I had* a problem, where the two main places I write were incompatible. That is, the software I prefer to write with - Dropbox and yWriter, wouldn't run at one of the places I write at, due to the particular system configuration. So I'd resolved to write the novel at home, and write shorts and other things at the incompatible place.

Which was working - this morning, before my colleague's assistance, I wrote the start of what I thought was a short story that had been kicking around. It went pretty well - I liked the voice, I liked the concept, I even liked my opening page, which probably means it was rubbish. It got my attention, it flowed well, it felt lively.

What it didn't feel like was the start of a short story. It was punchy, but took its time. You knew what was going on, where the plot would be going, but nothing was actually happening, so much for that first page or so. And as I was writing, notions crept in - that while the concept was simple, its ramifications weren't, or shouldn't be. That, as a story, it was a bit of a trick-piece, but as a novel it might have more depth. Some character and humanity.

Which is mildly problematic, as I'm already writing a novel, but manageable. I like to multitask. But it posed an interesting question to me - how do you know if the idea you're toying with is novel-sized or short-sized? Obviously we do know, most of the time. But how? What is it about a story that makes you feel there's a whole novel in there, or that there couldn't be? And how implicitly do you trust that initial assessment - how easily will you consider turning a short into a novel, or ripping the heart out of your book to make a short?

*Until about half an hour ago, when a colleague showed me Dropbox's command-line install (thanks, Austin!). Now I'm golden, as soon as I get dropbox up and running under wine.

 

I'm close to the end of something that's been monopolising my time, and along with the light at the end of the tunnel, there've been increasingly persistent thoughts about my novel. Well, novels, but the others are still in the crib, chewing letter blocks. 

I'm not happy with the story as it's written, nor do I feel too sure about the second version I'm looking at writing. Things don't work, don't mesh quite the way I'd like. The end doesn't answer or solve the beginning, exactly, the hooks and turns are slightly sideways. It feels like the beginning and end of two separate realities have been stitched together.

And the reason occurred to me last night - I'm trying to keep too many of the components. Trying to make the story work with X, Y, Z, A, B, and K.  Which would be okay if those things were naturally intertwined or meshed somehow, but they're not. Well, not without a lot of pushing, and I think it's that pushing that's putting the strain in my story.

I wrote a while ago about breaking your own rules, where the audience isn't given the expectation for some crucial elements of your world or story. Here, however, I'm talking about an altogether sillier version - breaking rules that you have specifically enunciated to the reader.

Inspired once again by Doctor Who - the second half of the Weeping Angels. Amy, for retcon-reasons we won't go into, has to keep her eyes shut and navigate a forest with Angels in it. Angels are a perculiar kind of alien that, as explained by Ten in Blink, don't exist when they're being observed - as soon as they're seen by any living thing, they turn to stone. When Amy inevitably encounters the Angels, she has to 'walk as if she can see', to fool the Angels into thinking she can see them, so they won't kill her. When she (of course) gives her blindness away, the Angels attack.

It's happened to everyone. You're writing along, chest-deep in the groove of the story, barrelling forward, and in walks a character you've not seen since the start of the previous novel. Everyone turns to look at them, and - wait, what did they look like, again? Did they have a weird speech mannerism? Do they like sushi?

What do you do? Stop everything and trawl through your work, looking for previous references? Skip over this bit with big FILL THIS IN LATER notes? Wing it and promise yourself you'll check it later (hah)? Whatever you do, your stride is now broken, the engine of story that was driving you along now sputtering and flicking on its fuel light.

And it's entirely avoidable.

Not at all inspired by Moffat's new and improved Weeping Angels on Doctor Who last night, of course (I know it's magic pretending to be science, but is it too much to ask for a little narrative consistency?)

Retcons - "retroactive continuity" - are rife in television and film, where continuity takes second, third, or fourth place to the whims and wishes of the director, the execs, the screenwriter or even the marketing department. In novels it's rarer, but not unheard of (J.K's wand lore in Deathly Hallows, anyone?).  A retcon is a usually-game-changing factoid that, when introduced in a later story makes a previous story no longer sensible. Take the wand lore example - as there are already a half-million copies of this argument on the internet - in early books, the wand chooses the wizard, and wands don't work as well for wizards who aren't their masters. In book seven, a wand changes allegiances away from a disarmed master. Which means, as everyone goes through duelling practice at school, pretty much nobody's wand works properly anymore as a matter of course, and there's no way of knowing who the real master of anyone's wand is. And what happens if you defeat a wizard whose wand already thinks it's somebody else's anyway? Erk.

 

So, we have swathes of information in hand, now. Treatments, loglines, plot and character arc flaws, and tension and pacing problems. All (hopefully) nicely organised so you can pull together all the aspects and problems of a particular chapter, arc, act, character or storyline with ease.  The whole time, I've been reiterating "don't fix it yet", "don't touch", and "just note what's wrong". Hopefully it's become clear why you don't dive in a fix the first problem you see - a lot of those problems are iceburg tips, or perhaps smoke signals from a problem much further away, or surrounded by other problems that aren't as apparent. Fixing things right off the bat is like sweeping the ice chunks off the titanic - it does nothing to fix the big problems, and you're going to wind up doing it over and over.

