What are you Writing?

[AmateisGal]

Figured out how to end my latest chapter, and just sent it off to my critique partner.

 

[Fading Fast]

Figured out how to end my latest chapter, and just sent it off to my critique partner.

Congrats - nice accomplishment. That always feels good.

 

[MikeKardec]

Figured out how to end my latest chapter, and just sent it off to my critique partner.

I've never been able to do that as I go ... make elegant units out of chapters. I have to get all done and then go back and figure the best breaks and how to resolve them. I break stuff into chapters but it's pretty arbitrary at first. I structure carefully, that's the discipline of a has-been screenwriter. The first draft gets a 3, 4 or 5 act structure. Usually it's 4. Then in rewrites it gets broken further into a sort of self created structure that is something like the theoretical Hollywood "Hero's Journey" structure. I don't know if anyone in Hollywood would actually accept a well and specifically developed Hero's structure, they spend too long getting up to speed. Anyway that Hero's structure is both optional and piecemeal depending on how much I need it ... I mostly use it to remind myself if I've missed anything. Then chapters, which are completely separate from the structure.

If I'm working with something of Dad's it all goes out the window. The first goal is to make it as good as it can be just by cutting, then some writing gets done in order to join any sections that were cut so severely that they no longer join. Then I sit back and figure what the story is telling me what it wants to be without really caring what his intentions were ... then I try to execute that in as close to his style (which I've utterly submerged in by that time) as possible with a light a hand (when it comes to changes) as possible ... the tricky phrase here is "as possible" that can lead to a lot or a little, it just depends on what it needs. Lastly, I try to stick in some details that come from his life that he never put in. I always try to add back in pieces of the original author's life if I have to remove or change any of his work. In these works I try to stick to the original structure, whatever it was. I find that, structurally, team written stories are the most complex. Having more than one writer, even if one of them is dead (Dad died in '88), just makes the whole experience richer and the level of detail and meaning and nuance goes way up.

With the "tanker story" mentioned earlier (due out in 2017 but negotiations are still under way), I added a beginning chapter, then rewrote, polished, and restructured the body of the story completing or perfecting the trajectory of many elements, and then expanded the ending. I definitely did less to make it "perfect" than I might with something I considered more my own but I always had to ask myself, "Is this the LEAST I can do to make it what it needs to become?" It has to be a complete experience that requires no excuses, it's goals must be achieved within that framework but it also has to be sort of minimalist. But whatever I am, Editor, Recreator, Forensic Literary Archaeologist, those are the rules I've made for myself. They play out differently every time, but I always play by them.

 

[AmateisGal]

I try to make each chapter it's own little story. I don't know if it ends up being that way, but I try. Also, I firmly believe in ending every chapter with some sort of hook or a question, something to keep the reader turning the pages.

In other news, I had a talk with my agent and I need to add a suspense/thriller/mystery aspect to my current novel. Why? Because my last novel (the one she's trying to sell) has that aspect. And in order to build a brand, I need my books to be somewhat similar (not story-wise, but have some of the same elements). I've got a great idea so that shouldn't be a problem. I'm just slightly upset with myself for overlooking this crucial element.

 

[MikeKardec]

That's why you have people to help you. None of us are as good alone as we are in teams!

I always think of stories like this: Every one is a mystery and every one is a love story. That wouldn't have solved your need which is probably requiring more than the minimal requirements in my little rule but I do see those as requirements. Mystery doesn't mean "who done it?" and Love story doesn't have to mean potentially sexual romance but you got to have those two.

I hope to someday hear how you're going to reverse engineer in the mystery/thriller aspect. Retrofitting stories is a challenge I take very seriously but I never get to talk to anyone about it! I've done it a number of times but I've never done a genre conversion!

 

[belfastboy]

I am in the finishing stages of reading/editing my novel and it has struck me that, at its core, I have written a romance novel (sans the bodice ripping). Just coming to terms with that as it was not my intent when I started out on this endeavour. I have three more scenes to write to fill in some blanks and fill in a gap in the timeline so that my hero ends up in the right place on the right day at the end of the story. Right now I am missing two days that need at least a cursory explanation other than "time travel".
Next book I will plot a time line as I write so that I better keep track of the days as they unfold in the story.

 

[AmateisGal]

That's why you have people to help you. None of us are as good alone as we are in teams!

I always think of stories like this: Every one is a mystery and every one is a love story. That wouldn't have solved your need which is probably requiring more than the minimal requirements in my little rule but I do see those as requirements. Mystery doesn't mean "who done it?" and Love story doesn't have to mean potentially sexual romance but you got to have those two.

I hope to someday hear how you're going to reverse engineer in the mystery/thriller aspect. Retrofitting stories is a challenge I take very seriously but I never get to talk to anyone about it! I've done it a number of times but I've never done a genre conversion!

I came up with a great idea - I turned to my character's past in Berlin to find the key and I think it will fit in nicely. I'm not keen on all the work I'll have to do to get my draft up to speed, but then again, it's going to make this story SO much fun that I won't mind too much.

 

[belfastboy]

I came up with a great idea - I turned to my character's past in Berlin to find the key and I think it will fit in nicely. I'm not keen on all the work I'll have to do to get my draft up to speed, but then again, it's going to make this story SO much fun that I won't mind too much.

Congrats!

 

[MikeKardec]

I am in the finishing stages of reading/editing my novel and it has struck me that, at its core, I have written a romance novel (sans the bodice ripping). Just coming to terms with that as it was not my intent when I started out on this endeavour. I have three more scenes to write to fill in some blanks and fill in a gap in the timeline so that my hero ends up in the right place on the right day at the end of the story. Right now I am missing two days that need at least a cursory explanation other than "time travel".
Next book I will plot a time line as I write so that I better keep track of the days as they unfold in the story.

Beware of worrying about that sort of stuff too much in the early phases. It's important to get it right eventually but agonizing over it too early can stifle creativity. That's what rewriting is for. Or the "romance novel" aspect, that could be what I've mentioned as "the story trying to tell you what it wants to be." If you hate it then deal with it but if you find it interesting, GO FOR IT. Life is easier and you make more out of the calories you have to spend on creativity if you let it talk to you!

I came up with a great idea - I turned to my character's past in Berlin to find the key and I think it will fit in nicely. I'm not keen on all the work I'll have to do to get my draft up to speed, but then again, it's going to make this story SO much fun that I won't mind too much.

That could be cool and it could inform a good deal of other stuff in the rest of story. As much as I oppose authors getting stuck in genres, genre and the "brand name" of a author is the most powerful marketing tool out there. Your agent is making a good point.

The comic book I did is all about a posse pursuing a guy through New Mexico's Jornada del Muerte desert but the chase is interrupted by four flashbacks where you get the back story to the chase (which you "think" you understand from the first few scenes) from the point of view of four of the posse members. It's not quite a "Rashomon Effect" (the exact same story told by several unreliable narrators) because each flashback takes the events a bit further as opposed to being repetitive. It tries to attack the reason they are all chasing this man in a way that completely undermines how you feel about who did what as opposed to changing what you think are the facts. Needless to say my co-writer and I learned a LOT about what this story was trying to tell us as we went about the 30 + rewrites we had to do. Check it out. It might interest or repel you enough to be inspirational -- http://lawofthedesertborn.com/

 

[AmateisGal]

Beware of worrying about that sort of stuff too much in the early phases. It's important to get it right eventually but agonizing over it too early can stifle creativity. That's what rewriting is for. Or the "romance novel" aspect, that could be what I've mentioned as "the story trying to tell you what it wants to be." If you hate it then deal with it but if you find it interesting, GO FOR IT. Life is easier and you make more out of the calories you have to spend on creativity if you let it talk to you!



That could be cool and it could inform a good deal of other stuff in the rest of story. As much as I oppose authors getting stuck in genres, genre and the "brand name" of a author is the most powerful marketing tool out there. Your agent is making a good point.

The comic book I did is all about a posse pursuing a guy through New Mexico's Jornada del Muerte desert but the chase is interrupted by four flashbacks where you get the back story to the chase (which you "think" you understand from the first few scenes) from the point of view of four of the posse members. It's not quite a "Rashomon Effect" (the exact same story told by several unreliable narrators) because each flashback takes the events a bit further as opposed to being repetitive. It tries to attack the reason they are all chasing this man in a way that completely undermines how you feel about who did what as opposed to changing what you think are the facts. Needless to say my co-writer and I learned a LOT about what this story was trying to tell us as we went about the 30 + rewrites we had to do. Check it out. It might interest or repel you enough to be inspirational -- http://lawofthedesertborn.com/

It sounds fascinating! Off to check it out now...

 

[belfastboy]

Being a neophyte writer I did not follow any of the rules....not realizing there are such things....when I started. I had a character, an incident and I began to write. The character(s )took on a life and a huge part of the fun & excitement of this journey is allowing the characters to develop a life, a personality, a character and allow that to inform what comes next. Out of that process I began to develop the requisite structure, pivot points, conflict and resolution etc. The story is down on the page including the ending. I am now revisiting the timeline and filling in some gaps. For instance I discovered I need account for two days in order to get the hero in the right place on the right day . Over the course of the two years of writing I lost track of my timeline and as the story takes place over just two weeks, the two days are not critical to the plot but important for continuity. I also decided that as one character has just the one chapter written in their voice it is anomalous. I either need to write two more chapters/scenes in their voice or jettison the one I have written already. I will write the scenes and see how they scan and if it adds to the fullness of the story or is just filler. I will write it first then decide. I have an editor for grammar, sentence structure and punctuation ready to go and when the additional stories are complete in about two weeks time I will send out to my 3 readers for the input on "story" that you suggested. I think next time knowing now what I know.....the structure will arise much earlier in the process and I will actually plot a hard copy of the timeline somewhere on my office wall to help keep me on track.
Do you write always in chronological order? Or do you write scenes as they arise? I have done a little of both but need be careful to make certain the consciousness of the character is congruent to the time and place. It is a little bit trickier to do properly. Thank you.

 

[MikeKardec]

Being a neophyte writer I did not follow any of the rules....not realizing there are such things....when I started. I had a character, an incident and I began to write. The character(s )took on a life and a huge part of the fun & excitement of this journey is allowing the characters to develop a life, a personality, a character and allow that to inform what comes next. Out of that process I began to develop the requisite structure, pivot points, conflict and resolution etc. The story is down on the page including the ending. I am now revisiting the timeline and filling in some gaps. For instance I discovered I need account for two days in order to get the hero in the right place on the right day . Over the course of the two years of writing I lost track of my timeline and as the story takes place over just two weeks, the two days are not critical to the plot but important for continuity. I also decided that as one character has just the one chapter written in their voice it is anomalous. I either need to write two more chapters/scenes in their voice or jettison the one I have written already. I will write the scenes and see how they scan and if it adds to the fullness of the story or is just filler. I will write it first then decide. I have an editor for grammar, sentence structure and punctuation ready to go and when the additional stories are complete in about two weeks time I will send out to my 3 readers for the input on "story" that you suggested. I think next time knowing now what I know.....the structure will arise much earlier in the process and I will actually plot a hard copy of the timeline somewhere on my office wall to help keep me on track.
Do you write always in chronological order? Or do you write scenes as they arise? I have done a little of both but need be careful to make certain the consciousness of the character is congruent to the time and place. It is a little bit trickier to do properly. Thank you.

I have written out of order after I did an outline and knew what the scenes ought to be. Side note: I think that sticking to an out line is a good idea until it isn't ... basically, have discipline but don't close yourself off from changes if the story leads elsewhere. Anyway, I find that writing out of order without a plan develops interesting "experiments" but directly incorporating it into the finished narrative later is pretty difficult. I grew up around writers, but I really learned to write from learning to act. If you want the right things to come out of a scene first of all, it has to be the right scene. That is a HUGE issue. Only the right set up, the right characters, the right preceding action, the right history, will allow the scene to play out naturally AND deliver the information you need it to. The fundamental unit of organization for an actor is the scene, acting teaches you to focus on its qualities. Whether you write in order or not knowing what comes before, to a profound extent, controls the scene. I'm very sensitive to the beginning of a scene and, if writing a script, will sometimes start it dozens of times, sometimes the same way sometimes alternative ways until it takes off. I'm a bit less experimental writing prose. The reasons this matters is the foundation, get the foundation right (what comes before) and the rest will work. What comes before is the previous scene with those characters, the back story or just the previous LINE. It's a house of cards and you have to get the base set up right. Sometimes you have to back up and change the back story to make something work ... if it's really important. Any way you do it is fine as long as you work on the story to make it right and make it communicate what you need to communicate.

Walter Murch, genius movie editor and guru of all things perceptual, likes to cut movies that were horrifically overshot. Films where the director provided LOTS of options. His first Academy Award was Apocalypse Now. He gets familiar with the script, understands the story he is trying to tell, but also tries to "free associate" connections between scenes and themes. He doesn't organize by the shot, pulling out what he will need in the future. He likes to go hunting for what is next, seeing all sorts of other stuff prior to funding it ... it tunes up his brain to alternative connections ... connections that weren't obvious from the script. This is really helpful in that process I keep talking about where the story starts to suggest its own reality. It's a way of having a dialog with it, or starting a dialog with it. His resume is INSANE. He created the "worldizing" effect for the sound effects in American Graffiti, cut The Conversation, The English Patient (another Oscar), The Talented Mr. Ripley. He's also written some great books on editing and storytelling the best is The Conversations with Christopher Ondaatje ... the author of The English Patient novel. The brilliance of a Murch Cut is that it might rearrange the whole story but still tell it more artfully.

We are all neophyte writers! If you are not humbled by the void this stuff comes out of, if you are not aware you are just a medium (no matter how hard you labor at the nuts and bolts) you will have an ugly lesson coming. There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no writers who don't realize there is more to the unconscious muses than man will ever know.

 

[belfastboy]

I have written out of order after I did an outline and knew what the scenes ought to be. Side note: I think that sticking to an out line is a good idea until it isn't ... basically, have discipline but don't close yourself off from changes if the story leads elsewhere. Anyway, I find that writing out of order without a plan develops interesting "experiments" but directly incorporating it into the finished narrative later is pretty difficult. I grew up around writers, but I really learned to write from learning to act. If you want the right things to come out of a scene first of all, it has to be the right scene. That is a HUGE issue. Only the right set up, the right characters, the right preceding action, the right history, will allow the scene to play out naturally AND deliver the information you need it to. The fundamental unit of organization for an actor is the scene, acting teaches you to focus on its qualities. Whether you write in order or not knowing what comes before, to a profound extent, controls the scene. I'm very sensitive to the beginning of a scene and, if writing a script, will sometimes start it dozens of times, sometimes the same way sometimes alternative ways until it takes off. I'm a bit less experimental writing prose. The reasons this matters is the foundation, get the foundation right (what comes before) and the rest will work. What comes before is the previous scene with those characters, the back story or just the previous LINE. It's a house of cards and you have to get the base set up right. Sometimes you have to back up and change the back story to make something work ... if it's really important. Any way you do it is fine as long as you work on the story to make it right and make it communicate what you need to communicate.

