The Inefficient Method of Novel Writing (Part 2) · 3:06am Aug 18th, 2016
...A week and a half late, because you can't say I don't practice what I preach.
I have a laptop and am back in business! I've got part two of my writing method done. Here's Part 1, if you missed it.
As a reminder, this is the Inefficient Method, for those who have decades to spare. There are more efficient ways to write, mostly by not doing these things, but if you just want to end up with a book this method will probably work, eventually. Last week we covered Not Writing, the somewhat related Writer's Playtime, and writing "Good Parts First." So at least we got to some actual writing last week!
...Now it's time to throw it all away and start over.
Step 4: Changing your mind.
Any author, efficient or inefficient, can change their mind. Stories change in the writing and editing, and there are plenty of novels that were totally reconceptualized or rewritten before they became what you see on a shelf.
But inefficient writers are probably more prone to mind changing, and often on a larger scale, for a few reasons. Taking a long time to finish something is going to give you a lot of time to think and reconsider. Spending a lot of writer playtime exacerbates that, giving you new information to work with, letting you look at the book from different perspectives, and letting you hone in on exactly what you like about it. And writing "good parts first" avoids some of the inertia you can feel when you've got 20,000 words behind you of stuff you didn't want to write in the first place.
So as an inefficient writer, you're probably going to change your mind about the plot, about the perspective, about the ending, about the genre...
Do it. Change your mind. Whatever you're changing it to is probably more thought out, more interesting, more creative, and more fun for you to write. Sure, you might have to scrap everything, but if you've been writing good parts first, at least you had fun and you can chalk that first draft up to writer playtime.
When changing your mind, or looking for a new direction, or deciding whether to go through with it or not, an important thing to keep in mind is: What the hell are you writing?
... Seriously, sometimes you're going to realize you don't know.
Often multiple pieces of a story come to you as a part of some other aspect, or even as part of the core idea you had. As a part of those larger contexts, these things seem like pure gold, and sometimes they are! But sometimes when it comes to putting that piece in place, you realize that it's not something you can do. Maybe it's a character or setting that's going to require way more research into a subject than you ever wanted to do. Maybe it's a relationship that was supposed to be platonic, but is clearly not platonic, and your story has no romantic subplot as written. Maybe you were trying to subvert genre conventions that you walked directly into, or you walked into a different genre that you have no actual interest in.
What's important to remember, as an inefficient writer, is that "works" doesn't mean "contains all the correct pieces and would look really neat if correctly assembled." In this context, "works" means "contains all the correct pieces and would be interesting/fun to assemble."
Your sci-fi story might have come complete with a character who’s an astrophysicist, while your science education comes from sort of remembering some episodes of Bill Nye the Science Guy. Sure, you could try to learn enough fake it, but do you want to? Do you really need the astrophysicist? What happens if you kick him out?
It can be hard to do that when your whole story idea was “This military captain teams up with an astrophysicist to save a solar system.” But as I said before: do it anyway. Don’t lock yourself into a character or setting that you don’t feel confident writing, any more than you would lock yourself into a broken story.
But. One very important thing that needs to be said here: Do not throw things away. Do not write over them. Put them aside, because someday you're going to be thinking "hey, I wrote that really great description of a turkey dinner. I could use that here!" And if you didn't save it, you will be tempted to stop work on your story in order to invent time travel so you can go back and fill all of past-you's shoes with cranberry sauce.
Personal Experience: My novel actually started out as a slightly tongue in cheek traditional fantasy-- think The Princess Bride. As I played with it and wrote some it got more serious, until I looked up and found I was writing epic fantasy. Then I realized that many problems I had writing it were coming from the fact that I don’t read epic fantasy, and I had no idea what I was doing. In fact, my real interests tend towards fantasy set in the 19th or 20th century, so I looked at my novel and thought: what would it take to change it to that?
The answer turned out to be “a lot.” But it was worth it.
