Writing a Novel

[Julius Seeker]

This place isn’t very active, not since the downtime

I normally don’t discuss my personal life anywhere online, but I want some activity! And this is largely responsible for my relative inactivity in recent months.

A novel is something I toyed around with as a youth, but I never had the discipline or experience to really achieve it. I completely failed at crafting coherent conflict with escalation, I couldn’t do scenes (nor did I understand their purpose), and I didn’t fully understand plot mechanics... The discipline was a difficult part. I couldn’t write a chapter without it somehow morphing into some sort of comedic erotica (the plague of a youthful undisciplined mind).

Fast forward more than a decade, I’ve written a lot of comedy and sci-fi on a professional level, worked with well established screenplay writers and novelists, and picked up a ton of knowledge. I am making my first attempt at a novel. I began in August when I drafted up a concept and an initial outline. From there I targeted a 65,500 word manuscript, I wrote 110,000; not necessarily a good or bad thing, only that I miscalculated the pacing. From there I knew my characters well, the locations, and what they were going through. I revised my outline - this took a lot longer than my initial rough outline. Earlisr today I finished marking up the rough draft with notes on character revisions for consistency, plot restructuring, and fixing up all the weak points in plot development. And I have an editor looking over it.

While it sounds all pre-planned, I ignored the notion that extensive re-writes were going to be necessary after the rough draft. While I do have a lot of writing experience, I have never written anything this extensive dealing with original characters. I have never worked with narrative and action description like this before. There’s a lot of learning even with all the awareness of what steps need to be taken. If I am, so far, to take one learning away. It’s that I should never never overestimate my abilities =P

Right now, it’s more of a hobby, I have no current commercial aspirations. I just wanted to see if I could do it. Has anyone else tried writing a novel before? What was your experience?

[Don]

I like to write as a hobby but it's exhausting when you're serious about it so the ideas tend to just stay as ideas. My computer hard drive died this year and I ended up losing most of my written stuff when the Best Buy guys decided they're going to format the backup drive to replace the main drive without asking.

I got the feeling that it's relatively easy to finish writing something in one go regardless of your writing ability. But if you stop you'll likely change your mind and then go in circles forever revising. Jin Yong's novels went through 3 major revisions and they're like almost completely different stories because I'm sure you can change your mind a lot during the years he's been active as a writer. Now Jin Yong is a famous and rich author so he can take years to rewrite the same story 3 times but I sure don't have that kind of time. I guess at some point you just have to accept that you're not going to get everything exactly the way you wanted it so that you can finish something.

[Julius Seeker]

I don't think I could get away with just a single draft. Some writers can, I see myself as requiring at least one major revision. After all the issues I found with my initial outline after reading through my draft. It will likely result in about a 50-65% rewrite, although only one of the chapters (amounting to about 2500 words) had to be completely re-written - I did that this morning. I am about to action all of my hundreds of notes throughout. Next step will be to read through and polish that all off. The goal is to have something resembling the final product when I am done. Puting an analogy to software development, this is kind of like the Beta draft - everything is there, no blockers, it's just a matter of fixing up all the bugs and polishing.

Something I think that pays when writing a story is perhaps prototyping the characters, figure out who they are before putting them in. It sounds like work for the sake of work, but it can remove a lot of the inconsistency in dialogue and motive by already having the character developed, and this should happen before completing the outline phase. It's simpler working with established characters, and even simpler and more artistically appealing having complete creative control.


One more learning that I found helped a lot; tasking and scheduling - creating deadlines for tasks. When missing dates, it's a matter of determining why the deadline slipped and then adjusting accordingly. Again, it seems like a bunch of busy-work, but I found it adds a good sense of responsibility. Even if it's just a hobby, there's no reason why some quality overhead direction can't be a part of it.

[Eric]

I'm always readin, just not much to report on.

[Julius Seeker]

Haha!
Everyone has turned E-shy.

[kali o.]

Writing substantial works is too hard. I'm the type that gets lost in perfecting a single paragraph and no matter how many revisions I complete, I am generally never satisfied with my own thoughts.

I guess my OCD lends itself more to editing than to creating original work.

[Oracle]

Writing substantial works is too hard. I'm the type that gets lost in perfecting a single paragraph and no matter how many revisions I complete, I am generally never satisfied with my own thoughts.

I guess my OCD lends itself more to editing than to creating original work.

Hire an editor :p

[Julius Seeker]

Kali, I can relate! One little paragraph can eat up so much time.
The thing I do is what I am calling productive procrastination (probably poorly named, because it’s not really procrastination) - that is, setting specific goals, and trying to ignore anything that slows me down from achieving those goals in a good amount of time. If anything like that sticks out, tag it as a “leaving this for later” and moving on across the rest of the work assigned. I find it has made things a lot faster, although it means more drafts in the end. Although it can mean 20 minutes to edit 1000 words instead of two hours.