Walter Murch, genius movie editor and guru of all things perceptual, likes to cut movies that were horrifically overshot. Films where the director provided LOTS of options. His first Academy Award was Apocalypse Now. He gets familiar with the script, understands the story he is trying to tell, but also tries to "free associate" connections between scenes and themes. He doesn't organize by the shot, pulling out what he will need in the future. He likes to go hunting for what is next, seeing all sorts of other stuff prior to funding it ... it tunes up his brain to alternative connections ... connections that weren't obvious from the script. This is really helpful in that process I keep talking about where the story starts to suggest its own reality. It's a way of having a dialog with it, or starting a dialog with it. His resume is INSANE. He created the "worldizing" effect for the sound effects in American Graffiti, cut The Conversation, The English Patient (another Oscar), The Talented Mr. Ripley. He's also written some great books on editing and storytelling the best is The Conversations with Christopher Ondaatje ... the author of The English Patient novel. The brilliance of a Murch Cut is that it might rearrange the whole story but still tell it more artfully.

We are all neophyte writers! If you are not humbled by the void this stuff comes out of, if you are not aware you are just a medium (no matter how hard you labor at the nuts and bolts) you will have an ugly lesson coming. There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no writers who don't realize there is more to the unconscious muses than man will ever know.

Thank you for taking the time to write your thoughtful reply. As always I value your input.

 

[AmateisGal]

This weekend, I'll be working on my next article for AMERICA IN WWII magazine. I'm writing about the women correspondents of WW2. These gals were, in a word, amazing. I can't believe the courage they had, often more than their male counterparts.

I'd love to work on the novel, too, so maybe I'll sneak a bit of that in, as well.

 

[Benzadmiral]

I tend to develop an outline early and update it regularly. But I've noticed that, as I approach the end of the story (novel or short piece), I don't make any more notes and I don't consult the earlier ones. I steam straight ahead to the end -- sprinting for the tape, as it were. When I go back to the notes, I see I usually followed the outline pretty closely.

Currently I'm mulling over an idea for another "Man from U.N.C.L.E." fan story. True, nobody will pay money for these stories; but, "Writing fan fiction isn't work, it's joyful play," and writing them is a good way to keep your skills sharp. This time I'm trying to work out a crossover with two characters from a famous Billy Wilder movie. However, I have no real plot yet, and I'm very much a plot writer.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Finishing a piece on the 1950s radio series "X Minus One" for publication in an upcoming boxed set of episodes from the program. Focusing it on the career of the producer, one William Welch, the most interesting thing about whom is that he went on to write for all those corny Irwin Allen sci-fi TV shows in the sixties.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ Interesting, but it doesn't sound surprising. Never heard of "X Minus One," what was its quality level?

And kudus, sounds like an assignment right up your alley. They are lucky to have found you.

 

[LizzieMaine]

X Minus One was pretty good radio for its time -- radio drama was on its deathbed, but it managed to stick around for almost four years. Half-hour adaptations of stories from "Galaxy" magazine by some pretty decent authors. Some of it is very dated in a late-fifites space age mentality kind of way, but the production values were quite high and they hold together well. NBC tried to revive it several times in the sixties and seventies before giving up for good, and it's been around in syndicated reruns off and on since the seventies. And of course, Radio Spirits puts out several fine boxed sets which help pay my mortgage.

 

[belfastboy]

I am engrossed in reading Faulkner these days but bogged down with The Sound and The Fury so have put it aside for Light in August. The best part of TS&TF was Faulkner's intro where he spoke to his process. He said the failing of As I Lay Dying was that he knew too much, about the characters and their story and he no longer wished to write that way. He said the Light in August he started out with a pregnant woman walking down a path, that is all he knew and he wrote the story from there. I look forward to reading it to see where he takes it. It is a fascinating concept....is an outline required or can one just start with a thinnest of a premise and write from there?

 

[AmateisGal]

All I managed to do the past few days was tinker with my novel a bit. Didn't get a thing done on my women correspondents of WW2 article because my daughter and I both got hit with the flu. I barely got out of bed Sunday and Monday, and today I think we've finally hit the "starting to feel better" phase. Thanks, flu! Fortunately, I got a deadline extension from my editor, but I'm hopeful I won't have to use it.