Long Tale Press

No kidding. That's why I'm furiously planning my next piece for National Novel Writing Month.

Someday, I will get back to The Fallen. It's my first novel and I love it dearly, and it deserves to be taken to a higher plane. It just might take a while for me to do it.

Sign up for National Novel Writing Month at www.nanowrimo.org; novel writing starts November 1st!

Oh, you should totally try NaNoWriMo! It's a hoot. If you can find, let's just say, an hour a day from now until November 1st to work on it, you should totally be able to get an idea ready to go by then.

Anyway, I'm sure evrybody has a different process, but here's mine.

First, I get an idea (ok, duh, probably everybody starts here). They come from all over. Including this year's novel, here is where my past three novel ideas have come from:

• Desperation. I wanted to do NaNo, so I started plotting out a spy thriller because I enjoy those, but then with about a week left before november I decided that I hated the story and couldn't imagine actually writing it. So, out of simply having nowhere else to turn to, I decided to novelize a role-playing game that I had run with some friends years back. It turned out rather well (The Fallen).
• Calculation. Between NaNo 2005 and 2006, I came up with this great idea for a pirate adventure story. It's still a good idea, and I did a lot of pirate research on it. Somewhere in early-october 2006, with a new baby due in 2 weeks, I came to realize that there was no way I was going to be able to write my grand pirate epic in 30 days, let alone 30 sleep deprived days. So I methodically thought of something else through brainstorming and refinement. Although I hadn't read it at the time, Donald Maass' book "Writing the Breakout Novel" outlines a very similar process in his chapter on coming up with a good premise.
• Inspiration. I was at a Barnes&Noble looking for a reference book on Microsoft Windows' COM programming (really) when I saw a book on one of the sale tables about the Pony Express. Suddenly, a novel jumped into my head--a young-adult western set on the Pony Express trail. That one is called Wiry Fellows, which I've been cleaning up ever since and which isn't quite ready to be posted here. I'll take it up again in December, after NaNoWriMo, and will probably post an excerpt from it here in January sometime.
• The recesses of my mind. I was lying in bed one morning, in that dreamy place between sleep and wakefulness, when I had a nightmare. When I woke up, I said "wow, that's a great premise for a story." So that's what I'll be doing this November: a dream-inspired young-adult Sci-fi/horror novel.

The moral is to be open to ideas wherever and whenever they come.

After that, what I do depends on how much time I have before November 1, but the goal is to do whatever I have to do before NaNo starts so that I feel comfortable that I know what the story is . Not knowing is a sure recipe for writers' block, and nobody wants that. I usually take the process of story development in stages.

Stage 1: Write some pretty much unorganized thoughts about the premise, the main character, et cetera. Try to reason out what the story NEEDS. Like, who is the antagonist? Or what is the antagonist? What are the main characters trying to accomplish? What can I do to make their job harder? What tools can I give them to make success possible?

Stage 2: Think a lot about my characters. Who are they? What drives them? What's missing from their lives? What are the sources of conflict in their lives? Why should they care about doing the things they'll need to do in the plot? This is the stage where, ultimately, character arcs come from. This is where I set up my characters with their personal flaws and foibles, their mis-apprehensions about reality, or whatever it may happen to be. But this is where I give them some sort of personal deficincy that they'll have to overcome in order to a) grow and change as a character, and b) succeed in achieving the story goal. This is a good time to look for over-arching themes, or things which could turn into a theme if developed a little bit more. This is a good time to decide which possible themes I won't try to pursue because it would turn the book into a muddle.

Stage 3: Write a rough treatment of the story. Two to three (or four, or five) pages that says what happens. I like to think of it as "if I was at a party and I had just finished reading this book, and I was telling someone about this great book I read and they said 'oh, yeah? what happens in it?', this is how I would summarize the whole story." It's not a scene-by-scene treatment or even a chapter-by-chapter breakdown, but it is a more or less chronological treatment of the plot, in brief.

Stage 4: I work through the rough treatment and do a chapter-by-chapter summary. For each chapter, I write a paragraph or two that says what needs to happen in the chapter. This is almost a scene-by-scene breakdown, except I don't really have that kind of patience and by this point I'm usually pretty confident that I've got the story in my head. I know what happens. At that point, there's little reason to waste energy trying to refine it further. I also like to leave the details somewhat vague, because half (if not more) of the fun of writing a novel is discovering while you write it amazing good ideas that you could never have thought of ahead of time. If I leave the chapter summary a little bit loose, I have the freedom to work those ideas in. But if I had done a rigid scene-by-scene breakdown, I would be emotionally less willing to take the story in an unexpected direction because I wouldn't want to waste all that planning effort.

When November 1st, comes, we dive into stage 5: write it already. You have to be really focused to get through a whole novel in just 30 days. For me, the chapter summary is the key to that. It's the key to never having writers' block. Every day when I sit down for my 2 hours of writing, I open my manuscript, I open the chapter summary, and I copy the paragraphs about that day's chapter straight into the manuscript. Then pretty much I start with sentence 1 of the paragraphs, and turn it into a scene. Then the second one, and so on, until I've got to the end of the chapter.

And that's pretty much it. Or at least, that's the idealized version of it. The reality is that I bounce around between stages 1 and 3 kind of a lot before I'm ready to do stage 4, but that's to be expected. Collectively, those stages are how you figure out the plot, how the characters relate to the plot, how their strengths and weaknesses fit in, and where to tweak things so it all fits better. The one thing I didn't really talk about is research, but if you need to do any you have to fit that in somewhere in stages 1-3 also.

Anyway, just as an example, development for this year's idea it has pretty much gone as follows:

In January, I had that nightmare. I spent a couple of hours that morning before I forgot it (you know how slippery dreams are) in phase 1 and phase 2. Then I let the whole idea sit for a long time, percolating in my brain, thinking about it now and then. Somewhere in the summer I remember getting the urge to work on it, so I fiddled a bit more with what I had come up with so far and took a stab at doing some phase 3. Then I let it sit idle for a long time while I tried to finish up the edits on Wiry Fellows. But now that we're in October, I've Wiry Fellows aside and am working through this new one in earnest now. I'm still in phase 3. I have a good handle on the opening of the book (the first few chapters) and the book's climax and resolution, but I'm a little weak on what needs to happen in the middle to sustain momentum and keep the story moving forward. I'll get there. Then I'll do the chapter outline. But man. 18 days to go. I'd better get cracking...

Sign up for National Novel Writing Month at www.nanowrimo.org; novel writing starts November 1st!

Many thanks, Cloister. I agree with everything you said. I put this aside years ago because I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong. I think most of the things you mentioned are in those first couple of chaps. I have a tendency to do too much explaining (telling) in the beginning. I mention this because I think others are having the same problem. Usually it's only a matter of reworking the beginning. It is so hard to see what's wrong (to be objective) about one's own writing, so sites like this are sooooo helpful. shear/sheer--funny comment. See what I mean about my spelling? Spell check couldn't have picked that up. Again, thanks Cloister. How do you find the time to read and review every submission? I'm glad you do by the way. Now, tell me how Nanowrimo is going for you!

Oh, I'm off to a slow start. I'm kind of a political agitator in my other-other job (ha ha), so what with the election and all I decided there were more important things I had to do in the first few days of the month. Now that the election's over, I'm having a little trouble mentally switching gears and getting back into the swing of writing. So it's nice to be able to come here once in a while and having something new to read. At least that gets my writing muscles working again.

Hi Cloister. I'd be interested in hearing what you think of Yoshi97's review of CRAZY ALBERT. I actually had/have some of the same concerns he mentioned. I love writing descriptive paragraphs. I love the genre Literary Mainstream, but I believe Yoshi has a point when he says today's readers might be impatient with this kind of writing. They are anxious to get into the action--the meat of the story, and maybe I don't do that early enough in this novel. I await your response.

I can see Yoshi's point, but I don't happen to agree with it. I didn't have a problem with the pacing or the balance of description and narrative in the excerpt. Again, I think that To Kill a Mockingbird provides a good touch-point: in that book, the first sentence lays that book's "crazy Albert" on you (apologies if this isn't an exact quote, it's from memory):

"I think it all started the day we decided to make Boo Radley come out."

You learn a little bit about the mysterious and enigmatic Boo Radley in the opening graphs, but then remarkably little about him for quite some time after that. Granted, the novel isn't really about Boo Radley as much as it is about racial injustice, but Boo provides a sub-plot that runs here and there throughout the book. That Harper Lee chose to open his masterpiece with a line about a minor character in the book who never quite makes an in-person appearance speaks volumes about the power of planting a question in an audience's mind and leaving it unanswered for a while.

Yet, our curiousity about Boo, based on that tremendous hook of a first line, keeps us reading until we're then also hooked by the book's main plot.

I find Lee's choice to open with Boo Radley really fascinating. I wouldn't have thought to do that, but it's an inspired choice. And his choice to keep Boo such an enigma, too. Brilliant. Throughout basically all of the book up until the climactic scene, we are left in the dark about Boo: is he crazy? Violent and dangerous? Merely addled? All we really have are the local children's impressions of Boo, and what we can surmise. That he leads a sad and lonely life, devoid of meaningful human contact. So, when we finally do learn what sort of a person Boo is, the answer is both powerful and surprising.

Anyway. On those grounds, I don't believe I'd agree with Yoshi's advice to tell more about Crazy Albert in the beginning. Let him be a mystery for a while, the better to make the eventual revealing all that much more satisfying.

Sign up for National Novel Writing Month at www.nanowrimo.org; novel writing starts November 1st!