Ian Lewis's Blog: Ian Lewis Fiction - Posts Tagged "experimental-fiction"
The writing process
The more I write, the more the creative process changes. My first foray into fiction resulted in short stories for the most part. They were written organically, with simple, abstract ideas in mind. Literally, I would sit down and try to write with no outline at all. I was repulsed by the idea of approaching something creative as if it were something clinical. It needed to be pure. Three novellas and almost three novels later, I've found the outline is indispensable.
How did I get there? It was, well, organic I guess. My ideas became more complex, notably with the impetus that drove The Camaro Murders. It was high concept, yet literary and grounded, multi-character and to a certain point plot-driven. Timeline was critical because the story is told out of order.
With all that in mind, what evolved into an "outline" was hardly what I'd call an outline today. A semblance of that didn't evolve until I wrote Lady in Flames. It's continued to evolve with each release, to the point where now I typically write a paragraph for each chapter and create a cast of characters, like I did for Godspeed, Carry My Bullet and Beacon Road Bedlam.
However, it's not only the outlining process that's changed. The actual writing itself comes together in an entirely different way than before. I never used to advance past a paragraph without it being perfect, or at least what seemed perfect at that moment. This of course slowed down the writing process, sometimes to the point of me losing interest in what I was writing. So I let go a bit, realizing that moving past the thought and hammering out the story was more important. Revisiting the weaker, underdeveloped writing at a later stage, even as late as the editing process, resulted in stronger writing because you see things different with fresh eyes.
My current endeavor is another high concept story with a lot of abstract ideas that I can see clearly in my head. Because it's easy to take that for granted, It's hard not to "tell" rather than "show." So I've found myself laying out the skeleton of the story, getting the ideas out in the narrative without weaving the rich detail and evocative prose that I want to be there in the end. That will come later.
I won't lie. The writing process has become more like work than it ever has. Striving to write at professional standards demands that much, but it's the creative impulse that provides motivation for all of it. I hope you as the reader enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.
How did I get there? It was, well, organic I guess. My ideas became more complex, notably with the impetus that drove The Camaro Murders. It was high concept, yet literary and grounded, multi-character and to a certain point plot-driven. Timeline was critical because the story is told out of order.
With all that in mind, what evolved into an "outline" was hardly what I'd call an outline today. A semblance of that didn't evolve until I wrote Lady in Flames. It's continued to evolve with each release, to the point where now I typically write a paragraph for each chapter and create a cast of characters, like I did for Godspeed, Carry My Bullet and Beacon Road Bedlam.
However, it's not only the outlining process that's changed. The actual writing itself comes together in an entirely different way than before. I never used to advance past a paragraph without it being perfect, or at least what seemed perfect at that moment. This of course slowed down the writing process, sometimes to the point of me losing interest in what I was writing. So I let go a bit, realizing that moving past the thought and hammering out the story was more important. Revisiting the weaker, underdeveloped writing at a later stage, even as late as the editing process, resulted in stronger writing because you see things different with fresh eyes.
My current endeavor is another high concept story with a lot of abstract ideas that I can see clearly in my head. Because it's easy to take that for granted, It's hard not to "tell" rather than "show." So I've found myself laying out the skeleton of the story, getting the ideas out in the narrative without weaving the rich detail and evocative prose that I want to be there in the end. That will come later.
I won't lie. The writing process has become more like work than it ever has. Striving to write at professional standards demands that much, but it's the creative impulse that provides motivation for all of it. I hope you as the reader enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.
The Driver has reached the end—The Blinding End
I’m happy, exhausted, relieved, and somewhat sad to announce the final release in the Driver series: The Blinding End. I’ve lived with the Driver for the last sixteen years, and when I first conceived of him, I had no intent for a series nor conception of what one might look like. But here I am, five books later, on a journey that took me from an unexpected release with a small eBook press to independently publishing on my own.
The Blinding End is something of an encapsulation of what the Driver series is, or perhaps what I always intended it to be. When I started out with The Camaro Murders, it was a purely selfish creative urge that at the end of which I determined if I were going to continue writing, I’d better have a reason to do so. There had to be something I was trying to convey—I needed to have an aim, a truth. Otherwise, art doesn’t really have a point, does it?
And so, a glimmer of The Blinding End (or its denouement, rather) has always been in my head. How I got there would be the question, but I knew I wanted to continue with the experimental bent of the first book, playing around with POV and format—something I did throughout the rest of the series. And so, it will please fans of the first book to know this is the most unorthodox entry of them all, containing both first- and third-person narratives, chapters, short stories, newspaper articles, poetry (even an Epic Poem), songs, memories, photographs, and other fragments. There’s even an in-novel novelette.
The book is ambitious for sure, weaving in the prior stories’ styles and themes everywhere from the blurb to the chapter titles to the writing itself. I would even suggest the cover is in some way evocative of all the others. The Blinding End is truly the culmination of the series, both literally and figuratively. And while it was a lot of fun to write, it was difficult, too. I was trying to balance the organic development of the tale with tying together loose threads and wrapping up plot lines and character arcs as well as properly framing the metaphysical aspects of it.
If you recall, this is the third book in an in-series trilogy that began with Beacon Road Bedlam. So, there are a number of things in motion, not the least of which is the antagonism between Sheriff Hildersham and Tad Ozzel, a reporter turned villain. Ozzel’s search for the truth doesn’t quite overshadow Hildersham’s nor the Driver’s own search, but it does in fact instigate the penultimate events. But it’s the metaphysical thread woven throughout the story that was trickiest—I needed to surface it in an intelligible manner without giving too much away. There needed to be some mystery about it as there also needed to be the promise of understanding it. It’s a delicate balance to be struck between opacity and translucence, between obscurity and clarity. Yet there is always something elusive about the transcendent, something that always seems to evade when you try to articulate it.
