Archive for October 2011

4

Thinking about NaNoWriMo

27/10/11

I have never done NaNoWriMo.

I thought about it repeatedly when I was screenwriting, but it always clashed with paid work, and now I write all the time anyway. I even write pretty quickly, the gap between TGAW and Angelmaker notwithstanding. (To be fair to, er, me: in the time since TGAW was published, I have written three books, a screenplay, and assorted newspaper bits and bobs. It’s just that the books have got caught up in the slow grinding of the publishing/bookselling machine, which is a tad retro.) That is not to say it does not appeal to me any more. It really does. And one year, I will remember in around June that I want to do this in November, and I will clear the decks a bit. This year, though, aside from being the father of a one-year-old and the husband of a woman who works very hard, and having a few bits and bobs of paid work to do (like edit a book and write a short story and prep for a conference and… so on…) I’m also trying to go to the US briefly to hug everyone at WORD Brooklyn repeatedly and jump up and down and behave like an infant. Although that may have to wait until December, because inevitably the time I was thinking of going is that weird turkey-based holiday they have in the US which always falls around my birthday.

So I never get to NaNoWriMo, somehow…

But occasionally people ask me for thoughts on how to approach it.

I can only tell you what I would do if I were going into it now…

All right, this is me, checking out the basic rules. Heeeeere we go:

  • Write a 50,000-word (or longer!) novel, between November 1 and November 30.
  • Start from scratch. None of your own previously written prose can be included in your NaNoWriMo draft (though outlines, character sketches, and research are all fine, as are citations from other people’s works).
  • Write a novel. We define a novel as a lengthy work of fiction. If you consider the book you’re writing a novel, we consider it a novel too!

    • Oh! Well, that’s a pleasant surprise. I’m allowed to plot in advance. Cool. So here’s my first and most obvious decision – plan a lot.

    Okay, you’re not going to stick to your plan. I never manage to plan rigorously and stay with it when I write. But it’s really good to know what you’re deviating from and why it was there, because when the new track goes wrong you can go back to the plan and say “okay, this was the point, so how do I use that to fix this?” And you can.

    Also, when I say “plan a lot” I mean that you should know your moments. There will be several of these, and they’re less likely to vanish during the writing. You’ve got what Robert McKee would call your “inciting incident”, the thing which kicks it all off. Then you’ve got the first “oh, crap” moment, where the hero’s life changes and he or she crosses from normal life into the new world. Then you’ve got a string of reverses, each of which raises them level of tension (“I’ll call my friend, he’ll know what to do!” “Oh, no, he’s in league with my enemies!” “Wait, I can bring him back to the side of the angels!” “Oh, no! He’s actually the source of the whole evil!”). One big shift, and a moment of total committal, brings you into the showdown where all is revealed and everything is won or lost. Note that while I’m using pretty dynamic language to discuss what’s happening here, this applies to character-driven pieces – where the emotional journey is all and the actual physical action is negligible – just as much as it does to plot-driven stuff. (Incidentally: I would incline to go with plot-driven work in something like NaNoWriMo, because if you skew it slightly your characters will still feel solid and the action will still be earned – see below – whereas if you goof on an emotional level because you need nuance and you don’t have time to refine it, your story will feel wooden. But that’s me: you may be able to bullseye emotion first time out of the box and hold the line. People can.)

    Regarding earning your wow moments…

    If you can nail this, the whole thing will feel good. People reading, even as they point out that Bob dies in chapter two but mysteriously reappears in chapter five with new hair, will be happy. Earning your wows is vital. Basically, let’s say you have a moment where your hero finally pulls a gun on her enemy. That has to matter. It has to be seen to be the result of a long chain of events, and it has to have a significance for which you have prepared your audience. It has to be an achievement, or a reverse, or a moment of sheer horror as we realise she’s actually going to kill the wrong person and go to jail, or kill the wrong person and expose herself to threat from the real villain… We have to see causes, consequences, and above all we have to be straining at the leash either to stop her or to urge her on. Imagine this moment was live theatre: your job is to make it possible that at some moment during the play’s run, someone will actually get up and try to prevent the action on the stage from going ahead. So: eat your greens. In my experience of collaborative narratives, for example, everyone wants to write the final gunfight or the sex scene. No one takes the time to do the flirting, the buying of the gun, the training – and those things are the path which lead to the big moment. Without them, it’s just fireworks battering the reader, and that gets dull fast.

    Next: structure is your friend.

    Again, you don’t have to be tied to a shape; it’s just that knowing how your story needs to play out to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion is hugely helpful. I use the detective story template in my mind, because it’s simple, flexible, and powerful. If you work with it, it absolutely will get you where you need to go, and if you pay attention to its whispers, it will ensure that when you arrive your reader says “Oooooh!”

    It goes like this: CRIME => INVESTIGATION => SOLUTION. Parts 1 and 3 are relatively straightforward. The hard part is 2. Consider an episode of House (because House uses the detective format in a medical setting every week, and rarely gets dull): the middle section is filled with mis-identifications. The witnesses lie, the doctor-detective stumbles and risks disgrace, the sickness-crime progresses to a new low, and lives are at risk. New suspects are found and dismissed, and then… epiphany. It was the one-legged man after all! But he has two legs!

