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2012 Reading challenge, book 4: On Writing
February 8, 2012
The name “Stephen King” has by now become a byword for “successful author.” He’s one of those authors, along with J.K. Rowling, that are always cited as the exception to the rule that most writers won’t be able to live solely off the fruits of their writing. He’s ubiquitous. In light of both this and my interest in fantasy and sci-fi, which often encroaches upon the borders of horror fiction, it might surprise you to learn that I didn’t read my first Stephen King book until nearly 4 years ago – that book was Insomnia and even he admits it was a muddled novel. So, what do I think of a book about writing, written by one of the titans of the industry? Let’s find out.
Title: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (10th Anniversary Edition)
Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: 5 out of 5
About the book: Part memoir and part instructional manual, On Writing ties together King’s career as an author with more personal facets of his life. In an unusual move, the instructions about writing – arguably the biggest draw – are placed towards the end of the book, and On Writing instead devotes its first half to King’s childhood, adolescence, and attempts to break into the publishing world.
What I liked: From the start of this book, I felt that I was in the presence of someone who made me comfortable and welcome. More than that even, I felt a tremendous sense of self-assurance when I read it. King’s been there before, knows the pitfalls, and is happy to steer you around his memories with confidence. Every time I finished a section or chapter in this book, I told myself, “OK, it’s time to put the book down now.” And then, of their own accord, my eyes would snake down or over to the next page, and I would be held fast once again. This was, literally, the first book of the year that I could Just. Not. Put. Down.
Throughout the book, I got the sense that although writing was something he put effort into, he didn’t fall into the pretentious Byronic-hero hole that so many other authors, both beginning and established, fall victim to. (It’s a hole that I’m only now learning how to crawl out of.) Instead, he made it feel as natural, physical, and vital as chopping wood. If you have enough wood, your house stays warm. If you crank out enough words, you stay warm.
A lot of the time, I judge a book by how vividly I recall the images later, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t expunge from my mind the scene that King describes of having an ear infection as a child – one so intense that his eardrums had to be repeatedly lanced with a needle to drain the pus. I have tried and tried, with no avail, to stop imagining the looming needle coming closer to perforate my own eardrums. That is strong writing.
In the instructional section on writing, King unpacks the metaphor of a “writers’ toolbox” and runs with it. The advice inside is fairly commonplace – know your grammar, remove adverbs, etc – but they’re relayed in such a matter-of-fact manner that they acquire additional heft. He also provides an extremely useful glimpse into the revision process by including a “before and after” sample of his own writing, and then going step by step through the changes he made to tighten up his prose. Revision is an extremely important part of the writing process, but seldom is it actually demonstrated instead of discussed.
Besides all that, look at the cover. It’s got a Corgi on it! I love Corgis. Knowing that Stephen King owns them just makes him even more awesome in my book.
What I disliked: The length – it’s too short! I could easily have read another 200 pages. In particular, the move away from the memoir section was too abrupt, as it stopped nearly right after the acquisition of Carrie, his debut novel. King did write about his substance abuse problems, but I would have appreciated greater insight on what led him down that path and why he felt he needed to self-medicate. Yes, it’s not a topic that really lends itself to a discussion of the writing craft, but it is something that a lot of writers end up dealing with anyways.
The verdict: I originally gave this book 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. Then I started reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and that book paled in comparison to this one so much that I retroactively bumped it up another star. Whenever I read this book, I felt I was in good hands. What better can be said about an author than that?
Next up: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.
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Book statistics, genre love, and genre hate
January 28, 2012
Last week I started an additional side project related to my reading efforts. Spurred on by an article in Salon talking about gender bias in book reviews, I have decided to keep a spreadsheet of my own reading efforts with the intention to derive some nice statistics at the end of the year. Will I end up giving print books higher ratings, on average, than eBooks? What about female authors versus male ones? There are so many questions to ask and answers to seek, and so many ways from which to view this information, that this project is impossible to resist.
