Seriously.
It’s creepy.
I’m sitting at about 90k words right now, with 4ish chapters left to write – and it’s the climactic battle and fallout – FUN stuff to write. Not that the rest hasn’t been fun, because it has. But still. This is THE. END. I can see that sun rising over the horizon, almost feel the rays gently punching my face. You dig?
Of course, then I have massive amounts of edits to make, friends to coerce feedback from (manuscript form will probably clock in around 420 pages – but that’s double spaced Courier 12 pt – it was 381 when I check the other day), and then the inevitable learning curve of agents & soul draining query letters. Then again, maybe I’ll get lucky ;). But I will submit. This is not just for me. Oh sure, it’s for me at this stage – but I’ve got a story to tell, and a story isn’t even a shadow without readers.
It’s interesting to watch your/my writing style develop. I’ve never even attempted long form fiction before – I’m comfortable with the shape of my poetry, and unsurprised by what I generate in the short story vein, but this is uncharted territory. Guarded by fine young cannibals shaking their suspicious minds at me and bespectacled angelic owls, their calls of “who” long-twisted into “what the fuck”, I’m sure. But I can dig those.
What am I finding?
- Well, evidently I abhor description. Which makes sense. I generally skim all the (to me) pointless shit about how a room looks, what the fuck the bedposts are made out of, what clothes someone is wearing (unless it’s somehow relevant), etc when reading a book. So, it falls out that I just wouldn’t even bother including those in my writing right?
Where someone else (don’t ask me who) might write something like:
“The door was wrought of finely shaped iron – covered in delicately sculpted flowers of black metal, each petal a ready razor for skin, each shaped thorn more dangerous & hungry than their inspirations. The thing was heavy and cumbrous like an early attempt at a tractor, but well suited to its purpose: blocking passage.
He reached for it, fingers trembling at the thought of touching such fine workmanship, mind crumbling under the strain of its beauty. Unfortunately, the physical weight of the thing outstripped its beauty in this case – Juan was dainty and weak, a butterfly-slip of a man, barely able to resist imploding with every inhale, struggling to remain upright with every exhale. He most certainly could not budge the door – but just touching it was enough for him. “I have lived!” he whispered as he extended a finger, gently caressed a gleaming petal. A single drop of blood slipped from the finger, striking a greedy thorn. “
I might say something like:
Juan tried to open the heavy iron door. He pushed as hard as he could but couldn’t budge it. Damn thing was heavy.
The reader should know by this point that Juan’s a fucking weakling – why should I tell them again? And the decorations on the door don’t matter for shit, unless they tell us something about the rest of the story – is the person who made the door relevant? Is this a useful way of telling us that they are very strong, or a skilled iron worker? Then maybe.
- I’m also big into dialogue. Seriously, most of the book is dialogue. Which makes sense because it’s description light – something has to be filling these pages right? I’m really not sure how the reader will take this, as I don’t recall having any thoughts about the percentage of dialogue to description in the stuff I’ve read thus far. I’ll certainly never be able to read a book without pondering this in the future. No doubt the process of trying to write as incidentally inspired changes in the physiology of my ‘reader’ aspect.
- It’s hard for me to write a story in isolation. Ideas grow like cracked out weeds once I plant them. My original intent was to write a “pulp” sci-fantasy-mystery, ringing in around 240 pages or so. Light reading, you know. Now, I’ve got an outline for a 9 book series. Yeah. I need to figure out how to get that shit under control.
- Every time I sit down to write, it’s hard. It hasn’t gotten any easier to start. BUT it has gotten easier to continue. Once I break about 500 words in a sitting I can usually keep going long enough to finish that scene, and potentially another.
- I’m finding that I agree strongly with Stephen King’s statement about writing being like “unearthing a fossil” – at least in the context of the story I’m writing now. It really feels like I’m just “finding” stuff – the skeleton came first, and then as I write I find the flesh for each joint, and sometimes the flesh for the next joint too. I’m not sitting down and saying really “What’s the next plot point, how do I get there?” I’m saying “Here’s what has happened, here’s where they are now, what are they doing?”, while keeping the goal in the back of my mind – the subconscious seems to be doing the rest of dot connecting.
Huh. Theres 800 words right there.
I really think blogging so regularly has helped get my mind in shape for daily writing.
Caffeine isn’t hurting either. It goes give me gas though.
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