    In an emotional context, this plays out in exactly the same way: Roger has nightmares and cannot sleep. He knows why, but he will not think about it. He takes out his pain on those around him. Sally, meanwhile, tries to coax him to unburden himself. He lies to her over and over about his horrors. Back and forth they go, and abruptly Roger begins to doubt his own theory. Is it something else which troubles him? He confesses all to Sally. She is appalled, and leaves. Alone, he realises the truth about himself, and follows her to make it right. They meet and… what happens happens.

    Or you can dial it right down to something like The Slap.

    Or up all the way to The Gone-Away World, which has a detective story structure deep down inside itself. (Granted, you’d be advised to be a little more restrained; I took thirteen months over the first draft of TGAW and it was 200k words long.)

    Which brings up another thing: keep it simple.

    I am not in general an advocate of simple, in the sense that I allow my stories to breed complication upon complication – although they do generally have a single-sentence heart, as long as you can use a semi-colon. I don’t mean that you have to adopt a realist approach, either, just that this is a limited time gig and limited amount of space. You need to be able to recognise where you’re going and go there. Know the thrust of your story, say it aloud into the bathroom mirror, and let that statement be your guide. Anything which does not advance that goal, put to one side – weave it in later if you need it and can afford it.

    And finally… voice and style.

    I loathe the advice which says “write what you know”. I think it’s completely misleading. People immediately assume they can’t write fantastical stories because they live ordinary lives, or that they have to write about personal problems and worries. No, no, no. Try this instead: “write what you are”. Write from the heart, from your sense of self. If you’re confused about that, write your confusion. Make a metaphor of it. Express it. Write in a style which comes from you, too. If you are naturally terse, write tersely, and push yourself to expand where necessary. Don’t try to adopt a style which doesn’t feel like yourself; your mask will slip as you work. Write, and find the voice, and then when you’ve found it, print it out and stick it up over your computer and look at it any time you’re in doubt. Let one good paragraph tell you how your writing should sound. Then take that voice, that way of thinking, and make it your guide in writing the story. If you find you’re writing in brief, stark sentences, tell your story that way, but don’t be afraid to describe opulence; if you find yourself warming to it, to the idea of lush things, that’s great – your character and your story are about warming up, about desiring richer perception and experience. That’s the root of what happens. If you find yourself sneering a little through your prose, good. Your central character or antagonist feels contempt for opulence. Or you feel contempt for the character, that works, too. Let the writing be your guide, and don’t try to impose a false self on it. At the same time, don’t be afraid to tell it where it needs to go. You can bend the narrative to where it needs to go. That’s the skill of the job. But don’t try to lie. That turns story into words on paper.

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    10

    Changes

    05/10/11

    Two words: Zetetic Elench.

    I’ll come back to those words later. If you know what they mean, by all means ruminate on them. If you don’t, have patience, I’ll explain in due time.

    All right, first up: this is not a rant about Doctor Who, although there’s going to be a fair bit of discussion about the Doctor and the present season, because it’s a current example of something which is perhaps the most difficult thing in long running series TV: change.

    Second, when I say it is the most difficult thing, I mean it. This is fifth degree black belt, Olympic level, hardcore, ninja writing stuff we’re talking about. It is a problem which only happens to shows which are so good they get renewed again and again and again. In other words, you have to be at the top of your game even to get the opportunity to have this problem. Okay? So it’s a problem I sure as hell have never had in real life, and while I am about to grumble about various TV shows – constructively – it should be understood that I do so from a position of supine admiration for the writers on those shows, for the decisions they made and the processes by which they arrived at them, even where I think those choices were ultimately not the best ones. Because I am critiquing, by definition, maybe the top fifty TV writers in the world, and I know that I would probably not make such good choices. I’m a novelist for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is this: I’m much better at it than I was at writing for the screen.

    Third: there will be spoilers. Not just of Doctor Who, but of other things. It is not avoidable. All the same, I will try to minimise them.

    So, with all that said, let’s roll…

    All right. This all started last night, when I watched the penultimate episode of the latest season of Dr Who, and found myself thinking that it was basically depressing. I think of the Doctor as fundamentally happy-go-lucky, because I was raised on the old shows. The new doctor – and he’s been awesome – is actually kinduva headcase. He’s traumatised, he’s a xenocide and a genocide, and he’s a bit scary. Where he used to fib, he now lies. He’s been brought into the world, which is vital – Tom Baker’s Doctor, however much I loved him, was essentially a wandering God, largely an observer who occasionally cheated and put his thumbs on the scales of human life. But the consequence is that he has also acquired some serious baggage. I liked the David Tennant Doctor a lot, but I was a bit startled by quite how many alien civilisations he obliterated. The pattern is familiar in a variety of guises – John Constantine, the Hulk, the Jedi – and goes something like this: an apparently unarmed character espouses peaceful living but has principles on which he won’t compromise. He is called in some way to protect those around him. An enemy appears who has an advantage in numbers and in aggression. The central character warns the enemy to back off – which they don’t, because it’s one dude in a flappy coat versus an army, so why would you? The central character then waits or is busy while the situation deteriorates. The enemy is poised to eat a planet or take someone’s soul. The central character says “I warned you,” or “you leave me no choice,” and steps up a gear. In the case of Constantine, this means that someone gets sent screaming to Hell with their own innards driven through their eyeballs or something equally grotesque. With the Jedi, guardians of peace and justice, it means arms come off. And with the doctor, it means species extinction.

