Infernal Circuit

The last time I tried this kind of public writing diary, I was working around a couple of restrictions. These included a day-job that limited my writing time, undiagnosed sleep apnea that was having an adverse affect on my mental and physical health, and the kind of split focus that comes from carrying a lot of projects and bad work habits.

This time around I’m in a very different place: I can devote a large chunk of my day to this project without getting interrupted; I’ve spent the last few years working on the physical and mental problems; and I’ve spent the last five years getting much, much better at planning and process. It’s also a good point to flag that there’s a considerable amount of privilege behind my process, especially given that I’m now doing a PhD that directly ties to my writing.

Which brings us to day two of the Hell Track sprint, where I set out to chase a minor milestone by the end of the day: having a rough sketch in place of all 15 scenes in the first sequence. I cleared a lot of action stuff off the decks yesterday, which means I’m not left with the plot-heavy talky scenes where character dynamics are established and fleshed out.

SOME NOTES ON PRE-DRAFT PLOTTING

A couple of people have noted that this project isn’t really starting at the beginning, what with me coming to it with something resembling a plan and a bunch of pre-writing. This is 100% true, as you can see the beginnings of this project back in July of 2017, when I wrote five titles down on a post-it after getting irritated at the 80s BMX movie, RAD. In that respect, the original plan for Hell Track looks like this:

For those wondering how I got to the first sequent plan I posted yesterday, the process went something like this.

First, I studied a whole heap of arena-of-death movies, since they’re the inspiration point. I rewatched The Running Man. I rewatched The Hunger Games. I spent more time watching the live-action Tekken movie than is truly sane, and I acquired a copy of the Death Race remake that came out a few years back.

Once I’d gathered a whole bunch of them together, I started looking for general story beats and common narrative threads. Somewhere along the line, I broke out my copy of Save The Cat and started drawing connections to the Monster In the House genre detailed therein, which gave me a starting point for characters and plotting, because there are essential components to that genre. A Monster in the House movie absolutely needs an evil monster that exists to punish people, an enclosed space in which people are trapped and separated from the outside world, and a essential sin that brings the monster into the house.

What’s interesting about the Arena Of Death sub-genre is that it flips the expectations – while horror movies will have the protagonist sin and bring them to the house to be punished, Arena of Death movies are usually driven when the monster (aka the evil culture surrounding the arena) and their representative (incredibly often, a ruthless executive) engages in the sin of overreaching in the name of ratings/popularity/etc and brings in someone they shouldn’t who proceeds to wreck havoc.

This immediately gave me a number of scenes that had to be filled, and so the characters followed. My protagonist needed to enter the book with the kinds of skills and knowledge that would allow them to wreck havoc on the Arena of Death, and my antagonist needed to be the power-behind-the-throne executive who was overreaching in the name of ambition.

Watching all those films also gave me the general pattern for the first act of an Arena of Death narrative, with the first half of the first act showing us how and why the protagonist gets brought into the arena (as well as showcasing the abilities and qualities that will eventually tear it down), while the second half of the first act is basically getting to know the lay of the land before they’re tossed into the Arena to fight at the beginning of Act Two.

Once I bad all that down, I ran my idea through a bunch of basic plotting processes: a Save the Cat beat sheet; the brainstorming questions in Lisa Cron’s Story Genius; Dan Harmon’s story circle. This gave me a bunch of outlines and synopsii that grew more elegant as I went, along with a handful of drafted scenes, and gave me enough information to winnow out the really bad ideas. Some of those include:

1. A version where all the action took place with weapon-wielding riders getting about on BMX bikes instead of motorcycles. Sometimes you cling to the source of inspiration a little too strong.
2. A version where Shenandoah, my evil executive, was actually one of the demonic beings who control the world’s corporations in my mystic-cyberpunk universe. She’s much more interesting as a mortal aspiring to upper management, whereupon she’ll become an immortal being as a reward, as this gives her a reason to take crazy risks and explains more about the world
3. A version where I attempted to establish the protagonists support crew in the first sequence of the first act, setting up four protagonist-like POV characters who will engage in the arena. This was largely because I’d planned five books within this concept, and I figured I could switch the prime protag spot, but those characters all have very different roles now.

It was then that I put down two five-scene sequences to make up the first act, based upon the most recent synopsis, and looked for the gaps that needed to be filled in order to make the story feel like a story.

Which brought us to yesterday, and the point where this sprint kicked off.

MAJOR CHALLENGES IN TODAY’S WRITING

1. Fitting more movement into my writing routine. One of the downsides of working from home in general, and yesterday’s approach to writing in particular, is the sheer lack of incidental movement in my routine. I did clock up 10,000 steps yesterday, but they all happened in a single hour and half after the day was done. Today, rather counter-intuitively given my goal, I wanted to break up the writing a little more to incorporate shorter walks/chores and get me away from the keyboard to get the blood flowing and try and break free of the afternoon slump.
2. Incorporating a new POV character subplot. I started this book with four POV character who get arcs across the length of the work, but in writing the first sequence it quickly became apparent that I was going to leave a subplot dangling. I went for a walk early this morning and pondered ways to rectify that, which largely means checking in with a fifth character POV into the rest of the novel.
3. Working skeletal and fleshing out. I’m writing fast-and-loose today, trying to lay down the frameworks for scenes that get fleshed out as I go. This isn’t my preference, which means my brain keeps sending me distracting thoughts like “oh, this is how we ramp up tension during those various courier-run beats,” and I have to ignore those thoughts and focus on finishing the skeleton before I start adding muscle.

PROGRESS NOTES

Yesterday blew most of my expectations about how much could be done out of the water, so I was curious to see how today shaped up as I made a few alternations to my practice. I broke up the pomorodos focused on writing a little more, and squeezed in a walk around the block as I pondered sequence details mid-morning.

I didn’t quite get the first sequence fully drafted, as there’s a complex scene at the end of it that I skipped over so I could write the beginning of sequence two. Slightly less than yesterday, but there were also slightly fewer writing sprints due to the aforementioned plotting and taking some time out to manage some stuff associated with my PhD Confirmation (probably) scheduled for next week.

THINGS OF NOTE

1. I wrote my first scene that I’m really, truly happy with today, heading into the beginning sequence 2. There is a very high probability this means I’m leaning harder on a specific genre beat that I should be, but that’s perfectly okay at this stage of a draft. On the other hand, it may be the result of putting antagonist and protagonist in the same place at the same time, which is always a high-value scene in narrative terms.
2. I’m going to need to fact-check every riding scene, because even a little causal research over lunch reveals exactly how little what I’m writing matches up with the realities of riding a motorcycle.
3. I’m not sold on the mid-morning walk as a useful thing for productivity, although I’m certainly less stiff at the end of the day. A pre- or post-lunch walk would be ideal for resetting my attention, but that’s not particularly feasible in Brisbane summer.
4. Brisbane place names sound really weird in a cyberpunk setting: The Indooroopilly Enclave; The Milton Road Run; The Mount Coot-tha Arcology. I am not yet sold on any of them.
5. My first task tomorrow isn’t going to be writing, but going through the existing scenes and making notes about what’s finished, what’s still in progress, and what additions/changes need to happen on redraft. There are currently seventeen scenes in various states of completion and detail, and it’s getting hard to keep the state of each clear in my head.
6. My writing speed is relatively consistent on a sprint-by-spring basis, which means the basic guideline behind behind writing more is spending more time writing. I’m curious to see whether more detailed planning will speed this up, but that’s an experiment for a future project sprint.

I recently mentioned my interest in applying the six-week project sprint/two-week admin and recovery model to my projects in my newsletter, figuring it would be a good way of combating the fragmentation that comes from having multiple projects splitting my attention between writing and exegetical work for my thesis. Basically, by focusing a six-week project sprint focused on achieving one goal, and alternating those between theoretical and creative writing, I carve out clearly defined time periods where I know what to focus on and finish.

Today I started off the first of these, focused on a book that’s been kicking around my to-do list for a while:

Since I’m trailing a new approach, I’m going to keep a public diary here on the blog where I track the process and the challenges. This a) keeps me a little more honest about my processes than I’m inclined to be if there’s no public consequence for taking a day off, and b) gives me a record to refer back to at the end that’ll help evaluate whether this process is working or not.

The last time I tried this was five years ago amid the worst of the sleep apnea problems, and it was a project that didn’t end up in a good place, so I’m curious to see how it works this time around.

All going well, I’ll hit the end of this six week sprint with a 90,000 words novel draft that’s finished. With my usual work schedule, writing Monday-through-Friday and taking weekends off, that’s 30 writing days with a minimum of 3,000 words a day to get anywhere close to my goal.

SOME BACKGROUND DETAILS WORTH KNOWING

1. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this book. I’ve written a couple of plans experimenting with different approaches, put some careful thought into which marketing niche and genre I’m aiming at, and started a handful of drafts where I taken things in the wrong direction and had to re-think where I was going.
2. I tend to measure my work days in pomodoros (via the Pomodoro Technique), breaking things down into 30 minute blocks of time where I spend 25 minutes focused on a task and 5 minutes regrouping/resting. Usually I’ll devote between 2 or 3 hours to my current project and split the rest of the day between other tasks, but I’ll be upping my focus to about 4-6 hours a day for the next six weeks.
3. About 80% of the time devoted to the project will be drafting or redrafting scenes. The rest will tend to be fleshing out planning for the following days work, or reviewing work to figure out scenes that need to happen in the next section of the book.
4. I did some fairly detailed benchmarking and planning, especially given that there’s going to be some distractions that kick in about three weeks in as I deliver my PhD confirmation and gear up for the start of the teaching semester at Uni. The first major milestone is finishing the draft of the first act and the plans for the second, which should hit about the middle of next week.