And if you recall in the last post I said that one of the “good parts” I wrote first ended up in the final book? Yes, that scene was originally traditional fantasy, and pretty much all that changed in that scene were the weapons involved.
Of course, no matter how much you focus on the good parts, and how much you change your mind to wiggle around it, if you want to finish a novel eventually you get to...
Step 5: Writing things you don't want to write
Okay, there are some days when writing in general is like pulling teeth, and for Inefficient writers, those are days when it might be time for some Not Writing or Writer’s Playtime. But eventually, hopefully, you’ll come back around and want to write something.
But there are some scenes you’re never going to want to write. Efficient writers just write them, they don’t have time to avoid writing something because it’s boring or hard, or else they’re going to slide into being Inefficient writers. But if you’re already an Inefficient writer, these scenes can hold you up for days or weeks or years.
In my experience, there are two categories of things you don’t want to write:
1) Things that are boring or awkward: This includes introductions or exposition and scenes intended to portray some subtle thing or a simple action that’s really important to the plot. These are scenes that should be simple, but when you sit down to write them literally anything else seems more interesting than the words you’re trying to put on the computer screen.
2) Scenes that make you squeamish: Depending on who you are, these might include scenes that are emotionally raw, gorey, sexual, or romantic. You know the scene will be interesting, it’s supposed to be powerful, but the headspace you need to channel that is not a place you want to spend time.
A lot of the tricks for getting them written will work for either one, but some work better for one category than the other.
So what are those tricks?
First, this is a place where “good parts first” can come in handy, because these are the “bad parts” that “good parts first” is opposed to. So hopefully they make up a small portion of your story, and if you have enough of the good parts written you can tell yourself that you just need to finish these last few pieces and you’ll be done, which is a great motivator.
The next is kind of obvious, and easier said than done, but see if you can change them into something you want to write. This especially goes for scenes that are boring or awkward: can you accomplish the same things while the characters… do something? If the entire scene is just to show that the main character stopped by the apartment and left the key that’s going to go missing, can he be having a fight on his cellphone while he does it? Can he be thinking humorous observations about the apartment? If you can come up with something, not only will you want to write it but your readers will thank you.
Of course, changing it gets kind of tricky when you’re talking about scenes you’re squeamish about. Usually those are pretty damn important, and already interesting, and often serious. It is worth considering if there are any “editing” tricks, in the film sense, that you can use: fading to black (or having the POV character pass out); letting the POV character disassociate and staying deep in their POV while they experience the events at a distance; cutting back and forth between scenes of similar tone and tension, allowing you to skip parts you find particularly bad. But there’s only so much you can avoid writing if you want the scene to retain the power you planned for it to have.
Another trick is that if you can’t change the scene itself, you can change how you’re thinking about it. Look at a boring or awkward scene without much action as a way to use description to suggest emotional tone or character personality. Outline an emotionally difficult scene from the point of view of the antagonist, even if you’re going to write it from the POV of the protagonist. Switch from considering a scene emotionally to considering it strictly in terms of the actions involved, or vice versa. Whatever lets you get the scene on paper, somehow.
Finally, when the scene is as easy to write as you can make it and you’re still stuck, prepare for battle. Clear a night, or a weekend, when you are going to write this scene. Pre-select a playlist and get yourself in the right mindset. Go to the bathroom and get yourself a drink before you sit down. Turn off the internet if you have to. Remove every distraction you need to, and then start typing.
It will suck. Treat it like a job or a duty. Take lots of short breaks, no more than five minutes. Basically, not enough time to start doing something else. Don’t stop to read what you’ve written, unless you’re starting to feel okay about it.
Then, when you finish, celebrate. You deserve it.
Personal Experience: There was one scene I had to write that I was squeamish about, to the point where it was painful to think about (even though there was nothing physically happening to any character in it.) I struggled for months and avoided this scene, until I finally got the idea of thinking about it from the antagonist's perspective. That changed everything-- I put on some good villain music, got myself all set up, and set about ruining a hero’s day. It was much more fun to write it in that mindset, even if I was still writing the protagonist's POV.
