The Easiest Thing…

Tags

challenges, distractions, motivation, new author, new writer

In the world is to not write’. ~William Goldman

You would think that in ‘these difficult times’ where we’re all adapting to ‘the new normal’ (two cliches that I already despise) that there would be infinite time to write, all the time one could ever want or need.

Sure. Sure there is.

But William Goldman was right. The easiest thing to do is not write.

Inertia sets in. Momentum is nearly impossible to build.  It’s simpler, less painful to continue down the Youtube rabbit hole.  See what someone had for lunch today on Facebook. Do the Google and spend an hour tracking down the history and evolution of the rifled musket.

Often, I find myself preferring to clean a corner of the garage or reorganize my bookshelves or strip paint from some old furniture that ‘has’ to be done RIGHT NOW rather than write.

I’m still struggling to get back in the routine of writing daily.  I start out with the best intentions…

Today I am going to write! I declare… right after I read the paper and have a cup of coffee. I shan’t be any good until that happens.

Then the wife needs help with something. Hanging curtains or a picture or something. That gets you out of writing for maybe an hour.

I’m ready to write… but the dogs need treats. I need a shower. Right after those two things. I’ll get right to work…

Hey, that song that’s now stuck in my head. Who sang it? What album is it on? Getting those questions answered devolves into a thorough reshuffling of the vinyl shelf. Alphabetical isn’t going to work. Chronological is so much better…

And so on and so forth.

Next thing you know, it’s midnight and you’re trying to decide if it’s time for bed or you can make it through another video in the series about sharpening the blades in your block plane.

You don’t own a block plane. At least I don’t.

It’s too bloody late to write now. I’ll knock it out first thing in the morning.

Right after a cup of coffee and the paper. That’ll wake me up. For sure…

Seriously, the thing that is still a struggle, even with nothing else (like work) taking up my time, is sitting down and writing on a daily, or even near daily basis.  A good week is four days. A typical week is two. A bad week is one. Or less.

I wrote today, so I don’t feel guilty about ‘talking about writing’ instead of actually writing.  That’s the worst. Talking about it instead of doing it.

The funny thing is, the doing isn’t so hard. A thousand-plus words a session. Every time. It’s the making up my mind to do it. The sitting down with an open notebook and putting the pen in my hand. Once that’s done, it’s all downhill from there.

Maybe part of it is adjusting to the new routine. This is only Week Two of not having any place to be. My wife and still getting used to being around each other 24/7 for the first time in years. It isn’t hard – it’s not like we don’t like each other or anything. But it’s all fresh and new and a little daunting.

That’s the current struggle, anyway.  This week’s struggle. Next week my excuse will be the lines in my notebook are the wrong color blue, or the dogs are looking at me funny. Something will come up, I’m sure.

I’ll keep working on it. I’m sure I’ll figure something out. I did before.

I’ll let the people that read this (both of you) know what comes of the effort.

~James

 

 

The Second Draft

Tags

motivation, novel, sci-fi, science fiction, script, Writing

An unexpected, but pleasant, surprise in the pursuit of the Second Draft…

I’d only worked on Second Drafts for screenplays before starting this venture. Screenplays are fairly easy to proof and edit and revise, relatively speaking.  They are so short, so compact, and so sparse that making wholesale changes is simple. Toss out a page here, add another there, tweak a description, make a check for punctuation and format, and voila, you have a new draft.

Soon after completing the first draft of The Novel, I’d printed a few hundred pages out, thinking that I’d go about ‘fixing’ The Novel in much the same way.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

Too much information, too many things going on, far too many instances of ‘if I tweak this, I have to chase down and change everything related to and affected by it’.

Not going to happen. That is yet another reason why the project got set aside. I can give you many more, but that’s a good one for today. Just the sheer immensity of the thing was enough to curdle my milk.

So I sat on the whole thing. For several years, as it turns out.

The whole time, though, while I wasn’t ‘working on it’, my brain was taking care of some things.  Bringing up something during an idle moment, perhaps while sitting at a campfire on a Scout trip, or while paddling a canoe down the Colorado.  Little things would bubble to the surface, and I’d get a chance to think about it. Turn it over in my head, and make a decision to keep, discard, or alter those ‘somethings’.

