Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Last week I set aside my first draft notebooks and fired up my writing computer for the first time in two months, kicking off the first chapter of a project that’s living in my head as Untitled Space-Bro! Space-Marine Novel for about two years now.

I’ll be honest: this surprised me.

I was pretty sure I’d given my heart to notebooks, promised myself to them for the foreseeable future. There was something innately pleasurable about the process of opening up a blank page and scribbling in it with pen. I adored the portability of the notebooks, the fact that I could head off and write while tramping around the streets of Brisbane.

Instead, I’m sitting them aside. Because I am fickle and heartless.

And because a few things changed my mind.

ONE: I CRUNCHED SOME DATA

I often get irritated when writers use the word experiment to describe their approach to an aspect of the craft/business of writing. Too often it’s used to imply I just want to try this thing without putting too much thought into it, rather than I’ve got a hypothesis based on existing data that I’d like to test in a somewhat rigorous manner.

I went into the notebook experiment with a hypothesis I intended to test, based on experiences to that point: that I would probably end up writing more, using notebooks, than I would with a computer.

The first month was good.

The second month, leading into GenreCon…well, when I actually sat down and crunched the numbers, I was wrong. I am about as productive in a notebook as I am on a computer, all things considered, but I’m not noticeably faster.  When I factor in redrafting time I may even be a little slower, since the drafts that I produce on the computer tend to be a little cleaner and don’t require as much rewriting as the novel draft will.

Here’s the thing: metrics that do not help you make decisions aren’t worth tracking. If you’re not looking at the data and thinking, well, how does this inform my next step, then why bother tracking the information at all?

And I’ll be honest – right now, the idea of being even a smidgen faster appeals to me. After a few years of fighting against my own body just to get stuff done, I feel a powerful need to catch up. So many stories to write, so little time to get them done, and I feel like I’ve lost a few years.

It’s not rational at all, but it’s there.

In another time, another place, that might be a lesser concern. I would look at the quantitative data and weight it against the qualitative information and think, yes, I can deal with being a little bit slower for a smidgen more joy in the process.

TWO: THE NECESSITY OF THE PEW-PEW-PEW

My last project everything I don’t usually do in fiction: third person; big, sprawly story; lots of story elements that were way outside my comfort zone. Switching to the notebooks freed me from the old habits and kept me from getting bogged down when things got tricky.

This project…not so much.

In fact, it’s right in my comfort zone and, bizarrely, more planned out than anything I’ve ever written in the past. Every time I sat down to write the notebooks would irritate me because I wanted to be focused on doing different things with voice or pace or subtext and far less on getting the plot right or figuring out the structure of the scene. That shift in focus made it far harder to trick myself into sitting down and working on the story.

The moment I put the story on a screen, that changed. All systems were go. All the characters started talking and all the guns started going pew-pew-pew.

This story needs the pew-pew-pew. The pew-pew-pew makes the screaming and dying at the end worthwhile.

The notebooks were getting in my way.

And I do not believe in getting in my own way, when it comes to getting shit done.

THREE: HOLY SHIT, MAN. MY POOR, NEGLECTED EMAIL 

You know what’s great about notebooks? They’re not connected to WiFi. You can’t check Facebook. You sure as hell can’t update Twitter or check or your email or search Wikipedia for answers to a research query. Your choices are literally forward momentum or staring at a blank page.

You know what sucks about notebooks? Sometimes you need to do that other shit.

The creative side of the writing is about five-sixths of the job, but the rest involves a certain measure of treating your business like a business and being a goddamn professional. Responding to email in a timely manner is part of that, especially when you’re working on collaborate projects or working with an editor/publisher.

This is…not something I have managed well in recent months. In fact, I got really good at ignoring my email when I wasn’t logging into a computer into my computer every day, and I am not a man who needs to make ignoring my email easier.

THE UPSIDE OF THE EXPERIMENT

None of the above tells me I shouldn’t write in notebooks – it taught me the value of them as a tool and how it should be deployed.

If I look at my three-moth plan and noticed a whole lot of travel coming up, I’ll be kicking off a new project in a notebook right-quick so I don’t lose momentum while I’m on the road.

If I find myself stuck in a project that wasn’t moving forward, I’ll be busting out the notebook and forcing some forward momentum via the magic of being unable to erase things.

I’ll certainly be planning on at least one project in 2016 that will be entirely handwritten, coinciding with the busiest periods at the day job.

If I find myself dropping under a certain word count for several weeks in a row, I’ll almost certainly be stepping away from the keyboard for a stretch.

If my priorities shift – an unlikely turn of events, given the mortgage hanging over my head like a Sword of Damocles – you can bet your ass I’d be hefting the keyboard into a deep, dark hole and scribbling it up like a mother-fucker.

Until then: new tool in the toolbox, clearer vision of how to use it. Personally, I call that a win.

INCREDIBLE THING 1: ANGELA SLATTER WON A MOTHER-FUCKING WORLD FANTASY AWARD

Technically not incredible, by the strictest of definitions, as anyone who is surprised by Angela Slatter winning major awards hasn’t been paying attention for the last few years.

But she’s also one of the hardest working writers I know, hustles like a champion, and writes brilliant books. One of them, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, just took home the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.

