I remember what it’s like trying to write a scene too far from the here and now without adequate background information. It’s akin to trying to paint without colors.
I’d need to describe a room, and I’d have no idea what the walls or floor would be made of. So then I’d have to read about how stone is quarried, and about different types of roofs, and make some decisions about the availability of wood, which in turn entails some decisions about geography, maps, and placement of forests. Several hours later I might come back to my scene and eke out a sentence. Only to discover that I now need to know if the windows would have glass, which means researching the history of glass-making …
No. I’ve been firm in my conviction that I’m going to do all the research I expect to need before attempting a single line of prose. I want the geographies and the cultures and the technologies and the languages spread out before me like colors on an artist’s palette, so that the times when I have to halt everything and drive to the art supply store for a new pigment are mercifully few and far between.
Jak’s style, on the other hand, is much more ad hoc. He wants to outline the plot in considerable detail, but would be happier doing most of the worldbuilding on the fly. He’s never argued with my need to do it all up front, but he’s already showing signs of dismay at the amount of time it takes … and I’ve only covered a fraction of what I believe we need.
I suspect he feels like until we’re setting down prose we’re not really writing, and fears that perhaps we never will — that it will be all buildup and no payoff. I can understand this, but I can’t effectively reassure him, because I’ve never done anything on this scale before. I think this will work out, but I can’t be certain.
Last week I ran across this interview with Tim Powers:
How long does it take you to write a novel? And what do you make of the whole idea that a successful novelist ought to write a novel a year?
It takes me a long time. Longer than I can really justify, I guess. But I do have to do a powerful lot of reading before I can even figure what sort of plot would fit into the period I’m writing about and the things that were going on then. I take heaps of notes, make dozens of long, cross-indexed files! And I freely let myself get sidetracked on peripheral topics, which generally don’t prove to be useful (though it’s very nice when they do!). And then I have to figure out my plot and characters, in a lot of detail since I want to have made the tricky decisions in the outlining stage rather than be surprised by them as I’m writing—though inevitably a few sneak in anyway. All this winds up taking about a year, somehow.
Then all that’s left is to write it; and with revisions and all, if the book is in the neighborhood of 200,000 words, that takes about a year too. And then the editor usually has some suggestions for revisions, which prove to be good ideas.
If I wrote a novel a year, they wouldn’t be the sorts of novels I write. They might be better, objectively!—but in my eyes, at least, they wouldn’t be what they could be. The real reason to write fiction, after all, isn’t to make money, nor to show the human heart in conflict with itself, nor to give a picture of one’s time, nor to call attention to the plight of any oppressed classes, but to show off. You want to be able to say to visitors, “Sit down, let me clear that stuff off the couch, it’s copies of my new novel.” And to show off effectively, I want each book to be as close as I can get it to what I want it to be. It’s like making six-foot-tall replicas of Gothic cathedrals out of toothpicks in your basement—you might as well get all the saints’ faces right.
I found this immensely reassuring, as it all sounds very much like me and the way I work. When I told Jak, he half-laughed, half-groaned at the thought of a whole year of pre-writing. I honestly hope to have it done in less time than that, but it’s likely to be measured in months rather than weeks, which is tough. For both of us. I am very fond of instant gratification, and this novel process is the antithesis of that.
But damn it, if we’re going to make six-foot-tall replicas of Gothic cathedrals out of toothpicks, we might as well get all the saints’ faces right!
There’s a famous cartoon where two scientists confer over an elaborate equation, the middle step of which reads ‘then a miracle occurs …’.
That’s been the plot outline of our first novel — a complex escalation followed by a gaping hole where the climactic scene should be, indicated by ‘some powerfully big magic happens here’.
But it couldn’t be just any powerfully big magic, and finding something that would fit in that very precisely-shaped hole had been stumping us for weeks. Yesterday I think we finally carved out an answer.
I’m not quite ready to trust it — I’m still half-afraid one of us will realize some terrible overlooked flaw that sends us back to the drawing board. If this does work, though, then we have all the major story elements of book one in place, and the rest is just details.
Lots and lots of details.
Dear Jak,
You know that desk you moved out of Claire’s room last weekend and left in the hallway, where it still remains despite my earlier strong suggestion that you remove it to the living room?