Most of it, not so much the individual words, but the ideas, survived.

World building. General events. Characters. Settings and locations. That’s all still there, waiting to be used, even if it doesn’t make it into this book, it might make it into the next one.

Ultimately, what I realized was that this pass, this draft, felt a lot like taking an essay test in school that you’d studied particularly hard for. The kind of test with questions beginning with ‘compare and contrast’ or ‘discuss the causes and effects’. Open ended questions where you only need to figure out where to begin and how to end, and everything else in between is relatively easy.

That’s how I feel now, with this draft. Like I’m ready for it. Prepared. The words flowing out of my head like water out of a pitcher.

It’s still early, but I haven’t felt like driving my pen through my eyeballs to end my suffering. Yet.

Another surprise. My economy with words seems to have improved.  Saying more with less. Not to the point where I’m building an entire world, including complete languages, in 1700 pages a la Tolkien, and certainly not the brevity of a Heinlein, but I feel I’ve moved past the verbal diarrhea of a Robert Jordan, much as I like his work. I’m not afraid I’m going to vomit up a dozen or so volumes of 1000 plus pages, thank God.

Having the story, or most of it, in my minds eye already sort of feels like cheating. Or like I said, taking a test you are particularly well prepared for, maybe even to the point where you are looking forward to it.

It’s likely it will all turn out to be garbage this time, too. But I’m thinking it might be a bit more pleasant the second time, and that’s something.

We’ll just have to see.

~James

Back in the Saddle Again.

Tags

author, challenges, novel, science fiction, Writing

Wow. Nearly four years since I’ve posted here. I don’t which is crazier – that it’s been that long or that the blog is still here. The interwebs are a wonderful place.

Imagine how much other crap like this is languishing in the murky depths, the dark nether-places tucked into the empty spaces between inactive MySpace pages and Russian twitter-bot accounts.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Anyway. Enough digression. Enough dissembling.

I started writing again.

Other than some tinkering around with world building and fiddling about trying to build some backstory for the protagonist of The Novel, I haven’t done much pen and paper work since finishing the First Draft on Thanksgiving weekend four years ago. Fighting your way through 300,000 words over two years might do that to you.

And it was a fight. A struggle, especially through the last half. Some days I was lucky to get 300 words on paper. Very unlike the early, heady days where everything was Fresh and New and Exciting. It became very much like work.

So I stayed away. I never forgot the story I wanted to tell, but I didn’t have the energy to tell it anymore. To battle my way through the problems that I knew so desperately needed fixing. I’d compare it to tackling some monumental task like cleaning a garage or that room in your house that’s been the collecting ground for unwanted castoffs and things you’ll get around to later. You never know where to start, which thing to deal with first, and that makes it all the harder.

Combine that with the fact that the last time you took this on, it consumed two years of your life. That is a big commitment. I’ve learned to appreciate the productivity of the Stephen Kings and the Piers Anthonies of the world and the incredible volume of material they are both capable of churning out.

But the urge hit me to pick up the pen again. I knew where I wanted to start and I had an idea where I wanted to end. Perhaps the tinkering around I’ve done in the last year has been the catalyst, giving my brain the chance to ease into the idea of committing to The Work again.

Maybe our friend COVID has done it. It looks like the stay-cations we’ve all been ‘gifted’ are going to be around a while longer than we expected. Long enough that we can stop looking at our time away from our jobs as extra-long weekends.  This is the ‘when I have time’ all of us have dreamed of having. Might as well be productive with it.

So I started The Second Draft on Saturday, and have had two additional solid days since then. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 words.

Not anywhere near the realm of profligacy of a King or an Anthony but an improvement over the near-zero words I’ve averaged per day over the last four years.

How does that affect you, Dear Reader (if there are any of you still lurking about out there somewhere)?

I’m going to make a concerted effort to post here as much as I did in my heyday, if I ever had one.  I doubt it will be every day. I’m hoping for every day that I write. Hopefully that will be every day.

