Dragon.

Back in November I wrote a short novel for NaNoWriMo and I am still editing it, but at the same time I have also returned to the novel I had been working on before that. It is a giant, grotesque monster of a thing and it has taken awhile for my head to get back into it. So I have spent some time going back and reading what I have so far (which is about a hundred and twenty pages) and it has been a very strange experience. I have been working on this one in one way or another for about six years (when I say “working” I mostly mean “thinking” and “researching” and “procrastinating”) and sitting down and reading it has kind of been like getting a drink with an old friend; it is a fun and pleasant experience, but there is some anxiety too. I read and I read and I read and I’m super pleased with how the author writes EXACTLY the way I do! How cool is that? But then I’ll come to a too-long paragraph describing a headboard or something and I’ll be all like, “Jesus H. Christ it’s like Henry James is writing a Restoration Hardware catalog or something!” (That is a joke that’s predicated on your being familiar with Henry James’s longwindedness AND ALSO the very manly home interior store Restoration Hardware [if I were a private detective I would furnish my private detective office exclusively with things purchased from Restoration Hardware]).

The novel has the working title “Elegant Mess” because that’s exactly what it is. It has at least three main storylines (one in both first and third person) and some tangential ones will be added later. There are connections between the storylines, but you don’t know that yet, but I still have to lay the groundwork as I’m writing, which means I have to fricken’ keep track of everything! Which is why my bedroom wall looks like this:



The long and the short of all of this though is that I’m sort of afraid of this novel and have been for a really long time. You see, I’m really good at writing small, pretty, interesting clockwork magic boxes of stories (I’m using only complimentary words here. One could just as easily say that what I do is write plot-less, existentially self-referential, gimmicky kafka-on-prozac structure-porn), but writing something that is SO MUCH BIGGER and LONGER and UNCUT is kind of terrifying! Especially when it is still supposed to be a magic box!

There is something freeing about it too though. Because it is SO f’ing BIG that you get to really stretch out and try things and experiment, and if something doesn’t work, well who the fuck cares? It isn’t like I have a three book deal with a publisher or anything. I’m writing because I want to. One of those note cards on my wall says this:

It seems counter-intuitive that I have to remind myself to do this, but it needs to be said. Writers are generally neurotic and so sometimes we have to remind ourselves that there’s a point to all of this self-created stress and that this is love. Love of this work. Love of the process and love of the end product (Other neurotics who must be reminded of this: photographers, painters, poets, sculptors, actors, and really anyone who has ever undertaken a project for the simple joy of it.)

So why bother working on something that’s scary? That’s difficult? That has already claimed six years of brain space?

Well, what’s the point of working on something that isn’t scary? That isn’t difficult? That isn’t kind of a sanity-threatening monster? When they read you those stories as a kid, the knight wasn’t trying to slay a dark cave full of kittens. No, it was a fire breathing dragon. SCARY!

Well I’m going to go back and tinker some more on my dragon*. You should go do the same to yours, whatever it may be.



* "Tinker on my dragon" is not a euphemism for masturbation. I thought this was worth mentioning.
.
.
.

Writing about Writing, How Novel.

I have been writing a lot more these last couple of months, which is actually quite nice. I am working on a “novel” that I have been endlessly prewriting and researching for literally years. In those years my life has changed a lot – new cities, new jobs, new relationships, school, blogging, and all sorts of different kinds of mental states - but all that time I have had this “novel” kicking around in the back of my head. Now that I am not in school and am single and have managed to finally find a groove at work that eliminates a lot of my stress, I have been tackling this writing thing with a renewed zest. I’m very proud of myself because this past weekend I sat down and wrote for SEVEN HOURS and completed about twenty-five pages. And this was not fun, lazy, stream-of-consciousness writing, no, this was writing with goals. Things needed to happen, dammit! Characters needed to be introduced, themes initiated, places described, clues dropped, mysteries begun, storylines tantalizingly interconnected with just the right amount of subtly.

Well last Sunday I finally cleared the 100 page mark. Although it is a completely arbitrary benchmark, it is a big deal for me personally because I always give a (big) novel about 100 pages to lay it all out for me, especially if there are multiple storylines involved (I am writing three main story lines with offshoots here and there for fun. And some point-of-view shifts in there too, just to make things more complicated and interesting. Plus there is some movement back and forth in time depending on the character(s) involved. This sounds needlessly complex, right? I know. Please don’t judge me. I’m building a fun house, okay? And a fun house has a lot of stuff in it.).

So I am very pleased at the moment. I feel like I have moved out of the beginning. From this point on I am writing the meat of it; the real story. A lot of writers like to break everything into a three-act structure just because virtually every story can be broken down this way if you look at it hard enough. I don’t think that way when I am building a story structure, but sometimes it can be hard to see the forest for the trees when you’re in the writing and I find it helpful to step back and try to see the three-act structure as I’m bumbling along. Well I’m 100 pages in and I have to confess that I am not yet at the end of my first act, but I’m getting there. And, more to the point, I’m excited about it!

If the first act is introducing your characters and setting the scene and laying out the conflicts, then the second act is all the stuff that actually happens and then the third act is your climax and trying everything up. Think of it as Who, What, and How. WHO is in this movie? What is this movie about and WHAT happens, and HOW it all ends. (I’m just riffing right now, none of this is scientific or English Department approved) Well lots of writers hate the second act, and I understand why, but I am really looking forward to it. As a reader or – say – someone watching a movie, the second act should be the good part. This is where all the car chases happen and the bank gets robbed and the protagonist gets double crossed and all that good stuff that you know and love, but the reality is that it can be a real drag to write because it’s all sort of obligatory at that point. The first act is fun to write because it’s like you’re creating these interesting people and getting to know them and there’s really no pressure yet. This is when you start to think, “Oooh! And later there is going to be an awesome car chase!” But by the second act you have already invented this person and they’re starting to annoy you because they aren’t doing what you want them to and you’re all like, “Listen motherfucker, you have a car chase to get to!” and you feel all of this pressure to get to the car chase already, but you do have to get there and you realize that nine other things have to happen before you can get there and you just don’t feel like writing any of those other nine things today, so you don’t and before you know it you have sixty pages of a story that you haven’t worked on in a year.

