Category: writing

So where were we? Jeez, the last time I said anything of substance in this forum I was still single. (Don and I made honest men of each other on Labor Day, and the wedding was, as the phrase goes, everything.) The new year started with an auspicious portent: a fiction sale! My short story “Mrs. Peak and the Dragon” is part of Abyss & Apex‘s Q1 2018 issue. It’s an old favorite of mine that was sitting around waiting on some indefinable Oh but it needs more tweaking, and so I’m very glad to have been nudged into just sending the damn thing out already.

And now it’s time to start building up those write-all-the-time muscles again, because I’m gearing up to write another novel. (More on that later.) And where better than in the pages of a blog that pretty much everyone has forgotten exists?

While I was at Boskone last month I had the opportunity to sit down with my alpha readers for Mojo City. To my delight, they approved of the shape of the first draft, and their concerns about what would need to be fixed in the 2.0 release matched my own. They even, dare I say it, enjoyed reading it. And having spent a month away from the thing, I’ll be starting up that revision process sometime this week by sitting down and reading the 1.0 version for the first time since I closed it down. I’m looking forward to finding out what’s actually in it, as opposed to what I thought I put in it. And, of course, there will be lots of $PLACEHOLDERS to finally make specific — a series of walks through Chinatown and the Lower East Side are in my future — and characters who need to be made deeper and more believable. I think it’s going to be fun once I get into the groove, but I can feel an echo of the same resistance that kept me from starting the first draft: I don’t know all the answers yet, so how can I be sure it’ll be perfect? What if I screw it all up?

To which I say: Crikey, man. Pull on your big-boy writer pants and just start. You can fix anything you break in the 3.0 draft. Plus, hey! Here’s a video that will teach you how to do something you always kind of fake your way through, never the same way twice. It is, as the nice lady says, “one of the biggest challenges you’re going to face in your life.” And now that you can surmount that, how hard can finishing the damned book be?

Six years ago I started thinking about a novel. Six months ago, I started writing it. And yesterday, to my surprise and delight and relief, I finished the first draft. I am pleased to announce the birth of MOJO CITY, Version 1.0, weight 98,000 words, length 450 double-spaced pages.

To do it, I had to learn a bunch of different lessons: How not to let fear of the blank page keep me from starting at all; how to maintain forward momentum on a project that, when I started, seemed impossible; how to navigate the straits between leaving room in the writing process for spontaneous moments of invention and knowing exactly how my story was going to get me from A to B to C and on to Z. But most of all, I had to learn how to write an imperfect draft without leaping off the balcony.

I mean, you hear this over and over: Your first draft will stink. Everyone’s first draft stinks. That’s what they do. But it’s one thing to hear that delivered as fact, even from teachers you respect at writer camp, and quite another to believe it. My own impulse toward perfectionism has always been my own worst enemy. It kept me from starting the book for years: what if I turn a good idea into a bad book? With a short story, you really can put off starting the first paragraph until you have the whole thing mapped out in your head. It’s a strategy that will produce completed pieces. But when you’re about to embark on a voyage of 98,000 words? Safer for now just to keep adding notes to the pile. Start later, when you’re more sure of what you’re doing.

But no. Did you know that if your character is standing outside a blown-up pizza joint talking to some cops but you really need him to be in Washington Square, eating falafel with a bodhisattva, but you don’t know quite how to get him out of his current conversation, you can just write

[AND NOW HE LEAVES AND ENDS UP TALKING TO C IN THE PARK]

and come back later? Like, in the second draft? And that’s a totally acceptable thing to do? So you can go on and write the scene that you actually have in your head, instead of agonizing over a transition that will make more sense later? It’s true! I did it. So can you. You can also direct your main character to the scene of an incident at $INTERSECTION, and then have him later meet a friend to hear a band called $CLEVER NAME.

This was a revelation. And, more important, it was the crack in the dam that let me get out of my own way and just write the damn book. Characters flat? Fix it in the next draft. Language undescriptive? Fix it in the next draft. Causality questionable? Chronology dodgy? Geography unreliable? It doesn’t matter. In the words of James Thurber, “Don’t get it right. Just get it written.”

You probably knew all this already, dear reader. But I spent a few long years fighting to absorb this truth into the marrow of my bones. And I don’t want to forget it. So I’m putting it here.

So that’s what I’ve been up to instead of writing the blog. How about you?

—Hey, the crickets have stopped again.

—It’s because you’re making so damn much noise. What was it you wanted me to see, anyway?

—Check it out! A head!

—Human?

—Mostly. Actually, no…I think this one’s entirely human.

—Well, that should be worth a few bucks to somebody. Nicely preserved, too. Where’d you find it?

—Under the sand. I told you: for moonlit fields to give way to unstructured sand so abruptly is unnatural, even in a place like this. I think the breakdown was radiating out from the head.

—Why would the head be so vigorously entropogenic? Heads propogate structure, they don’t destabilize it. Why have a head if you don’t build stuff with it?

—I think it just…gave up.

—Eeew.

—Oh, I don’t know. It probably thought of itself as tragic.

—Well, I don’t want you bringing it onto the ship if it’s going to turn us into sand before we get back.

—Naah. It wouldn’t hurt us. Besides, we’re not bringing it back.

—What?

—I think this could be a viable space again. Wouldn’t take much. Here, give me the spanner.

—Don’t tell me you can fix that thing.

—Sure. Well, we can get it ticking over again. The cogs just need a little re-alignment…like so…then we just…there.

—Hmm. Pretty lights.

—Yeah… It should be fully online in an hour or two.

—How long will it do its job properly this time?

—Hard to say: days, weeks; maybe decades. Depends on you, doesn’t it, snookums?

—I wish you wouldn’t tickle its chin like that.

—You’re just pissed that we can’t sell it to a curiosity dealer yet.

—Hmmph. A human head! That’s two days at the Ganglion sipping fizzy liquids, that is.

—Look, let’s give it a chance. We can come back, check it again in a few days. If it’s spitting out sand again, first round at the Ganglion comes out of my share.

—Deal.

—Good. Now, shall we go?

It’s not even ready to be sent to the beta readers, but: The first draft of “Slow” is done. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is a recognizable plot. The bits of stuff that made me want to write the story in the first place are all in there, along with a number of things I didn’t anticipate.

Praise be to all attendant spirits and to muses great and small.

Okay, I now officially know better than to post ramblings about the upheavals of my story drafts. Not only is that last one incomprehensible but the fixes I’ve devised mean that when the story finally sees the light of day it won’t really resemble the weird tidbits I felt compelled to share.

(I have an actual plot now. That’s nice. I just finished banging it out in little cryptic notes to myself. I wonder if it’s going to work? I guess I’ll find out when I write it up.)

Well, everybody is still in the bar, but I got Michael to start ranting about pop culture and the Slow, which in turn got Will to drop his little bomb and for Jake to spill his martini down his sleeve. Jake thus far is entirely too flighty. I’m going to have to fix that, but first I need to stop trying to go back and edit things and just write out the rest of it first.

Writing dialogue for three people at once is hard.

I worry that this whole story is just a way to describe the image I had when I started this: the accident that created the Slow, and what the Slow is. There may not be a lot of actual Things that Happen. Or who knows. Maybe there will. Or maybe I’m right but it’s not a big deal after all.

For any of this to go forward, sooner or later Michael has to leave the bar.

Once he leaves, he is going to want to come back eventually. I just have to make that convincing. More chemistry with the bartender will be required.

I will finish this. At which point this posting will make more sense, maybe. And then I’m getting back to that other idea I had.

This. I want to do this. I want very much to do this. But the Horror of the Blank Page–the Horror of the Idea of the Blank Page–has had me under its spell for so effing long that I don’t know if I remember how to write any more. There’s a voice in my head saying It doesn’t matter. Just apply. Promise yourself you’ll write two short stories—that you’ll write something—in time for the application deadline, and that you’ll send it in. Just write. It doesn’t matter. Just write.

The sound of that voice had me curled up in a small ball in my office, my forehead sinking slowly through the desk, for a long minute. A second voice assures me that Charybdis sang a song like that, and I don’t know who to trust. The act of putting this into words scares the hell out of me. The idea that I am putting it on the blog for people to see scares me more. I always swore to leave this particular drama out of the blog. What if everything is gone?

I want to be there. I don’t know what I’m going to do next.

UPDATED: Link in paragraph one tweaked so you can tell what I’m talking about more readily.