MAJOR CHALLENGES IN THE COMING WEEK

1. The biggest challenge to this week is getting used to the kind of focus this sprint needs. I’m used to spreading my attention between two or three major projects on any given day, rather than doing deep work on one, and there is a part of me that’s screaming at me that ignoring project X and Y will end in tears. 
2. The second challenge is creative: the major reference points for Helltrack are a number of arena-of-death style films that were popular in the eighties, such as The Running Man or Death Race. Film is a highly visual medium, which means you can convey a lot of information and context very quickly, which is a huge advantage when depicting action sequences. Film also mediates the time in which things happen – almost everyone is watching at the same speed. Prose doesn’t have those advantages, which means depicting a nail-biting race sequence or jaw dropping action scene requires a very particular skillset that I’m picking up as I go.
3. The third major challenge is procedural: I like to rewrite as I go, fixing my mistakes, which is something you can get away with as a short story writer but inevitably bogs you down and distracts you in a novel where you’re maintaining multiple plot threads means you’ll struggle to keep the whole thing in your head.
4. A minor challenge, but meaningful: ignoring the double full stop in the blurb of the cover image I posted until the coming weekend, when I’ll have time to swap it out.

THE PLAN

I have about twenty-five scenes scheduled for the first act of the book, although “scene” is rather loosely defined as I’ll may end up rendering something as two-to-three shorter fragments instead of a single scene with a single POV. I tend to split first acts into two sequences – one building the characters up to the point where the book’s conflict truly begins, and another building up to the end of the act.

As a person who pantses books by default and plots out of necessity, my notes tend to be rough and in-motion for much of the process. If you look at the scene map for the first sequence, you’ll already see the points where I’ve added in unplanned-for scenes after a day’s writing (they’re the lighter colour).

In contrasts, there is little detail in the later sequences at all beyond a spine of five-to-six scenes that will get fleshed out as subplots reveal themselves here. I’ve already got notes that Juniper, for example, needs a handful of POV scenes after getting one in the second-to-last scene of the act.

In screenwriting terms, this would actually be two sequences (one focused on the run, one focused on the aftermath), but I’m using the term as a placeholder more than anything else.

PROGRESS NOTES

One of the things I’m looking at with this kind of tracking is figuring out what writing a novel draft actually looks like, so I can better plan future six weeks sprints and establish what kind of time I need to devote to the task. I knew 3,000 wor

ds a day would require spending more time writing than I normally devote to writing on daily basis, but I wasn’t sure how much more time it needed.

In that respect, I committed myself to doing three full pomodoro blocks today (about six hours) in an effort to hit 3,000 words. In that respect, I over-estimated slightly – despite a relatively slow start, I was sitting on four-thousand words by the time I’d done five hours I was well over my target number. I’m tracking each session using the spreadsheet that came with Chris Fox’s 5,000 Words an Hour ebook, and the individual sessions looked something like this:

Individual numbers jump around a bit as I delete notes or scraps of pre-writing that don’t quite fit the final version of the scene I wrote, but day one ended at 5,044 words over the day spread over ten different scenes (I had the eleventh already drafted, as it was a big part of nailing the voice and world-building).

One one hand, this is better than expected. On the other, the first day (and the first act) are always the fastest for me to write, since I’m largely getting to know the characters better and setting up the conflicts and arcs. Things tend to slow down drastically in the second half of the book, where you’re largely dealing with consequences rather than setting thigns up.

THINGS OF NOTE

1. If I’d stuck with my old process, where creative work got a two-hour pomodoro before I moved on to other projects, this would have felt like a really bad writing day. Sticking with it for a longer stretch evened out the numbers nicely, to the point where I hit what I regard as my “average” of approximately 800 words an hour by the end.
2. At least two scenes that I drafted today already require pretty significant redrafting to flesh them out, as decisions made in later scenes mean going back and changing what had already occurred.
3. The character of Jinsen strayed way, way further off my notes than expected, although he’s now better suited to the role I had in mind for him in later acts (and future books). I’m also not 100% happy with the name, as it feels self-consciously “cyberpunk” at this stage.
4. I am really bad at applying the question of “what’s the absolute worst thing that could happen” at the planning stage.
5. I really need to set up an injury tracker for this book, even though there’s the possibility of magical healing.
6. My focus really started to fragment towards the end of the day, and I struggled to stick to work for a full two-hour block. Hopefully, this will improve with practice. If not, it becomes something to incorporate into future daily plans.
7. Despite this, I’m largely used to 5,000 word days leaving me feeling wrecked and drained because I’m not “actively choosing to ignore other projects” so much as “forcing myself to slog because something is due and still panicking about the other stuff that needs doing.” I’m in much better shape after this than normal, although I’m noticeably stiff after a full day on the couch.