Another thing I struggled with is the darkness of the book. All along, I’ve tried not to be gratuitous with things, but I also wanted the books to be realistic—and in the case of The Blinding End, I really wanted to raise the stakes for the Driver. I needed him to be in such a pit of despair that he could no longer rely on himself. All the same, I knew I had to turn things around at some point. Or at least I wanted to. I didn’t think it was fair to beat the reader down with morosity over an entire series and not provide some sort of payoff or relief.
And therein lies the point, the thrust of it all. While the Driver’s actions, however well-intentioned he may have thought they were, are what gets him into hot water with Malveinous, it’s really the Driver’s aim (or lack thereof) that constitutes his real problem. He’s not aligned with anything other than his pride, and Malveinous comes to represent the wages of that. And it’s a bottomless, meaningless, void awaiting him—a madness that will swallow his very existence whole. Who or what can save him from that?
Well, I don’t want to spoil things too much for you. There’s something of a fever dream at the end, something akin to how I remember the end of G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.” Some readers may enjoy it. Others will not, perhaps seeing it as a flimsy guise for a Christological Logos archetype (a guise that’s not so much flimsy as not even there). I suppose it may go over some readers’ heads.
At any rate, I may or may not have succeeded on that end of things. But my hope is that readers will at least be entertained by my strange meanderings that I saw so clearly in my mind but struggled to capture on the page. It’s a hard thing for this author to accept that while a piece of art may have been objectively crafted, there is always the reader’s subjective perception of it that may carry them far afield from what was intended. And I can’t blame them, for I am guilty of the same thing with the art I consume.
But perhaps they might agree that their ability to subjectively perceive such things bears within it an inherent assumption of objectivity, that the mechanisms by which they see and think and speak rely upon a common foundation, a reason, a Logos—a Word.
The Blinding End is something of an encapsulation of what the Driver series is, or perhaps what I always intended it to be. When I started out with The Camaro Murders, it was a purely selfish creative urge that at the end of which I determined if I were going to continue writing, I’d better have a reason to do so. There had to be something I was trying to convey—I needed to have an aim, a truth. Otherwise, art doesn’t really have a point, does it?
And so, a glimmer of The Blinding End (or its denouement, rather) has always been in my head. How I got there would be the question, but I knew I wanted to continue with the experimental bent of the first book, playing around with POV and format—something I did throughout the rest of the series. And so, it will please fans of the first book to know this is the most unorthodox entry of them all, containing both first- and third-person narratives, chapters, short stories, newspaper articles, poetry (even an Epic Poem), songs, memories, photographs, and other fragments. There’s even an in-novel novelette.
The book is ambitious for sure, weaving in the prior stories’ styles and themes everywhere from the blurb to the chapter titles to the writing itself. I would even suggest the cover is in some way evocative of all the others. The Blinding End is truly the culmination of the series, both literally and figuratively. And while it was a lot of fun to write, it was difficult, too. I was trying to balance the organic development of the tale with tying together loose threads and wrapping up plot lines and character arcs as well as properly framing the metaphysical aspects of it.
If you recall, this is the third book in an in-series trilogy that began with Beacon Road Bedlam. So, there are a number of things in motion, not the least of which is the antagonism between Sheriff Hildersham and Tad Ozzel, a reporter turned villain. Ozzel’s search for the truth doesn’t quite overshadow Hildersham’s nor the Driver’s own search, but it does in fact instigate the penultimate events. But it’s the metaphysical thread woven throughout the story that was trickiest—I needed to surface it in an intelligible manner without giving too much away. There needed to be some mystery about it as there also needed to be the promise of understanding it. It’s a delicate balance to be struck between opacity and translucence, between obscurity and clarity. Yet there is always something elusive about the transcendent, something that always seems to evade when you try to articulate it.
Another thing I struggled with is the darkness of the book. All along, I’ve tried not to be gratuitous with things, but I also wanted the books to be realistic—and in the case of The Blinding End, I really wanted to raise the stakes for the Driver. I needed him to be in such a pit of despair that he could no longer rely on himself. All the same, I knew I had to turn things around at some point. Or at least I wanted to. I didn’t think it was fair to beat the reader down with morosity over an entire series and not provide some sort of payoff or relief.
And therein lies the point, the thrust of it all. While the Driver’s actions, however well-intentioned he may have thought they were, are what gets him into hot water with Malveinous, it’s really the Driver’s aim (or lack thereof) that constitutes his real problem. He’s not aligned with anything other than his pride, and Malveinous comes to represent the wages of that. And it’s a bottomless, meaningless, void awaiting him—a madness that will swallow his very existence whole. Who or what can save him from that?
Well, I don’t want to spoil things too much for you. There’s something of a fever dream at the end, something akin to how I remember the end of G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.” Some readers may enjoy it. Others will not, perhaps seeing it as a flimsy guise for a Christological Logos archetype (a guise that’s not so much flimsy as not even there). I suppose it may go over some readers’ heads.
At any rate, I may or may not have succeeded on that end of things. But my hope is that readers will at least be entertained by my strange meanderings that I saw so clearly in my mind but struggled to capture on the page. It’s a hard thing for this author to accept that while a piece of art may have been objectively crafted, there is always the reader’s subjective perception of it that may carry them far afield from what was intended. And I can’t blame them, for I am guilty of the same thing with the art I consume.
But perhaps they might agree that their ability to subjectively perceive such things bears within it an inherent assumption of objectivity, that the mechanisms by which they see and think and speak rely upon a common foundation, a reason, a Logos—a Word.
