Ian Wood: February 2010 Archives

Festering spleens, I can't stay here ten solar days. I have a book to write!

Calm down, you can relax, please. You're on your blog. It's safe here, you're among friends

Good lord, I hope so. I see Evil. And he's got that funky...skull-carousel thing going on. I hate that shit. I mean: you hang out with a guy in Manchester for years, he's your mate, right? And one day he's Henry VI! Then...then there's drinking, and you lose a decade or two, and then bang-pow! He's Evil! And not just any Evil. The Evil.

Do you...know what year it is?

Of course I do, I'm not a fucking idiot. It's 2012.

And do you know where you are?

I'm on my blog. What is all this bullshit? Who the fuck are you?

I'm here to help you.

Like hell you are. Bring me a sandwich, that'll help me.

We'll get you lunch soon. Can you tell me, do you remember where you were before you came here?

Of course.  I was in Ross Dress For Less, looking for one of those velvet-looking sport coats that turn up there, and...hey, hey, what's that?

What's what? Please, sit down.

What's that on your fucking head, that's what!

Be calm, please. My head is just like your head, it's the same.

Like hell it is! My head doesn't have a biomechanical...whatever the fuck that is sprouting out of it!

Please, sit back down. Please be calm. You're becoming very agitated.

I'm becoming agitated because you're a goddamn freakish...wait, you're him! You're Evil! You're going to end up a cinder in the microwave and blow up my parents and then Sean Connery's going to wink at me and leave even though I'm an orphan because they only had him for a two days' shooting!

Actually, I'm Terry Gilliam. I am surrounded by people who don't listen to me. I told them I needed him for longer, but...accountants, you know.

Don't blame it in the accountants, you bastard, that ending made no sense and scarred me for life!

Say...is that Black Tar Brand™ heroin?

Why, yes...yes it is. Would you like some?

Yes. Yes I would. Very much. Here, let's use my works.

And that, my friends, is how I ended up doing heroin with Terry Gilliam.

Welp kiddies, it's deadline week again, and that means I've got four chapters to kick out the door between now and Friday PM. We'll see how that fits in with this here blog thing.

It shouldn't be too bad, relative to, say, getting hit in the face with a dead pelican. Two of those four are already written...sort of...meaning that there are at least three or four versions of them, which can be mashed together and revised. It's the two chapters that only exist as [INSERT AWESOME STORYTELLING HERE] in the outline that are troublesome.

So I'm off to go do that.

Sorry about the seabird.

I was going to write another post about arrogance and confidence and so on, but @DanielleLaPorte pointed me towards "How To Be As Confident As This Pig" on Josh Hargarne's blog, and I really don't have anything to add to that, so if you're hankerin' to read about ego and confidence and so on in particular, go there and do that. Meanwhile, I'll be writing here about a different yet tangentially-related thing. But if you go off to check out Josh's thing, this one will still be here. Amazing, what they can do nowadays with pixels and tubes and whatnot.

One of the reasons I took my January hiatus was because I needed to take a break from reading about writing, publishing, agents, contracts, Amazon shitting itself, and all of the other things which are necessary bits of knowledge to have while building a career but peripheral to the creative act of writing itself. I was swamped by everyone else's ideas and in danger of losing sight of my own, so I dropped out of sight. It was a good thing to do, and it feels good to discover I was actually missed (here and elsewhere).

I've never been a focused person--at least, I don't think so, other people in my life have disagreed--mainly because my interests and curiosity are broad. This is generally a good quality to have, but can make it difficult to sit still long enough to, say, write a novel. The rest of my life is full of real-life type things that take up time, so I spent January assessing what my own priorities are and figuring out what I needed to do to finish this book I've started. The first thing I decided to do was to stop listening to how other people write. The second thing I decided to do was cut short my nascent efforts to get involved with online writing communities.

Both of those decisions resulted from the same realization: at this point in my life my time is very limited, and I'd reached the point where I needed to discover my methodology and focus entirely on my work. There's a lot of good advice about writing out there, but I've been reading about writing for almost three decades, and the returns have diminished to the point where--right now--it's not worth it. If I'm going to invest time in reading, I'm going to read fiction, not books about fiction.

Some of the advice that's out there has to do with the benefits of community, and I'm sure that for a great many people such involvement is invaluable. But the thing about communities, particularly those built around writing, is that they take up time. You can't really join up without committing yourself to reading the works in progress of others, and thinking critically about them, and offering your thoughtful and constructive opinions. Not, that is, if you expect others to do the same for your work. Unless you're an asshole, there's got to be giving to accompany the taking. I made the decision to prioritize my creative work over that of other people.

But I still needed feedback and criticism. Useful feedback and criticism. I also needed some expert help in getting over my 25,000 word hump. I've got a drawer full of unfinished projects here, and all of them died around the 25,000 word mark. I don't know why, but clearly there is some barrier that I have heretofore lacked sufficient creative steam to either power over or smash through (I call it a hump, see, but it could be a wall...or maybe a pit of some kind, or an expanse of sticky tar with, like...spikes in it...or something...).

