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Underground > Creation >

The Novel-Writing Jitters

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

12:13 / 08.09.06

The summary, well, summarizes my problem. I'm used to writing comics, which are short 24-page bursts of stories that fold into a larger story in the end. So now that I'm working on a book, a book that I hope will be, you know, good and all that, I'm finding the length of the process totally harrowing.

So I'm torn between soliciting some opinions on the work-so-far, just to see if the fundamental premise holds up, or just putting my head down and investing another three to six months of my spare time in finishing a first draft.

The risk of the first is that people won't see the thing as a whole, and all of the bits at the beginning that I'm planning to bring back and tie up at the end won't be brought back or tied up.

The risk of the second is investing a year of my life in something that people could have told me was fundamentally flawed from the first two chapters all along.

Anyone else had this problem? And how did you resolve it, and was that resolution satisfactory, in the end?

All Acting Regiment

12:40 / 08.09.06

Have you got the whole story worked out beforehand? We had a thread recently about the "Snowflake method", and though I can't find it, I remember one of the salient points is that it's better to have your ideas worked out first so you can zap inconsistencies etc at the planning stage. I'd say, if you know what you're doing, stick to those guns, but if you're writing it as you go along it might be na idea ot get help.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

12:45 / 08.09.06

I have major "signposts" for the 15-20,000 word mark, the 45-50,000 word mark, and the 60-65,000-word mark. Three different conclusions for me to choose from in the end, largely depending on how the characters all feel when they get there. I'm leaving myself a lot of play between these points, but always with the destination in mind.

12:51 / 08.09.06

75K is a little short if you're planning to sell it, Matt.

12:58 / 08.09.06

I keep saying this:

At his point, you're not writing a novel. You're writing a first draft.

And it's gonna suck. It's supposed to suck. That's what first drafts are for. Anne LaMott says that early drafts are like those rockets that NASA builds for the express purpose opff blowing them up. they were never meant to fly—they exist only to show the flaws in the design. But they're vitally necessary to the process.

Put it another way: Right now, you're not making a sculpture—you're mining ore. That ore will be refined, and smelted into ingots, and then melted down and recast into your sculpture. But right now you've just got to concentrate on getting it out of the ground.

So the 30,000-word mark is utterly meaningless. you have not, in fact, really begun the real work of writing your novel at all. You are still in the stage of amassing your raw materials.

Today you are a miner. And a miner doesn't worry about whether the mouth on the sculpture looks a little off; he just keeps swinging his pick and shoveling slag.

12:59 / 08.09.06

Also:

Sax, I say this with all love: Shut up.

14:05 / 08.09.06

Oh, I wasn't trying to halt the free, soaring flight of the heartbreakingly beautiful bird of creativity with my leaden arrows of prosaic commerciality, just making the point.

Whisky Priestess

14:41 / 08.09.06

He's right, you know. And - I am not one of them, nor, I guess, are you, Jack - some people write in such a way that their first draft is pretty much also their last draft, in the sense that they doggedly agonise for hours over writing it first time around so that the only changes made are relatively minor.

I like the rocket imagery and I'm sure it's a great way to work if that's how you do it - but you seem to be implying above that the last draft *should* be almost unrecognisably different from the first, and I know that's not how some people work.

So once Matt's finished his 75,000, he might actually be three-quarters of the way to finishing the whole thing, with only slight revisions. It's possible, no?

Whisky Priestess

14:50 / 08.09.06

Also, way to discourage the poor guy!

So the 30,000-word mark is utterly meaningless

It's not meaningless, Matt. It's a bloody good start.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

16:05 / 08.09.06

Replies! Awesome.

Sax: 75,000 is short, yes. But (a) I expect things will expand in the second draft... I'm more worried about whether the worldbuilding works at all. And (b) I'm aiming for something in sort of a Jim Thompson vibe, so short isn't bad given that I'm mining a pulp vein.

Jack:

To extend the mining metaphor, I'm used to panning for gold: with comics, at the end of the day, I know whether I've found a nugget or just sand. I dread slogging away hauling buckets of ore up from the depths for a year just to realize that the goddamn sculpture needs to be made from soapstone. Sometimes, alone in the mine, the sweat and blood gets in your eyes and you lose some perspective on what the endpoint really should be.

Miners, you may have noticed, often have foremen.

But in relation to the actual questions posed, I'll just put you down in the "keep plugging away" column, shall I?

WP:

I'm certainly not doggedly agonizing. Not just pounding out blather, but I'm anticipating a good revision process.

It's just that the time commitment is on such a different scale with this that it's not a couple weeks' work and "hmm, that really didn't work..." it's a year. Or years. That's bothersome.

It's the balance of "an external view might be helpful in clarifying some core world-building issues" versus "external thoughts at this point might 'steer' me more than I should be steered at this point" that's running around in my head.

21:49 / 08.09.06

Matt, if you want an objective professional opinion, thirty thousand words is actually (possibly a bit) more than enough to send out to a couple of literary agents (details in the Writers And Artists Yearbook, if you're in the UK.) What they won't do is give you a detailed crit, or say anything other than that either they'd like to see more, or that they're not interested, but if they do want to look at the rest of it then it's a real shot in the arm in terms of actually finishing the thing, if you've got the fear at the moment. And if they aren't interested not to worry about, there are plenty more fish in the sea, and so on. Good luck!

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

23:38 / 08.09.06

That is a wonderful suggestion. It involves swallowing some fear, but that's galvanizing, right? I wish you were my great aunt. Alex doesn't deserve you.