So, if you continue these steps, there’s a chance that however Inefficient you are you will someday end up with a book. (Or not, depending on how much time you spend Not Writing, but you’ll have fun.)
There’s one last step here: Making people read your book. I can’t talk much about that because I’m still working it out. I’ve done things towards that end, like placing my book with a small press publisher, and I have ideas as to how to get the word out, but I don’t know how that worked,. I have some back-up plans for if it didn’t work, but it’ll be even longer before I know if those worked.
But the things I talked about here, as sloppy and meandering and, well, inefficient as they might be, did work for me, eventually. They got a book written, and if that’s your goal, you could do worse.
Since this is (technically) a Monday Blog Post, a big thank you to: bats, diremane, First_Down, sopchoppy, Bradel, stormgnome, jlm123hi, Ultiville, Singularity Dream, JetstreamGW, Noble Thought, horizon, Sharp Spark, Applejinx, Mermerus, Super Trampoline, Quill Scratch, Peregrine Caged, blagdaross, Scramblers and Shadows, BlazzingInferno, Merc the Jerk, LegionPothIX, and Themaskedferret.
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My own experiences at novel writing seem to be a fusion between the Inefficient Method and the Efficient Method. As a result, it's gone with the speed of Inefficient, but with the fun goof-off time of Efficient.
This maybe wasn't the best plan.
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From what I've seen, your problem is that you want to be efficient, but you're actually inefficient. So you end up trying to force yourself into efficiency and snapping back into Not Writing, which is the very heart and soul of inefficiency.
I think what you need to do is schedule yourself more creativity-related playtime and allow yourself to treat it as being productive. Because otherwise you're going to end up on youtube. (I also think you'd be better off writing out of order, but I know you can't do that.)
I know a thing or two about forced cooperation.I read through both of your blogs, and I must say that this is pretty enlightening stuff. I've been struggling with writing for some time now, and although some of these were things that I had considered—daydreaming, charting and brianstoming being among them—others among them—playing around, writing unrelated things about my characters and settings—were things I'd not. The racehorse analogy actually applied to some writing that I had done earlier, and I had figured that due to a more reasonable character motivation, it wouldn't fit, so it's going.
I think everything here is useful, and it's nice that it comes from experience. Thank you for sharing this with us.
I find this particularly wise.
That. All of that.
I've found myself at both ends of that stick. Either deleting a segment and realising I could have used that, or writing something new and realising this segment I wrote x-many months ago would fit perfectly in here.
Step 5 sums up why I rarely write blog posts
AHH so much to comment on here
YES.
It's my firm belief that 90% of all problems, obstacles, and general sources of dismay over a story stem from how you're approaching your material, how you're thinking about it. Good writing comes from good thinking, or put another way, interesting writing from interesting thoughts. As a beloved college writing professor of mine put it, facts can't think for you, you must think about the facts. This applies to the fictional facts of stories. How you think about them will affect everything, from prose to character to setting to plot.
This is a great example of learning how to think dynamically about your scenes and characters.
From personal experience I can say: I absolutely agree. The longer you sit on the egg, the more it will be a real bird when it hatches.
This of course ignoring the rare yet common times when a story roles off your tongue so fast and complete and easy you can scarcely believe you wrote it. But I think these moments are the result of strong flashes of inspiration stemming from matured ideas, gestating unawares in the back of your mind.
This is my largest insecurity as a writer: not enough general, real world knowledge, let alone specific. It's the difference between saying "cover" and "duvet," or "wine" and "cabernet sauvignon".
P.S.
I've been enjoying the promo stories so far!
I know this is a bit of an unanswerable question, but which is your favorite? Or perhaps, which do you care for the most, or I guess stressed the most over.