Had to do it

I’ve shelved the thing I was working on, Project 2, I call it. As I said earlier I didn’t want to but it wasn’t coming along and it was making me not want to write. Of course if one isn’t writing, one isn’t a writer.

Ultimately Project 2 is the wrong story at the wrong time from the wrong writer. I’m sure I’ll come back to it, it’s a great story I want to tell. But before the excuse train starts….

Fortunately I rediscovered a prior project in the same setting that’s perfect for introductions. The catch, I’m not sure these stories are novel-length. but I think there’s some kind of novella market. I hope.

I’m also going to be doing the (hopefully) final revision on Project 1 at the same time. Authors need to juggle multiple projects, I figure. Might as well start that.

Difficulties

My current project is dragging. It’s based on an idea I’ve had for years, but it’s not coming along. I’ve restarted it once already, abandoning one, well, a little background.

I’ve always written off the cuff. My two manuscripts weren’t planned, but this one used independant POVs that I was writing seperately as an experiment. I figured I’d combine them later but that didn’t work at all. So I started over. I struck one POV in favor of a new one, started another from scratch and heavily tweaked the setting. The main POV had to be adjusted for those tweaks but I can use most of the text from the abortive attempt.

It’s still not going well. Surprised, aren’t you? I’m not sure if the problems I’m having are the adjustments or if I’ve got an underlying story or structural problem. Today I was sorely tempted to throw the whole thing out, but I feel I should stick with it since I’ve already started over once.

One complication is I’ve drifted rather far from my initial inspiration, which might not be a bad thing since said inspiration is a promising but deeply flawed major studio movie. Another problem is I’m working from an outline for the first time since I had such problems coordinating the POVs. Tinkering with the outline feels like editing while writing, a practice I think is horrible craft.

I’m making headway, it just feels flawed. A good bit of my progress is copying and pasting to be sure, so it might all come crashing down when I get past the point in the story I abandoned take one at. Still I believe that junking it before I have a draft could be dangerous in what’s still an early writing career. Gotta just put my head down and plow through it. If most of it disppears in rewrites, so be it. I haven’t had to do that yet but I keep hearing it’s pretty common.

Oof

Project 2 is coming along slowly.  It’s three storylines with multiple POVs each that I’m writing separately to weave together later.  I’ve never tried this before, I hope it works out. I can see that process mightily sucking.

At the end of last month I had about 30,000 words, today I have about 38,000.  8,000 words in 15 days isn’t very good, even if you only count weekdays.  If I write my goal every weekday I can have a decent sized rough draft in, oof, 6 months.  Granted I only have one manuscript to go on, but I’m working with half again the number I think is a good sized manuscript to have room to cut.  I cut the shit out of project 1.  One particular revision I added a lot of extra material that filled out the characters and added depth to the story, I thought I was doing good work until I totaled everything up and was still pretty low in word count.

About word count:  Check out the F/SF book section, go ahead, I’ll wait.
They’re freaking huge.  It seems like every new author is starting with some damned epic series that could double as booster seats.  George RR Martin’s endless delays with A Song of Ice and Fire have really turned me off epics in general (and him in particular, no excuses) but I still think the expectation in F/SF is longer books.  Of course more words doesn’t necessarily equal better words, I wouldn’t put crap in a story just to pad it out (I hope).  But people are buying fewer books and they expect a good value for their ridiculously overpriced paper.  And when ebooks take off, that removes any constraint to restrict word counts.  It seems I just believe that bigger = more likely to be better.

Not that it matters right now.  Word counts are the only estimate of productivity in writing.  You can’t tell on quality until the story’s done.  And I’m just not writing enough.  I’m staying up too late (not writing) and getting out of bed too late in response.  I’m unemployed, for crying out loud, one would think I’d be producing a ton of work.  But no.

38,016 words.  End of the month, I want about 50,000 words on this project.  That actually under my daily goal, meeting it every weekday until then.  Counting today.  This is doable.

I wish this story was coming along a little easier.

Project 2 is coming along slowly.  It’s three storylines with multiple POVs each that I’m writing separately to weave together later.  I’ve never tried this before, I hope it works out. I can see that process mightily sucking.
At the end of last month I had about 30,000 words, today I have about 38,000.  8,000 words in 15 days isn’t very good, even if you only count weekdays.  If I write my goal every weekday I can have a decent sized rough draft in, oof, 6 months.  Granted I only have one manuscript to go on, but I’m working with half again the number I think is a good sized manuscript to have room to cut.  I cut the shit out of project 1.  One particular revision I added a lot of extra material that filled out the characters and added depth to the story, I thought I was doing good work until I totaled everything up and was still pretty low in word count.
About word count:  Check out the F/SF book section, go ahead, I’ll wait.
They’re freaking huge.  It seems like every new author is starting with some damned epic series that could double as booster seats.  George RR Martin’s endless delays with A Song of Ice and Fire have really turned me off epics in general (and him in particular, no excuses) but I still think the expectation in F/SF is longer books.  Of course more words doesn’t necessarily equal better words, I wouldn’t put crap in a story just to pad it out (I hope).  But people are buying fewer books and they expect a good value for their ridiculously overpriced, lamentably cheap paper.  And when ebooks take off, that removes any constraint to restrict word counts.  It seems I just believe that bigger = more likely to be better.
Not that it matters in this case.  Word counts are the only estimate of productivity in writing.  You can’t tell on quality until the story’s done.  And I’m just not writing enough.  I’m staying up too late (not writing) and getting out of bed too late in response.  I’m unemployed, for crying out loud, one would think I’d be producing a ton of work.  But no.
38,016 words.  End of the month, I want about 50,000 words on this project.  That actually under my daily goal, meeting it every weekday until then.  Counting today.  This is doable.  I wish this story was coming along a little easier.

Preventing utopia….

I’ve been working on a setting that has several states formed as a reaction to the development of a future United States.  All of them are to some degree social engineering experiments but there’s one in particular I have some fondness for, a superefficient state with close supervision of residents (and lots of booze!).  I realized this had a good chance of becoming a country of John Strongchins who make no mistakes and are never, ever wrong.  If I wasn’t careful.

But what the heck to do about it?

I had already determined that in-universe the big dick on the block would be someone other than Strongchinistan.  That would help.  The rest was inspired by a line from a book: “Better never means better for everyone.  It always means worse, for some.”   Which if you don’t know is from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.  Of course a superefficient state would pretty much maul anyone without the requisite, well, efficiency.  And I felt better.

Now I just need to figure out what’s wrong with the other ones.

Anyone else had a similar oh shit moment while working on something?

New project!

Something I started working on a while ago but couldn’t really get a handle on.  The plot seemed kind of thin and I couldn’t figure out how to expand it.   In the intervening time I spun out some other ideas I thought would be a throwaway, but I realized I could integrate them into this project which would not only fill out the word count but make the A story stronger.  Right now it’s a scifi half-assed techno-thriller.  It’ll calm down probably, because I’m not strong on the techno nor the thriller.  Tom Clancy I ain’t, especially since I have to make all my shit up.

I’ve worked through all the stuff I had before, not in detail but giving it a once over to integrate what I’ve developed in the setting.  It’s the same one I was exploring with the Wendy stories I’ve probably abandoned (sorry, honey).  That’s 11,635 already and the supporting subplots are another 3,000 or so.  I have a feeling I’ll end up overwriting the, well they’re not really subplots, more like subthreads since I don’t want them to take over the story.

But we’ll see what happens.

Interestingly, these are multiple-POV stories.  I’m writing in a third person limited style so far, which is the same as my manuscript.  In the past I always wrote third person omniscient, it’s interesting to me that I’ve abandoned that form.  We’ll see what happens on rewrites because my “A” thread has two characters I want to be more or less equal.  I guess I could separate them as the story evolves.

We’ll see what happens.

TV

I can’t help but think, could I do better, when I read or watch something.  Most of my writing interest is in novels.  After that I think about movies.  There are similarities, not in the writing as much as the story telling.  They’re both discrete, longform styles.  While novels can be bound into a series they’re not really what I’d call episodic.

Which brings me to what I’ve been thinking about lately, which is television.  I’ve never tried to write television (as an exercise or for markets) , my experience has always been as a viewer.  And it hasn’t always been a good one.  I used to be a huge fan of Grey’s Anatomy (witness the greys category on my main blog), until the quality of the writing went to shit.  I hate to use the phrase, but the Izzie/George/Callie triangle was the moment, I believe, when GA jumped the shark.

Television problem:  they are, in America, at least, are expected to last forever.  This invariably produces horrible storytelling.   Eventually.  Grey’s Anatomy was about (ta da!) Meredith Grey.  When her drama started to resolve other’s melodrama took up the slack, to the detriment of the series.  But even lesser examples eventually fizzle.  It takes something like Law & Order, a program almost fanatical in it’s plot-driven nature, to sustain quality over such a long time.  But very few genres can incorporate the zero character development L&O has.