I have been time tracking my progress. At the beginning, I was taking an average of about 70 minutes to read + action notes on every 1000 words. After many hours of work, I have this down to 20 minutes.

I think the idea of setting up a structured process sounds very unappealing in concept, it makes everything seem like a whole lot more work than one would hope. But in the end it’s a much more honest approach, and moving through the process feels a lot better (IMO). More confidence. Also, attempting to speed up the process by procrastinating on certain points works as well... mostly because coming back to them later means that thing that might take hours could take a few minutes on a different day with a different mindset and different goals.

Going in with the rough draft, each chapter with goals, and deciding “this is going to be shit” is a good mindset. It takes away the pressure of trying to write something brilliant, and instead makes it about writing something that gets done.

Next draft, read over the rough while re-outlining each chapter in detail with all plots and subplots pointed out; then review the outline, tweak it.

Next - go over the rough draft and make notes of everything that needs to change/be cut in order to fit the new structure.

Next - action all the points in the notes.

Next - go through all the dialogue and narrative for character and scene consistency.

Next - polish it all up. Tag all the locations that are too much of a headache to do just the .

Next - go through and address all the tags. By this point the story will be I. A good enough state that others can read it, enjoy, and offer their take on what should happen at those points... either that or just look at how other authors address similar bits; or better yet, see how a movie does it, and write the bit in your style adapted to your story.

It’s a ton of work, but as time goes on, it becomes quicker to do. I sometimes wonder if this is why some indie authors take several years to finish their first book, and then bang out 3-4 more in under a year. Some of those draft suggestions I have above can go as fast as 100,000 words in a few free days of work.

[Julius Seeker]

I’ve left my career as a video game designer/product manager (which I had been doing for more than a decade on top of an additional 5 or so years in marketing and QA management). I have decided to take a stab at becoming a writer; mostly I want to take my marketing experience and make it work for me; I sold my stocks and banked a lot in RRSPs and am living off the tax returns + other savings.

I have a process and an editor (my wife, that’s her field).


After a few years I feel that I’ve devised a very good writing process (for me)

1. Do the one pager outline
2. Create a lot of conflicts for each part within the parameters of the outline. (basically: he cuts his foot on a stone and begins bleeding out; or she asks him if he wants to go to a bar he knows he has a problem with, etc...)
3. I look at the One pager, and then use the conflicts and one pager to design chapters based on mechanics.
4. Enter all the scenes into a program called Scrivener (which is a writing program that divides everything up into separate files that can be compiled). There are different levels: my summaries for chapters are at the top, next tier are the scenes under each chapter, and under each scene is the conflict (it’s like a filing system where you can write long descriptions).
5. Then I point-form my summaries, and assign all the vital notes to various bits and pieces in a scene (different files, what comes before, and what comes after): in the end I have 3-10 different files per scene: up to 40 per chapter, and hundreds per book.
7. We take days reviewing everything, making sure character arcs are compelling, as well as plot points. That we have a good balance and pacing. Good consistency. Good setup/payoff, etc... No plot holes. Reviewing all the cards takes HOURS.
6. I draft it out.
7. Usual editing process, sing-offs etc...

I used the process to outline a 4 novella science fiction series. Now I am writing the rough drafts.

I began at 9am today, taking a break: thanks to the outlining I am already through nearly 5,000 words (rough crap) just today. It’s much easier when you know what you’re writing in great detail. The rough draft can then focus on the artistic nature: basically, it feels like I am already writing a draft 3 or 4. My goal is to get this done with one single draft + edits - very few re-writes.

It may be an incredibly stupid life choice; I don’t care, I can and will try it out =)
Overall, I think I have a lot of valuable experience and experimentation under my belt. It’s all about making the writing itself as easy as possible, and have confidence that you won’t screw up any details except the artistic part you’re working on. No thought needs to go into the plot while writing; that thought is done.

I’ll update later with my success or failure story. Either way, it’s been fun so far.

[kali o.]

So why not share your favorite chapter here (previous work or current work). Teaser, if you will.

[Julius Seeker]

Will do when they are closer to completion, and I know they aren't complete shit. =)
(They may not be now, but I can't be sure until I read through them and enjoy them; they're still early on in the actual writing as I have spent all time on these four in the outlining process)

I am probably going to end up roughing them all out first, then do a read through and corrections. I am relatively confident that due to the outline detail that I'm avoiding unnecessary repetition (which I found to be an issue under my old processes).