Regardless of this, one thing has become obvious despite the small pool of books I’ve read so far this year: I really don’t like crime/detective fiction.
My chief complaints about both Zoo City and Empire State (oddly enough, both published by Angry Robot Books) had to do with their attempts to blend sci-fi/fantasy story elements with crime/detective story elements. The combination didn’t work for me, and in Empire State in particular, I found that the author’s application of sci-fi elements was used to wallpaper over some glaring inconsistencies.
This raises an interesting question, then: do I dislike the crime genre as a whole, the mixing of genres, or just the way those two books handled said mixing? Well, now that I’ve got my handy-dandy spreadsheet, the question will be a little easier to answer come December 2012, won’t it? Assuming, that is, that we don’t blow up in some Mayan calendrical apocalypse.
Anyways.
I read Old City Hall near the end of 2010 and really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that when I went to Word on the Street in September 2011 and told the author, Robert Rotenberg, how much – oh my god, can I tell you what an intriguing character Albert Fernandez is? – he gave me an autographed copy of the book for free.
OCH is about a crime, and one of the main characters is a police detective. Does the book fall, then, under the rubric of crime fiction? Or rather, since many of its most important events take place in a courtroom, should it be classified as a legal thriller? Where does one draw the line dividing genres? In this case, is there even a line to be drawn? I have no idea. All I know is that I found the book’s analysis of coutroom behaviour fascinating, and wanted even more of it.
On top of that, I also enjoyed the movie Children of Men when I saw it, and that was based on a book by noted detective fiction writer P.D. James. Would I like her Adam Dalgleish books just as much if I tried one? I don’t know. Part of me doesn’t want to read mysteries because my knowledge of the genre is so poor that it will feel like work – the literary equivalent of eating broccoli (make sure to read at least 5-8 servings per year!). However, another part of me knows that I’m missing out on some amazing fiction because of my own wariness.
This is another issue that I hope tracking my reading on a spreadsheet will be able to rectify: If I can analyze my reading habits and figure out what patterns and holes there are in said habits, I’ll be closer to improving them and to becoming an even better editor.
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2012 Reading challenge, book 3: Empire State
January 25, 2012
Title: Empire State
Author: Adam Christopher
Publisher: Angry Robot Books
Rating: 2 out of 5
Well, it was bound to happen – I came across a book that I didn’t like. Empire State by Adam Christopher will no doubt please some readers, but I am not one of them.
About the book: It’s New York in the 1930′s, and a catastrophic fight between two superhero-like figures has inadvertently caused a rift in space-time. This rift begets a parallel version of New York known as the Empire State. The Empire State is grey, gloomy, rainy, and isolated, perpetually dealing with rations due to a never-ending war with a nameless, faceless Enemy.
However, private detective Rad Bradbury has stumbled into what could be a lucrative case – a girl whose disappearance the police won’t investigate. Things become even more puzzling when her body turns up and the police still refuse to get involved. Combine this with an unusual occurence at the docks – a ship has returned from a fight with the Enemy for the first time ever – and Rad finds out that he’s stumbled upon the most important case of his career: one that could lead to the destruction of the Empire State itself.
Note: The spoilers start here.
What I liked: The sci-fi elements were intriguing, but the only standout passage I can recall is the sequence where Rad, our protagonist, comes face-to-face with the fissure connecting New York to the Empire State. The interdimensional rift and its surrounding mechanical paraphernalia were the only part in the book where I felt awe and wonder at the proceedings. Everything else was a wash.
What I disliked: Here’s the “everything else” I’m talking about. There were so many problems that I had with this book that it’s hard to enumerate them all. Take it as a very telling sign that it took me a full week to read this book, and almost another full week to write this review. However, in the interest of being thorough, I will go through some of the problems I perceived:
- The rift-causing cataclysmic fight between the two superheroes occurred at the very beginning of the book, but the one person who saw one of the superheroes survive is mentioned in the first two chapters and then dropped completely (as is all mention of the original NYC) for the following 10 or so chapters. Talk about whiplash.
- It is revealed that the Empire State occupies a pocket universe. Fair enough. But on top of that, the pocket universe and the rift that connects it to the original New York already existed in unrealized form, and it was already occupied by the faceless force that the Empire State calls the Enemy. It turns out that the Enemy is somehow both a reflection of both New York and the Empire State. Because what the hell, why have a single parallel universe when you can have two, right?
- All of the people in the Empire State are copies of people in New York, except for the prime villain behind it all. Instead, both he and his double occupy the Empire State within the same body, and the hosting body manifests split personalities. How is this possible, you ask? Why, because the villain (an influential judge in New York) somehow managed to enter the pocket universe before the Empire State was even created, and seize control of it at its moment of birth. No explanation is given for how he was able to find the rift and not be subsumed by the Enemy in the intervening period.
- The rift (also known as the Fissure) has time dilation properties. This provides a rather handy excuse for people who wander into it to go missing for 19 years. Despite all this, there are people on the New York side of the Fissure who can predict the events of the Empire State timeline; this makes it incredibly easy for people to pop in and out of the action when a daring rescue is most convenient.
The case that Rad is asked to solve goes off the rails immediately and becomes tied to something much larger – the potential destruction of Empire State as other characters attempt to merge it back into the prime reality. So far, so good. But the final 50 pages are non-stop action of a bewildering sort, as everyone and everything moves, people get repeatedly injured, and characters change allegiances like a person with OCD washes hands (Captain Carson, I’m looking at you).
Speaking of flip-flopping, it’s never truly clear what will happen if the Fissure is tampered with. Some characters believe it will result in the two realities merging. Others believe that it will result in annihilation – a meeting of matter and antimatter writ large. Of course, when the Fissure actually is tampered with, it results in the tenuous connection between the two realities being strengthened, not diminished. This, along with almost all of the other phenomena the Fissure exhibits, is casually explained by the excuse that the Fissure is so unusual, almost anything is possible.
The verdict: This novel was a strange and frustrating beast. The noir/crime elements of the story– missing girls, corpses, down-on-their-luck detectives, crusading journalists, and lots of both booze and beatings – were so haphazardly blended with the later sci-fi elements that I was left scratching my head.
I gave this book 2 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. This is the lowest my GR ratings tend to go – I like to believe that I’d be smart enough to ditch any book deserving of a 1-star rating before I finished reading it. However, this book frustrated me because a lot of the time, it felt like the author was breaking the rules of his world whenever he thought it convenient – it felt like I was reading a less egregious version of the book described in this article from the Onion. I really wanted to like this book considering all of the effort publisher has spent building buzz around it, but I just couldn’t overlook its flaws.
Next up: On Writing by Stephen King
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2012 Reading challenge, book 2: How to Win Friends and Influence People
January 20, 2012
Title: How to Win Friends and Influence People
Author: Dale Carnegie
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: 3 out of 5
My 2012 reading has continued apace. Here are my thoughts on the first non-fiction book I read this year, which I finished over a week ago.
About the book: This was one of the books, if not the book, that launched the self-help genre. The title pretty much says it all. However, the subject matter is deeper than the title suggests, as it also talks about effective leadership skills, and talks about interpersonal skills in greater context.
What I liked: I liked the sense of Dale Carnegie’s voice that shone through the text. Yes, the tone is a tad fusty (the book itself is over 75 years old), but I got a more authentic sense of the author’s voice here than I did when reading other famous self-help books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or Getting Things Done.
Those other books sounded fake because the anecdotes used to illustrate key concepts were so heavily paraphrased that they ended up sounding like the authors themselves. They also packed a lot of fluff – GTD, in particular, could have been just as useful at half the length. In contrast, How to Win’s chapters were succinct, and the letters and anecdotes that Carnegie quoted really did sound like they were written by other people.
