Category Archives: Now That’s a Novel Idea

Creative Insanity, Now That's a Novel Idea

Day 4: Still surviving

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It is nearly received knowledge among writers that it is better to overwrite than underwrite. It’s usually easier to trim, say, two scenes that don’t illustrate a certain character or event as well as a third one does, than it is to add stuff in post-production. I’m clinging to that in my own project, even though that means that I might not type “The End” on 28 February. But if I do type ‘240’ on my last page of writing that day, that means I wrote 60 pages a week, which is pretty good, in addition to being 240 pages more than I had last Thursday.

Already, I’m halfway through Chapter Two, and I know that I’ve essentially said the same thing about one character three times. That’s fine for now. Once I go through the MS as a whole, I’ll be able (hopefully) to decide which one works best and axe the others, trimming my novel down to a lean version of my story.

The other thing I have to do is stop worrying about overwriting. The whole reason I decided to write this as a short novel was to explore the characters a little more. So I can have conflict on the first page, but readers need to know who the characters are, what they want, and what they have to lose, by the time the action starts. I’m allowed to indulge myself by spending a page describing why one of my protagonists is disgusted by another one; later, when I look at the whole thing, I will be able to pick out the details that describe his feelings best, along with the ones that react best against what the other protagonist thinks about him. Conflict can and should be between all the characters in a story, even the ones that work together.

In other news today, I’m reading The Magic of Recluce, which is one of those books I’d wanted to read since the mid-90s. As I read it now, I really, really wish I had. The conflict between Order and Chaos, and especially the idea that something good done for a bad reason is still bad, would have been a good lesson to have laid out for me when I was young and dumb (as opposed to old and unwise, like I am now). I’m only halfway through, but I have all my tasks done for the day, and I have a lot of tea, so maybe I’ll be able to finish it soon.

And, this: This poster is going in my office once I’m settled in Michigan. Considering I was weathering a Michigan winter when I first read The Lord of the Rings, I almost have to. (Art by Lindsey Naylor; I couldn’t find a link to an artist page, but if anyone has one, send it my way.)


Now That's a Novel Idea, Writing

Day T-1: The Calm Before the Crapstorm

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This morning, my head ran through about a thousand excuses why I should put off writing this new book in February… I need to write/ sell more stories, I need to put more freelance queries out there, I need to do things like eat and sleep… but for some reason, I didn’t like any of them. (Perhaps I liked the ‘eating and sleeping’ part a little, but I’m a Navy vet… I once went two months consuming nothing but fresh coffee, burned coffee, and re-re-reheated instant potatoes, so I’m already acclimated.) That means today, I have to plan everything and get ready to write tomorrow morning.

Stories are perhaps as difficult to craft as a novel, even if they don’t take as much time to write, but the easy part of a story is that there only needs to be one big question in the plot… what if a card magician is suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome and performing his last show, but wants to pull off a flawless version of his daughter’s favorite trick? What if the delusions that mental health patients see are real, and need their own place to stay when their person completes therapy? What if cars became too prohibitively expensive to buy but are now being sold on a ‘micropurchase’ plan? Those are all questions that can be handled in a handful of pages. Maybe a long story can get away with only one central ‘what if,’ if it’s a complicated one. But a novel needs to answer each ‘what if’ with a few ‘what nows.’ And that’s what I’m scrambling for today. I have about six or seven active folders in my new Scrivener project with about a paragraph or three each, and every time I add one character or idea in there, I have to think of two or three things that can go wrong with that. Meanwhile, while I’m typing on one idea, my Muse is pulling out another seventeen, and I should actually be working on those documents and outline scraps instead of typing this, but I had to send a short note out to the real world first.

So, that’s enough for now. Expect tidbits about the forts of the west and perhaps English and German mythology over the next few days, because my book sits at the intersection of them.

Quote for the day:


It’s splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.
– Gustave Flaubert

Creative Insanity, Now That's a Novel Idea, Writing

Siege the Moment

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It’s hard to be a writer if one doesn’t write. I’ve known this in theory since around the time I pasted a printout of WordPerfect 5.1 codes on the inside cover of my notebook and began typing out my stories and poems during down time out to sea. But from time to time I forget that and either get stuck on writing a piece that isn’t working or that I’m not ready for yet, or get caught up in a depressive positive feedback loop (Day 1: You suck, don’t write; Day 3: You didn’t write for three days… you really can’t write; rinse, repeat) and go for days without writing anything. So far this year, I’ve done alright, squeezing out at least five hundred words a day, but often hitting a thousand or even more. But that’s not good enough for what I want to do, so I’ve decided to deliver myself a mainline shot straight to the frontal lobes and stun, shock, or otherwise confuse my body into getting another work finished and ready to send out into the world. I made that decision in a moment of pique and unfortunately wrote it down, so now I have to do it or my Muse will get mad and quite possibly make good her threats to leave my head.

Add into this mix my difficulty in writing a new story. Over a month ago I set aside one of my short Weird Westerns and started playing with an idea I had about a group of soldiers and civilian fighters holding out in the Wyoming foothills against a mass of Ogres bent on overrunning them and avenging the death of one of their own. The idea was vivid, painted with the beautiful and dangerous landscape of the Rockies and the bold and vicious colors of the Ogres and the Human soldiers, but my three attempts at the story failed after just a page or three, no matter where I tried to enter the story or how I tried to tell it. So, I decided that perhaps a novella was way to go.

And for a while, this worked. I pushed through the part that had been blocking me and got about 27 pages typed out. I liked the direction of the story and the conflict seemed to be tight enough to push the action forward. Unfortunately, the characters came alive for me. Yes, that’s normally a good thing, but this time, two of them strode into my head and started telling me everything else I had to add. And to top it off, I realized that I had rushed the beginning, and I needed more characters for people to realize about besides the two or three that are enough for a story. Quickly sketching an outline of everything I wanted to include told me that my 30-page story would easily fill 200 pages, and maybe more. I quickly titled the outline “Craptactular Crapticles” and tried to toss it into the trash, but it was too late… my Muse and the stable of writers and typers she keeps in my head had already seen it, and they liked the idea.

So here I am. And because there’s no plan in the world that can’t be made even more frustrating and brain-chilling than adding a deadline, I’ve decided to make daily posts about my progress, with a goal of being finished with the rough by 28 Feb. That’s faster than ‘NaNoWriMo’ times. Oh, and I also work for six-seven hours a day for three days on the weekend, along with a seventy-minute drive there and back. And I haven’t written a novel-length manuscript in well over a year. Yippee.

Starting Friday, I’ll be complaining writing about my new journey. I won’t be posting the entire thing because it will most likely still be shite donkey shite fossilized donkey shite unrefined at first, but I’ll share excerpts and things that come to mind while writing my Precinct Thirteen Ripoff homage to great westerns and action films like Seven Samurai, Zulu, Dawn of the Dead, and Rio Bravo. Wish me luck.

And if you’re spending the bitter cold of the winter trying to keep your brain warm, share what you’re working on, too. Misery loves company. Err, I mean, writers work well with a good support network.