So, are we up to fixing it yet? Well, no. As you might have guessed from the title - we're not quite there yet. On the plus side, all this analysis will hopefully mean when we do come to the actual rewriting, you'll be itching to get your fingers back to the keyboard. But I digress - we've one more vital thing to look at before we start finding solutions. 

So we've created our treatment, our logline, and made notes on what isn't working with the plot and character lines. Now we have our novel in miniature (treatment), complete with mission statement (logline) and a note on all the ways and places it isn't fulfilling said mission statement. But we're not done, yet. Remember when I said we'd get to pacing and drama? Well, yes.

Tension is how you tell the reader something is important, how you draw them in to caring about this particular moment more than what's come before. It's not just a matter of making the monster bigger or the reward greater, it's in the writing itself - the rhythm of sentences, the character and narrator focus, the sound and the impression of words. You can make a scene about someone tying their shoes inordinately tense, if you want to. Controlling tension through your novel is a lot of work, but absolutely essential.

Tension, pacing, drama - whatever you'd like to call it - is essential to a novel, but it's not like chocolate topping. You can't just pour some over and make things tasty. Tension in the wrong place is perhaps worse than no tension at all.

So, we have a treatment for our novel - a one-page-per-chapter breakdown - and an act structure, synopsis and logline. Now comes the part where we start looking at all these things, deciding what isn't working and - more importantly - why.

Note that there's no mention of how to fix things yet. Hold off on that until you've found all the structural things that you think need fixing, otherwise you'll constantly be rebalancing your fixes and your original work while you find new problems. So - for now, we're just isolating the cracks in the plot.

It starts out with pulling together a lot of the things we've just been creating:

Make graphs out of those rating systems so you can see the rise and fall (and progressive build, if you used a cumulative system like I suggested) of themes, character arcs, tension, interest and anything else it occured to you to write. Create a table (or another format, if it makes more sense for you) of plot and character information across each chapter so you can easily access one 'strand' of a story at a time. (This is why excel spreadsheets are awesome - you can code it to pull all those together for you). Take your logline, print it out, and tape it to the wall or somewhere easily accessable. This is now the Divine Commandment of your novel; everything must bow to it. 

So, you've now trawled through your entire, sprawing manuscript, carefully refraining from line edits and rewrites as you went, and pieced together your super-synopsis of what's actually going on in those pages, and when. Those outline-first authors out there: does it match your plan? Is that chapter really as compelling / important / moving as it was in the plan? Did you spend an unexpected amount of time talking about something else entirely?

If the answer's "no", then you either took shortcuts with your synopsis-making or were so unbelievably disciplined with outline-following in your writing that I fear you may've ironed out the creative spark of that novel completely. But I digress.

As I said last time, novels are too big to think about all at once. You can look at the general story or the minutae of a scene, but you can't hold all of them in your head at the same time and think about how they're working together. So, step one - we condensed the novel into who, what, where, why, how, and added some notes and ratings on theme, action, character arcs, etc. But that synopsis is likely stretching at least a page per chapter - useful, for later, but still too big for the moment.

 

You've done it - you've ploughed your way through the terrible first draft, squidged over the soggy middle sections, minced around overwritten dialogue and grinned maniacally at the world after placing that period at the end of the last sentence. It's finished. You have A Novel. Probably not a terribly good novel - we are, after all, being honest with ourselves about the realities of rewriting - but it's A Novel, nonetheless. You are now A Novelist. And now, it's time for big, serious novelist things like Editing, Re-Drafting, Revising.

No it isn't. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. If you dive in now (even after the requisite six weeks (or whatever your pause-preference is) of waiting) you'll be plopping yourself right back in that forest, trying to shape the path when you can only see a few metres ahead. Sure, your subconscious will have had fabulous ideas in the meantime, and you'll have realised exactly what that scene with the eggtimer and the chainsaw needs to make it work, and why it just wasn't feeling right when Billy left Jilly. But you won't have the overall landscape in your head - you can't. It's just not possible to keep an entire novel in your head as one big lump.

So - we need an overview of the structure, the developments, the plot, the arcs, the pacing, the tension. We need these so we can draw up a battleplan for that forest - for where the vicious pruning and careful nuturing will fall. Without this, you're really just writing another first draft. SO how do we get one?

I seem to be on a roll with life-organisational things, here. This one isn't quite as dull as the last two concepts, but equally important.

Not everyone creates the same way. Some of us are spaghetti-flingers, some of us are meticulous outliners. Bottom-up, Top-down, sideways or painstaking-research worldbuilders. Morning-writers, evening-writers, hours-that-no-sane-person-should-be-awake-writers. Napkin-writers, notebook writers, netbook writers (and, probably, iPad writers).

There's really no way, short of trial and error, of discovering how you work, especially when it comes to creative processes. What worked when you had to write an essay in school might be a mind-killer when it comes to a novel. But what works for a novel might be totally different to what works for a series. What works for science fiction might be completely different to what works for horror, for you.