I also liked that this book had such practical information; it contained little jargon or technical-sounding acronyms. Instead, there was just good, old-fashioned psychological insight, the most important of which can be boiled down into five words: people like to feel important.
What I disliked: Yes, the book explicitly states on the cover that it’s all about how to influence people, but I was still uncomfortable with some of the pieces of advice offered – they felt downright manipulative. On top of that, I’m unsure whether the now-dated references to celebrities and captains of industry detract from, or add to, the book’s charm.
The verdict: I liked it, and felt that a lot of the book’s suggestions were practical and easy to implement. It says a lot of true things about human nature, even if the book’s method of attack is flowery and old-fashioned.
Next up: Empire State, by Adam Christopher.
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2012 Reading challenge, book 1: Zoo City
January 15, 2012
One of my goals for the year is to read at least 40 books (at least 25 of which must be fantasy or sci-fi), either on paper or in digital format. So far, I’m off to a good start, as I’ve already completed two books and am partway through a third. After that, there are at least three more books (all non-fiction, all about the process of writing) that I want to read. With that in mind, I’m going to posting reviews of my 2012 books. So here goes: my thoughts on the first book I read this year.
Title: Zoo City
Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: Angry Robot Books
Rating: 3 out of 5
The plot: Zinzi December is a disgraced pop journalist with a Sloth on her shoulder who pays off the debts she incurred as a junkie by writing 419 scam emails. Like all residents of “Zoo City,” a slum in Johannesburg, she’s been “animalled” – that is, she’s done something so awful that she’s now been spiritually conjoined with an animal familiar.
Like all “zoos,” her animal has also given her a unique power, or mashavi. Normally, while Zinzi uses her mashavi of finding lost things to earn some money on the side, she refuses to find lost people. However, the shady associates of a music producer have asked her to find a missing teeny-bop starlet, and the payment for doing so is too great to turn down. When she digs deeper into the girl’s disappearance, she gets tangled up in a world of drugs, lies, and black magic…
What I liked: I loved the merging of fantasy aspects with real world ones. No one knows what first caused the mysterious “zoo plague,” but interstitial chapters within the book flesh out the world of Zoo City by providing snippets of academic and pop culture material written about the “zoo” phenomenon. Cleverly, one of those snippets contains a citation to an academic article reinterpreting Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy in light of the zoo plague.
On top of that, the setting of Johannesburg is both familiar (in that it’s wonderfully textured and realized) and strange (in that the only other major spec-fic story I can think of set in Johannesburg is District 9). Finally, Zinzi December is a marvelous character. She’s smart, tough, self-serving, and able to think on her feet. She’s hard to like but easy to admire, and I take my hat off to Lauren Beukes for writing a main character that is so complicated. I wouldn’t want Zinzi to be my friend, but I would want her to have my back.
What I disliked: I feel that the book’s chief misstep was the mystery itself. Of course, as with many crime/detective stories, nothing is as it seems and the people asking Zinzi to take on the job have ulterior motives.
Ultimately, the resolution of the story – involving murders, kidnappings, blackmail, and a heck of a lot of black magic – seems too bloated and frenetic to appreciate. Although I’ve muddled my way through some of the unspoken motives of the perpetrators, now that I’ve finished the book I feel that there are a lot of plot holes I still can’t patch over.
The verdict: I liked it, but not as much as I had hoped to. I came to this book with high expectations based on some interviews with the author that I listened to and on the book’s surprise win of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. However, I’ve never been a big fan of detective fiction, and the book’s melding of it with speculative fiction/magical realism left an odd taste in my mouth. I wanted to see more of the slums of Johannesburg, hear more South African slang, and read more about how zoo people have become a new global underclass. I also wanted to see more of Zinzi’s backstory, which I think has been left too much to the imagination. Instead, I got a detective story mixed into all of it, and it dampened my enjoyment of the book.
Next up: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.
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The obligatory New Year’s post
January 1, 2012
Hello to all, and a happy 2012!
