot, which then bring out new threads and new ideas for more scenes forward and back. But that hasn’t been happening. Each scene I’ve been writing for the last ten thousand words or so has been capping and concluding, weaving into place what I’ve already got, and there’s no extra coming in for me to work with in the next few scenes I write.
I came up with an absolutely awesome connection that ties together my themes, the sympathetic terrorist group the story’s partially about, the protagonist’s main flaw and the learning process he undergoes throughout the story, and the technology underpinning the entire society. They’ve all got the same reason to be the way they are, and the pretty pretty symmetry’s had me walking on air for five days – apart from when I actually had to write something, that is, because it doesn’t give me any more to material to write with. I didn’t need to write a whole series of scenes on the protagonist’s relationship with his mother to make it obvious why the he falls to pieces at the hint of a crisis – it’s already obvious why he’s that way. It’s wonderful for characterisation and knitting the whole thing together. But it’s solved all my specific problems way too easily.
If this goes on, I’ll run out of plot, without having to write much apart from the basic framework, and without having enough to actually bring the whole thing together for a conclusion that’s more than, you know, stuff blows up.
You see, I don’t write subplots. Or at least, if I do, I don’t think of them as subplots. I weave together a stack of threads around a central plot, all of which are important to the central plot, or important to the threads that are important to the central plot, or important to the… you get the idea. Subplots of interaction between minor characters are something that just tend to happen because the protagonist needs to get a kick in a certain direction, or the character of a minor character needs to become clear a certain way if their actions later are to make sense. But it’s the threads and the necessity for them to come together a certain way for the good of that central plot that drives the story, not any particular idea of what’s actually going to happen in each “subplot”.
Yesterday, I realised that writing this fast, I’ve been focussing so intently on overarching plot that I haven’t had the time to do any of the brainstorming or plot-dreaming that usually happens without my even noticing it, and I’ve managed to get this far through with hardly any extra plot threads at all. Every moment at the keyboard I’ve been spraying out words like a machine gun to meet my word count, and while I’ve been happily following any digressions that occur to me, none of them have been opening up the expected can of worms. I’ve been falling into bed completely exhausted at a few minutes past midnight (my writing deadline) every night, and sleeping the dreamless sleep of the dead until I have to stagger out of bed off to work.
So last night, with 2,000 words to go and four or five hours remaining on the clock, plenty of time remaining to procrastinate, I took out a pencil and a pad of paper and did some brainstorming. Not about the plot. About the fistful of spaghetti I can use to extend my existing conceptions, so that I can get the plot cooking without it even noticing. So, ten pages of totally illegible scribble and UML state machine diagrams later, I wrote a couple of thousand words of spaghetti: my protagonist travelling in lifts, and on trains, and hearing random gossip which I realised halfway through was about another character he doesn’t even know yet, but will, and didn’t even scratch the surface of the little girl with the violin case who’s always sitting on the floor outside the flat next to his, who I’m hoping may turn out to be the daughter of the ex-wife of…
Aaaaah, precious new plot threads, which will challenge me to weave them in and make them important, hopefully giving rise to many more threads in their turn… And I got some lovely coloured index cards the other day, because all my white ones were starting to get mixed up and confused. I’ve been keeping reminder notes of all my underused spaghetti – continuity issues I need to reinforce in green, characters on pink, scene ideas in yellow – each with a tally of how many times I’ve already used them. So hopefully, in my moments of totally idealess despair brought on by actually finishing a scene and skimming through the whole document to find where to write next, I’ll be able to shuffle and deal until I get a connection and find something that I absolutely have to write, and right now.
Now all I really need is an actual antagonist, rather than a couple of people who are either annoying or only selfish and malicious on a very small scale, and one guy who I think is the antagonist, but currently won’t appear as more than a name and one short sentence which isn’t nearly evil enough to make up for his complete absense in the rest of the story. (And, of course, to stop rambling in my LJ and write the remaining 1400 words to hit my quota this evening.)
So as I said: my second wind, may it last long. I can’t believe how much better it feels to be 5K past half way than it did to be actually half way. To the next 20,000 – here I come!
A few thousand words ago (ie. yesterday) I was really hitting the wall here.
My characters suck, my plot sucks, my whole sense of subtlety/melodrama sucks, and I keep having to herd it back from the direction it wants to twist, because I had no idea that adding a single mild torture scene would immediately make my plot head for a direct echo of V for Vendetta with all the enthusiasm of a guided missile. I don’t want it to go there, because aside from the whole plagiarism thing, the scenes that attempt to support that kind of plot direction are some of the worst I’ve got. But since I still haven’t decided why the whole conclusion happens and I’m stifling the way it naturally wants to go, the whole thing is just... stalling.
I shouldn’t have taken a day off. I mean, I should have; I needed to. I really was about to break down if I hadn’t taken my mind completely away from it for a day or two. But I knew what would happen; I knew how ugly the horse would look when I tried to get back onto it. On Monday night and all through yesterday I felt pretty much like huddling up under the doona sobbing and never coming out, ever again.
I had a good night writing last night, though, so today the benefits of having taken a break have really kicked in on my mental state.
