The emperor has new clothes

I changed everything because although I loved the last theme, the one-column was driving me mad. All my friends and links were relegated to the bottom! Tsk.

Anti- or prologue?

I recently re-tweeted (I’m on Twitter as VictoriaMBell , O any tweeters out there!) agent Kristin Nelson’s blog post on “Why Prologues Often Don’t Work“, because I think it makes for a succinct and clear discussion (her blog is great generally, btw!).

I was also interested to see her reiterate something I’ve heard elsewhere: “This is why almost all the agents I know completely skip the prologue and start with chapter one when reading sample pages. A beginner writer might actually be able to do good character, dialogue, tone, pacing, and whatnot but it’s more than likely not going to show in the prologue.” I realized something, reading that — I often skip (bad) prologues too, when reading for pleasure: they feel disconnected from the main meat of the book, and they frequently don’t make any sense to me until I’ve read a good portion of the novel. Then I’ll loop back.

I also wanted to touch on Kristin’s point number 1: “When the sole purpose of the prologue is to fill the reader in on the back story so the real story can begin” (go to the blog and read her example of a good prologue, too). To veer slightly away from the topic of prologues, this reminded me of one of those elementary craft lessons: don’t put a big clump of back story up front. It just slows down the action at a point where you want to keep the narrative moving, and 9 times out of 10 the reader doesn’t care about the character enough yet to wade through it all. I was taught, and this has been really helpful to me, that when revealing significant moments of back story, it’s important to think through your chosen point of view. Is it natural for your POV character  to think or not think about something in this particular moment?

But back to prologues (see? I looped! Sorry for being all over the place in this post, though). How about you? Are you anti- or prologue?

“New novel going terribly, thank goodness”

A new column piece from A L Kennedy! Funny, I was just thinking about her in the shower this morning — no, not like THAT, you pervs. Anyway, read her Guardian column — I relate… http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/feb/03/novel-going-terribly-al-kennedy

Cycles

Just realized that out of the 2 (!!) posts I wrote last year, one was almost exactly a year ago. I WILL DO BETTER THIS YEAR. Honest.

A Bit Stuck

Many of the hits I’ve had lately are from poor hapless souls (students, I’m guessing) searching for “Where are you going, where have you been?”, the Joyce Carol Oates story and also the title of my last blog post. You can find the story here, people. You’re welcome.

It’s been 3 months, so it must be posting time…! Eek. So, where have I been? I finished off my full-time job at the end of December, thinking I would slip right back into freelance editing. Not so, mates. All those rumours about the economy not doing so well? There’s something to those.  I’m rather blessed, though, to have found something else full-time, starting end of January, and I am well pleased cos I need the cash.

Writing has been a tough slog lately, to be honest. I finished draft 2 of my thesis and sent it off to saintly (and I say that with NO irony whatsoever, seriously) thesis advisor at the beginning of January. While I await her comments, I thought I’d get going on a new project, to keep up the practice of writing every day and make it easier once I get said comments back. Initially I thought I’d actually go back to working on one of my older projects, but it’s weird how much I’ve changed over the last while: my writing preoccupations  seem to have become radically different and reading old stuff feels like reading someone else… So, I shall start something new, then, I thought, thought I. Got a few (good, I think) ideas floating around, but I don’t seem to be able to get much down, which is frustrating. I keep telling myself I’m “composting” (letting ideas sit and ferment; or is it foment?) but then the other half of my brain runs about flapping its hands and crying “You’re not WRITING! Therefore you’re not a WRITER! You have nothing to SUBMIT! You are an unproductive member of SOCIETY!” Brainfite! Sigh.  But it’ll come, eventually. I hope.

One of the reasons I really want to start something new is to have work to submit to the rather excellent Coffee Shop Author contest, conceived by my friend Susan Toy. It’s for Canadians only, alas (well, not “alas” for us Canadians!), but if you’re Canadian, do it. DO IT! There’s also the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, but I ain’t got nothin’ for that.

I wish I could write short stories. Just to have work to circulate, submit… Stupid novels.

Where are you going, where have you been?