Part the second

I got into Burn Notice when I watched the first season on Hulu.  I, just yesterday, caught up on the second season via gray market streaming sites (before I continue, wow!) .  As much as I enjoy it, it’s got some serious TV trope problems.  The biggest is it’s the A-Team, minus Mr T, add Bruce Campbell (net gain).  Leverage, on TNT, yeah, same show.  Are TV writers lazy?  Are TV executives scaredycats that demand the same show, just reskinned?

Maybe, but I’m going to focus on something else.  TV, unlike movies, is a (theoretically) casual experience.  Intricate shows like Lost and Heroes are the exception, and they’re probably capitalizing on something akin to miniseries (remember those?) as “event television”.  But even they lose their way, waver off course.  I hear they’re back now, but I’ve never watched either show.  Take the fate of Firefly as an example.  Sure, Fox kinda screwed it, but I don’t think it would have ever caught on (witness Dollhouse’s imminent spiralling doom) because it was too much to swallow.  And this isn’t turning into a “people are stupid” rant, either.

Television is episodic.  Each individual show has to stand on its own, as well as carry any larger arc with it.  Using Firefly as an example (and I LOVE Firefly/Serenity), it calls to its backstory way too much.  Burn Notice pulls this off really well by interspersing the overall arc in with the individual stories.  It helps that Burn Notice is set in sunny Miami, not on a small spaceship.  The point is viewers need to be able to watch something episodic without feeling like they’re missing out.  That goes for smart or stupid people.

Have you ever tried to write something episodic?  With weekly episodes?  Which merges directly into part the third.

You get shitty art from committees.  TV shows are written by a staff of writers.  They HAVE to be.  A weekly TV show, I can’t even imagine the pace, it would kill any one writer, or any three writers.  But, well, you get shitty art from committees.

Therefore, TV is constrained.  Heavily.  Which explains why it’s so reliant on tropes.  Burn Notice has the nagging mother, the lingering ex-girlfriend, both Fiona and Sam are compliant to an astonishing degree.  Does Michael ever thank them?  And this is a good show!  And this is without taking into account corporate incompetence and the bad hack:talent ratio.

That, in long, is why I’m probably wrong when I think I could do better than TV writers.  And why, were I to get into television, it wouldn’t be the weekly grind.

That, unfortunately, leads to another problem.  Overreach.  Miniseries died because they were expensive as all hell.  Premium (channel) series run into the same problem.  Deadwood, Rome, Carnivale were expensive to film and again the stories made the viewer reach for them.  Reach exceeds grasp.  The Sopranos, The Wire. They were shot in normal cities and had easily understood, but still high quality stories.

Speaking of bad writing, this has been rambly as fuck.  More of a diary entry than anything.

Speaking of rambling, where, I wonder, does Battlestar Galactica (new), fit into this?  I admit, I stopped watching early in season one.  The pilot and 33 were incredible, but I lost interest quickly, around the time of the witch hunt episode.  But it’s a complicated “reach” plot and lots of backstory.  And being genre it’s inherently limited.  Can it be shunted into the niche category?  I dunno. I just thought it sucked.

Blegh

I got a shitload of outlining and a good start done on a SF project before Wooga (who’s reading my main project) chastised me firmly about losing focus. I’d been waiting for her feedback on the latest revisions to parts 1 and 2 (with part 1 being fairly extensively revised) and told me I was stalling on part 3.

And she’s correct.

I really don’t want to do this rewrite. But I must.

Fuck.

Oh, bother

I’m going to have to rewrite the third part of the manuscript. Sigh.

I’ve got about half of Wendy actually taking off into space written, too.

Wif a quickness….

My big project was written in phases over the course of several years, at a guess five of them. In that time my writing got better and my style changed somewhat, became looser and maybe a bit meta. The good is that I’ve gotten into his more recent phase and revisions are whipping by, mostly because I’m not doing many. The bad is that I may, someday, have to do a wholesale rewrite of the first part.

The details,  I’m up to 70,608 words, which was 71.436 at the same point in the last draft.  This third phase is the shortest, I have a feeling it’s gonna grow.

Progress Report

58 pages, 37,418 words.  Same point on the last draft I was at 61 pages and 38,119 words.  I guess I’m still doing okay on length.  Been slacking badly, tho.