In my current situation, there was really only one way to get regular, focused, and useful criticism without any expectation of reciprocation: hire someone to give it to me.

That was a big leap for me, and I don't regret it. I happened to know someone with over two decades in the business, who lived on my side of the continent, who I clicked with--which is vital; you don't want to work with someone whose criticisms are based on their failure to understand rather than your failure to properly express. She's cheaper per hour than my therapist was, she doesn't blow smoke up my ass, and I'm confident that when the time comes to kick said ass, she'll do so. Best money I've ever spent.

I'm not telling you all this by way of advice, because it'd be ridiculous for me to tell you that what you need to do is hire a development editor.¹ However, I'm confident enough to suggest that the key transferable bit of my little process here is the identification of my priorities, the peculiarities of my unique situation, and--most importantly--the honest assessment of my weaknesses. I know what my strengths are, but those aren't what fucks a man up, now are they? Maybe what works for you, your situation, and your weaknesses is gathering a little local group of aspiring writers together and meeting in a dive bar once a week to get drunk and hack each other to literary bits.

What's important is knowing when you've listened enough, and knowing when it's time to start feeding your own creative beast whatever meat it wants, regardless of what any Expert says.

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¹Just as it's silly for Warren Ellis to say, "If you don’t have some kind of kit for capturing ideas, even if it’s a 50p reporter’s notebook and a pencil from the local shop for local people, you’re doing it wrong." Lots of folks do that, lots of folks recommend doing that (which keeps Moleskine in business), and it works for them. I've always been of the opinion that if I can't remember an idea that came from my own skull it isn't worth remembering, and as I have a prodigious memory, that's worked pretty well for me. So: not doing it wrong, thanks.

Awhile back I snagged a .JPG of a pencil drawing to use in one of my posts. It was original artwork, so I made the image a hyperlink, back to the site I snagged it from.

The artist, having spied my link via his referral logs, wasn't pleased. Not mad, mind you, but he sent me a note saying that while he appreciated the link, he would've appreciated asking permission and actual name attribution more. So I did the latter, adding his name with a proper © symbol. I also apologized, because it was a naughty thing to do. Since then I've made proper attribution wherever possible (which isn't very often), and I check for Creative Commons or other usage directives (which aren't very common). I know that I've missed some, or grabbed a graphic that someone lifted from someone else. Content undergoes its own evolution and migration once it's been released into the wilds of the Internet, and it's often difficult to keep track of what came from where.

This, however, is a different order of business:

It usually takes an author decades to win fawning reviews, march up the best-seller list and become a finalist for a major book prize. Helene Hegemann, just 17, did it with her first book, all in the space of a few weeks, and despite a savaging from critics over plagiarism.

The publication last month of her novel about a 16-year-old exploring Berlin’s drug and club scene after the death of her mother, called “Axolotl Roadkill,” was heralded far and wide in German newspapers and magazines as a tremendous debut, particularly for such a young author. The book shot to No. 5 this week on the magazine Spiegel’s hardcover best-seller list.

For the obviously gifted Ms. Hegemann, who already had a play (written and staged) and a movie (written, directed and released in theaters) to her credit, it was an early ascension to the ranks of artistic stardom. That is, until a blogger last week uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel “Strobo,” by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes

The author has apologized for not being "more open about her sources" (in German, here), and acknowledgments have been added to the second edition. But she has also

...defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

How, exactly, does one go about creating something new when originality does not exist? Granted, Ms. Hegemann herself doesn't use the phrase "something new," that's an interpretation by the New York Times reporter. But what she does say is this:

“I myself don’t feel it is stealing, because I put all the material into a completely different and unique context and from the outset consistently promoted the fact that none of that is actually by me.”

So you're not the plagiarist...your narrator is.

I have a project I'm working on. It's a first person narrative about a fellow who thinks he's Nick Carraway, to the point that he's written a novel that is a word-for-word copy of The Great Gatsby. But I'll make it clear in my press releases that it's not me writing, it's this deluded guy who thinks he's Nick Carraway.

Genius!

I understand how easy it is to run afoul of someone else's copyright. I also understand that it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. But to claim that there's no such thing as originality? To hide behind a fictional construct as justification for your ignorance?

Ex post facto bullshit.

It's true that the lines of creative ownership are blurring, but in this case they're clear and bold.

RELATED:

The Online Photographer hears from Harlan Ellison. [Via @neilhimself.]

Which is my way of saying I am just swamped. But my pages are due tomorrow night, so I'm going to plow through these chapters here--a revisin' machine, that's me and no mistake--and check back in here after that, when the dust settles and the cleaners have gotten the blood out of the carpet.

There are as many theories about novel outlines as there are novelists. I've never worked from an outline, which might be one reason (among many others) that I've got a file cabinet full of unfinished manuscripts. It does not, however, explain their noisy lovemaking what keeps me up at night. Worse than peacocks in a cement mixer, they are.