It is a dark-colored desk in a dark hall, directly outside the office door. During this particular period of early-morning insomnia I have so far unwittingly attempted to occupy the same physical space as the desk a total of three times. I expect fully one third of the surface area of my lower body will soon be sporting a variety of interesting colors ranging from yellow to purple. The blood loss has so far been manageable, but I note forlornly the loss of several smaller toenails.
Granted, I am a hopeless clutz and also egregiously slow to learn from experience. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that my continued ability to walk is in your own best interest — I know you’d hate to be stuck with all the grocery shopping — and plead once again that you remove this obstacle before I become permanently impaired.
All my love,
Karawynn
Jak brought five more fantasy novels home from the library today, as part of our ‘survey every reasonably successful fantasy book/series from the last decade’ project.
From this you may correctly gather that I’ve not been doing so previously. It’s an odd reversal for me, as I was insatiable for fiction as a child and young adult. I was the kid who’d bring a book to gym class. In my twenties I’d regularly devour three or four books a week.
In recent years, however, my patience for less-than-perfect fiction writing has steadily diminished and now approaches zero. My standards are just too high, hardly anything can touch them. (Like I said: crotchety and hard to please.)
Despite what I thought were appropriately low expectations, I have been disappointed by most of what I’ve seen so far. In a few cases I was actually appalled.
I considered posting short reviews here, but on reflection decided that would do far more harm than good. Some of these authors are people I know (and even like); it’s probable that I will cross paths with many others if Jak and I stay on this road. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and I am awkward enough making small talk with strangers at conventions without worrying about whether they secretly hate me for publicly scorning their magnum opus.
So I may grouse about the quality of published fantasy in general, but I will only mention something by name if I can bring myself to recommend it without adding caveats and qualifications.
Thus far that list has a single entry: Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon is … well, ‘charming’ is the word that comes to mind. It’s too different from the type of thing we’re trying to write to be any sort of useful model, but it’s the one thing I’ve read this month that I’ve been able to actually enjoy.
And the marathon continues …
So as I mentioned, Jak and I are writing a novel together. Technically, we’re not actually writing yet, and it’s no longer just one novel, but the phrase will serve.
This is the first in an open series of posts about that process.
The seed of this particular story was planted in February 2005, at around 11p, in bed in our hotel room at Radcon. By 2a we had a decent-sized sapling — several characters, a magic system, and some key plot points.
We made a little more progress on the worldbuilding after we came home, but soon we were both working full-time day jobs with long commutes — lovely from a financial standpoint, lousy for our energy level and available time. So after the initial spurt, our little tree lay dormant for another four years.
This year, thanks to a crashing economy, we are once again in a ‘low employment’ situation, meaning that one and sometimes both of us are working fewer than 40 hours per week. Also important: Claire is now ten and requires less constant attention than she did at six. If we were ever seriously going to do this thing, now seemed like the time.
We started slow, making Monday evenings ‘Novel Night’: takeout dinner and several hours of brainstorming and development. About three weeks in, I suddenly went cold-turkey on WoW, which freed up a non-trivial amount of my time*. Some of those hours went into research; others went into reading, as I decided I should have a wider knowledge of successful fantasy fiction from the current decade.
Jak ramped up to match my involvement, and our one day a week became three to four. Many long conversations — ideas tossed back and forth, ideas shot down mid-flight, ideas transmuted. Meanwhile, my market research led me to accept that our chances of selling even an excellent standalone novel were slim compared to the chances of selling a series, and we agreed to expand the story across multiple books.
So now our little sapling must become not just a full tree but an entire bloody grove. For someone whose prior comfort zone stopped at ‘shrub’, that’s more than a little daunting.
I underestimated the power of my perfectionist streak. Should know myself better than that …
I genuinely had every intention of using a premade WordPress theme and just tweaking it slightly. I even had a decent one picked out. But naturally this turned out to be an exercise in a hundred tiny annoyances and dissatisfactions, so after about an hour I tossed it and started rolling my own code and design. From scratch.
Took me two long days of doing not much else to get to this point (which made for a very mopey Jak, as I’ve been unavailable for working on our novel). It’s bare-bones at the moment, so I’ll be adding features as I go, and I’m sure I’ve missed some style combinations that will crop up as it gets further use.
But I am happy with it, which is saying a lot, because these days I am crotchety and very hard to please.
Caveat: If you’re using IE 7 you’re probably seeing some mess, because this is my party and I refuse to spend hours attempting to cater to a crappy browser. IE 8, Firefox, and Safari all work properly.
More details on the site page.
