Steady Progress

My newest novel and WIP is coming along nicely. I have made or exceeded my daily writing word count targets every day since I started the project in early October and this week, tomorrow in fact, I will hit the 40% completed mark.

For this project I have kept my daily target a manageable 1000 words. I know that normally that I can actually hit 1500 to 2000 words per day with only a little extra effort, but two factors led me to decide on a smaller goal.

The first was that this is in a genre I have not written before and when venturing into unexplored territory it’s best to go slowly as you learn the terrain.

The second is that this is coinciding with the busy period at my day job. Right now is the open enrollment for Medicare Advantage plans for the whole population and the dramatically increases my work load bringing with it overtime hours. Last week I worked 12 hours above my scheduled shift. Given that this is going to last through the period when I write most of the novel, I thought it best to keep my goals modest.

The importance of a modest is goal is that it can be met while not being so small as to slow the progress. If a goal is too large, then you will miss it too often and that can emotional effects that dampen one’s ability to sit and do the work. Too small and you’re too tempted to stop early and then the lack of progress becomes an emotional impediment.

If I maintain this level of productivity and if the novel lands about where I am expecting in word count, then the first draft should be complete by mid-February.

The answer for me is an unqualified yes. I know that when an idea for a story, a game, or any other sort of creative endeavor first arrives in my shriveled brain that is a window in which if I do not start working on the concept it will never become fully realized.

It doesn’t matter if I have taken the time to produce detailed notes or outlines the idea itself seems to go stale and lose life the more time passes between its inception and its execution. I have folders on my computer of half-started ideas that I failed to follow through on in time and are now adrift without direction or propulsion.

Curious enough this does not seem to apply to any concept that is executed fully and then set aside. If I write a novel centered on a concept and the set that novel aside, I can come back ten years later, re-read it, and its vibrancy is still there, but if it’s only an outline or a synopsis. Nope, that’s as dead a week-old corpse.

Because of that fact or limitation in my creative process I am plowing ahead on my novel without having a signed contract in my back pocket.

The work is not wasted. No writing ever is, it is all honing the craft, but also even if my editor and I cannot come to terms, and that’s an outcome I doubt we have a great working relationship, there are other houses and other editors so forward I go.

A dissatisfaction with the current progress of Lovecraft Country has me thinking about second act issues. Of course, when I speak of second acts, I am referring to the traditional three act structure that many films and television shows employ even though I myself utilize a five-act structure when building out a novel.

In the three act model the first act is establishment of the characters, the world, and the central conflict of the story. The third act is after all the major revelations and the characters hurtle towards their final conflicts and resolution leaving the second act, which is the same size in term of word or page counts as the other two combines, as a vast middle where advancement and reversal take place as the characters chart the course of the plot. It is not unusual for second acts to become muddled and messy as their purpose doesn’t seem as well defined as acts one or three. This is in part why I like the five-act system instead of one massive poorly defined act there are two with better laid out purposes.

What’s important is that the characters have goal that they have identified and chase that directly immediately impact the story. The second act of Star Wars (A New Hope for you youngsters.) Is the Flacon’s capture, the discovery and rescue of the princess and the escape from the Death Star. At each of the turns we understand exactly what it is the characters need to achieve, the cost of the fail to do that, and the escalation as obtaining the immediate goal brings further problems and troubles.

While things that happen here do affect the third act and the story’s eventual conclusion the characters are not looking off to that distant end but rather dealing with objective that if they do not meet them now there will be terrible consequences.

Keep your second act moving, as the writer keep your eye on the final prize the conclusion, but remember that the characters have to have immediate goals that matter to them now.

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in October when participants commit themselves to the lofty goal of completing 50,000 words on a manuscript between November 1 and November 30. (Couldn’t that have least selected a month with 31 days?) That comes out to an average of 1667 words per day, every day, including Saturday and Sunday.

I attempted this once before, on a lark, and experimenting with an idea that I was going to ‘pants’ all the way through. That did not work.

For reason that can’t be fully detailed here I may be producing a new novel here and unlike my other excursions into novel length projects this one may require speed.

However, my writing process is to write Monday thru Friday reserving my weekends as fun and recharge time. IF I want to commit to meeting NaNoWriMo goals that would raise my average daily word count to 2500.

That’s not undoable.

When things are going well, and I am not lolly-gagging I can maintain a production north of 2000 words per day.

Factors in my favor are that I have an outline broken down into the five acts, I have character notes and descriptions, I have world building notes and cultural details for the sub-cultures involved, so I am well prepared for this book.

Factors against me is that I’m lazy, I like playing my Xbox One, and there are too many movies to watch.

As has been very clear for some time on this blog I am a plotter. I can’t even write a short story unless I know how it ends and for longer form fiction such as feature screenplays and novels I must work from an outline.

Sometimes those outlines are highly detailed, one stre3cthed out an enormous 87 pages but usually they are more along the lines of 20 or so pages and that is exactly where my latest outline landed.

To construct my outline, I first break down my story into acts, usually five these days, with an understanding of where each act ends, the dramatic turn that propels the characters onto a new course for each act change.

Then when I wrote out a prose outline populating it with characters and their motivations I discover deeper level to these acts and while the locations of the act breaks occurs they often change from external events, Character A discovers the body of Character B, to decision points Characts A starts investigating Character C after discovering character B has been murdered. It is always better when the dramatic change at the end of an act is propelled by a character choice rather than a stroke of lightening from the author.

The most recent outline for a proposal going to my editor at Flametree has been a lot of fun to craft and the subject matter is exciting me. Here’s hoping my editor feels the same.

One of the things I hear fairly often from pantsers, writer who compose their text directly without a synopsis or outline guiding their writing, is that creating an outline feels to them like something that drains away surprise and spontaneity from their work.

Fair enough for them but I find that even with my extensive outline and synopsis building the pieces still manage to surprise me with revelation along the way.

My current work in process started with just the barest idea of who got killed, who killed them and why. Okay, that’s the essential elements for a murder mystery but hardly enough for me to fully understand the world or the characters so I moved on to extensive notes about the world.

I created these notes to explain to myself how the ship, which would take generations to reach its destination, worked, how the various groupings of people coalesced into stratified cultures and how all that impact the formation of character and motivation. That itself revealed some subtle changes to the original concept that deepen the ‘reality’ of the world.

Next I produced a bullet pointed act break down of the story as experience by my protagonist. I like working with acts not because the structure is king over all but because understanding how structure emerges from story illuminate what I need for this particular tale.

The curious thing and the discovery is that when I started making the bullet points for Act 1 I had a very simple understanding of the antagonists point of view, a very reductive reason for their actions, but when I reached Act 5 and the protagonists and the antagonists clash in a final revelation of truth not only had I discovered a deeper relationship between the two but the antagonist’s motivations had deepened. It because easier to see how they were the heroes of their own story and discovering this at this very early stage will make the prose outline a richer and better document with its own surprised which will repeat with the novel itself.

Somehow, I always have discoveries inside my thoroughly plotted stories, discoveries that would have eluded me had I tried to ‘pants’ my way through it.

This is not to say pantsing is a wrong approach merely that surprise and discovery is part of every process and you need to find the process that works for you.