When I finally decided to seek a guide and find my way out of my rut (no ordinary ditch, this was a vast untrammeled wilderness of fear and stalling, well-populated by nasty mole ratses with red eyes and dangerous leathery flying things with mocking cries and loose bowels), the first task she set before me was an outline. That didn't take very long, because I've had the bulk of the tale floating around my head for quite some time. There were only a couple of plot surprises, minor new happenings that I didn't know about.

The true surprise was the mere fact of the outline itself. It was only twenty-three pages long. But once I committed the full story to paper, I could see that it actually had a coherent shape. There was a beginning, rising action, a climax, a dénouement. I discovered that I had done a much better job of story creation than I thought. There it was: love! Explosions! Transsexual hijinks! Oh my, yes.

Prior to this, I had been thinking of an outline as a supporting structure, skeletal, something to hang the meat of the story on before sending it off to shamble about the landscape. When I finished the outline, I saw it as more of a flume, something to contain the rushing waters of the tale as they bear the reader along through high-banked curves and precipitous drops towards the end. Some authors see an outline as too restrictive, preferring to ramble along and let the story find itself as they write. But I do all that rambling in my head. Late at night when sleep flees and teases like a...fleeing, teasing thing...I review plots and, more importantly, characters. Who is this person? I would ask myself. And myself would chide me, saying, You know, she really wouldn't react this way...you're forcing her to behave in a way that serves the plot, which is nonsense. Stop it at once! Likewise, I snapped out of a near-doze and killed off an entire sub-plot at 2:30 in the morning when I realized that it was the desperate and insecure flailing of someone who lacked narrative confidence.¹ Once I had the outline before me, I knew that I'd made the right decision.

Every writer has different methods that work for them, and any Expert who tells you that This Is How It's Done is full of crap. You'll only know what works for you after you've tried a method and discovered its utility for yourself. At best, reading several variations of Successful Writer Person Writes About Writing will provide you with a variety of choices. Yes, there are certain immutable truths--writers write, James Patterson is a conglomerate, agent's assistants like chocolate--but nobody can tell you how to get your words onto your pages. You have to figure that out for yourself.

For me, this outline marked the end of the story development process. That's not to say that the plot won't continue to evolve. But the flume course is laid out now, the water is pouring down it, and I'm in ready to ride it and flash my tits at the camera during the big drops.

Let's see...amusement park metaphor...tits...yes, my work is done here.

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¹Killing off a sub-plot is a highly technical and writerly operation that involves removing the 3x5 index card with "Headshot in the park" written on it from the center column of plotty 3x5 cards and tacking it in a lonely corner of the cork board, where it sits and thinks about what a naughty distraction it's been.

I do!

First, I failed to acquire a Time Turner that actually works (these people are deceptive thieves who need a beating). I also failed in my bid to slow the rotation of the earth, mainly because I couldn't get a decent grip on the Santa Ynez mountains. Thus! Stuck with a mere 24 hours in every day and no way to slow them, I had to make a choice, and my choice was to actually get serious about The Book.

So, with the ongoing assistance of a swell development editor who promises to kick my ass, I've got the outline outline for Walk of the Night People committed to paper. I know what's going to happen, and when, and why. I've got eleven existing chapters to revise mightily, another fourteen chapters to write, and a schedule to drive me. The first draft should be complete in six months at the outside.

I still believe that maintaining an online presence is a necessity for the mod'ren author. I also believe that maintaining a balance between public writing and private creative effort is crucial. I've been out of balance, and Writebastard was siphoning off energy that I needed to pour into my fiction. Without fiction output this blog devolves from somewhat pointless to utterly superfluous. I took the first month of 2010 to decide what I actually wanted to do with my creative life, and then implemented a plan to get it done.

Now, I am so planned and implemented. I am the most planny implementarian this side of the Tigris. I am a locus of negative entropy so deep and vast that teacups broken within three blocks of my desk reassemble themselves in deference to my creative singularity. If I moved to D.C. you would soon receive notice of your free national health care coverage and a request for tissue samples so that they could begin cloning the replacement organs you'll need when you're 114.

A very exciting time, bookwise. Even though there was nothing truly surprising in the outline--the plot's been mostly set, in my head, for a few months--putting all of the pieces together on paper was revelatory: there's a shape to the tale, which wasn't entirely apparent while I was doing the mental work. A beginning, middle, and end, a proper pattern of action and character that unfolds in the way that People Who Know About Such Things say it should. That's not to say I've conformed to some standardized method of plotting a novel. But the arc of the tale I'm telling feels like a good one. I'm done with the mental heavy lifting. Now I get to write, and have fun. Watch this space! I'll tell you all about it, right here (you are so very interested, I know).

Actually, of course you are. You wouldn't be here if you weren't. That's how it's supposed to work...unless you're like this guy Günther I met in Munich who was devoting his life to the singular pursuit of boredom. I last saw him in a café on Einsteinstraße right after the Wall came down, wild-eyed and chain-smoking shitty French cigarettes, half out of his mind with the notion that his pursuit of ennui had become interesting.

Poor bastard.