Category Archives: writing

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So, what’s next? – a progress report

desk

My sun-room window overlooks a swamp, which is currently full of leafless trees. They’re dripping with fresh rain that should have come down in the form of three or four inches of fluffy snow. Our little flock of ducks are happily waddling about the yard grubbing, for who knows what, in the muddy ground. I, however, am sitting here, thinking about writing and not actually doing it.

Right now, my current project has progressed to being about 1/2 to 3/4s done with chapter 16 (for context, this is about 72,000 words through the book). The next few chapters charge into territory I haven’t yet covered in any draft. This is partly because the original ‘next chapter’ has been moved off to chapter one of the subsequent book. However, that’s not the main reason it’s uncharted for me. While it’s true I’ve spent countless hours on nit-picky details, various bits of polishing, and improvement in content and craft, I’ve never been this close to the end of a book.

Instead of all of the motivation and excitement I should be feeling, I’m dreading what’s coming next. Shouldn’t I be pleased with my progress? After all, I’ve nearly passed an important milestone in my writing career. For whatever reason, I just can’t mentally bring myself to that place. It’s not that I’m totally lost on what to do next. In fact, what needs to happen is pretty clear, but it’s going to be difficult, and like anything that seems hard, it’s causing me a major procrastination jag.

The ending has to be tidy, exciting, and fill in some open questions, while at the same time building up to the next book. Most importantly, everything needs to come to the inevitable ending that’s not so predictable the reader knew how it was going to end by somewhere in the 4th chapter. I seriously doubt I’m going to have that problem. What I may have trouble with though is making that riveting and inevitable ending plausible.

I suppose the only course of action here is to just get the lead out. Once I get started, the last few chapters shouldn’t really take more than a few weeks to draft up. As always, there’s revision and polishing to clean up any messes, and feedback from those helpful test-readers who have already given me a tremendous amount of help.

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Thinking about the information dump #4

thinking

This post was actually a comment on a different thinking about the information dump, but I like it and it deserves it’s own post. So, to give proper credit, this post comes from Pontius Cominius. Visit Pontius’ site (if you don’t, I’ll know!):

https://pontiuscominius.wordpress.com/

This is an angle I hadn’t considered, but should have. It is an elementary kind of problem that gets at the root of other problems. This comment is also one of the reasons I blog on writing. Thank you, Pontius’, for sharing this thought.

 

Lemme throw in the fourth alternative. It’s sort of like Fog of War, which isn’t just a setting on many different war games that allows you to look at the enemy troop dispositions. Fog of War, or rather, Fog of Life, is that there are no pat explanations for most things that happen to you. If I’m driving on a freeway and then there’s a traffic jam, and I finally get to the end of the jam and there’s NOTHING THERE, it annoys me greatly. I want to know why we were slowing when there’s no apparent reason. It could be that there was a phantom accident there from 2 hours ago, and the traffic is still clearing, or a dog ran across the freeway 3 minutes ago and now is gone or squished, but regardless, as a normal enough human my curiosity has not been sated.

In the infodump world, I’d turn on the radio and they’d announce there had been an accident there and there was still slowing even though the accident cleared, or the know-it-all character in the passenger seat would announce, “I saw that accident there two hours ago, I should have warned you.” In real life, that very rarely happens. I go on with driving to my destination and I don’t know why I was in that traffic, but I can guess.

Likewise, in your fantasy story, to drive your narrative on, skip the infodumps and the know-it-all character. The KIAC is a pain in the keester, because the reader will say, “if KIAC knows it all, why doesn’t HE do the quest?” And the author mumbles something about KIAC not being suitable, not wanting to take it on, and so on.

Further, human nature leads most of us to avoid embarrassment by asking obvious questions. If I hear a conversation where some writers are talking about Kee-ack, if I have no skin in the game I may ask “what’s a Kee-ack?” And they’d say “Know-it-all character.” If I was worried about losing face or respect, I’d keep my mouth shut because I’m afraid the authors will mock me later or even right now for not knowing.

My seven year old frequently doesn’t know words I use. I have to prompt him to find out – “do you know what _________ means?” “No.” Explanation then follows. I know that his level of understanding isn’t high, he’s seven. Your character who is thrust into this old war with rules he does not understand is going to either have to be an extraordinary person who will ask the questions, or he will go through being ignorant and suffering for it. Which kind of character is he? People don’t usually volunteer helpful information to new people. You gotta be proactive.

