Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Ending things

So here I am a week out of NaNoWriMo.  It's always tempting to relax, congratulate myself on a job... done, and let my momentum die completely.  In that spirit, I haven't written anything since my last, short post here.  With wholly warranted embarrassment I realized yesterday that I'd forgotten that I had a novel waiting on the very cusp of completion.

Hengist and Undine has about a week's worth of work left in it.  There's the climax and denouement to go over, and a major infodump to write more interestingly.  Then it will be time to face the fact that there's no excuse not to send it out.  That's a big deal.  I'm realizing that I've gotten used to being an aspiring author.  Yet I'm about to move on to being an unpublished author, and I'm not quite sure what to expect.

I can't stay where I am, though, or I'd be in danger of being embarrassed in front of the entire internet.

So in the last week of NaNoWriMo one (or I, at least) launches into a crash course in narrative efficiency.  Specifically, with 10,000 words left to go, and realizing that I was nowhere near the end of my story.  It seemed prudent to make myself a little chart with ten spaces, each representing 1,000 words, and space out my 15 or so remaining plot points between them.  I think I did something like this in previous years, but not so systematically.

It worked quite well for the first 5,000 words.  That involved wrapping up one plot thread, so I could launch into the end.  The problem came when I finished that and launched into the climax--only I wasn't actually at the climax.  I had gotten my protagonist into a climactic problem (note to me: "climatic" refers to climate; "climactic" refers to climaxes) but hadn't done anything toward getting her out of it.  And while 5,000 words is enough to wrap a story up, it wasn't enough to work out a solution and put the solution into action.

So how do you fix that?  In my case, the ending just sort of happens.  At the last word, everything is where it ought to be, I just might have glossed over how it got there.  It wouldn't be the first time, or I the first writer, least of all in NaNoWriMo.  Although it Hengist and Undine I learned that plot holes can be your friends.  You can fill them with daring and clever solutions that you hadn't thought of in your first write-through.  Can I say that?  Is that bragging?  If I tell you that I'm an awesome writer will you believe me?

Anyway, endings are hard when you're on a deadline.  Everything else can spread its luxuriant tendrils across your story, and get ripe and vital and scintillating, and then suddenly there isn't room for a proper ending.

Hard or not, though, endings are important.  I think for me, more than for other people, perhaps, an interesting story can really fall apart if the ending doesn't come together.  I can be watching/reading/playing something that has me involved, and then... the end happens, and I realize that my interest was completely contingent on the ending.  Sometimes the ending frays and the whole story loosens behind it at a result.

I feel like this has been happening more often in media lately.  Has anyone else noticed this?  It's tempting to rattle of a list of disappointments I've had recently, but I realized as I ran through candidates that I would give away how out of date my pop culture intake has been.  Is anyone still talking about the end of Battlestar Galactica?  But in that case in particular, I actually have a friend or two more behind the times than myself, for whose sake I'll skip the specific enumeration of offenses.

Suffice it to say that lately writers on deadlines have been dropping the ball on their endings.  With the serialized stories you get in television, especially, I imagine it's tempting to keep raising the stakes, betting that you'll find a solution to your own plot by the time it rolls around.  The challenge of getting renewed for next season is guaranteed, and the challenge of wrapping up your story is contingent on meeting that first one.  Even so, I dare say that a satisfying ending isn't optional.

Now I'm reminded that not too long ago I was admitting to having trouble with my own ending.  Eye, meet log.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

NaNoWriMo: A brief observation

It was perhaps foolish to expect that I could write a novel and populate a new blog in the same 30 days.  But that's done, and I hope I'll be able to put more up here.

I "won" NaNoWriMo, which is cool.  This is number 4 for me, and the new novel is The Silver Mask.  I described it in its early stages as a "fantasy stew" and I think that still holds true.  I don't know if the plot worked out to anything special, but I got to play with characters and situations that have been rattling around in my head for a long time.

So this post is short, too.  I've actually been planning some longer posts on subjects that interest me, but they will take time to write, and tonight was taken up by a traditional post-NaNo slack.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Inspirations and despairations

NaNoWriMo is coming along.

There are certain authors whose writing's immediate impact on me is to make me despair of ever being published.  Neil Gaiman is one of these.  Stephen R. Donaldson, whose Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever I just recently began, is another.  It's a very definite quality of prose which does this.  I respect plot and want very much to do it well, but it doesn't tend to leap out of the first paragraph at me and say, "Fool, you will never compare with this!"  There's a certain richness, a high ratio of thoughts expressed to words used, an exceptional number of stirring images hung elegantly on the chassis of a single sentence.

Luckily the first time this happened I resisted the urge to abandon these books and retreat to less intimidating writers.  It wasn't hard, really, because apart from the terror of failure that it can inspire, rich prose can simply be a pleasure.  And not very long after I would bite the bullet and read this prose which was so much better than mine, I found it had a vitalizing effect on my own writing.  Not that I think I approached Gaiman or Donaldson, or Lord Dunsany (another example), but the metaphors definitely began to flow more freely.

I've come to think of my reading material like food, possibly to a fault (because I'll so seldom bother with anything that strikes me as the literary equivalent of potato chips, and my judgment isn't all that even-handed).

I glanced at the author's bio in the back of Donaldson's The Illearth War and saw that that ambitious trilogy was his publishing debut, and then miscalculated the dates to think he was first published at age 40.  That was heartening to me until I found out I was wrong, since I'm always dismayed by wunderkinds who are well on their way to literary fame by my age.  It turns out that Donaldson was actually 30, so, not that old, but not that young either.  At least, it still left a little room for hope for this 25.99-year-old aspirant.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

All NaNo's Eve

237/265 pages

That is where I am leaving The Tale of Hengist and Undine tonight. Over the past year or so I've been making red marks on what I had labeled the penultimate draft of the novel. Over the past few months, I've been taking those marks, making other changes as they come to me, and turning the penultimate draft into the ultimate draft.

The educational takeaway from this is that making changes on paper and then typing those same changes into a Word document is inefficient, maybe. I hadn't really anticipated how many hours of work it was to apply all of my changes even without thinking about them. So I really thought this step would be the easiest one. And maybe it has been the easiest--I don't really remember the previous steps clearly enough to compare them--but it hasn't been as negligible an effort as I had expected.

The practical takeaway from this is that I'm going into NaNoWriMo this year with some work to do on Hengist that I really don't want to put off until December. I was actually in almost the same situation last year. Which invites the question: why didn't I learn not to do this?

Ah well.

So in 2007 I approached NaNoWriMo with a rather casual approach toward plot, theme, etc. The result was, almost inexplicably, a three-year project with the end-goal of getting a decent novel published. So I'm apparently going at it from the same angle this time.

This year's NaNo is called This Silver Mask. I should point out that this is a very working title. I'm not at all certain that there will be a mask of any kind. If no mask develops, then of course I will have to make some changes to the title. But I'm not going to worry about the mask for now. I'm going to see about having a plot.

Good luck to everyone else who's trying this.

Friday, October 29, 2010

Inaugural post

Hello world.

I've thought for a while that, as an aspiring author, I ought to have a blog. I'd like to say that I've been too busy writing to mess around on the internet, but I the truth is, of course, that I've been busy with... other things. Things like working for money, and sleeping, the latter of which I ought to be doing now.

To cut a long story short, I intend to post here semi-regularly with thoughts that are, generally, more interesting than the ones you're reading right now. Come November (so very soon) I will be participating in my fourth consecutive NaNoWriMo, and hope to chronicle that at least intermittently. Before that, though, I am putting the finishing touches on a fantasy novel, The Tale of Hengist and Undine, which I still hold out hope of having in a publishable state by November 1. There are only 95 pages left to edit.

My primary purpose with this post has been to get the most basic stuff written and out of the way, and to crack the empty expanse of my unpopulated blogspace. That accomplished, I'm going to sleep, but I look forward to having more to say soon.