Categorization of Novels

I haven’t blogged as much as I’d planned to this month, but then there isn’t all that much to say when you’re writing a book. Every day, or as often as possible, you sit down and put more words on the page. For me, at least, most of the cogitating over plot and so on seems to go on in some mysterious nether world where I am oblivious to it. The story manufactures itself as I write, one thing flowing logically into the next as the pages mount up.

 But it is tiring work, and even at my fairly slow and steady rate of 20 000 words a week, I’ve not had much time or energy left over to get a lot of other things done. Like blogging.

 I have found, however, that consistent productivity has side effects- a sort of heightened inspiration. Lying in bed the other night, waiting for sleep to visit, I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness in surprise. There, right within reach, rattling around in my head, was the answer I needed as to why my novel Eidolon had stalled. Even better, along with that knowledge, was a plan of how to fix it. If I were to do this, change that, set it here instead of there, try out these characters and remove those – why I think the story would work perfectly.  I lay there, excited, turning over the story in my mind, investigating these new possibilities, and decided that yes indeed, I think it could work and I also think it could be a story I would enjoy writing very much.

 So I’m hoping to go back to that book shortly. I’ll throw out the 9000 words I have on it and start completely over. Sometimes that’s the only thing that works.

 The solution I found interests me greatly though, on an intellectual, thinking-about-writing level, and it reminded me of an interview in the Paris Review with Stephen King that I read a while ago. In this interview he categorises his novels into two groups, calling one ‘innies’ and the other ‘outies’. His innie stories tend to be about one character and go deeper and deeper into that character. In an outie, there are many characters. It’s a wonderfully simple classification.

 I’ve always preferred to write stories that are innies; they’re the ones that come naturally to me. Orange Moon is an innie, focusing on only one character, and indeed for the first half of the book there’s really only one character in the story. Remnant is even more noticeably an innie – Cass is the only apparent survivor in some sort of apocalyptic scenario, although many readers have said they were delighted to find that Izzy the horse qualified as another character in her own right too. I’m comfortable writing these innie books. I like to dig deep into a character’s psyche, seeing how she copes with the intrusion of the extraordinary into her otherwise ordinary life.

 I wanted to write Eidolon as an outie – a story with multiple characters and viewpoints, and  a setting that encompassed a large area. But I also needed the characters to interact in some way with each other, and my original idea had them spread too widely, and too much happening in too many different places for me to comfortably bring together.

  What I’ve ended up doing now, is pruning everything down to a more manageable size. It’s still, to my mind, going to be an outie, but I’ve reassessed the setting, and made the action specific to one area, one small town. And in that one area are all my characters, aligned to each other by geography, relationships, and the coming action of the book. Almost like a captive pool of characters, and they aren’t going to know what’s hit them. By focusing the book like this, it’s achieved a clearer picture in my mind, no longer alarmingly fuzzy around the edges. If I write it this way, I’m pretty sure it’s going to work. Even though it means throwing out the 9000 words I have on the story already and starting completely over.

 I’m looking forward to starting. And I sure as hell hope it comes together the way that I think it will, because I’ve been talking about it way too much to have to come back here and say – yet again – that I have to quit on it.

 P.S. I reached 60 000 words on my November novel yesterday and expect to finish it in the coming week. But more on that soon…

Filed under: Writing Journal