Thanks for tuning in.

~James

PS – had a thought about something that might have helped nudge me back into starting up again. A friend of mine and I have had a project on The Facebook for the last month, making fairly extensive posts about albums that have meant something to us. He’s  expressed some enjoyment at reading my posts. Those small encouragements were likely a part of my subconscious whispering that it’s time to get going again.

And I thank him for it.

On the Hunt

Tags

edit, first draft, obstacles, revise, revision, rewrite, screenplay, script, unpublished writer, Writing

Script #1 is done. I’ve spent most of the last month (when I wasn’t watching the Olympics – there’s a time-suck for you) revising, editing, and polishing. Thankfully, it’s over now.  I cut about 15-20 pages out in three passes.

As far as I can tell, it’s Ready. I could be wrong. It could be anything but ready, but we’re going to give it a shot and get it out on the market.

So now begins the hunt for that elusive creature – the Agent that is willing to take queries and read scripts that haven’t been referred by an Industry Professional.

I built a list of about 100 agencies that I thought I might want to call or send queries to. Part of that list came out of a book from the library, and part of it came from the WGA’s list of signatory agencies. A word of advice: Don’t bother with an agency list in a book, unless that book is less than about 2 years old.

The book I used was printed in 2006. A measurable percentage of the agents listed had passed away. A larger percentage of the agencies had gone out of business or merged with other companies, or they’ve changed their focus from writers to actors, or they don’t ‘agent’ anymore and have turned to managing.

(Side note: Can someone explain to me why a writer would want a manager? Do they do enough to warrant collecting 10-15%? I’ve heard it both ways, and I still don’t get exactly what good they might do. I can see how they could help an actor or a band, but a writer?)

Anyway, my suggestion is to go straight for the WGA list (found here: https://apps.wga.org/agency/agencylist.aspx). It will save you some time.

So I’m starting the Query Process. It’s almost disconcerting how few agencies are open to receiving queries, or are kind enough to spell out their submission guidelines. There are a number of agencies that don’t list any guidelines, so they are going to get a phone call or an email at least, maybe even a letter. We’ll see.

I figure out of a 100 agencies, I should get 10% that request a copy of my script, and if I’m lucky, 10% will be interested enough in me and my writing they will be willing to take me on as a client.

Like so many things in writing, it’s a numbers and persistence game. You sit down and write everyday, whether 100 words or 1000 or 10,000, and at some point you’ll have something done. Then you sit and edit for a few days or weeks or months, and then you have something better.

When it comes to representation, my gut’s telling me that that same combination of numbers and persistence will pay off. Send out a couple of letters, make a couple of phone calls. Hear ‘no’ a few times. Cross some names off your list. Do the same thing tomorrow.

Lather.

Rinse.

Repeat.

Eventually something positive will happen. Maybe. Maybe it won’t.

Maybe ‘They’ will discover your innermost secret – that your writing is shit (only that little voice inside you knows that. How did ‘They’ find out?).

Anyway, we won’t know until we try, will we?

I’ll post updates if/when anything exciting happens. Keep writing.

~James

PS – Seriously. Can someone explain to me the deal with managers?

No, I Haven’t Abandoned My Blog

Tags

author, first draft, new writer, novel, revise, revision, rewrite, screenplay, unpublished, unpublished author, unpublished writer, Writing

It had been a long time since I’ve posted anything here. 138 days to be exact. Long  enough, I would expect, for someone to think I might have abandoned this blog.

I haven’t.

I’ve been busy, though, and as I’ve mentioned before, if there is one thing that will likely get set aside, it’s going to be this blog.

So what have I been up to?

I finished transcribing The Novel. Next step is editing/revision. It turned out to be about 1300 pages in total. My tentative plan is to break it into 3 parts, and I think there is a large section, about 25% of the total text, that I’m going to remove. It doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the story. Maybe I’ll turn the excised part into another volume, like a side-story or a sequel. Maybe I’ll never use it all.

I’ve started an editing pass on Script #2. That finished out at around 180 typed pages. About 1/3 of that is going to have to go. Since my name isn’t Quentin Tarantino, I won’t be able to get away with anything over about 115 pages.

Script #1 is getting a polish/minor revision. That is still the project closest to being ‘done’, if there is such a thing.

The first draft of Script #3 is done. That one I pushed out pretty quickly – it took 19 writing days over 41 calendar days, and I’ve started transcribing it. I expect it will end up at about 105 typed pages, but we won’t know until we’re done.

Script #4 is underway now. I started work on it 12 days ago, and I’m about halfway through the first draft.

This isn’t to say any of it is any good. There’s a good chance that most of it isn’t. But I’ll tell you one thing – having first drafts done for a novel and three screenplays sure makes me feel a heck of a lot more like a writer than anything else. My confidence is improved, and that probably helps with my speed, and my desire to sit and write every day is also increased. On Script #4, I’ve written every day since I started, except for one, and each one of those days has been at least a five-page day.

I will try, in the next week, to post pictures of ‘finished’ products – or the stacks of paper that make up the first drafts.

Anyway, the big lesson learned is that writing gets stuff done. Not writing doesn’t get anything done. Talking about writing doesn’t make things happen. Wanting to be a writer doesn’t, wishing you were a writer doesn’t, dreaming about writing doesn’t.

Writing makes you a writer. So what are you waiting for?

~James

Update/Random Stuff

Tags

first draft, new writer, novel, screenplay, unpublished author, unpublished novel, unpublished writer, writing problems

I haven’t been completely inactive for the last month or so since my last post.

I’ve written three articles for Corner of the Galaxy, and had two published.

Screenplay #2 is done. At least the first draft. 35 writing days out of 50 calendar days, which is a pretty good pace for me lately.

I’m still transcribing The Novel. Down to about 20,000 words left. I’ve started transcribing Screenplay #2.

Have I mentioned that I hate transcription? If you want a case of tedium to go, take up transcription. It’s making me rethink (again) my choices to write in longhand for my first drafts. Longhand gives me more flexibility during the initial composition phase, but I pay for it during transcription. It’d be easier to just type the first draft, I think. Except for that whole flexibility thing.

The Next Project hasn’t come to me yet. Not that I need to wait for inspiration before I start, but the premise for Script #2 had been flapping around the inside of my skull for quite awhile before I decided to start on it. I don’t have any festering sores in there that need a good picking yet, but I need to find something soon. Not writing is much harder on me that writing is.

Anyway. I’m still writing. Nothing ready to send out for sale yet, but that time is drawing slowly closer. I’ll mention it when the time comes, but that shan’t be for awhile, I fear.

Back to the transcription.

Keep writing. It sure beats the alternative.

 

 

Beware the Advice You Take

Tags

new novelist, new writer, novel, screenplay, unpublished author, unpublished novel, unpublished writer, Writing, writing problems

I think I’ve been pretty upfront with the fact that I really don’t know squat about anything I talk about on this blog, other than the simple truths I’ve learned through trial and error. Anything I tell you can be taken with a grain of salt, in the vein of ‘your mileage may vary’.

Just because it works for doesn’t mean it will work for you. Other than the obvious things like ‘Write every day.’ or ‘Don’t talk about writing. Just write’.

For example, my routine that I’ve developed that helps me put my butt in the chair might do exactly the opposite for you. I like to write in the evenings. You might not be able to face the page at any time other than the wee hours of the morning. If you need two hours of free writing in your journal before you can even think about working on your Project, more power to you. Personally, I don’t have that kind of time. Or energy. If I put anything more than a couple hundred words into my journal, I find that I have nothing left when it comes to writing For Score.

Whatever. What I do gets me writing. What you do should do the same. It doesn’t matter how, it only matters that you do.

Anyway, given the caveat above, I think we all need to be careful about where we get our advice, or more importantly, who we listen to. If our Chosen Expert makes more money talking about writing (ie, teaching writing classes) rather than selling their own writing, it might be time to Choose Another Expert.

I recently found out that one of the Gurus of Screenwriting (with a very famous book on the subject) hasn’t changed his course in over 30 years.

The industry has changed – markedly – since he started teaching.

But his class still pounds out the same routine about spine, plot, the foundational challenges of the three-act structure, over-arching theme, sub-textual elements coming into play when developing the b-story, or whatever, that he was teaching back when feature writers were king and selling scripts for seven figures. TV, in those days, was for hacks that couldn’t sell a movie to save their lives. Nowadays, it’s almost the reverse. TV is where the excitement is, it’s the medium attracting the talent, and the writer is become king. There is still a place for feature writers, but they are more a part of a committee than a sole author.

You’d think he’d change with the times.

This is the example that jumps out at me, but he isn’t the only one. There are others peddling the Secrets of Success to writing for TV. Novels. Short stories. Stage plays. Screenwriting. On and on and on.

In my opinion, you learn more by doing – more by sitting down and writing on your own – than you do worrying about how many spaces you put after a period at the end of a sentence or whether it’s ‘INT -THE LIVING ROOM – DAY’ or ‘INT. – THE LIVING ROOM – DAY’.

Quentin Tarantino wrote Pulp Fiction out longhand in a pile of spiral bound notebooks. He worried about his story first.

When the time comes, you can figure out the format you need to submit your work in. Formatting is the easy part. The hard part is getting a good story together. Write. Edit. Rewrite. Polish. Throw it away and start over. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Worry about making your story good first.

It’s like building a house. The story is the framework and the rafters and the plumbing and the electrical – the stuff that makes the house work as a house. It’s at the end that you worry about the paint and drywall and whether you use cherry for the cabinets and Italian travertine marble for the floors – the things that make it pretty.

And be selective of who you take advice from. Would you take parachuting lessons from a guy that’s never seen the inside of a plane before, or you would want to learn from someone that jumps out of a plane – and lives – every day?

Of course, I could be completely wrong. It’s not like I know anything.

~James

PS – I’ve started contributing to The Corner of the Galaxy, a website devoted to the LA Galaxy. They can be found at: http://cornerofthegalaxy.com/

You can also follow me on twitter @JamesGGlass. It’s a different brand of idiocy than the blog is.

Things You Learn Writing a Book (or anything else).

Tags

first draft, new novel, new writer, novel, science fiction, unpublished, unpublished author, unpublished writer, Writing, writing problems

1. Writing every day sucks. Sometimes nothing good comes to you. If you’re lucky on those days, anything that comes to you has to be counted as a win. No matter how bad it is.
2. Writing every day is wonderful. On the good days, there almost isn’t anything better. The story flows from your brain and the page soaks the words up like a sponge. An hour or two will pass without you being aware of it and you’re 3,000 words closer to The End.
3. A good part of what you write is crap, but a fair amount isn’t. A sentence might be good, even a paragraph, but it doesn’t fit the story. Or the words, sentences, and paragraphs are horrible and some nugget turns out to be gold – an idea, a plot twist, a new character.
4. Just leave the crap behind and promise to make it better in the re-write.
5. Re-writes are inevitable. No one (that I know of) writes a perfect first draft of anything. You are not an exception to that rule.
6. Half the people that give advice – in person, books, or internet articles – are brilliant. Gods among mortals. They have the Secret and are worthy of your attention.
7. The other half are complete idiots that have no clue about what it takes to write anything.
8. The hard part is figuring out the difference. What makes it even more fun is that my idiot might be your genius and my genius your gibbering fool.
9. During the first draft stage, it’s more important to get the story on paper than worry about spine, plot, theme, your secondary character’s b-story, the save-the-cat moment, character arc, the villain’s motivation, or anything else the Gurus tell you need to be the Focus of Your Attention. Just get the story on the page. Fix the rest in post.
10. You will change, or at least your writing will, and for the better. After 50, 100, or in my case, 300 thousand words, you will see improvement.
11. Finally, The End is a glorious place to be. But you have to get there first. I got there eventually, but I would have arrived much earlier if I had written every. single. day.

So go write.

~James

Finished!

