Bob Defendi's Blog, page 7

Vacation 2: The Wrath of Bob

I've started a new vacation, so here are you book recommendations for today.

20 Master Plots and How to Build them, but Ronald B. Tobias, is a cornerstone of my plotting process. If you've read my posts on plotting, you'll know that for every real subplot, I assign it a full plot arc and then map it to one of the plots in this book. I use this book to make sure that the plot is complete and that it follows the accepted form. Basically, that I don't mess it all up. This book shouldn't be used to make your work look like everyone else's, though. This book should be used to as a jumping off point to take the accepted form and to find new and interesting takes on the old themes.

Dramatica: A New Theory of Story, by Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley is an interesting entry to this list because technically I haven't read it. What I have read are the Dramatica help files, printed out and from begining to end, back when those were the only way to digest this information. If you get Dramatica, you could still do that, but it would be an annoying and you'd abuse a tree. It might be better just to spring for the kindle edition of this book. It explains the Grand Argument Theory of storytelling (if they still call it that), and how it applies to plotting a story, Dramatica style.

Death by Cliché 2 Nearing Completion

So next week I go on vacation. For Thanksgiving, I tried to clear my schedule for my vacation. I don't think that will be possible for Christmas. I've promised two friends that I'd give them full alpha reads by the end of the year. On top of that, at literally any minute I expect to get back proofs on DbC 2, and I've asked for a proofer that gives very thorough work. Not only does he find stuff that requires entire sentence rewrites, requiring more than one pass, but I specifically ask for him and my editor because he's a gamer and my editor isn't, so I expect him to catch at least one thing that the editor didn't, that's game related.

Anyway. I expect some longish nights coming, and I don't think they can be longish enough to get done before my vacation.

I'll probably take Christmas Off, though. Because: Christmas.

Things continue on DbC 4. I discovered this week that I've been taking "In Late, Out Early" to too great an extreme. In late, out early is a bit of writing advice that's meant to curb an author's instinct to linger on a character. You meander your way into a scene. You linger too long after a scene should be over. Well, taken to an extreme, the character doesn't have time to make an impact. They become more of a highlight reel than an actual character arc, and evidently, I have committed that sin. It isn't the first time. It won't be the last. Sometimes, we worry more about keeping things moving than actually taking the time to let the characters breathe. In our fear of being boring, we become as frenetic as a coked-up hummingbird.

So, I've gone back and written some more connective tissue bits. In them, I'm trying to correct some character issues that critiquers also noticed. If they like the new direction, I can carry the changes through the stuff I already wrote. It also allowed me to work in a Star Wars joke I was dying to use, but skipped somehow. So there was that.

But all in all, things are good. I keep finding myself looking for the cat, but that's becoming increasingly infrequent. I don't know if it will ever completely go away. But we push on. We keep going. Right now I'm also playing Europa Universalis VI, and I'm about to vent my frustrations on the French.

I suspect we all know that will help.

Taking One on the Chin

The day after I wrote my last post, a few hours after it auto-posted, I found out that I needed to put my cat to sleep. I did the deed on Wednesday.

If you've never had to do this, you probably don't understand just how emotionally devastating this process can be. You go through various stages from grief to guilt to agony to obliteration. During all of this, I tried to get out my weekly words, and I'm writing a comedy. So. That happened. But, you know, I can't lose a week. Not if I can help it. I have to keep working. I have to get something down. I have to get my submission into writers group.

I squeezed out something like the bare minimum of text I could produce and not call the week a total loss, and then I decided that I needed to finish with something that was genuinely productive. I had to find a way to turn the personal pain into a net gain. To make it work for me, because screw pain. Pain is my bitch.

When I started writing Death by Cliché 2, I knew that I was going to tell an epic hero's journey story with a cat in DbC 3. So I introduced the cat in DbC 2 as a "Chekov's cat" sort of writing device. I also introduced several other characters in what seemed like self-indulgent vignettes, that would actually play an important part in DbC 3. Then, in DbC 3, Cat is one of the important characters, carrying an important load-bearing wall of the plot with him throughout the book.

A third, maybe halfway through the book, I discovered my cat had diabetes. Never one to pass up any excuse for a chapter quote, I did a riff or three about giving cats shots and how diabetes affected his appetite. How the insulin changed his personality. I would like to hope that any cat person becomes at least a little attached to the journey that my cat took through those chapter quotes. I know some people on twitter did.

