I mean, this is a pretty quiet blog to begin with, but still.
I was chatting with a coworker this week about blogs and business. Afterwards I was kinda like, Y'know, I'm not really even sure what I'm doing with that blog of mine.
Originally this was intended to be a personal sort of Public Object, a daily writing log where I could track the progress of the former Manuscript. After I met my original goal (111 days, which is to say a semester, of steady work on a novel) I dropped off to occasionally posting updates and snippets. In July of last year I removed all of my original daily log posts, leaving the blog a bit barren. About a week later, I went on a seven-month hiatus due to various personal circumstances (including limited computer access from mid-October until after New Year's).
And, well, now I'm back. And I'd like to post things. But I haven't really got a goal or a gimmick here.
So I'm going to have a think (and maybe even a post or two) about blogging and where it belongs for me. The blog's almost definitely going to have a makeover, and while it won't be disappearing, it might take a backseat and once again become a place where I offer brief updates and the occasional snippet. In the meantime, you can find me:
- on on deviantART (I post only rarely, but I do quite a bit of reading and commenting on others' works) and
- on Tumblr (which I am also trying to figure out what I'm doing with, because it's so cool but also a horrible massive timesink)
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Process and worldbuilding
As of April 1st, I've blown past my personal deadline for my VP submission! I figure this is reason enough for another ramble about process.
My intent, with this story, was to rework my process so that (a) the story would be structurally sound before I started diving into scenes, and (b) I could actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
This is how my process was supposed to work:
1) Draft an outline and a few early scenes, to get a sense of the characters and plot structure.
2) Fix the plot structure before doing any more work in-scene.
4) Redraft and polish the early scenes/outline for submission.
5) Do more worldbuilding in the interim.
This is how my process actually worked:
1) Draft an outline and a few early scenes, to get a sense of where everything is going to fall apart.
2) Start fixing the narrator's character arc.
3) Realize the narrator's character arc is entirely dependent on another character's political views, which are in turn dependent on the most significant and time-consuming chunk of worldbuilding.
4) Spend approximately 15,000 words and three weeks trying to work through said worldbuilding.
5) Emerge with a vague sense that the worldbuilding is only marginally tenable, but at least knowing how it's going to fuel the story, and dive into the non-narrator's political views as March 31st (and the cheaper application fee) flies past.
6) Become utterly enamored of a short story idea about said non-narrator, which APPEARS to need far less worldbuilding -- oh, but wait, that's a first draft and I'd have to start over from Step 1.
So. Yeah.
The good news is, working from an outline seems to have the effect I was looking for -- it helps me figure out snags before I'm neck-deep in scenes. The plot is much more coherent this time around (although it helps that I had a good idea of the overall structure to begin with, where, for my last story, I was flailing around among a dozen alternatives), and I've already picked out and started to remedy the biggest structural weakness.
The bad news is, worldbuilding.
A brief list of some of the topics I need to research and reinvent in order to make this story work:
- Political theory/philosophy (so as to build the working ideology of a relatively stable repressive pseudo-democracy that operates on a theory of innate and unequal intelligence)
- Descriptive politics/political science (so as to figure out a working mechanism of the above government)
- Economic...everything (to figure out whether a repressive pseudo-democracy could exist alongside what so far appears to be a relatively capitalistic system)
- The history of (among other things) the car, the airplane, the phone, the computer, and the Internet (to see if it's feasible to have tablets with instant messaging, but phones unconnected to wifi; car dashboards with their own Siri and internet access; and no sign of airplanes anywhere)
- Agriculture/environmental science (because most of the world is a wasteland and I have no idea how these people have enough to eat)
Now, on the one hand, this IS a fantasy, and so I get a teeeensy bit of hand-waving leeway for the latter two questions. On the other hand, the actual ~fantasy magic~ is not in any way incorporated into the everyday life (or even present!) for of 99% of the world's inhabitants, and I can't really say "Demons destroy all the airplanes" and "the Lowells invented ultra-productive agriculture that doesn't require any space at all, and they synced up wifi to everything except the phones, oh and this was all in the two years where they were inventing a super-secret protection against the evil demon things too".
So: Research.
I've rambled elsewhere about my struggles with research, but I'll rehash a bit here. Essentially: research is work for me. Hard work, because it's time-intensive, it involves only minimal writing, and the answers to my questions are often frustratingly elusive or ensconced in technical jargon from a discipline I'm unfamiliar with. My 'writing fix' -- the enjoyment that makes writing worthwhile for me -- only really happens when I'm putting words on the page, and when I'm researching, I'm usually not writing. Worldbuilding requires writing, but it's of a 'going in circles, patching up holes, finding inconsistencies, and deleting the untenable half of that idea' sort. And...I'm simply not very efficient at all of this. I don't know if there's a way to BE efficient at research when (as above) the research I need amounts to 'a ground-level beginner's understanding of this entire discipline as well as some fairly advanced knowledge of recent theories on specific subject X'.
On the plus side, you don't have to learn the beginner's ground level of a subject more than once. And, by and large, these are subjects that will be useful to me in other stories and other worlds.
One answer to this MIGHT be 'start worldbuilding before you start writing and before you put yourself on a deadline'. Which...is a thing I'm planning on trying, for a Super Sekrit Project that may or may not happen if I ever get this story done. But it's difficult for me, because I'm a very results-focused person, so I don't like to wander around reading up on this and that when I don't know what plot/character element it's going to be used for, if at all.
Anyway. I'm still chugging away at my submission, and keeping my fingers crossed that it'll be done before the final deadline. But I'm not sure, at this point, that I'll be satisfied enough with my draft to submit it to anywhere professional.