Having spent three hours searching for the files of something I was working on, I feel compelled to write:

In addition to a regular, reliable backup system, you need organisation. You need to be able to find exactly what you're looking for within a few moments. Not just stories, but publication details and dates, contracts, receipts (conventions and equipment can be tax deductable) and your entire writing business. They all need to be in the same place, stored according to the same system.

This is not negotiable - doing anything less is not taking yourself or your work seriously, and if you're not going to, why should anyone else?

But there are two kinds of filing systems - the kind designed for easy filing, and the kind designed for easy retrieval.

 

A common trope, particularly in horror or thriller stories, is the throwaway character. The blonde in the tank top who wanders in the monster's jaws, the jock who jeers at the mysterious MacGuffin and promptly snuffs it. It's an excellent and easy way to show the reader that this situation is dangerous, people can and will die, and we need to take these things seriously and not push random big red buttons because they're shiny, but without having to throw anyone we really care about under the bus.

I'm not talking about the big sacrificial scenes at the end of the book, either. Not deaths that mean something - only deaths that are purely there to show the reader that this story means business. To show you that when you are infected by an alien, you die, horribly, and it's something that the characters are justified in being scared of.

But you can't just throw the lambs in wherever, or because you can't think of an easier way. There are some particular ways and means of using them that are essentially verboten, because the damage they cause to the reader's experience of the book is irreparable, especially if the character concerned hits more than one category.

Fantasy has a great love affair with prophecies. From King Arthur to Eragon, prophecy is to fantasy what DNA traces are to CSI screenwriters - overused, underutilised, and usually nonsense.

They come in two flavours, usually:

We're All Doomed (but really I just meant that it'll be a little bit rainy on that day, everything's going to be fine.) We're Going To Win (but there's going to be a really big kick up the bum for somebody).

There's occasionally a prophecy like 'everyone will wear hats on Thursday' but unless you're Terry Pratchett, prophecies are rarely so incidental to your plot. In fact, they're usually the whole plot: Here is the Hero, Here is the Prophecy, Here is the Resolution, Hah, I bet you didn't see that coming!

Well, yes, that's exactly the problem. We did.

 

So the 'leaked' iPad app list is out over here courtesy of Gizmodo. There's a link on the page you can browse the whole archive yourself, including visit individual app pages.

There are a lot of duplicates in there - and I don't mean the full version plus the lite version, but identical copies of the same app turning up more than once. This makes me rather doubt the 1350 apps claim (were they just hoping people wouldn't look too hard?) but some are looking useful:

 

I hate the middle sections of novels. I think I've written about this before, but the middle section, 'Act 2', has always been the most difficult for me. The first act, I have the fresh excitement of a new story and new characters on a new world (even if it's a here-and-now setting, it's still 'new') making up the rules as I go. I charge forward to the crescendo and tumble myself down the other side... into a dank, tensionless swap I have to slog through to reach the home-run-stretch of Act 3. The excitement of act 1 has climaxed, and we're dumped back into a slow rebuild of tension for the next one, but there's no clear path. If I'm going to can a novel mid-way through, the middle is where it'll happen.

Which is why I was concerned for Shadowren, my current fantasy novel. At the moment, and for the next two months at least, my time is overcommitted and almost all of my writing is taking place not at home, but at one of my workplaces in the early morning before my shift starts. For technical reasons, it's extremely difficult to access my novel there, so I've been writing shorts instead. I haven't touched the text of Shadowren in weeks. And the point where I left of was up to its armpits in Middle Swamp Of Doom. Not only was I finding it like dental surgery to write, I had no real idea which direction the swamp exit was - I had only the vaguest and not-very-enticing idea of what the ending would be, and absolutely no idea as to 'why'. It was like a Hollywood director saying there has to be an explosion, while the scriptwriter has no idea what there'll be to blow up.

 

When you sit down to Do Some Writing, are you someone who takes a handful of ideas and smears them around the page like cake batter, or do you have your itemised step-plan of scenes, pulses, beats, plot points and snippets? Do you know what you're going to write before it appears on the page, or is every moment a journey of joyful (or frustrating) discovery of (sometimes not-so) wonderful prose?

The concept of "Writer's Block" is one of the most self-pandering excuses in our procrastination toolbox. "Oh, I can't write anything, I have Writer's Block!". Cue dramatic sigh, sweeping exit stage right. When deployed correctly, it can give you an apparently valid excuse to not write for years. But that's what it is: an excuse. There's no such thing as writer's block.

I've hit the middle of my novel. This has always been the most difficult part for me, in first drafts. 

"Oh, you're writing a novel? I've always been meaning to write one about blah, but I've never found the time." 

Above is the sentence most despised by novelists, second only to perhaps "So, what's your novel about?" Not only is it ludicrously condescending (try replacing 'novel' with 'symphony', or 'design document for a satellite probe' and you'll see what I mean. Good writing requires skill, talent, and a million words of practice. Three million is better. No, I'm not kidding. But that's a whole 'nother post, there) it completely ignores one of the most crucial aspects of writing: