The Furious 350...

Less background, more stuff about writing, specifically my personal writing habits...

Every book/blog on writing mentions something about "how much","when", and "how often", and the oft-loathed recommendation that one must write every damned day, day in, day out, forever, on and on, rain or shine, hell or high water 'til your fingers are nothing but hardened callouses... write even if its drivel, poorly thought out, self-indulgent nonsense poured into a moleskin writing notebook. Just write you fools, write anything, write, write, write!!! It doesn't matter what you're writing about!

Stop...

Like everything, there's a happy medium, a workable pragmatism. To just write for the sake of writing, while a noble notion, isn't necessarily good advice in my opinion. I suppose if your goal is to keep a personal journal, or a personal blog (like this one!) yes, by all means, write whatever's on your mind. But if your goal is to one day become a published fiction writer, then my take is that putting words to paper should require a bit of pre-planning and thought.

I am an outliner, and while many view the outline as a painful shackle unnecessarily burdening the writer, I can't live without one. "I just let the characters take me wherever they want to go!" is an oft repeated retort among the anti-outlining crowd. And that may be fine, if that's what you're going for.... but this stream of conscious fiction writing, for me, is more painful than 'following the script'. I started out writing this way, but what ended up happening was a plot-holed mess that meandered needlessly, driving up word count unnecessarily, and creating a Sisyphean revision task I had no stomach for . So, I work from an outline for novel writing. It's painful at the git-go, yes, it's not fun, but it allows me to power through my "Furious 350"....

Most of my writing is done in my head, during the drive to/from work, spacing out in the shower, what some people call 'daydreaming.' Working within the context of a pre-outlined chapter, I know typically what constitutes 350 words worth of a scene. It's a manageable word count (BTW, "It's" in this sentence is word 350 of this post) and easily doable sitting down for an hour to an hour and a half each evening. I know what I need to accomplish so then it's a matter of just "gettin' the words out.". Of course that's the idea, some days are easier then others, others are downright tedious and excruciating.

I myself write everyday. Not because it's good for me, like drinking thirty glasses of water a day, but because really 350 words isn't that much to be honest. Professional writers typically crank out 1000 to 2000 words a day, but that's their day job. That sort of throughput nets them a novel in three months or so. Typical novels are around 80K to 120K, lower usually if it's the writer's debut novel. (First time novels above 130K words are very rare.) By my math, if I write 350 words a day, every day, I'm clocking in at 10K words a month, which will get me up to a novel length manuscript in 8 to 10 months....

Sounds too soulless? too mechanical? Perhaps. It's discipline. It's exercise. It's like going to the gym everyday. (BTW, I can't do the gym... I've tried, man, have I tried...). But when it comes to writing, I don't believe in the 'muse' or the need for daily inspiration/affirmation. It's simpler than that. I write my 350 when I've had a crappy day at work, I write my 350 when I'm 30K ft above Iowa, when it's Christmas, when I'm not feeling well, etc...

So despite my mocking of the "write everyday" Nazis, I do write everyday. Why? I wouldn't get anything done otherwise. A creature of guilt, to squander the opportunity after having landed an agent seems somewhat unforgivable. I doubt if I'd be trying to write a novel a year otherwise. The more novels on submission to editors, that many less novels I have to write to get published.

The Empty Chamber: Part 1

This post should be called "The Winter of My Discontent: Part 1", but I digress...

After college, circa A.D. 1995, I went up to Alaska to work in a fish freezer near Glacier Bay. As opposed to hand-wringing about finding a career while idling away my first post-baccalaureate summer in Snohomish, unemployed and living with the folks, I decided to go Jack London and head up to the Last Frontier in the hopes of paying off student loans in one felll swoop, whatever 'fell swoop'  means (wikipedia it and leave me a post if you want.)... It was a noble thought.

Instead, I came home, paycheck in hand, and bought a bunch of ski gear, lazed about, hung out with old college friends, and had the odd job interview, all the while apathetically applying to graduate school. I'm pretty sure not one red cent actually went to Sallie Mae. Lots of time to kill, lots and lots of time to kill... So one day, I kick-started the parent's Tandy (I'm pretty sure it was a Tandy....) and after about thirty to forty minutes of hard drive lurching, I managed to get its word processor booted. Now, what to type? Start with what you know, they say. College, ah yes... let's write about college! Very original.

Not sure about everyone else, but my college experience was enjoyable, a significant upgrade from whatever high school was supposed to be, but it was still just series of quirky anecdotes and unrequited crushes lacking any central theme. I didn't meet my soul mate in college. I didn't triumph over adversity. There was no drunken /drug-addled late night odysseys worthy of Animal House infamy. A bit 'meh' overall and not very epic. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed college, that twilight zone where invincible youth and dreaming big teeter on the threshold of adulthood, but to milk it for a novel? Might as well give it a shot, I thought. So armed with a bit of nostalgia and longing for the salad days of yore, I wrote.

My first outing at a novel consisted of a twenty page episode hi-lighting a most exceptional meandering day of an enhanced college slacker. My intention wasn't to actually write a novel at the time, it was just to write. Inspired by comic books, a pseudo-angst gothic catharsis, self-aware coffee house conversations, and unrequited yearning for a true 'rock and roll adventure' as my late college friend Ben always referred to it, I embarked on what would become THE EMPTY CHAMBER. Written in amateurish first person (I intend to write a whole post on first person versus third person, and my writing philosophy there of...) it was an interesting experiment. As quickly as inspiration arrived, it left, and the embryonic novel remained a 20K artifact on a floppy drive for another two years.

Stay tuned for The Empty Chamber: Part 2...

Confessions of a Crap Artist...

Back in High School I wasn't much of a writer. I had no innate talent. After a few months, I could figure out what teachers liked to read in essays, enough to get B+/A- grades. But it was a struggle. I remember classmates acing essays they'd written late night the day before, while I struggled to surface in B range laboring days in advance. I'd dabbled in short story writing, but the number of short stories written in high school were only a handful. I also wasn't much of a reader either. This trend continued into college. I'd managed to pass my AP English exam with a marginal 3 (out of 5), which allowed me to skip English 101 and move on to honors level literature classes, focusing on the Greek and Latin classics, Homer, Dante, etc... Now in the major leagues, my essay grades at that point dipped into C+ range but by some magic, I managed to struggle through these classes with B- grades. Again, my fellow classmates managed to pull A+ 'exclamation point' grades from quickly rendered essays written in coffee shops prior to class, the miserable bastards.

So, clearly not talented, why bother?

Time to digress into the depraved geek world of role playing games, specifically TSR's venerable Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (1st edition, the old 1979 rule books, the new editions are for posers), Top Secret by TSR, and later on R Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020. While I enjoyed building and playing characters, the most rewarding part was playing the referee (aka Dungeon Masters in D&D). The crossover between novel writing and constructing adventures for your friends is surprisingly similar. Instead of entertaining one reader for 8 to 10 hours, the referee has to entertain a group of friends for 4 to 5 hours (depending on the volume of Mountain Dew consumed). And one's friends tend to be as harsh of critics as anonymous strangers, maybe even more brutal in their honesty. I enjoyed RPG's unapologetically despite their stigma and when the pool of willing friends dried up, left to my own devices, the need to continue to tell stories remained. So at that point, my writing picked up as my RPG outlets whithered. 

A once wise physics professor I had in graduate school by the name Glenn Rebka (of the famed Pound-Rebka experiment... look it up, it proved gravitational red-shifting, totally badass) told me solving physics problems is a matter of longevity. Which, like any personal endeavor, rings true. When it comes to art, I've always admired the talent-deficient die hard, either too stubborn or oblivious to realize his short comings, but willing to work to get their stuff in front of people good-bad-indifferent. Their stories are much more inspiring than the talent-rich do nothings. The world's filled those cats... I'm guessing of course, as I'm assuming those classmates writing last minute A+ essays probably aren't writing last minute novels destined for the Booker Prize. So if they are literary geniuses, no one will ever know.

Why read this blog?

I intend to post/regurgitate my writing history starting at the beginning... but until then, some credentials...

I am an agented author, represented by a very hardworking group of folks in the big NYC. So I managed to navigate the rocky shoals of the agent-query process with a reasonable amount of success. They represent Hugo/Nebula nominees, which is a good thing, because I write Science Fiction and you need an agent who lives/breathes your chosen genre. 


One hard lesson? Having an agent is by no means the 'golden ticket'...


I have two novels on submission to the big imprints who publish Science Fiction/Fantasy exclusively, and as a result, I have a few kilobytes worth of personalized rejections from the best editors in the field. And why that doesn't seem like much of an achievement, to have gotten my meandering prose across the desk of a big name editor and to have wasted their time for an hour or two, its actually been extremely helpful. Most have given me the boilerplate "not for me", "didn't connect with the characters", but a few have given me very thoughtful comments/rejections. A few, I hope to share...


Also, I love Science Fiction/Fantasy. I read it almost exclusively, and have a pretty good head about what's worth reading and what's not. I tend to switch authors every book, which helps to expose me to different styles and sub-genres. I also try to skip decades. There's absolutely terrific stuff written all throughout Sci-Fi's century-plus history. I'm not a 'quick' reader, so my need for variety may be a result of my low throughput book-wise. I know a few folks who can read a novel every two days... I'm a little slower, a novel every two weeks typically. I wish I could read faster, but alas...


More reasons to come....

I've succumb to 'platform' pressure...

Stephen King once said "the first million words" are just practice...

With that bit of humbling advice, I'm clocking roughly 400K words spread over four novels (some finished, some unfinished, some abandoned) after roughly fifteen years of on-again/off-again novel writing (mostly off-again).

So why should you read my writing blog? 

Bored at work is probably the best reason, or if you have Google Reader feeding a smartphone and you're sitting at a bus stop or you're waiting for a plane at the airport. Second best reason? You're a writer too, or you're interested in writing, or you're brimming with Shauedenfruede and revel in the missteps of others (I'm guilty of this in spades).

After reading hundreds of blog entries by writers/agents/publishers roaring that one needs a "platform" in these harrowing days of the e-publishing, I've capitulated. Do I think it will help me get published? I'm not banking on it. But who knows... It's something to check off my list, an opportunity that I didn't squander, no regrets, etc...

So what am I planning on posting? 

Hopefully not self-indulgence, ala a 70's era progressive rock album, but a personal blog is self-indulgent by definition, so... in light of that, I'm sure I will be egregiously guilty on all counts. I guess with fifteen odd years of writing triumphs (very few) and failures (more so), if I can help out fellow struggling authors, or perhaps learn something from others, this whole thing will be a reasonable success...