It Ain't Easy, Even When it Is

Shepherding a novel to publication is like threading a needle. Blind. On a moving train. While you’re being attacked by monkeys with sticks. Good times.

Chuck Wendig, A Terrible Mind, "Why Your Novel Won't Get Published"

A sobering view from someone who doesn't sound like he's that sober. In a good way.

So – what? – you wanted sugar coating? All he's suggesting is you should be realistic, reminding us that writing is a serious business. People who say, "Oh, if this doesn't work out, I'll write novels," make me crazy. (And I know people who say exactly that.) Some people, for some reason, think it's easy. If it were easy, everyone would do it. And god knows an awful lot of people try, only to discover to their dismay that the work of writing a book is just that – work.

Does that mean we're all crazy to even harbor the notion? Maybe, but what's wrong with crazy? Writing a novel requires a set of skills that can be learned, but you can't learn anything if you already think you know it all. Just be honest with yourself, understand and accept the odds, keep learning, and do your best. Because that's really all I can do, right? I can't do better than my best.

But if I work at it, my best can become better.

The FIrst Reaction

As a reporter, I have read more than a fair number of police reports, the daily drama of man at his lowest level. And there's one thing I see over and over that always surprises me.

In describing a shooting, the officer will note that the victim heard shots and started running, then realized he had been shot.

He realized he'd been shot? After running? This often is mentioned, even after the victim was shot in the legs. Sitting here safe at my computer, I always think that would be one of the first things you'd notice. "Hey! I've been shot!"

But no. Apparently not. There's fear, the surge of adrenaline, the fight or flight reflex, and your body takes over to get you out of danger. Only at some later point, maybe seconds, maybe minutes, do you stop and realize. "That really hurts. Well look, I seem to be bleeding from a bullet hole! Son of a gun! I've been shot!"

Although those probably aren't the exact words you'd use.

Just something to keep in mind when writing a scene in which a shooting takes place. The first reaction isn't always "Ouch!"

Detour Takes Me Closer to the Starting Point

Digging through the bowels of my hard drive, I came across the first chapter of the book I haven't quite started.

Let me explain.

This WIP (work in progress) has its roots in something that came to me about a year and a half ago. And at the time, I didn't just file the idea away. I actually started it, then got sidetracked because of our move from the island back to the mainland.

I didn't remember what I had written, and when I found it this week I was pleasantly surprised. There is some really good stuff in those two chapters. And I remember where I was going. But I'm not going there anymore. The story is so different now, what I'm envisioning now, than I'm not sure much of it is even usable. The original story doesn't bear much resemblance to to what I'm now planning. A couple of little things, a sassy computer but not much else.

Once I post this I'll begin plotting the book. Obviously, then, I belong to that group of writers who believe in having a plot in hand when I start the actual writing, as opposed to those who create characters, then plunge them into a situation and watch as they thrash around, writing down what they see. That may seems haphazard to me, but it works for successful writers like Stephen King and Anne Lamott.

I don't have the confidence to just jump in that way. If I'm planning a road trip from, say, from my home here in Louisiana to Seattle, I want to make sure I know where Seattle is, and something about the country between here and there. That doesn't mean I'm a slave to the road map any more than I am to the plot. Because the character-driven writers are correct – if you've created characters who are true to themselves, then they'll jump out and surprise you, they'll resist doing things just because the author wants them to. You either listen or you write a crappy book.

I usually end up revising the plot often, as the story progresses. It takes turns I didn't expect, characters do things I hadn't planned, sometimes characters reveal themselves to be very different people than I'd imagined. When I started Scurvy Dogs! I thought one character was a sort of comical background figure. Two thirds of the way through he shouldered me out of the way and revealed himself to be one of the main villains. And a good thing he did, because it makes the story way more interesting than I had planned.

Just because you're planning to drive from Louisiana to Seattle doesn't mean you're going to take the straightest path. You might end up zig zagging across the map to various scenic detours. You might decide Seattle is completely off the itinerary and end up in Los Angeles or even Fort Lauderdale.

And then, of course, you'll change everything again in the later drafts.

