Re: Doing The Narrative Drains

R.J. Anderson wrote:


*mulls* No, I don't think that's it. Looking at my outline, I can't see
any reason for it not to be an interesting, complex, multilayered story.

Outline != story. Look at the _story_ to judge its quality - do you like
what you have so far?


Certainly it hangs together, plot-wise. I think I am just suffering from
some kind of burnout, but I'm not sure which kind or how I ought to
treat it.

I think you're trying - for whatever reason - to force yourself to work
in a manner that does not suit you, which is why you're rebelling
against yourself. There's a stmple solution to that: stop being so mean
to yourself.


Part of the problem may be that I'm writing this book in a radically
different way than I've written anything before.

Did the book demand it? Why? Or was it an experiment, to see whether you
could do it/whether this would work better for you? In the first case, I
would question again _why_ you felt the need to change your working
habit, and whether you need to adjust it quite so drastically, in case
b) I'd say you have all the day you need, so abandon the experiment and
write the book how you feel it should be written. You get absolutely no
bonus point for not writing the best book you can, no matter how fancy
the way you take.


Historically I've
always been a pantser, starting the book with just a vague idea of what
it's about and where I want it to end up, and discovering the rest of
the plot along the way.

*And what is wrong with that???* It's a perfectly good method, and a
perfectly productive one - it is not even far out on the spectrum of
'weird ways to write perfectly good novels', so why do you think you
ought to write differently when you're obviously not enjoying yourself?

I'm like that, and my backbrain is cleverer than me - because while I
have little idea how everything is going to work out while I'm in the
middle of it, when I read it through at the end, I tend to find that it
*does* mesh; very well in some cases, and I need only minor adjustments
to make the story work.

The only deviation is the one I still want to call The Stone Priests.
(The name doesn't quite fit, but I love it.)

At the time I wrote the beginning, I was working on something else. It
was an attack novel, and I tried to get it out of my system quickly, so
I wrote a prologue, about five short chapters, four or five chapters
that came later somewhere, and - for perfectly legitimate reasons - an
outline. And it was a perfectly good and balanced outline, which would
have made a perfectly good book - but it wasn't, in the end, the book I
wanted to write. I chugged along with the outline for a fair while,
until I came to a crossroad ehere I could either write the book the
outline outlined, or the one my characters demanded. I wrote that choice
up for my livejournal and thought 'why am I even considering this?' and
gave my characters free rein. The result is a book that is much weirder,
has an additional main character who balances the others perfectly, and
it's much more _alive_. I've confirmed that I am not an outline writer:
I could see where the outline was restricting me, was stopping me from
experimenting and going off on tangents and adding new elements to the
mix. For some people that is a good thing and results in a tighter, more
coherent outpput; some are inspired by knowing what happens next, and
those people ought to write to outlines - but if it stifles your
progress, then you shouldn't. Simple as that.


I was also an obsessive polish-as-you-go type,
so that by the time I reached the end of the book my prose was pretty
shiny (but I often had to rewrite whole sections of the story from
scratch to make it hang together).

Yeah, but you might have to do that anyway, if you get to the end and
find that you can take the whole story up a notch, and ought to tighten
it _there_ and take out redundancies _here_ an outline won't prevent
_that_ at all.

With this book, I spent three months brainstorming, researching, and
painstakingly outlining the entire plot before I started, and I am
forcing myself *not* to revise anything I've written so far but to
always keep plugging ahead at the rate of 2000 words a day. I was hoping
this might make me more efficient,

Would you otherwise have spent three months _solely on revising_? If so,
you are now where you would have been otherwise, and with a less
polished product. Does outlining still appear to be more productive for
you?

You will still need to polish this at some point. If rolling revision to
you means that you produce twenty versions of chapter one, each
marginally different from the one before, then you have a prodecural
problem you ought to tackle. One solution might be to do your editing in
a different application than your writing of first draft, so every time
you are tempted to do more than the quick read through and take out
obvious howlers before moving to the next section, you have to save it,
open it in another application...

and I'm not sure that it won't, in
the end -- but it's definitely a major adjustment for me.

Then don't do it. I feel that most books are too precious to be
sacrified on the alter of experimenting with writing techniques, and if
this is making you unhappy, then don't do it. There is much more to be
gained by tweaking your existing writing methods than by forcing
yourself to learn a completely new one *which might never work well for
you.*

I keep wanting
to be happy with and proud of the stuff I've written already, and since
it's still very much in First Draft mode, I can't feel that way.

That very much sounds as if you don't ought to persevere. It seems to me
as ifyou could gain very little, and all of it hypothetical - it _might_
make you more efficient eventually - but you are losing an awful lot, eg
your enthusiasm for the story and your general enjoyment of writing.

Catja
--
writing blog @ http://beyond-elechan.livejournal.com
.

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