It’s one of those things I keep meaning to do, and then, you know, 10 months go by… In my defense, right after I wrote that last post (possibly the next day), I was offered a full-time job! As in canyoucomeinforaninterviewonfridaygreatwelikeyoucanyoustartonmonday?, and I feel like I’ve spent most of the rest of the year trying to catch up with myself…

So, this year has, in great part, been about learning to balance time: writing and working full-time. I still haven’t totally figured it out, but this is my ideal process:

• The night before, I think about what I’m going to work on in the morning: have a goal for a scene, or something. I don’t promise myself I’ll write x number of words because that just seems to be an invitation to myself to produce bollocks, but I’ll try and get a complete scene done (or at least end in a place from which I can continue said scene). I have to have an idea of what I’m going to be working on because on weekdays I have like 1.5 hours a day max at the moment (I have to be out the door by 8, so getting up at 5:45 is ideal (I don’t always manage this, mind you, but I try — see below)), and I have to make it count.
• Go to bed as early as I can get away with. Get up early. Use the strongest self-persuasion I have to. I tell myself that if Terry Fox could run across the country on one leg, I can get up and get my ass in a chair. One day away from the project is a slip in momentum, and it’s disaster thereafter.
• For the love of dog, do not open yer internet browser or email.
• Outlining? The verdict’s in: I need to do it, at least once I’m past the first draft. I need planning like mad — Excel spreadsheets! A giant drawing of the shape of my novel (it’s mountain-shaped — surprise!), with character trajectories and sub-plots and and and! Printouts of all my advisor’s words of wisdom, with bits highlighted! If I carry these around with me (except the giant drawing), their mojo seeps into me somehow.

What else is new this year so far? Hmm…

Well, I haven’t looked at the gargantuan novel since that last post. Never did enter the Amazon contest. Next year?

I did the “advanced” side of screenwriting with at UBC this summer. I tried my hand at outlining a full-length feature, without a whole lot of success, but it was a GREAT class; so much learned. Jesus, I’m going to miss these people. I’ll be the alumnus who drifts back year after year…

Mountain Novel has turned into my thesis novel, and I’ve been at that since September (had to hand in a full draft of the novel at the beginning of Sept). It’s going…well, I think! Surprisingly well! I’m enjoying the process! I’ve had excellent notes back from my amazing advisor and I’m really so damn lucky, basically. Of course she hasn’t read all the way to the end yet

And there you go. I do intend to be back in here before another 10 months is up!

All right, yes, I acknowledge it’s already been slightly over a week since I last posted and that does not bode well, but here is my motto for the year, grace a Samuel Beckett:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Things on the work front have been quiet-ish this week (not sure whether to be alarmed about that — is it the economy? — or relieved to get some time off after my hellishly busy Christmas and New Year. Mostly the latter, though), so I’ve been tackling the Amazon ABNA novel, previously called “Fire Eyed Boy” and now provisionally titled “Hold the Time” (do try and keep up). Last Sunday I went through a printed copy and marked it up with stuff to keep, stuff to lose (the funnest part about this process was buying different coloured Post-Its), and was feeling rather disheartened about how BAD the thing was (mawkish, amateur, melodramatic, with a kind of relentless cheeriness to the voice that made me want to strangle whoever had written the thing… oh, wait a second)… and as soon as I’d finished and was digging around on my computer for the files so I could start on-screen editing, I promptly discovered that the version I’d read actually wasn’t the latest, and I had some chunks and bits in other files that are actually NOT THAT BAD, and this discovery got me excited about the thing again.

So now I’m in the middle of building a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a novel, with bits patched together from various versions of the thing (which I fiddled with between 2005 and 2007. It’s amazing to see how my writing changed in that time), stitched together with new bits of writing. I’m aware that this is not the right way to go about things. I’d much rather start from the beginning and rewrite totally, but I don’t have time for that this year. So that’ll (have to) do, Pig. That’ll (have to) do. I’ll send it off to the contest, get summarily rejected, and keep thinking about how to make it better. I just do want to have something to enter.

On the topic of drastically reducing (which is what I’m doing, as the novel got pretty gargantuation — one version is 800 pages, fact fans, with 9,000 (OK not really) sublplots, and I’m just highlighting and deleting vast swathes of text… it’s vertiginous), I came across this yesterday, in a roundabout way because this author had posted the link to her blog on the Editors’ Association of Canada mailing list:

…In the end, it was a relief to cut 5000 words here and there and never look back.

But imagine cutting 500 PAGES of your work. I attended a summer writing workshop at Humber in 2002. I recall Nino Ricci talking about his first novel, and how it was originally 700 pages and if I remember correctly, it involved a lot of references to Jacques Derrida. When Ricci finally examined the manuscript, he found that the story was only about 200 pages and didn’t require Derrida’s approval. Ricci’s novel became Lives of the Saints and it won him a Governor General’s award.

All those words. That’s a lot of muck. It’s like diving in a Canadian Lake. You navigate with a compass because the silt is all stirred up.