So the plot is a framework to make me feel safe setting out, I guess. But by the time the trip is over, that map will be covered with erasures and ink blots and coffee stains. Because no matter where you think you're going, you really don't know until you get there.

What a ride!

Scribbling Continues as Story Grows

As I scribble ideas in the notebook (and when I say scribbling, I mean scribbling. See photo of my notebook pages.) the story is turning and changing in my hands, becoming more – more layered, more complex, more detailed. Better. Bigger. Stronger. And, I hope, more interesting and entertaining.

It's exciting, no doubt about that. I have had the thrill – a cliched thrill, true, but still a thrill – of sitting straight up in bed, and grabbing my notebook. Sometimes it's just a word or two, but I know what it means when I look back and see "Fern," or "the janitor." Sometimes it's a sentence or two, even a couple of lines of dialogue. And often an admonition – "Be Funny!"

I don't want it to lose the tone and feel that I originally came up with. I want it to be fun, quick, light. I've got a ton of good background material from my research, and now I have to guard against burying the story under too much details, or too many layers, and lose the carefree spirit that I think will drive the book – and then drive the reader through the book.

That's one of things I have to watch for. I don't want to write "too smart." That sounds horribly egotistical, doesn't it? But it's something I've been warned about more than once and by more than one reader.

Serve the story. That's always the number one maxim, isn't it? Whatever you do, whatever you write, whatever choices you make in the story, always be sure that doing it serves the story.

Almost ready to start writing.

Two Important Words – and Four More

Today I live in the heart of Paris. I write full time. Every day I sit at a table and ask myself, what if?

        Daniel Tammet, in the preface to Thinking in Numbers

Those are two great words. Really, they're the writer's stock in trade. Everything we do as writers starts with those two words. What if? And once we get the what if, the next four words are equally important – And then what happens? The rest of it is just so much detail, right?

Tammet is an interesting guy. In his youth he suffered seizures, and was variously described as high-functioning autistic or a person with Asperger's. He is considered one of fewer than a hundred "prodigious savants." He has an extraordinary memory, I think he was the guy who set a record for reciting the digits of pi to more than 29.000 places. He "sees" numbers (each integer between 1 and 10,000 has its own unique color and shape to him.) And unlike most savants, he can describe what he sees, what's going on in his mind, which makes him something like the Rosetta Stone of neurology.

I happen to be reading his collection of essays, Thinking in Numbers, because the character of my new work in progress is such a savant – an 11-year-old who sees math.

I think we've all had the experience once in a great while (too infrequently for me) of mulling over a math problem and suddenly literally seeing the digits of the answer swing into position, like great wheels that fall into place, like your car's odometer when you hit 100,000 miles. For Trammet and for my character, that's how everything is. To them, life IS math. Or not even math, necessarily, as that implies rules and formulas and process. To these guys, numbers are what make up the universe.

So I'm doing research, and that's how I got Trammet's fascinating book. He points out that in some languages, there are different words for numbers depending on what's being counted. He relates asking an Icelander what the word for four was, and the guy rightly replied, "Four what?" Chinese is even worse. Cut a piece of fabric in half and you'd describe it with the word for two flat things like paper. Roll it up and you need the word for two long, snaky cylindrical things. But wrap it up into a ball and you need the work for two round things.

And then there are the Amazon rain forest tribes that lack any word for numbers, or any idea of numbers or counting. Stuff just is.

It's a funny world, but it's the only one we've got.

I'm also rereading Oliver Sacks' fascinating, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Great book. Also a little scary. Sacks is a neurologist who studies cases where things have gone haywire with people's brains, so they suddenly lose the sense of "left," things on the left simply do not exist for them, or aphasia, or develop sudden gaping memory deficits. He's not studying what' the brain is capable of, it's amazing complexity. He's called in when something goes wrong. There's his story of a guy who has no long-term memory, he can only hold a memory for a matter of seconds, so he is constantly, desperately reinventing the world around him to explain to himself where he is,, who he is. 

More often than not, Sacks is able to say what seems to have happened in the patient's brain, but not why, and has to admit there's usually nothing that can be done to correct it. Great book, but frightening.

