Some Insights from Writing a Novel’s Worth of Hypno-Smut

(Unedited stream of consciousness text wall ahead with only an incidental relationship to the story, sorry!)

I was doing some Googling recently and learned that the typical length of a novel falls in the range of 80,000 ~ 100,000 words. Obviously, this is a highly variable number informed by an infinitely long list of factors, but I liked the tidiness of these figures, and, more importantly, they happened to roughly align with the amount of words I’ve written and posted on this site.

The fact that I’ve written enough words to fill a long~ish novel with a focus on a niche fetish centred on a cartoon is something about which I have… mixed feelings, but putting that aside, it seemed like a fun enough opportunity to discuss some of the things that I’ve learned up until this point. When I started writing Business as Usual I was upfront about the fact that it was the first thing I had ever written longform (excluding essays, reports, analysis, etc.), and was using it as something of a learning experience, so I thought it might be neat to point out some of the things I’ve actually learned while writing these last couple years.

1) Absolutely Everything Takes Longer Than I Thought It Would

This one is pretty self explanatory. I am never not surprised at how long it takes to write anything. I really am surprised how much longer it takes to write something that in theory comes from the top of one’s head as compared to something informed by research or analysis. Much of this likely comes from my not even remotely economical writing style, but even still it amazes me how much longer everything seems to take. Events seem to flow so much more naturally in my head than when they’re written down. Suddenly needing to describe things, write sentences that come across as at least halfway decent, bridging the gap between one event and another, etc. it all takes time, wayyyyyy more time than I expect, even if I’m already expecting it to take a while, and that’s even assuming I manage to accomplish those goals at all! When I look back on all the ambitions I had and how I thought I could hammer them all out as quickly as I did, even looking back on notes from how I thought it would progress, it really is just embarrassing how far off the mark I was. It would’ve been more realistic to aspire to eat all the components of a Ford F150.

2) Writing Something Down Changes Everything!

Relating to the previous point, when a story is in my head, everything just works. Everybody does what they’re supposed to do, it all makes sense, events flow naturally, and how everything is going to ‘look’ seems so obvious and elegantly simple to describe it feels like it could be done in the span of a minute. Then when I start writing stuff down the wheels fly off and kill somebody. Does this make sense here? Is this contradicted by that? The moment I write something down I become aware of all the little contortions that occur in my mind to make something fit. Suddenly consistent logic is a factor and it ruins everything! This is one of those “the pros make it look easy” things. When it’s done poorly, when things change radically from one scene to the next in the way that they do in something like say Family Guy or modern Simpsons (I haven’t read any truly awful novels in a while… y’know, besides my own… so forgive me for not having a literary reference here) it seems so obvious that it’s being done poorly, but I’m coming to appreciate now how easy it is to get blinders on and end up following your own weird little train of logic that doesn’t necessarily translate to an external observer, or how easy it is to stretch characters and behaviours to meet the needs of a given plot point or scene (doubly so when you’re kinda’ mandated to make them do something sexy every chapter, not that that’s an excuse but I’m using it as one anyway). It blows my fucking mind that a book like The Stand or Under the Dome manages to do this with dozens of characters and still feel largely natural.

3) Naming Things is Hard!

I really don’t know how some people manage to do this. Naming anything feels like such a hassle and it never seems to come out right. Even those lame pun names of cities and towns are a lot more difficult to pull from thin air than I would have expected. I don’t have any insight to offer here, it’s just something I haven’t figured out and thought I would mention.