I’ve got a lot of plans for this year, and I’m encouraged by the response I’ve received so far towards my new plan to focus on writing and editing fantasy and science fiction stories. This will involve a lot of reading and a lot more writing than I’ve done in the past. NaNoWriMo was just the warm-up to what I’m planning this year, although one that was necessary to build my confidence.
In any event, the arrival of World Fantasy Con to Toronto this year has provided much-needed motivation to get my butt in the chair, my fingers on the keyboard, and my nose in my (very new, very shiny) eReader. The sheer variety of eBooks on sale through publisher’s sites, bookstores, and independent distributors will prove to be a very sore trial on my wallet, but all growth requires sacrifice. I’ve given myself a limit of how much money I should spend each month on eBooks and mp3s, so that will (probably, hopefully) help.
This year I’m also going to track what I’m reading more carefully in the past. Goodreads has been a godsend to my reading list, and now that the new year has started, I will be able to get a better sense of how many books I read on average in a month, and how long it takes me to finish a book. I’ve set myself a goal of reading at least 40 books this year – a number I consider doable in light of the writing and WCDR stuff already in the works. No doubt as the year progresses my “to be read” list will grow longer and longer – but, knowing other readers and writers, that’s to be expected.
Overall, I’m optimistic. Will the stories I plan to write shatter the world with their loveliness and precise prose? Probably not. Will I win any contests or awards? Who knows, maybe if I’m lucky some will. I’ve heard it said that a writer has to write 1,000,000 words of crap before they write anything good. My hope this year is to write around 250,000 words, so if I manage to write anything worthwhile, I’ll be ahead of schedule. Maybe you’ll follow me as I walk down this new path, and maybe not. But at least I’m finally doing so after years of fear and mental hibernation.
Goals for 2012
December 20, 2011
Well, it’s coming up to the close of 2011, and I’ve given myself a lot to think about in the past few months.
Most importantly, I’ve thought a lot about what I’m doing right now as a lover of books, and what I could be doing to make the next year more successful on that front. My freelancing has stalled; it’s easy to blame this on the fact that I have a day job that takes up a lot of my mental energy, but that would be wrong because there are plenty of other people out there who are successful at balancing a day job and freelancing work.
So now I’ve decided that I need to sit down and think about what I want to do. Who do I want to work with? The kind of writing and editing I’ve advertised on my site so far has been targeted (somewhat haphazardly, I admit) to small businesses. However, let’s consider the following:
- Do I follow a lot of small businesses/entrepreneurs/start-up companies on Twitter? No.
- Do I listen regularly to podcasts about marketing, small businesses, or start-up culture? No.
- Are the people I network with on a regular basis involved in small businesses or start-up culture? On the whole, no.
In all three cases – social media, podcasts, and in-person networking – the majority of the people I converse with are fiction writers. I follow book review sites, publishing news, and other editors on Twitter. At WCDR meetings, I talk to people who just got their books published with independent presses. And on the podcast front, I listen to podcasts talking about the art, craft, and business of writing.
Then, let’s not forget, I attempted NaNoWriMo this year, and, wonder of wonders, actually hit the 50,000-word mark. Consequently, I’ve had to admit to myself: The people who I felt I should work with as a freelancer were not the same people that I found myself most easily connecting with.
What does that mean, then? I think it means I have to re-brand myself and devote myself to what I’m really interested in: Working on fantasy and sci-fi fiction.
I can hear some of you groaning in the background. Genre fiction? I hear you scoff.
Well, yeah.
It’s the fiction I find myself reading and enjoying most often. This more a change in direction than a reversal – I’ll still try to work on writing website copy and helping people with their WordPress installations. But I’ll just have to be more diligent about finding writers who want me to critique their work.
To help me with this task, I’ve set up a few new goals for 2012:
- Buy a new domain name and migrate the content from here at 105 Creations to a URL that gives people a clearer idea of who I am and what I do.
- Read at least 25-30 scifi/fantasy books.
- Write at least 5,000 words of my own fiction every week. More to the point, write a series of short stories as my own personal writing challenge along the lines of NaNoWriMo.
- Build a network of like-minded writers and bloggers who also appreciate sci-fi and fantasy writing.
- Attend the 2012 World Fantasy Convention in November.
This last bullet is the most important. The 2012 WFC is happening in Richmond Hill, of all places (though the site says Toronto), and that’s practically in my backyard. Given my new realization about what I want to do and my new sense of focus about how to achieve this, I would be a fool if I didn’t take advantage of such an event handed to me on a silver platter.
So, those are my goals for 2012. And if it turns out that the Mayans were right and the apocalypse does happen, at least I’ll have faced it doing something I love to do.
What I’ve learned from NaNoWriMo, Part 2
December 4, 2011
A few days ago I outlined some of the things I learned about myself and about writing because I participated in NaNoWriMo. Here’s a continuation of that list.
I’ve had it easier than other people
Although I “won” NaNoWriMo on my first try, just because I did so doesn’t mean that I was a better writer than those who wrote only a few thousand words. The majority of people who attempt NaNoWriMo do not reach the 50,000-word mark. I think the fact that I did speaks to me being lucky more than anything else. There are a lot of time constraints that cut others’ word counts short. Here are a few of the circumstances that I felt made it much easier for me to reach the 50,000-word mark.
- I don’t do shift work or retail work. This meant that I had a consistent schedule around which to conduct my writing.
- I don’t work on weekends. This meant that when I did fall behind, I had time to catch up on my writing.
- I live with family. Having someone else worry about meals and housekeeping (though I do contribute) made things a lot easier.
- I’ve finished school. I’m pretty sure I would never have been able to juggle NaNoWriMo simultaneously with essays and midterms.
- I had people who cheered me on. My friends and family were interested in my progress and willing to discuss plot points with me. Writing the story would have been much harder to do if I didn’t have anyone close to talk to about it.
- I didn’t encounter any catastrophes. It’s obvious: sudden illnesses, accidents, computer crashes, or deaths in the family push writing to the backburner, which makes sense.
Just because you wrote 50,000 words doesn’t mean you’re “good,” and just because you failed to reach 50,000 doesn’t mean you’re “bad.” Sometimes it comes down to exactly how lucky you are.
I still haven’t figured out a writing routine
There were days when I didn’t write anything at all, and there were days when I wrote over 5,000 words in a mad rush to catch up. (Read: Sundays.) On some days I wrote in the morning, and on others I wrote in the evening. On weekends, I wrote throughout the day. Sometimes I wrote at home, while other times I wrote outside of the house. Sometimes I told myself that I would tackle a list of certain scenes, while on other days I decided to roll with whatever the muse chose to throw my way.
In short, my efforts to write weren’t consistent, although there were overarching patterns. It will take me a while to figure out when and where it is most optimal for me to write. Once I find out what works best for me, the question will then be how to keep things that way.
This is about discipline, not craft
At first, I thought a lot about the craft of the story. What was its theme? Who were my characters and how would I build their character arcs? How would I flesh out the setting? How could I weave backstory with the present day? A lot of these concerns were brought to my attention by the Writing Excuses podcast; their commentaries gave me a lot to think about. However, trying to incorporate these aspects to the story slowed me down.
As time wore on, I abandoned those questions of craft for this simple one: “What happens next?” I became a lot less focused on skill, and more focused on keeping the plot going and just getting the bloody words out. NaNoWriMo calls for pipes and welding and concrete foundations; the caulking and insulation can be added in the second draft.
Writing and identity politics
Let’s face facts: I’m a straight, white, middle-class woman, and I fell into the trap of almost all of my characters being straight and white, too. The only person who broke the mold was one of my protagonists, who is black. However, I haven’t put a lot of thought into whether his racial background affects the story. (Or whether it even should. Part of me thinks not.) On top of that, though, I’ve fallen into the trap of having only one or two female main characters in contrast to several male main characters. My story doesn’t pass the Bechdel test even though I majored in Womens’ Studies in university!
This has led to frustration. I don’t want my story to be full of boring, normalized, un-Othered characters, but I don’t want to add characters to my story who are “different” in one obvious way so I can be more politically correct. It’s a really hard tightrope walk, and I haven’t even begun to balance on it properly.
What’s next?
There’s a part in Watership Down after the does escape Efrafa, settle in Hazel’s warren, and start to dig burrows; in this part, they say that they never recognized how much of their frustration and unhappiness in Efrafa stemmed from being unable to dig. I now feel the same way about writing this story: I noticed this November that I felt happier because I had something to work on.
After this novel is done, I don’t know what I’ll do next. I think I’ll try my hand at writing a bunch of short stories. In any event though, I need to keep on writing. Hopefully, if I’m dedicated enough, I can pass through the phase of writing my crappy first million words and move onto stuff that is infinitely better.
What I’ve learned from NaNoWriMo, Part 1
November 30, 2011
I’ve spent the last day or so in a haze. This haze has consisted of a few sets of words, combining and buzzing and circling around my head like a cloud of midges:
- holy crap
- I’m done
- 50,000 words
- I finished NaNoWriMo
So, yes, I actually completed NaNoWriMo (A day ahead of schedule!) and the experience has been extremely illuminating. Here are some of the things I feel I’ve learned by taking part. I’ll add more items to this list in another blog post a few days from now.
Just because I’ve written 50,000 words doesn’t mean I’m done
The rule for NaNoWriMo is that if you’ve written 50,000 words, you’ve “won” the event and have written a novel. However, most novels are significantly longer than this. A typical debut novel published by a publisher is between 70,000 and 100,000 words. At best, writing 50,000 words means your work sits comfortably in the “novella” category. I can tell that my novel will be much longer than the 50,000-word minimum, as there are lots of holes I have yet to fill; for example, I still have no idea how the story will end. I think, at best, that I’m between halfway and two-thirds through.
Despite this, I can understand why there’s such a focus on the 50,000-word benchmark: It’s a nice round number, and it’s probably in the upper limit of what a fledgling novelist can accomplish in a month. Thus, it’s like a good workout: It’s doable, but it still forces you to push yourself in order to build muscle.
This thing is nowhere near publishable
This goes right up there with the story being incomplete. Even if it were complete, though, I would not consider sending it to a publisher – or at least, would not do so without some heavy editing. My goal right now is to prove that I have the discipline to finish a novel. However, just because a novel is completed doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, and since it’s a first attempt, I seriously doubt it will be. My plan right now is to finish the darned thing and just let it sit untouched for a few months so I can see the flaws more objectively when I pick it back up.
“Pantser” versus “planner”
During November, I did a lot of catch-up listening to old episodes of Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing podcast. Within the show, several episodes mentioned the distinction between outline (“planner”) and discovery (“pantser”) methods of writing. Some writers feel that they need to discover the plot during the act of writing, while others feel that they should plan out everything that happens in the story before they sit down to the keyboard.
I don’t know whether it’s because this is the first time I’ve tried writing a novel, but my attempts to plan out the story failed. I found I was much more comfortable writing in the moment to see where the story took me. A lot of the time, I went down detours I never expected to encounter. Then the fun was in trying to make sure those tributary streams all flowed to the same river. Which brings me to…
Wattle-and-daub, or: Writing like an Impressionist
I mentioned in a previous post that I didn’t write the story linearly. Instead, I would focus on a scene and try to see that scene in my head to fill in the details. Or I would think to myself, “Well, something needs to happen in this scene here. What will it be?”
What amazed me, though, was the sheer amount of the world I had created that remained unknown to me. A lot of the time, when I discussed the story with friends and family, they would ask me things about the characters, plot, and setting, and I would answer “I don’t know.” I didn’t know about where my military commander came from. I didn’t know the span of time over which my story was taking place. I didn’t know whether one of my characters came from an abusive home or not.
In all honesty, it felt like there were images in my head, but they had the colouring and contrast of an Impressionist painting. One detail would be vivid, but the rest were all covered in black. As I worked harder, I either uncovered the black spots to reveal colour, or found places for new black spots to form. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced, because I feel that since this information is coming out of my head, I should know about it already. I was expecting writing for NaNoWriMo to be more like creating a painting than creating a statue out of Lego.
The million-word threshold
ISBW brought another concept to my attention as I was catching up on old podcast episodes: That of the million-word threshold. Raymond Carver is thought to have said that writers need to write at least a million words before they get all of the crap out of their systems and finally write something well.
I have no idea how true this is, but if so, then I’m 5% of the way there. Onwards and upwards!
How I got my writing mojo back
November 20, 2011
I knew from the age of 7 that I wanted to be a writer. That idea grew with me as I grew up, when it reached its most distorted apex in high school. You see, I didn’t want to be just any writer – I wanted to be that writer.
You know the one. The one who becomes a smash success with their first book. The one whose crystal-clear, vibrant prose would make readers weep and publishers bow in awe. The kind of writer who lives in a trendy apartment downtown, dispensing insightful bon mots in coffee shops, wearing black, and generally living the bohemian dream.
Despite this unrealistic ideal, one family member in particular was supportive of my goal. Too supportive, in fact. She constantly asked to see what else I had written lately, and said I would be famous. I grew very resentful of her constant interest, but still kept on writing – I was a teenager, of course, and this sort of irrational thing is a teenager’s specialty.
I hit my final year of high school and took a creative writing class. In that class, I wrote a short story that I had considered my best up to this point. It was about a high school girl who was incredibly gifted but had a lot of pressure put on her, who nearly got killed in a skating accident and then recovered from her coma by going through some sort of spirit-quest while being guided by a painfully obvious Jungian archetype figure.
In other words, my story was pretentious as fuck.
Unsurprisingly, I eventually grew dissatisfied with it. I tried so hard to sound distant and thoughtful and pretty, but it just wasn’t getting anywhere. I likened it to having a “membrane” separating my mind from the story I really wanted to tell, and concluded that I would never be a good writer, because I couldn’t break through it.
At this point, I finished high school and entered university. This meant essays. Lots and lots of essays. Some of them were interesting. A lot of them were meaningless. But all of them required effort and time spent writing. It was at this point that I concluded I would never really be a writer, because the writing I used to enjoy was fiction and would never amount to anything, whereas this writing – the important stuff – was hard and boring. Besides, my “fun” writing was pretentious and disappointing and distant, right? So much for the downtown dream!
Things stayed like that both throughout my university studies and for a year or so after I graduated. “Leisure” reading was fun, but I was just too burnt out to take the next step.
Then a funny thing happened. I got an iPod and started listening to podcasts. I subscribed to “I Should Be Writing” and “Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing” and “Variant Frequencies” and the “Seventh Son” trilogy. I was exposed to the heroin of genre writing, and it was fun. On top of that, I decided that freelancing would be an excellent fallback plan in light of my current employment situation. And what did I think I was good at? Writing, of course.
I got to networking. I joined organizations. I blogged. And slowly but surely, I started to write for myself again. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m now doing NaNoWriMo. I also got myself out of the “fine Canadian literature” ghetto that I was in and embraced reading non-fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books. Now I’m writing something that is unabashedly a genre novel, and doing so with glee.
Will I “win” NaNoWriMo? Who knows. Will my writing be good? Who knows! The difference this time is that I know that real writing – satisfying writing – takes time and tenacity.
All that really matters is that I’m doing it again, and that I’m doing it with more realistic expectations. And that’s why I’m happy that I’ve got my mojo back.
This originally appeared as a guest post on the blog of Valerie Haight. She has recently been signed on to Turquoise Morning Press. This post was originally published on November 14th, 2011. It has been slightly altered from the original version.