Tags

first draft, new novel, new novelist, new writer, novel, science fiction, SF, unpublished, unpublished author, unpublished writer, Writing

Over the Thanksgiving Holiday, two years and two weeks after I started, I finished the first draft of The Novel.

To be honest, it is roughly 300,000 words of steaming equine feces, but it is done. You can fix something that’s been written. You can’t do anything to save something that hasn’t made it to the page.

There is plenty to fix. Plot holes. Poor descriptions. I’m sure I’ve called a character by one name and changed it halfway through. Some characters need more development. Some need to be cut.

I read somewhere that, out of any first draft, 1/6 is pure gold, 1/6 is perfectly serviceable, 1/6 can be saved and used with some adjustment, 1/6 might be salvageable for another project, 1/6 is unadulterated garbage, and 1/6 is justification that either the writer should have never started, or better yet been strangled at birth.

If I’m lucky, my percentages will run close to that. I fear that they will end up nearer the ‘should have been murdered in his crib’ end of the spectrum.

We’ll see.

I still have about 50,000 words to finish transcribing, which I will try and have done by the New Year, but the hardest part, the writing, is done. I will pack it away at that point, along with barley, hops, and yeast, and let it ferment for awhile. Once a suitable distance has been obtained, then the long, difficult task of trying to make something of the mess I’ve made.

Now to try and figure out what I’m going to work on in the meantime…

James

Back on the Horse

Tags

author, first draft, new novelist, new writer, novel, unpublished novel, unpublished writer, Writing, writing problems

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve been away from this blog for over three months. Some of you might not have noticed at all. Either one is okay. This blog is for me as much as anyone else and I haven’t been able to face the added burden of blogging in addition to the daily struggle of deciding whether I was going to write or not.

Most days in the last few months, especially in October, I’ve lost that battle, and it beat me bad. I might have put pen to paper a total of four days last month.

I have picked up my writing pace again, managing to squeak out a few hundred words in the dark hours of the night. It hasn’t been much, but it has been something. It’s better than nothing.

A change I made to when I write has made a huge difference, and that positive experience of the last few days has given me a reason to post here again. Instead of starting to write at 11 or 12 o’clock at night, I’ve begun my writing sessions much earlier, around 7.

And what a difference it has made. The first day I tried it, I squeaked out my typical-0f-late 3 or 400 words. The second day, I got 500 in before calling it quits. The last two days have both been well over a thousand words, and I’ve worked on The Novel five out of the last seven days.

Just when I’d given up hope that I would never finish this damned book, I can now see a glimmer of hope that I might finish it. I may even be finished in the next week or two if I can keep up the pace. A little over two years since I started, and after something in the neighborhood of 300,000 words, I will finish.

And I will finish.

A good sign, in my opinion, that I am not just lying to myself again is that my mind is processing rewrite and editing ideas for when I do finish. What to cut, what to leave, what to repurpose, what to discard all together. How to break this monstrosity into separate parts that will eventually become an (expected) three or four book series.

For someone that preached ‘you have to write everyday’ and ‘just write’ and ‘the thing that differentiates the dabblers from the pros is daily writing’, this has been a bitter pill to swallow.

But I’ve swallowed it, and dealt with it, and dealt with the inner turmoil that its caused me. The feelings of not being good enough. That I should just quit. That there is no point.

Something that has helped me get through this feeling of hopelessness and helplessness is the ‘I Should Be Writing’ podcast by Mur Lafferty. It can be found here: http://murverse.com/podcasts/. Lately she’s been talking about dealing with those moments of inferiority that strike some of us. In general, Mur has a firm but delicate touch when it comes to addressing the psychological issues related to writing. Her casting schedule is irregular, but there are number of previous ‘casts archived so there is plenty to listen to. I highly recommend it.

The Plan, as always, is to blog with some frequency, but I’ve revealed here that this plan in particular has not always survived contact with the enemy. Hopefully I will be back soon.

In the meantime, keep writing. If not that, do the best you can to get through today. Maybe tomorrow will be better. If not that one, maybe the next one. It happened for me. I’m sure it will happen to you.

~James