So after I had my bare minimum chapters written for DbC 4 I went back and tossed out the epilogue of DbC 3. It was crap anyway and I'd always suspected that I'd need to rewrite it. Instead, I wrote a chapter quote stating that I'd just returned from the vet, and about three hundred words that I hope are a touching good bye. I finished with an In Memoriam, so now the book has a dedication, and now the reader knows how that story actually ended.

I had plans that Cat from book three would be in book four, at least in part, but the place I left him was not unlike heaven for cats, and I think there he will stay. Happy. Forever.

Or at least until the world needs to be saved again. For all cat kind.

Vacation Over (Sort of)

Various things happened over my vacation. Mainly, I caught up on Halloween stuff. I have this tradition of playing horror (or at least atmospheric) computer games for Halloween, but this year everything was displaced by the release of Civilization VI, which I'd preordered. So after pushing through the final content edits on DbC 2, and starting my Thanksgiving Vacation I jumped into some games.

I played Bioshock 2 (atmospheric.) I learned that Five Nights at Freddy's is an absolutely brilliant game that I'd rather watch Markplier play than play myself, and I learned that being hunted by a xenomorph for six hours straight in Alien: Isolation is absolutely exhausting (but worth it).

This morning, for breakfast, I went through an accepted my final changes on DbC 2 (about six commas and the like) and dropped in my author's bio, then realized I'm in about four anthologies that aren't listed in my bio, so sent out requests for the titles of the ones that haven't actually released yet.

No podcast today (I write these on Sunday). I'll try to finish the Alien game, and then maybe get some more work done on DbC 4. As soon as the game's over, I'll throw myself full into finishing my plot blueprint of the book. I've got Act One done and the whole thing plotted in general, but I really need to work out the fiddly bits on the whole thing so I can have a solid working document to write from. Right now it's all kinda hodge podge. All the data is there I just don't have it in a particularly convenient working document yet.

I guess I don't have big message this time, unless it's this: Work is what you do, week in, and week out (barring vacations). It can be a grind, but that's the grind we sign up for. It's hard work, and much of it is uphill, and we wouldn't do it if we had any other choice. But we don't, so that's what we do.

In our own, post-vacation, scatter-brained way.

A New Vacation Tradition

I'm on vacation and I'm going to start a new vacation tradition. Instead of coming up with an insightful blog post, or a cheap nothing post, I'll post book recommendations. I'll start with books on being a better writer, at least until they run out.

Possibly the best book on writing characters and point of view, Orson Scott Card's Characters and Viewpoint is a master class that takes you from the basics (what's the difference between first person and third), to the intermediary (what's the difference between full and limited omniscience), to advanced (what's the difference between light POV penetration and deep penetration. This book is a must for new and experienced writer alike. Also, if my editors read it, they might stop italicizing all my characters thoughts without my permission.

 

Techniques of a Selling Writer, by Dwight Swain, is hands down the best general book on writing I've ever read. It walks you though many aspects of the craft, but of the many spectacular pieces of advice, the two that stick out the most are motivation-reaction units and what I call the Swain ending. Motivation-reaction units explain how to order character reactions to create a believable experience of the reader. Often writers present the reaction of a character in an improper order, and it leaves the character's responses seeming unmotivated or wooden. In the Swain ending, Dwight outlines the perfect character dilmma for the end of any story. While he might overstate how often you should use it (I believe he says it's required for every story), you'll be amazed at how many stories you see with the Swain ending, once you're aware of it. Tangled, for instance, has the most interesting take on the Swain ending, I've ever seen. Read the book, then rewatch that movie.

Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder, is consider by many to be the definitive book on screenwriting. It takes you from inception to building a plot board, to hammering out story beats, all the way through the end. It is an insightful look into the structure of movies and screenplays. While it might seem that it's only useful for creenwriters, with a few alterations, it is useful for certain novels. I've used it to plot every Death by Cliché after the first.

Crunch Time, Redux

Next week I go on vacation for Thanksgiving, and my editor, Michael, has returned Death by Cliché 2 just in time for me to have one sleepless week to get it done. I’ve already done one pass on it, and he’s told me that he’s happy with my edits. I’ve addressed his issues. After this pass, it will be ready to go to proofing. I could probably just accept his edits, but I can’t not do a full pass. So I’m doing 53 pages a day until it’s done.

But I hit a chapter last night where we still have a disagreement, and I thought I’d talk about that today because he’s a great editor and he’s letting me make the call. I usually go with everything he says, but I’m sticking to my guns on this one, and I think I need to discuss why.

The chapter in question is 11. The thing is presented, on the surface, as a joke. The chapter quote has the narrator making the comment that he’s surprised that I’ve made it that far into the book without writing a scene in the POV of the weather. Then I present, you guessed it, a scene in the POV of the weather. After that, the narrator makes a joke about how that whole chapter was a shot at him and we move on.

Michael thinks it reads like a Wikipedia article.

It’s written in that slightly self-indulgent style of much of the first book, which is largely absent from the second. That is a clue. It feels largely out of place in the book, which is another clue. I think it will stick in the craw of the reader a bit, which is the intention.

I think, when we’re working on these things from the inside, we sometimes look at them backward. We’re challenging everything and we say, “This belongs.” “This doesn’t belong.” That’s almost always right, but every once in a while, the fact that something doesn’t belong is the whole point. Look a chapter 3 of the Grapes of Wrath (I'm not comparing myself to the Grapes of Wraith, but bare with me). The famous turtle scene. It’s the very incongruity of that scene that invites analysis. It’s Steinbeck saying, “I’m doing something here, pay attention.” Not every bit a symbolism of literary artistry needs to draw attention to itself, but when the book is a comedy about gamer jokes, it doesn’t hurt to send up a flare.

I listen to a lot of podcasts by Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor. I hope that one day he and his students will read my books, or people with minds like theirs. I want to challenge them intellectually and literarily, as well as engage them humorously and emotionally. I want them to have some layers to unpack. I’m trying to tell a good yarn, yes, but that has never been all I’ve been doing.

Don’t get me wrong, I cut a lot things because they legitimately didn't fit. There are about five-seven chapters that didn’t make the cut. At least one of them was one of the funniest chapters in the book, in my opinion, but it didn’t support the narrative, and all the ground it covered was better covered elsewhere. Funny alone isn’t enough to get you in. Every chapter has to do double or triple duty.

And there’s one last reason. When Death by Cliché originally came out in 2006, it included a prologue. The editor didn’t like the prologue, and it was the first note I ever got from him (being the prologue). I don’t like prologues in principle, and this was my first published novel, so I caved instantly. I cut it, and the 2016 version of the novel was published without it.

Here’s what happened in that prologue. Two “giants” (meaning giants in the gaming industry) met around a miniature gaming sand table and invented fantasy wargaming. During it, it’s implied that the universe fractures, and that the game they are playing becomes the first of the many worlds like the one Damico falls into in the first chapter of the book. It’s not a strong implication, but it’s there, at least in this line:

“The first giant circled the table, the gears turning in his mind. He reached out and with a finger, touched the 40mm figure on the wall. For just a moment, he thought it looked afraid.”

It ended like this:

"Words have power. Words have meaning. Words can create and words can destroy. A man can say, 'A day that will live in infamy,' and begin the events that would save a continent. A woman can say, 'Let them eat cake,' and not know she’d just catered her funeral. Quantum physics shows us that a single observation can split our universe into countless realities.
How much more can a man do with a word? How much more with five?
'Play the game, wizard-boy,' the first giant said."

Now, it’s hard to prove a negative, but I’ve had a lot of complaints in the current version of the novel that it’s never explained how Damico ended up in the game world. I’m going deeper into that in book two, but I never had that complaint with the 2006 podcast version.

This isn't exactly equivalent with the issues with chapter 11 in book 2. Chapter eleven doesn’t explain something left unexplained if I cut it, but there’s that part of my mind that’s whispering that the book is something more if I leave it in, for the people willing to dig and put in the effort. For the people who aren’t, it’s 487 words of me committing to a joke about pissing off the narrator of my own book, which isn’t the farthest I’ve gone for a joke, by any stretch of the imagination.

So other scenes died so that one lives. Michael doesn’t like it, but he knows I do, and he’s giving me the call, and I’m keeping it. Here’s the thing. I’m not keeping it because someone will get it one day and think better of me. If people think well of me, they will think well of me for the humor, or the surprising and inevitable ending, or the way I handle the PTSD aspects of the book. I’m keeping it because someday someone’s going to read the book a second time, hit that passage, and get it, and feel a sense of pride as they figure out was the passage really means. They will feel better about themselves.

That’s why we put layers in books. Not because pulling them apart makes the writer something more. We put layers in books because taking them apart shows the reader that they are brilliant and witty and wise. It rewards them with the greatest compliment that a writer can give back to a reader.

Quiet, dignified applause.

Back in the Saddle. Ish?

So sometimes it's hard to get back into the discipline of working when you've given yourself a break. This has been doubly true for Death by Cliché 4. First of all, I had written far ahead of my Writer's Group. This was great on the one hand, because when those bad two weeks of 110 hours of daily work hit, I didn't need to produce any new words. On the other hand, I fell out of the habit of writing a full two weeks before I started my vacation.

Then came said vacation, and 94 hours of Civilization VI, followed by a fair number of hours of Master of Orion, and lots of very purposely not working.

I returned to my day job and objectively a terrible, stressful week. I was the only one submitting to Writer's Group last week, so I canceled it to give my brain relief from yet another deadline. I think it's maybe the second group I've canceled in the year (not counting scheduling conflicts, like conventions).

Finally last night I managed to get some time to really work on the book for an uninterrupted hour and a half. I had my chapter quote work, which I had kinda thrown out. I had about one and a half chapters, but the second chapter had been entirely written in fifteen-minute chunks and I just couldn't get my feet under me.

But last night, after the house was quiet, I finally forced myself to really sit down and finish chapter 2. By the end, I felt like I had my rhythm back and the book no longer felt like an insurmountable challenge. The book had never been that daunting. It was the idea of working again that had been daunting.

So now I know that about myself. In fairness, I knew it about myself before. I have to relearn that pretty much every time I come off a vacation, but every time it just feels like it's too much and that I will never get my feet back under me again. I know in my head that isn't the case, but it always just feels like so much work.

But you have to do it because that's the job. Butt in chair. Day in. Day out. That's the habit of the profession. That's the discipline you need to develop.

And my point of this post is that you don't just always have that discipline, even after years of perfecting it. It's a constant struggle to maintain it, and even a small vacation can seem to wreck it entirely. Sometimes just a long weekend is enough to tear down your good work and leave you feeling like a complete neophyte.

The thing that years of experience does bring you is the memory of the habit. Like a mold in which you can quickly build the habit again. As bad as it felt to start, I had my habits back probably after the first hour. Maybe after the first thirty minutes. It's like physical conditioning. A well-conditioned athlete still gets tired, maybe more slowly than a slob like me, but it still happens. The real difference between him and I is that when I exhaust myself it takes forever to recover, and it takes him five or ten minutes.

It's the same with work discipline. Build the good habits and you'll lose them just like everyone else, but if you build them well, they will come back to you, and they will come back very quickly. So keep plugging away. It doesn't get that much easier, but the amount of time that it stays hard gets shorter, and that's what you are really fighting for.

Also, a really good video game probably doesn't help the whole process. Two make it just that much harder.

Working Through a Broken Implementation

As I write this (yesterday compared to the earliest you could have read this), I'm finishing up my post-two-novel-edit vacation. The only real work I did during that vacation, besides building and subjugating many a civilization in Civ VI, was to take my chapter quotes for Death by Cliché 4 to my writing group. I usually just let them critique the chapter quotes with rest of each individual chapter, but I'm doing something very difficult with the quotes in 4 and they needed to be critiqued as a whole. For one thing, I was about 70% sure they were just way too long and about 40% sure the entire form was wrong and about 10% sure that I needed to scrap the whole idea altogether.

We discussed them at a high level at fairly great length and determined:

Yeah, they are either too long or too short and making them longer probably isn't an option.The original idea I had for the form, which I couldn't make work, was probably better, and while this one might work, it isn't great.It's a neat idea and if I can make it work I should. (But man, it's hard, structurally).

Have you ever had an author give you the advice that sometimes you need to write scenes that will never make it into the novel, just to help inform the greater work? If not: sometimes you need to write scenes that will never make it into the novel just to inform the greater work. This is like that. The chapter quotes in 4 tell a unified story. They are, in the form I wrote them, not unlike the 10% of a screenplay that hits all the really plot-relevant parts. If I hadn't written what I wrote, I wouldn't have the full shape of the thing in my own head, and therefore I wouldn't be able to knock it down to about 10% of that and squeeze the thing into the head of the reader.

With jokes.

I did say it would be hard didn't I?

But I think I needed to work through that to get to where I am now. Sometimes we get to where we need to go in stages. Sometimes we have to throw out something almost entirely, but we don't think of that as lost work. We think of that as a draft and we move on. It's a part of the game. It's the price we pay for trying to create. We have to innovate, at least in part, on everything we do. Even when you work in tropes and hackneyed ideas, hopefully, you're innovating in your use of those tropes and hackneyed ideas. Of course, some of my reviewers would disagree, but that's something you have to work through too. In a way, everything we have done is a draft for everything we do in the future, and everything we have done in our life is a slightly more broken version of our next attempt as we push forward, chipping away all the pieces that don't look like an elephant until we come to that perfect, platonic ideal. Unobtainable? Sure.

But that's no reason to stop trying.

Fin. And Also Critique Rage

You should sleep better when you finish a big two-week push.

Not that I'm complaining. All right, I'm complaining, but it's a warm, happy, sort of complaining. Maybe I'll take a pain killer before bed tonight. First world problems.

Anyway, Saturday night, just one week plus a few hours from starting the second novel edit, I finished, putting in the last of the critique notes. There is still one set of notes I have to collect from one critiquer Thursday, but I'll put those in Thursday night and they'll probably take less than an hour. That left me with just the third book which I was about five-eighths of the way through. I was more than three quarters through by the time I went to bed and I finished that by the afternoon. So my goal was to finish by Monday night. I finished a day early. I still need to make a pass on my comments to take out the snark, but my vacation should begin apace.

I think the work on the first and third book was very solid. The middle book I'm not sure I was objective enough about. I need to go back and look at it through a better humor lens. I'll do that in a couple weeks and see if it needs another pass. I'm not sure I have the funny tuned right. We'll see. That might just be a third draft problem.

I noticed something on this big editing push I thought I'd talk about, though. I call it critiquer rage. I've spoken before about how you have to read past what the critiquer says to find the real problem behind words. One manifestation of this happens when you thoroughly lose the reader at some point during a critique session. From that point on, the tone of their notes change and they basically start hate-critiquing. I don't really blame them, because I've done it myself. It's that point where you've stopped evaluating the manuscript in front of you and now you're just arguing with it.

It's a hard place to be in when you're trying to read those notes. Sometimes you just have to throw them out. I try not to, but I DO have a critiquer or two who simply can't give me useful data once they've hit that point. The fact that they hit that threshold in the first place is pretty useful of course, and I go back and fix the issue that broke them, but much of their critique after that are just vitriol.

MOST people, though, still have some gems gleaming through their combativeness after their breaking point. You can still read their variations of tone and say, "They are calming down. This section is probably working if it's making them forgive me a little" or "They are arguing with the furniture now, I suspect this section is boring." Often they will spot logic problems when they are angry that they will NEVER spot when they are involved in the story, so really think through any of those.

The big thing is that you have to keep your head when you hit those chapters. It's hard, but you have to remember that they are doing you a favor and it was probably something you did that made them angry. You probably didn't ask for their critique if you didn't trust their opinion, so you need to listen to that opinion, even when you don't like it. And you need to find that opinion even when it takes some unpleasant digging. Sometimes I'll take a little break and flip to an easier critiquer when I find myself losing my own objectivity. Sometimes I'll read ahead and go back over a section several times, discounting a section as simple meanness then going back and thinking, "but maybe..."

Remember. They volunteered. You almost certainly didn't pay them. This is your career. You need to suck every bit of value out of their notes you can get. You might get more notes after you fix those problems, but likely your critique pool is finite. Unless you're at the point where you don't need notes from anyone but your editor anymore, you need to fix as problems as possible before use up the next resources in that pool.

And then you sleep. Hopefully better than I did. Maybe with the help of schedule 4 pharmaceuticals.

The Grind, Week 2

Remember sleep? I don't. I bet sleep was nice.

Things are going great. This blog post will probably be short because I want to stay laser focused. To remind readers, my goal is to create second drafts of two novels in two weeks, before my vacation, which includes a rather large pile of critique notes. That involved about 90-110 hours a week including my normal day job and drive times (I think the first week shook out at about 98 due to prior commitments). And between 5-6 hours sleep a night. On Friday night I slept in a whole 8 hours.

Things went well the first week I edited my cyberpunk murder mystery. I started on Saturday afternoon and I finished then next Saturday evening. I'm pretty happy with the results. I was worried that I'd feel rushed and while the pace was certainly punishing, it really made it MUCH easier to keep it all in my head at once. It's hard to tell how many details I would have caught if it had been spread over my more typical two weeks, but I was routinely noticing details at the end of the book that contradicted little things I'd said at the beginning of the book. Often, I'm still finding those on the third or fourth draft, but it's vitally important you catch them all in a mystery.

So now I've started the draft of DbC 3. I'm feeling pretty good about how things are going. Here's the thing, though. The edits for DbC 2 are just coming in from the publisher. That's only one set of notes, so they won't take as long as a full critique group. So now I have to ask.

Do I think I can get them done before the vacation too? Am I up to that challenge? I don't think I am...

But then again...