I am, officially, as disappointed as it is possible to be that I wasn’t able to make it to World Fantasy this year. It’s a weird thing when friends get news this good and you’re not able to immediate communicate the feeling of holy fuck, you’re awesome, congratulations.

INCREDIBLE THING 2: DAVID WITTEVEEN’S GENRECON RECAP

I know, I know, I said I was done with GenreCon posts. But David Witteveen put together the STORIFY OF DOOM tracking his tweets over the GenreCon weekend and it is brilliant. He’s got great sound-bytes and take-away moments from every panel he attended, along with a series of photographs from across the weekend.

Well worth a read, if you’re interested in seeing what GenreCon’s all about.

And David is well worth following, if you’re a newer writer interested in seeing what good post-con follow-up looks like when you’re developing a network. ‘Cause, from what I’ve seen, he’s been absolutely killing it.

So I got caught up in an interesting debate on twitter on the other night, largely revolving around the question of whether or not 50K actually constituted a novel-length work and the difference between answering yes to that question, answering yes, but it may be extraordinarily hard to sell, depending on your genre, and answering no, it’s a goddamn novella.

If that sounds like a waste of time…yes.

If it sounds like something you have passionate feelings about…yes, it’s that too. Writers get passionate about wordcounts. We get passionate about what they mean and where the arbitrary lines between form may be, and occasionally we spew some truly stupid shit in the name of trying to unravel its mystery.

It gets even weirder when you start considering the importance of genre on the discussion.

For example, I used to think short stories were around 3,000 words long, largely because that was usually the upper word-count on any short stories we submitted during my writing degree. The one time we actually wrote longer than that, in my undergraduate course, was in a subject devoted to the novella, where we were permitted to break out an 8,000 word story.

That sound you hear? It’s the vast majority of Sci Fi authors laughing hysterically at those word-counts.

SF is a genre where the short story is still relatively well-respected and, compared to many genres, well-paid. Our awards have neatly codified word-lengths that make things obvious – short stories don’t end until 7,500 words, novelettes fill the space between 7,500 words and 17,500, and novellas cover the space until you hit 40,000 words.

It’s all neat and tidy, on the surface, until you consider that the majority of the novels we pick up as SF readers usually kick on until they hit 80,000 to 100,000 words and the short-novels of the pulp eras can feel slight to someone used to modern story lengths. Professionally speaking, selling a shorter work to a big six publisher can be tricky, which is why the internet is full of cranky writers looking askance at NaNoWriMo participants chasing 50k with such dedication.

Personally, I wish they’d stop.

For one, it’s a pretty blinkered world view – there are plenty of books that still get published at the 50k word length. My understanding, from talking to peeps on the romance side of things, is that there is still a good market for the short romance novel. It can feel like a pretty solid length in YA and middle-grade fiction. It’s perfect for anyone trying to capture an old-school pulp feel in their work.There is all manner of non-fiction options that work at that length.

There’s a surprising number of contemporary crime and literary books in my collection that would hover around the 60,000 word mark.

Limiting myself to books within arm-reach of my couch, where I’m writing this post, I’ve pulled down The Great Gatsby, James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, Elizabeth Bear’s Book of Iron, Christa Faust’s Hoodtown, and one of James Sallis’ Lew Griffin books whose title is partially obscured by a paperweight and difficult to make out. I’m not doing an exact word-count, but they’re all books that feel like books and exist on the shorter side of word-count.

One book in reach – Matthew Reilly’s Hell Island – is probably considerably shorter, and I expect I could pack that list out considerably by grabbing some of the omnibus editions of books by folks like Jack Vance or Philip K Dick.

One of the things that got interesting about studying the novella at uni was the various essays we read attempting to define the form. Everyone basically fell back onto the same excuse: I don’t know what separates a novella from a novel, but I know it when I see it it and I know it’s slightly different.

This was usually from people with passionate beliefs about the novella. People who read them and enjoyed them and sought them out. Hardcore novella-readers whose definition is I’ll know it when I see it. 

Word count is an absurdly arbitrary means of distinguishing between a novella and a novel. It will be at the mercy of contemporary tastes and the history of a genre and how well-read a particular reader is inside it. For many folks – people who aren’t passionate readers interested in the minutia – the novella and novelette lengths may as well cease to exist. Short works are short-stories, longer works are novels.

Some people will bypass a definition of novel altogether and just go with this: is it a book?

the rise of the 100k novel is still relatively recent, when you consider that it began as pulp paperbacks began to die off between the fifties and the eighties, and those thirty or forty years are a drop in the ocean compared to the four hundred years, give or take, that the form has been around.

We won’t even begin to talk about the fact that a major disruption in the way books are sold and distributed has already started to challenge the primacy of the 100k book in all manner of interesting ways.

So here’s how you solve the conundrum of whether your 50k is a book.

You write it. You hit fifty thousand words. You ask yourself: “is this done yet?”

If the answer is yes, you finish up. You figure out what’s next.

If the answer is no, you keep writing until you hit the end.

Either way, you go back and fix things up, make it the best book you can posssibly make it, ’cause if you’ve done NaNoWriMo with the intention of kicking off a writing career, you may as well try to sell that bad-boy regardless of the market’s preference for 50k books.

You may not sell it to Penguin/Random House or any of the other big six, but there are options.

So many fucking options.

And you figure them out after you finish the book.