Writing whine

[ellarien]

It is now slightly thereafter ...

But that wasn't what I wanted to post about.

I'm feeling somewhat disenchanted with the Behemoth novel at the moment. It's been stalled at just over 100K words, give or take a few brief false starts, since May or thereabouts when the heat and the travel started to make it hard to keep to routine, and I can't rouse myself to much enthusiasm for finishing it. There's still a lot that needs to happen in between now and the ending, certainly more than 20K worth; hero and heroine have only just met, after a long online acquaintance, for one thing.

The trouble is, I have a horrible feeling that the words so far are not only the wrong words, but describing entirely the wrong subset of events. There's a multi-planet-spanning civilization on the verge of economic collapse in the aftermath of a war a generation ago, a tragic Ahab-esque Captain, hyperspace pirates and enigmatic aliens and a peevish semi-sentient computer ... but most of what has actually happened on stage so far seems to involve messing about with thumb drives and cellphones, drinking coffee, and trapesing through endless corridors. Once I get to the end, I'm going to have to go right back to the beginning and try to find the right bits to put in instead.

It might have been more efficient to start with a proper outline, but nothing happened when I tried to write one. If I didn't have three more or less coherent novel-length objects lying around, I'd be starting to think I wasn't cut out for this novel-writing business at all.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should have called it "Reasonably Large and Manageable 47," then!

The lurkers support you in novel-writing angst.

[ellarien]

Thanks!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it might be a good idea to set it aside for a time, and do something else. And when you're ready, read it all in one go, and see what shape it takes for you. That might give you the ending.

[ellarien]

Yes, I probably need to give myself permission to write something else for a bit. (What that might be is a different question.)

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Novels are large and frustating projects to wrestle with.

John Braine, in his how to write book called, appropriately enough, How to Write A Novel uses a method that might fit your situation. Namely he writes an exploratory draft, then works out what the story is really about and produces an sysnopsis/outline, then he re-writes the novel according to the outline because by then he knows what the important scenes really were.

Though on thinking about what you've said above, perhaps all the large scale stuff is merely background and the real story is small scale?

[ellarien]

The exploratory-draft thing does seem to be how it's working out -- assuming it ever works out at all.

The scale issue is awkward. In a sense it's a story about two families shattered by a wartime incident, but there's a much larger issue that will get incidentally solved when the family members find each other again. And my tragic captain can't seem to decide whether he minds more that he lost his son or lost the war ...

Outlines

[barbara-hambly.livejournal.com]

Depends on what you mean by, "outline." I make scribbly sort of notes of how the action gets from Point A to Point B to The End, just to make sure that it CAN get to the end. I don't hold myself to it, but it's a compass to keep me from getting lost and wandering away.
My husband George used to say that many times, what feels like writer's block (something he was no stranger to, poor soul) is actually simply your subconscious telling you that you're walking down the wrong road. He said, "Go back to the last crossroad, and go the other way."
Don't know if that helps, but it's my experience, for what it's worth.

Re: Outlines

[ellarien]

Thank you. I have various notes scattered around, scribbled or online, and I know roughly what has to happen and what happened in the past, but for this one I think I could really have used a list of what happens and what is revealed in each chapter.

The thing about the crossroads made me smile, because the current scene has the heroine dodging through a maze of corridors pursued by suspected pirates. I think there are some wrong turns further back than that, though.

One thing's for sure; just sitting down every night and trying to emit 500 words isn't going to help until I get some of this stuff straightened out.