You must trust the compass because it’s so easy to get turned around. I wasn’t following any compass when I wrote those extraneous, superfluous chapters. I ended up at the wrong end of the lake. And it’s hard to get out of the lake with all your heavy scuba gear.

I found this seriously heartening and intend to write to her forthwith to thank her!

I also had my critique on Monday and Tuesday for my mountain novel (my UBC novel; the one that used to be called Fraying). It went… really well. I was kind of stunned. I hadn’t expected much of it as I’m still floundering around with a new structure I took on late last year — essentially, the book now takes place over a month instead of in four years (!), and mostly on Aconcagua instead of four different cities, and a whole storyline involving a marriage and a child has been ditched, and I’m trying to get my head around the whole thing and what the thread of the novel is now. Alas, I had a wee freak-out in class about how one thing I was trying wasn’t working, and everyone was so great and positive and encouraging, and I’m excited to get back to that ASAP. If only I knew what my next scene was to be :-/ I’ll just have to write it and find out.

So there you go. That is all that goes on in the writing world of me.

Seriously — August?!

Wow. OK. This seems like a good time to trot out my New Year’s resolutions. Actually, they’re kind of more goals, these writing-related ones:

• Write in this blog at least once a week (as opposed to, like, every six months).
• Revise “Fire Eyed Boy” (it’s too bad I’m hating pretty much all of it… Now I remember why I abandoned the thing in the first place) for the Amazon contest — a contest you might be interested in, if you haven’t heard about it already: see here — but note you’ve only got until Feb 2.
• Finish first draft of “The Book That Used To Be Called Fraying When That Title Still Fitted” (a friend in my novel class calls hers “LEVON”) by June, thereby a) giving myself time to revise before the thesis draft is due in September, and b) giving myself time to get ready for part 2 of the script-writing course out at UBC in July — for which I’ll have to produce a feature-length screenplay… aargh!
• In June, come up with pitch/treatment for aforementioned screenplay. Perhaps a few scenes.
• Get short-story sub ready for the Writers’ Union Postcard Story contest — here — by Feb 14th.

So, hear ye, hear ye etc, let these goals be here in electronic concrete forevermore, for purposes of nagging and derision should they not be completed.

Strangely, as I was writing this, Kevin Alexander (or Kevin Alexander’s people) sent out a notification of his new column — on goals for the new year. Must be something in the air.

When last we left our heroine…

… she was freaking out about her screenwriting course at UBC. Well, I did it and not only did I survive it, but I loved it. The geek in me really responded to the “rules” of it — the structure, the formatting — and actually, when you have setting, dialogue, action and reaction (from the characters) to work with, it’s kinda amazing how much you can get across without that access to inner monologue I was angsting over. And dialogue! Do you know how little dialogue you really need?! (Of course you do; I’m just waking up to this. Ignore me.) I’d write something I thought was pretty minimal, and the rest of the class (we workshopped our scripts — it was a really collaborative process, which was also different and cool) would say, “you don’t need this much,” and I’d strip some more until all I had was the nugget — all I needed. Good lessons learned. Great class, great teacher, great times and fun in Vancouver. I’ll be doing it again next summer, for the last three credits I’ll need in that genre.

Upcoming this fall — more novel! Hurrah! The up-in-the-air novel class has come together and I have to have 80 pages ready by September (insert manic laughter here). But actually, Boyfriend has been away the last couple of weeks and I’ve made seriously good use of my time, and now I have 80 pages all in a row. I have to revise, shuck and winnow (I have no idea if that makes sense — a farming girl I am not), but it’s gonna be OK. I feel like I’ve got to know Remy, my main character, and Sophie, the other main character, a lot better — and most importantly, what they want.

I’ve been reading a book on writing called “From Where You Dream” by Robert Olen Butler (Pulitzer Prize winner, byotch, with a foreword by the amazing Janet Burroway), which is fantastic — I wish to evangelize about it to everyone. I like what he has to say about writing process, and yearning as a tool for character. Write from the heart, he says, and I’m paraphrasing and making it sound unbelievably hokey, but it isn’t when he talks about it; my favourite books and stories get me in the heart. I admire those clever, quirky short stories you seem to get all over the place, but they’re “head” stories, yeah? I don’t feel ‘em.

It’s been a good summer. Lots of writing, lots of relaxing, perhaps not *quite* enough work (although that’s picking up) — it’s always the one and not the other –  lots of getting in touch with old friends, too, via the wee miracle that is Facebook. Life=good, and now I’m hitting publish and hitting the novel file. Later.

Bright Shiny Morning

This is so snarky, as The Believer would say, but it made me guffaw in several places: John Crace’s Digested Read: Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey.