Brian Yansky's Blog, page 24

MAD SCIENTIST'S SON # 6

There's a point in every novel where it becomes all wobbly at the knees. It seems about to take a big tumble. You doubt everything. That's now. I'm struggling because I'm uncertain it holds together and some of the problems I've already talked about seem Mt. Everest in size.

I have thoughts of starting a new book. Wouldn't that be fun? A new book will give me some distance, some perspective. Maybe if I just set this one aside and move on to a new story then I'll have the new story going and I can come back and climb Mt. Everest. In fact it won't even be Mt. Everest anymore maybe. It will be Mt. Nothing Too Hard To Get Up and Over.

But, of course, that's not true. And, also, even if I did write a new manuscript I'd still come to the same kind of problems eventually. I'd be right back here looking at Mt. Everest.

I do, at least, know that I can only finish a novel by finishing a novel. I have to push on in my imperfect, stumbling, bumbling way. Whatever happens with this novel, I have to see it through.

More Mad Scientist's Son

MAD SCIENTIST 4

I've already expressed my diagnosis for this manuscript. Needs more heart. I think it feels thin. Sometimes you get mostly through a draft and you have the sneaking suspicion that something is wrong. You aren't sure what. You have to listen to that obnoxious and unwanted voice though.

I need to push through to the end even though my inclination is to go back to the beginning. But I'll have a nice, short, beginning to end draft if I push through. Then I can go back and do heart surgery. I'm sure it will need lots of other work, too. This whole making something out of nothing, breathing life into characters, isn't easy.

MAD SCIENTIST 5

There's a big difference between wanting to fit in and wanting to know why you don't fit in. Frank wants to know why he doesn't fit in. So in a sense he wants to know the truth of his situation. This has to be clearer from the start. It has to be in there from the start. Part of this must be that he feels something beyond him, something withheld.

So I need all of this PRESSURE in his situation. There is the echo of life in it if it's done right. There is something going on that is withheld and beyond us all. Why are we here—and then there's that bitter and inescapable truth: no one gets out of here alive.

Mad Scientists Son #3-rule breaking

Today I pushed ahead into a section that may or may not work. I'm adding a new POV in the last third of my novel. You aren't supposed to do that. I can remember an instructor I worked with at Vermont College telling me that it was a bad idea when I did it in a manuscript I wrote over ten years ago. She was right then. The ghost of her voice comes back to me now.
"Don't do it. Bad idea," her ghost voice says.
"But it feels like it might be a good one."
"Same thing Napoleon probably said right before he invaded Russia and we know how that turned out."

She's right. I know it goes against a very sensible fiction writing rule. Do not bring a narrator in so late. The reader doesn't have time to warm to them. It's jarring also to have the sudden switch. It may undermine established rhythms you've worked for.

There are many good reasons not to do what I seem to be doing anyway.

Sometimes you just have to go with what feels right though. However, I am aware that I might be fooling myself so I'm going to keep this POV for now, but I'm going to be suspicious of it. In later drafts when I'm thinking about structure and I'm forcing myself to get some distance from the work, I'll try to be sure this actually fits and works. If not, I will be merciless. It will be gone faster than a bad piece of fruit.

The Mad Scientist's Son#2-TWPTWD

There are some cool ideas in this novel.

I'm not sure these ideas in my novel work, but there are some interesting ones. I'm trying to get one figured out right now because it's a turning point in the manuscript. I thought about it last night, which was not a good idea. You want to toss and turn, just go to bed thinking about your novel.

"You're like a fish flopping out of water," my wife said.

I could say I am a fish flopping out of water BUT I'm not that ridiculous. Instead I grunt something about being sorry and go back to thinking and flopping.

It could be worse. I could be out driving. It's always kind of a small miracle when I'm thinking some writer problem through and driving and I realize I'm at my destination. How did I get there? No clue. Really, the cops should be looking out for writers as much as drunk drivers.

I can hear the cop now. I get pulled over. "Are you a writer, Sir?"
Me, hesitantly, "Yes."
"Thought so. You have the look. I'll need to see your license and registration."
"Was I doing something wrong?"
"I think you know you were."
"Not really."
"You haven't been thinking your writer thoughts?"
He says "writer thoughts" with an uncalled for distain.
"Maybe a few."
"More than a few I'd say. And then you thought you'd take a little drive?"
"I was just thinking. I can still drive when I think about writing."
"They all say that. Should have taken a taxi."
"Sorry."
"Sorry is not good enough. Step out of the vehicle, Sir."
"You're taking me in?"
"This is going to cost you a lot more than a taxi. I'm going to have to charge you with TWPTWD, Thinking Writing Problem Through While Driving."

"QUIT FLOPPING," my wife said.

The Mad Scientist's Son #1--No heart

I'M GOING TO TRY GETTING AT THE WRITING PROCESS IN A NEW WAY, NEW TO THIS BLOG ANYWAY. I'm writing a diary as I work though a manuscript. I hope I can talk about different aspects of the writing process and it will be fresh. I enjoy writing about writing, but I've done it for a while now and it's all getting a bit stale. New is good.

Here's where I am in the novel--I've written a first draft. My first drafts are neatly crafted works of art. HA. We're talking a hurl of words. We're talking a writing GPS that has schizophrenia. We're talking wandering all over the place. We're talking get-those-words-on- the-page-and-worry-later-if-it-makes-sense mentality because that's the only way I know how to do it. So my first draft is as rough as a Charlie Sheen breakup or breakdown or something like that. So, yeah, we're talking rough.

But it's done and I'm about halfway through my revision. So that's where this diary picks up.

So here's a place to start. My first thought this morning.

Crap. It's got no heart.

The manuscript has some things going for it, but there's no heart. It's the freaking TIN MAN of novels.






Maybe it was my focus on other things, especially the central idea of the novel that led me to my heartless manuscript. How do I get heart?

Go back to the beginning. Think about what the character wants/needs/ desires/ wants. I need to regroup and try to think this through.

On the surface he wants to find his father. He needs to find his father. That does help drive the plot. Okay so maybe I get more heart if I develop the relationship between the father and son more. Cause it's there but it's not there there. Needs to be there there.
But that's not enough. It's a good surface need, but it's not really something that can give it HEART. I mean I want HEART. I need HEART.
Maybe identity is the heart. Maybe I need to make Frank more the outsider. I mean he is (he's the son of a Mad Scientist but in this world Mad Scientists are sort of accepted and tolerated in the way that writers and other artists are in our world--sort of) but not enough maybe.

Make him someone who doesn't fit and what he needs to know is why? Then he can move on. So he yearns to know why he doesn't fit or to fit? Why he doesn't fit, I think.

And it's something I can do. I felt that way when I was sixteen. Maybe partly because I was adopted but mostly because I am who I am (Did Popeye the sailor man say that? Am I quoting Popeye the salior man now?). Anyway, I still feel that way sometimes. I can do this.

connections

As I work through my first drafts now, while I keep pushing forward and resist the urge to start all over (always there in the early draft), I' m constantly thinking about how my story fits together. How what happens in chapter one fits with what happens in chapter twenty, for example. My first drafts are rough, rough, rough, more like discovery drafts, but I still keep this idea of connection in my mind because I don't want to wander too far off. I don't want to end up lost like some authorial Columbus asking, "Say, can anyone tell me the way to China? It's supposed to be around here somewhere."

So there's that.

Then my revision, at least the part that doesn't focus strictly on language, is about making these connections clearer and filling in my story.

And that's what I'm getting at in this post. Novels are all about connections. Story arc, character development, all that comes out of connections that the writer makes during the process and then manages to convey dramatically in the work. Everything has to fit together. I think that keeping this in mind helps me with structure.

first drafts

Everyone works differently. I've said before I can't outline and I can't. But I think my first drafts are becoming more and more discovery drafts. I don't even pretend anymore that I'm writing something close to finished.

I think part of this is because I realize that for me, in terms of structure, something I find out about a character on page 57 is going to change that character and maybe the story on page 3. Because a first draft is so much about discovering character and story and trying to integrate all the elements of fiction, I think it needs to be fluid.

You've got to be open to changes, big changes, at a structural level, not just changing words in sentences or moving sentences around in a paragraph.

So these days my first drafts are filled with places where I just mark what is going to happen.

My first draft is also filled with notes to myself. But it is a draft—not an outline. I have to try to muddle my way through the world I'm creating to feel like that world, however sketchy, exists.

But I know that my first draft is like an out- of- focus photograph. It's impossible to see how it will be when it sharpens. There will be many choices ahead and there will be many chances to make connections. It's kind of exciting and frightening. Finishing a first draft means both less and more than it once did when I believed my first drafts closer to a final version. One great thing about knowing my first draft is kind of a discovery draft is I don't have high expectations, and I think that makes it easier for me to keep working when I face difficult moments in that draft.

OR SO I THINK TODAY.

voice

I can't get very far in a manuscript until I have a voice. I struggle with getting that voice sometimes, as in I rewrite and rewrite the first paragraph and page, but I need that voice, whether it comes in a flash or has to be worked for, before I can go very far in a manuscript.

Generally, I believe you should push forward in a first draft, letting your subconscious mind do most of the work. Of course you're going to mull things over while you're in the shower or driving to work (pedestrians and other drivers beware), but when you're writing you're mostly trying to get to that quiet place where you can create and experience it all at once--that, as Robert Olen Butler calls it, moment-to-moment experience of your story. However, I can't do this without a true voice for my narrator. I can't get there.

I'll write ten or twenty pages sometimes just to see what happens but I'll keep going back to that first page and toying with where the story starts and what the narrator's voice is. For me voice is extremely important. That tone of the story helps me feel truly at home in my world. It's essential for me that I get that early in the process, however imperfectly, to open up my story.

after the acceptance

What happens after a writer gets an acceptance from the publisher? A whole lot of things. There's the contract to sign, which is fun. The publisher promises to publish your book and even pay you a little money in advance for the right to do so. Yahoo to that. Then comes the editorial letter. Not as much fun as the contract I must admit.

Editorial letter?

It comes as a surprise to some new writers that their book will require further rewriting beyond all the rewriting they've already done. It will-- in most cases. I haven't heard of many authors not doing at least one revision. Several revisions are more common.

What begins this process is a letter from the editor making suggestions. I've received a few of these now from several editors. They're all different, but they all have some similar qualities. They begin with praise (anyone who is in a critique group knows the importance of this—the fragile writer ego needs a little love). Then the editor mentions some problems he or she thinks the manuscript has. Then he/she says that, of course, the writer should decide which suggestions are helpful to the writer's vision of the book and which are not. After this though, the approach of the editors I've had varies. Some like to mention a problem and then spend some space explaining why they think it's a problem and then move on. Some like to spin out possible ways to fix a problem. Usually, the first revision letter focuses on big issues of narrative or character. I say first because, again, you will most likely go through several revisions after the acceptance.

This sounds like it might be hard and I know some writers struggle with these revision letters, but provided you have a good editor (most are, I think, and all of mine have been) these letters are another chance at the manuscript. And who doesn't want another chance to make the manuscript better? Really. Later, when the book goes out into the world and is reviewed and read by readers, you'll be grateful for every single improvement made by every single revision. It's hard to write a book. A good editor can really improve a novel and a writer should be grateful for all the help he or she can get.

So, after the thrill of acceptance, the first big step is going back to the manuscript and trying to make it better by going through the revision letter carefully. I try to be open to every possible change, but I know pretty quickly that some suggestions don't work with my vision of the book. Others I think are definitely good points I need to work on. A lot I have to think over and work through because I'm just not sure about. So, my advice is not to blindly accept or reject any advice in an editorial letter but to read it through several times, make some notes, then get rewriting. Some suggestions I can't decide about until I'm in the process of revision and see how certain changes affect the rest of the novel. It's all part of the process.

sheepdog writing advice

My sheepdog gave me some advice the other day, "Never take a bath. How will others know who you are if you don't smell like you?"

Opps. Wrong advice. I meant some writing advice. He said, "Sheep like to wander. Sheep will wander at the first opportunity. You must be vigilant when you are herding sheep."

That got me thinking about story and the way I struggle to figure out what really belongs. I think that it is easy, easy, easy to be distracted by all kinds of interests: language, interesting thoughts, diversions of all kinds. They make us take our eyes off our sheep and some of them wander off. The novel looses narrative momentum. A novel needs narrative momentum. It has to have it. You have to get all of your sheep from point A to point B. Don't let your sheep wander.