Usually, by the time I’m this far advanced in a story, I have a plot chasm or two where I have no idea how my characters are going to get from here to there, hopefully far away from the conclusion or I’m totally stuffed, and a scene or ten that I must have written while possessed because I can only now realise how deeply horrific they are. And I’ve got all that – although my plot chasms are worryingly close to the conclusion – but usually by this time I’m also holding a fistful of spaghetti that’s just begging me to macramé every strand into place.
The thing is, I write out of order, and while at first I tried changing the way I do that for NaNo, I was ending up with a David Eddings style endless trek of bantering characters across the countryside while I’m waiting what I feel is an appropriate amount of time before I can do the next important bit. (And while there’s nothing wrong with Eddings, the point is there shouldn’t be a next important bit that we’re waiting for – it should all be not only interesting, but important to at least some element of the plot. But I don’t know how to make the intervening bits important or interesting until I’ve written the scene they’re leading to and understand what has to be important and interesting about them. If that makes sense.). I gave up and wrote “the end” after my epilogue on day three, and I’ve got most of the major plot points already written out – it’s just how to connect them that’s remaining.
Usually, each scene I add brings in another few threads for me to weave in earlier and later, to keep in mind as I go forward and backwards across the plot, which then bring out new threads and new ideas for more scenes forward and back. But that hasn’t been happening. Each scene I’ve been writing for the last ten thousand words or so has been capping and concluding, weaving into place what I’ve already got, and there’s no extra coming in for me to work with in the next few scenes I write.
I came up with an absolutely awesome connection that ties together my themes, the sympathetic terrorist group the story’s partially about, the protagonist’s main flaw and the learning process he undergoes throughout the story, and the technology underpinning the entire society. They’ve all got the same reason to be the way they are, and the pretty pretty symmetry’s had me walking on air for five days – apart from when I actually had to write something, that is, because it doesn’t give me any more to material to write with. I didn’t need to write a whole series of scenes on the protagonist’s relationship with his mother to make it obvious why the he falls to pieces at the hint of a crisis – it’s already obvious why he’s that way. It’s wonderful for characterisation and knitting the whole thing together. But it’s solved all my specific problems way too easily.
If this goes on, I’ll run out of plot, without having to write much apart from the basic framework, and without having enough to actually bring the whole thing together for a conclusion that’s more than, you know, stuff blows up.
You see, I don’t write subplots. Or at least, if I do, I don’t think of them as subplots. I weave together a stack of threads around a central plot, all of which are important to the central plot, or important to the threads that are important to the central plot, or important to the… you get the idea. Subplots of interaction between minor characters are something that just tend to happen because the protagonist needs to get a kick in a certain direction, or the character of a minor character needs to become clear a certain way if their actions later are to make sense. But it’s the threads and the necessity for them to come together a certain way for the good of that central plot that drives the story, not any particular idea of what’s actually going to happen in each “subplot”.
Yesterday, I realised that writing this fast, I’ve been focussing so intently on overarching plot that I haven’t had the time to do any of the brainstorming or plot-dreaming that usually happens without my even noticing it, and I’ve managed to get this far through with hardly any extra plot threads at all. Every moment at the keyboard I’ve been spraying out words like a machine gun to meet my word count, and while I’ve been happily following any digressions that occur to me, none of them have been opening up the expected can of worms. I’ve been falling into bed completely exhausted at a few minutes past midnight (my writing deadline) every night, and sleeping the dreamless sleep of the dead until I have to stagger out of bed off to work.
So last night, with 2,000 words to go and four or five hours remaining on the clock, plenty of time remaining to procrastinate, I took out a pencil and a pad of paper and did some brainstorming. Not about the plot. About the fistful of spaghetti I can use to extend my existing conceptions, so that I can get the plot cooking without it even noticing. So, ten pages of totally illegible scribble and UML state machine diagrams later, I wrote a couple of thousand words of spaghetti: my protagonist travelling in lifts, and on trains, and hearing random gossip which I realised halfway through was about another character he doesn’t even know yet, but will, and didn’t even scratch the surface of the little girl with the violin case who’s always sitting on the floor outside the flat next to his, who I’m hoping may turn out to be the daughter of the ex-wife of…
Aaaaah, precious new plot threads, which will challenge me to weave them in and make them important, hopefully giving rise to many more threads in their turn… And I got some lovely coloured index cards the other day, because all my white ones were starting to get mixed up and confused. I’ve been keeping reminder notes of all my underused spaghetti – continuity issues I need to reinforce in green, characters on pink, scene ideas in yellow – each with a tally of how many times I’ve already used them. So hopefully, in my moments of totally idealess despair brought on by actually finishing a scene and skimming through the whole document to find where to write next, I’ll be able to shuffle and deal until I get a connection and find something that I absolutely have to write, and right now.
Now all I really need is an actual antagonist, rather than a couple of people who are either annoying or only selfish and malicious on a very small scale, and one guy who I think is the antagonist, but currently won’t appear as more than a name and one short sentence which isn’t nearly evil enough to make up for his complete absense in the rest of the story. (And, of course, to stop rambling in my LJ and write the remaining 1400 words to hit my quota this evening.)
So as I said: my second wind, may it last long. I can’t believe how much better it feels to be 5K past half way than it did to be actually half way. To the next 20,000 – here I come!