There’s more conflict in the ignorance, if you think about it. Your characters only know what they each know, and it’s compartmentalized, and they don’t share important information with each other, they don’t always realize that something important is important, and you end up with confusion and ignorance and conflict.

An example is Pearl Harbor. There was a radar station set up on Oahu and it was manned when the Japanese air attack first came in. We know that it was a massive air attack. The radar operators thought it was a glitch of the new machinery. The higher ups either disregarded it or didn’t get the message. What if they’d scrambled the air assets to get armed and up in the air, and gotten the ships ready with ammo and men to man the AA guns and fought? Was there even time enough for that? It’s the hindsight we have to see the clumsy ignorance of people having pieces of the puzzle but not knowing there was a puzzle or that their piece was key.

Finally, your KIAC is flesh and blood and has opinions and thoughts and fuzzy, incomplete or just wrong information. He’s biased. And that bias is going to come out in the information he gives your protagonist. He may be well-meaning, or he may be envious of your protagonist and set him up with dangerous or bad information. That gives you more conflict and if you can’t trust the KIAC, it introduces a level of paranoia to things. Nothing is black or white.

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Writer’s improvement hell – repetition

Improvement

I thought I had a good post on this topic, but I’m not sure I do. There isn’t one specific improvement situation that I feel like I can speak to just now. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff I’m constantly working on, but nothing in particular is sicking out in my mind. So, instead of banging on about what I’m stuck on today, I think I’ll ramble on about a couple of things I’m constantly working on. The first is starting sentences. One of the things I try to do when I write is NOT start subsequent sentences, or even sentences in the same paragraph, with the same word. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but most of the time it’s not. Even then, I still find myself being repetitive in this manner. Perhaps the first question one might ask is why bother? Well, it’s because it reads better that way. If I truly understood why this was, I wouldn’t be in writer’s improvement hell.

If you look at my last paragraph, you’ll notice that none of the sentences begin with the same word. The first draft had several repeats, but once it was revised to specifically eliminate these, the flow of the paragraph got better. I’m not going to try and claim it’s a golden example of how to write anything, but it does read reasonably well. Had multiple sentences started with the same word, it would feel repetitive, and that never reads well. Again, there are times when it just makes sense to repeat, so keep that in mind. An interesting side note here is when developing a presentation, I take the same approach. This tends to make the presentation seem more dynamic and less scripted. To make this work though, you need to kick in throw-away words. In the case of paragraph 1 of this blog post (for lack of a better example just now) The second sentence starts with ‘Sure’. This is absolutely unnecessary, the sentence could have just started with “there’s”. If I had done that though, it would have felt a little repetitive. Granted, not so repetitive that it would have sounded awful, but it seems better to me.

Having gone through that, there is a second writer’s improvement problem to be dealt with. That first paragraph still has a problem as far as readability is concerned. It’s the type of thing that drives my sister nuts (I’m not sure she reads these with any regularity, if so: Hello KDW and congratulations on your test!), the word ‘I’, in various incarnations, is repeated WAY too many times. This sort of repetition is probably not necessary. When writing in 3rd person, you get stuck using ‘him’, ‘his’, ‘he’, ‘her’, and ‘she’ a little more often than feels comfortable, but I couldn’t claim I’ve got an easy rule of thumb or remedy for that. There is, however, a remedy for paragraph #1. And here it is:

I sat down thinking there was a good topic for this post rolling around in my brain. Turns out, there wasn’t a specific situation I’m working through right now worth speaking to. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff I’m constantly trying to improve upon, but nothing in particular is sicking out in my mind. So, instead of banging on about today’s sticky points, I’ll ramble on about a couple of things constantly causing me heartburn. The first is starting sentences. One of the things I try to do when writing is to NOT start subsequent sentences, or even sentences in the same paragraph, with the same word. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but most of the time it’s not. Even then, this sort of repetition creeps into my writing. Perhaps the first question one might ask is why bother? Well, it’s because it reads better that way. If the technical reason was clear to me, I wouldn’t be in writer’s improvement hell.

In the second incarnation of the first paragraph, the word ‘I’, in various incarnations, is repeated a total of six times. The first paragraph has it repeated that many times in the first two sentences. Holy crap! Is that strictly necessary? –Probably not. Now, the best part of this whole post is the fact that the issue illustrated here is something I’m constantly struggling with, and often get wrong. On the bright side, I do recognize the problem, and more than anything else, that will help me to fix it.