    And then he feels just terrible about it.

    But he allows it to happen again, and again, and again, and again. He’s starting to come across – particularly in the recent episodes – as an addict. He can’t break the habit. He gets a rise out of it. He’s a smoker, and his gasper is massive retributive violence in the name of saving his friends.

    Some of the reasons for this are structural, consequences of earlier decisions in the Doctor’s story. His alone-ness, his sorrow, his regret… those are the consequence of the choices which were made bringing the series back for the Eccleston run. To make him real, the Doctor was made the last of his kind. To give him a sense of depth, he was given pain. He had been forced, by those same inflexible notions of right and wrong, to destroy his own people. But these choices are not impossible to deal with. There are ways for the Doctor to be redeemed and joyful without discounting those old sins. Through cloning or even just reproduction, he could create a new race of Timelords. If that doesn’t appeal, and you happen to have a TARDIS, you can create a new civilisation and drop in on it from time to time to keep it on track. You can share your technology, cautiously, with civilisations you admire. The rule of non-interference is so thoroughly broken at this point you may as well acknowledge it. You can allow the universe to evolve, let your friends become as magical as you are.

    And that’s the rub: the decision not to do that is about the fear of changing the format. It’s not internal, it’s external, an editorial decision. And it has consequences inside the world, because it limits the actions of a limitless man. It restricts him to repeating patterns. The repetition starts to look ugly after a while –  which is why Grissom had to leave CSI, why Ross started to get quite scary and alarming on Friends, and why Buffy could never leave Sunnydale and started to look like a picture of suburban desperation by the end. The Doctor, despite having changed a lot, has to be determined to keep humanity and the universe in general and his companions in particular in a kind of infancy. There’s been some great writing recently about The Girl Who Waited, and how the older Amy is revealed as something of a genius – for which sin she is erased so that young Amy can go back to being, er, a perfume model. It’s an artificial boundary on the Doctor’s actions, and in justifying it narratively the writing team is throwing him into increasingly starkly ghastly situations and getting him through them, and because they have considerable emotional integrity in the character they’re weaving the consequences into him and the combination is starting – despite everything they can do – to drive him nuts. I think the strategy is wrong, because I think the format could remain mostly unchanged if you allowed the Doctor to let things develop in the universe. You’ve just given him some extra vulnerabilities, and some extra allies. You’ve afforded him the chance to be surprised and even technologically overmatched, so that he’s suddenly relying on the things which define him: his ridiculous savoir faire, his charm, and his bold compassion.

    The thing I’ve never seen in any show is the thing I’d most like to see: characters who survive encounters with the uncanny and the alien, and who learn, adapt, and get stronger. It’s something the Doctor seemingly doesn’t approve of at all – ask Harriet Jones. And the thing about that is that she was right. The Who universe is filled with predators. Earth is – partly as a consequence of the Doctor’s presence – permanently under siege. But when she followed Xander Harris’s lead and announced explosively that the planet was tired of being everyone’s buttmonkey, he killed her political career, incidentally depriving himself of the kind of allies who might, just might, allow him the breathing space to negotiate with an alien enemy rather than obliterating it. The message was that Earth didn’t need to grow up and start making its own mistakes or fighting its own battles. It should remain in a state of childish naïvety – an illusory state of grace – because the Doctor preferred it that way. In fact, I think it’s that external barrier again: can’t have Earth reaching towards new technology which might make the Doctor’s last-minute saves less outstanding. I’m not sure it even makes internal sense any more – at one stage, there were Space Spitfires in the RAF in the 40s. Dissolve to the present, and they’ve gone away. It’s not hard to construct a narrative where we lose access to the technology – but every single time? Surely we’d be changed just a little?

    Which brings me to the Zetetic Elench.

    Iain M Banks proposed in Excession a civilisation whose entire way of being was to rush out into the universe and be changed. And that is what should happen to the Doctor’s companions. It is what he should wish for the whole human race and the Universe: not puppies at his heel, not copies of himself but something amazing which might eventually surpass him. Something of which he could be a part. Because he is the Doctor, and he is – should be – too large to keep a planet in a jar because he likes it the way it is.

    And that, I think, is the thing which long-running shows have to find: a way to allow evolution not just of character but of circumstance, of the basic rules of engagement, without losing their touch. And that is scary. But it also why writers do what they do. Because if you can do that, you’ve managed something amazing.

    [more here and here]

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