I've already decided my character is a savant, with a great gift, but also with counterbalancing challenges. Not autistic or even full-blown Asperger's, but he's not good with people, and he'll probably be too literal. This kind of research helps me understand that, a little, and also understand how the world reacts to that.

So as I start pulling the pieces of the story together, I begin creating this character and then I ask, What if ... ?

It's Starting to Bubble Again

It's been a month since I finished Scurvy Dogs! and I've been at loose ends, not sure where I'm going next. Done a lot of reading, done a lot of work for the Source, toyed with some ideas. But I didn't do much that was really concrete. It was almost as if I was charging the batteries or something.

But I could feel it growing the last couple of days, and yesterday I pulled out my notebook and started jotting things down. And I'm getting excited. This is going to be a good one.

It's not a pirate story. It's actually a story about a character who jumped into my head, almost full blown, more than a year and a half ago. I wrote about it at the time, and thought then I'd be getting to work on it very soon.

"Ha!" said life. Wrote Scurvy Dogs! instead, and I'm glad I did because it's a damn good book and I learned a lot in the process.

I thought I was going in a different direction, but the more I mulled the last few weeks, the more I realized this is the story I want to tell next. It'll present some new challenges, but I think it'll be fun.

For one thing, it'll be for a slightly younger audience than I've been writing for. I think it'll appeal to the kids who loved the Captain Underpants books and have grown a little, are ready for something a bit more. They're not quite old enough for the Alex Rider books. It's roughly the same audience the fans of Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kids books, although my story is nothing like those. Nothing.

The title character for this – and yes, I can definitely see this as a series – is an 11-year-old boy, small for his age, with curly blonde hair, glasses, and a cocky grin that's almost a permanent fixture on his face. He's beyond smart, he's a genius with an intuitive sense of math, but no people skills at all. The fact that he's been promoted into high school, where he's smarter than any of the teachers, doesn't help. He's got two friends, a high school girl who has her own personality issues, and a boy who's been his friend since kindergarten. The friend doesn't have much in common, but he's fiercely loyal, and takes pride in the fact that he's the main character's touchstone with "normal."

Also, it'll be a story with LOT'S of room for killing a dragon in every chapter. And it has some elements I've never tried to work with before, so that's cool.

I know the main character's name – it's the title of the book. Don't know the two friends' names yet. I imagine they'll tell me soon and then I can get to work.

And the story, the adventure is ... Well, I have only a general idea. I've got two or three more days of jotting notes and ideas in the notebook. By the end of the week I will take the notes and start typing them in and organizing them, and will probably begin writing a week or so after that, after I have a general, preliminary idea of the plot.

It's starting to bubble and I'm getting excited about it.

In the meantime – As I mentioned, it's been a month since I finished Scurvy Dogs! Haven't heard from Eddie the Agent yet, other than to acknowledge he's got it. It's nervous time on that front. I know I'm not his only client. I know I'm far – far – from his most important client. Without dropping names, this agency represents some very successful authors, names you know, authors of books you've probably read. So until I can prove I'm one of those guys, I have to take the time he's got left. Because so far I haven't earned a dime for him.

But still, you have these dreams. The one where you send it off by email, the agent gets it and happens to be between meetings or something, with nothing better to do, so he reads the first page or two of your book. He's hooked. He reads more. He cancels his afternoon meeting. He calls you raving, says he knows just who to send this to, with no changes. He calls the next day to tell you that between the book, the sequels and the movie rights, you're rich.

Nice dream. The thing about dreams is, they're great, a lot of fun, and they could come true. But don't waste a lot of time counting on them. Get back to work. That's something concrete.

You either trust your agent or you don't. I do. He's taking care of business, and when it's my turn, I'll be ready. And I'll having something exciting to add to his list.

Three Writers with Four Thoughts on Reading

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
      – Stephen King

(This next one may be my favorite quotation on the subject.)

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

      – Mark Twain 

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”       – Stephen King

There are worse crimes than burning books. One is not reading them.

      – Ray Bradbury