4) Planning is Important! (For Me)

There are some people who can improvise stories in ways that appear totally effortless. I am not one of those people. There’s a thing I tend to observe when I read a shonen manga, which is that there is almost always a point where it becomes obvious it’s being written week to week rather than following a well thought out plan. The characters get stupider, the power scaling flies out the window, weird plot decisions are made which undermine the integrity of the series up until that point or cripple it going forward. It’s weird how blatantly obvious it seems as a reader when this is happening in front of you. Of course making it piss easy to raise people from the dead will remove all the drama from a show centred on violence! Why is this one character so much better at everything than everyone else? Why are we changing the well trodden and established rules of the story in ways that are so clear that anyone paying half attention will notice and take issue with it? In my experience the answer to this is often just that when you can only move forward, when you commit to something well before your certain of its value, and get locked in, making these sorts of concessions are often the only feasible way out, especially if your trying to meet a deadline, self imposed or otherwise. I’d imagine that’s how you avoid things like forgetting an entire damn chapter in the middle of a story, though even now I still have only very questionable ideas of how to resolve things, and even in Compliance is Sorcery, which was set out with a clearer and more concise vision I’m still finding myself going ‘oh crap, sure wish I had thought of/remembered to include X back before!’

5) Stretching Things Out Across Long Periods of Time Makes for Odd Distortions

This is of a kind with the previous point. Keeping a consistent tone is harder than I would’ve thought (that seems to be the theme of this rambling mess), especially when you’re writing something across a period of months and in isolated chunks rather than as part of a cohesive whole. Ditto the prose in a given chapter, it’s funny looking back (when I can bare to) at previous chapters and being able to guess what I was reading when I was writing a particular part as compared to others. I wonder if this is the kind of thing that is much less likely to occur when you write something all in one go, or at least in a much shorter time frame. I’d like to think that the truly off the wall shifts have been mostly left behind, but I could be wrong, maybe I’m just more numb to them now?

6) It’s REALLY Easy to Get Locked Into a Particular Plot Point or Thought Process

Something I find myself doing quite a bit is coming up with an idea, often times in the spur of the moment, and then finding that I basically married to it forever, even if I haven’t written it down. Every subsequent idea feels like it’s informed by this one random thought that may or may not even be good, and it becomes a herculean task to start from scratch, even if you haven’t actually committed any resources. When this happens I find it becomes a fucking gigantic imposition. In my first of two failed attempts to draft and deliver stories in a week (two so far, anyway) I actually managed to get something coherent done and ready to publish, save for one minor character interaction that I thought might be neat, added in, and then couldn’t get rid of. There must be a million ways to get around it or just scrub it, but instead it just sits there, and a perfectly functional, if somewhat weird, story is just on the bench while I try to sort through this one incredibly stupid mental block that I suspect is entirely unnecessary. Such an odd habit.

7) There’s Way More Positivity Than I Expected (Which is Both Good and Bad!)

People have been overwhelmingly positive, well beyond what I feel is warranted. The comment section of my stories is bizarre in how nice and civil everyone seems to be. I’m pretty lucky in that regard. What I will say, is that the counter to people being positive is that I genuinely want to hear from people who come away with a negative impression of my writing or my stories or who outright hate them. The last chapter of Business as Usual got 3 dislikes, WHY? I really want to know! I suspect that the longer a story goes on, the more skewed it will be to the positive end, since committing to hating something for an extended period of time is a pretty unrewarding endeavor (I should know, because I’m still occasionally subjecting myself to manga and tv shows long after I’ve lost patience with them, I don’t know why I don’t do this with books though) and if you’re still reading odds are it’s because you enjoy it on some level, which is worrisome because as much as I value the positive reception (AND I REALLY DO!) I also want to know what people who straight up hate it think (preferably specifics rather than just ‘because it’s shit’, though if it is just because it’s shit that’s fine too, just not all that helpful). Like, if you’re disliking something 7 chapters deep, what has changed? It’s in my nature to focus on the negative, and It’s not as if it’s a binary, there are plenty of people who point out quibbles and flaws but still seem to come away positively and I really appreciate those who do, but I can only really think of one comment that was basically ‘hey, you suck at this’ and I kinda’ wish there were a few more (this really feels like one of those careful what you wish for statements, but we’ll see). Maybe a curiouscat or something so it’s easier to be negative without the stigma, I dunno…

ANYWAY that’s about it. I’ve learned a sum total of 7 things and most of them are probably things I should’ve known going in, but here we are.