That’s what happens normally anyway. I will admit here that I am kind of a free-spirited, tree-hugging hippie when it comes to writing though, because I do not chart out - in great detail - what needs to happen in every single scene, and I often spend (too long) letting my characters wander around and find the world interesting rather than scooting them along to that car chase. Incidentally this is why I can’t write a decent script treatment to save my life (self-described screenwriters often consider this to be lazy, but I consider most self-described screenwriters to be fake writers, so, you know, there’s that).

Please now put your tray tables into the upright position because the captain has turned on the No Digression sign and we will now be returning to the main thread of this longwinded blog post …

The point is that I am actually excited about getting into the second act. I think because I have been living with these people (in my head) for so long and spent so much time working out the details (in college I took a mythology class specifically as a preparation for one day writing this story) that now I just want to get out there with them and make everything happen! So sure, the first hundred pages have taken me like five years (more or less) but I’m hoping that the next hundred pages (and all the pages after that) take months and not years.

These are very exciting times! And I’m remembering what I enjoyed about all of this writing stuff in the first place, which is a nice bonus.

.
.
.

Thoughts on Sex Scenes.

Things that fell through this weekend: having a dinner party, going camping, going hiking. So I decided to commit myself to writing (since I clearly had the time). I have been trying to re-inject some electricity into my long-suffering “novel”. I was emboldened to do this when, at the Goodwill Saturday morning I found and purchased what has to be the one remaining dictionary of classical mythology that I didn’t already own. It was providence! A harbinger of fate! Or something!

After a lot of thinking and yes, even some actually writing I discovered that I have to completely disassemble one of my storylines and start over from scratch. Very sad face. This was upsetting and so I put it off by reading about Hermes in my new dictionary, but then, this happened:



Yes, I think that by choosing to lounge inconveniently there on my books the cat was actually trying to make me realize that while all writers must do research, at a certain point the research just becomes a crutch, something that allows us to further delay the act of writing by telling ourselves that we are better preparing for that writing. It was as if The Kitten squeaked, “Eventually preparation becomes over-preparation. Remember what Billy Joel said, ‘Too many choices make you change your mind’.”

Who knew my cat was a Billy Joel fan. That’s kinda weird, right?

Anyway, so I sat down and wrote.

I have knocked out nearly 26 pages so far this weekend and am currently trying to rewrite that disassembled storyline. Also, this weekend I wrote the first sex scene that I have written in a very long time. I actually wrestled with it some (not in the way that you are thinking, you filthy and pruriently-minded person you) because I hate the way that most writing deals with sex. Unless you are specifically reading erotica (come on, you know you do) most novels have a very PG-13 attitude when it comes to sex. The author leads you right up to the bedroom door and then closes it on you, breaks for white space and then opens the next morning. I recently read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson (on a recommendation from King Heifer a reader of, and occasional contributor to, this blog) and I quiet enjoyed it. The protagonist has a pretty liberal sexual attitude (he is European after all) and has the sex with three different ladies throughout the course of the book. What’s interesting though is that some of the sexual crimes in the book are described in awful and gut-wrenching detail, but the enjoyable, consensual sex (of which there is a pretty good amount) is almost completely omitted. Had this been an American writer I would just blame it on that Puritan sensibility that we still all seem to have when it comes to sex, but this was a Swedish author. The nation that gave us the Swedish Bikini Team, Victoria Silvstedt and … that’s really all that comes to mind. Anyway, what gives?

As I was writing this sex scene (the first in the story so far) I was trying to just write it and not think about it. I will say though that I am calling it a “sex scene” but in reality even I stopped the scene right as the actual sex starts. So why did I do that? For me, I guess that I didn’t want to over-do it … what came before was pretty graphic. The point of the scene is to see the way that these two characters interacted in that situation. I think that in fiction (as in life) the way one conducts one’s sex life is a kind of mirror or metaphor for the way that they conduct themselves in life. And that is the thing that I find kind of uselessly PG-13 about the omission of the actual sex part in most books. How these people fuck one another could actually tell you something about them. I may have ended the scene as the sex was starting, but believe you me, That is because I am a very “experimental” writer and I will be returning to it in flashbacks throughout the next couple chapters.

But I will say that I understand the caution most writers choose to exercise. It can be very difficult to tell when exactly you cross the various lines from titillating to erotic to pornographic. Since those lines are a little (or a lot) different from one person to the next, it is probably just better to avoid the whole thing entirely and just skip ahead to the next morning.

Well I say no bueno to that!

Over the course of several months the walls of my bed room have been filling up with 3x5 cards and post-it notes.



(This picture makes it look far less erratic than it looks in real life)

No doubt this makes me look like a crazy person, but one of those cards says on it, “WRITE HOW YOU WANT” and god damn it, since it doesn’t actually matter to anyone (it’s not like I have an agent, an editor, or a book deal) I am going to do just that. So that means that sometimes I will write, and you – the reader - will have to read, some actual sex. Any reader who gets alienated by that would probably have already given up on this book anyway (on the second page of the first chapter there is a conversation between a character’s hypothalamus and his lungs, yeah, it’s one of those kind of books).

Anyway, this blog post was just an excuse to take a break and think out loud a little, but that said, my broken storyline is not going to rebuild itself, so back to the salt mines I go. The dirty, dirty, sexy salt mines.

.
.
.