(P.S. If any of you have book/article suggestions re: the research subjects above, I'm eternally in your debt. The political/economic sciences are broader and less easily-defined fields than the history of ancient Rome, and I'm not even sure where to start. At the moment I've got a brief primer on political philosophy that is maybe a little too fond of Enlightenment-through-Victorian-era Upper-Crust Dude Philosophers, and more than a little light on more recent theories. I've got an eye on Hannah Arendt for totalitarian theory, but I picked up Origins of Totalitarianism a few months ago and dropped it because it was pretty intimidating.)
My intent, with this story, was to rework my process so that (a) the story would be structurally sound before I started diving into scenes, and (b) I could actually get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
This is how my process was supposed to work:
1) Draft an outline and a few early scenes, to get a sense of the characters and plot structure.
2) Fix the plot structure before doing any more work in-scene.
2.5) Get a strong sense of character personalities/arcs.
3) Figure out what worldbuilding needs to be done and take the time for what is ABSOLUTE NECESSITY for the submission.4) Redraft and polish the early scenes/outline for submission.
5) Do more worldbuilding in the interim.
This is how my process actually worked:
1) Draft an outline and a few early scenes, to get a sense of where everything is going to fall apart.
2) Start fixing the narrator's character arc.
3) Realize the narrator's character arc is entirely dependent on another character's political views, which are in turn dependent on the most significant and time-consuming chunk of worldbuilding.
4) Spend approximately 15,000 words and three weeks trying to work through said worldbuilding.
5) Emerge with a vague sense that the worldbuilding is only marginally tenable, but at least knowing how it's going to fuel the story, and dive into the non-narrator's political views as March 31st (and the cheaper application fee) flies past.
6) Become utterly enamored of a short story idea about said non-narrator, which APPEARS to need far less worldbuilding -- oh, but wait, that's a first draft and I'd have to start over from Step 1.
So. Yeah.
The good news is, working from an outline seems to have the effect I was looking for -- it helps me figure out snags before I'm neck-deep in scenes. The plot is much more coherent this time around (although it helps that I had a good idea of the overall structure to begin with, where, for my last story, I was flailing around among a dozen alternatives), and I've already picked out and started to remedy the biggest structural weakness.
The bad news is, worldbuilding.
A brief list of some of the topics I need to research and reinvent in order to make this story work:
- Political theory/philosophy (so as to build the working ideology of a relatively stable repressive pseudo-democracy that operates on a theory of innate and unequal intelligence)
- Descriptive politics/political science (so as to figure out a working mechanism of the above government)
- Economic...everything (to figure out whether a repressive pseudo-democracy could exist alongside what so far appears to be a relatively capitalistic system)
- The history of (among other things) the car, the airplane, the phone, the computer, and the Internet (to see if it's feasible to have tablets with instant messaging, but phones unconnected to wifi; car dashboards with their own Siri and internet access; and no sign of airplanes anywhere)
- Agriculture/environmental science (because most of the world is a wasteland and I have no idea how these people have enough to eat)
Now, on the one hand, this IS a fantasy, and so I get a teeeensy bit of hand-waving leeway for the latter two questions. On the other hand, the actual ~fantasy magic~ is not in any way incorporated into the everyday life (or even present!) for of 99% of the world's inhabitants, and I can't really say "Demons destroy all the airplanes" and "the Lowells invented ultra-productive agriculture that doesn't require any space at all, and they synced up wifi to everything except the phones, oh and this was all in the two years where they were inventing a super-secret protection against the evil demon things too".
So: Research.
I've rambled elsewhere about my struggles with research, but I'll rehash a bit here. Essentially: research is work for me. Hard work, because it's time-intensive, it involves only minimal writing, and the answers to my questions are often frustratingly elusive or ensconced in technical jargon from a discipline I'm unfamiliar with. My 'writing fix' -- the enjoyment that makes writing worthwhile for me -- only really happens when I'm putting words on the page, and when I'm researching, I'm usually not writing. Worldbuilding requires writing, but it's of a 'going in circles, patching up holes, finding inconsistencies, and deleting the untenable half of that idea' sort. And...I'm simply not very efficient at all of this. I don't know if there's a way to BE efficient at research when (as above) the research I need amounts to 'a ground-level beginner's understanding of this entire discipline as well as some fairly advanced knowledge of recent theories on specific subject X'.
On the plus side, you don't have to learn the beginner's ground level of a subject more than once. And, by and large, these are subjects that will be useful to me in other stories and other worlds.
One answer to this MIGHT be 'start worldbuilding before you start writing and before you put yourself on a deadline'. Which...is a thing I'm planning on trying, for a Super Sekrit Project that may or may not happen if I ever get this story done. But it's difficult for me, because I'm a very results-focused person, so I don't like to wander around reading up on this and that when I don't know what plot/character element it's going to be used for, if at all.
Anyway. I'm still chugging away at my submission, and keeping my fingers crossed that it'll be done before the final deadline. But I'm not sure, at this point, that I'll be satisfied enough with my draft to submit it to anywhere professional.
(P.S. If any of you have book/article suggestions re: the research subjects above, I'm eternally in your debt. The political/economic sciences are broader and less easily-defined fields than the history of ancient Rome, and I'm not even sure where to start. At the moment I've got a brief primer on political philosophy that is maybe a little too fond of Enlightenment-through-Victorian-era Upper-Crust Dude Philosophers, and more than a little light on more recent theories. I've got an eye on Hannah Arendt for totalitarian theory, but I picked up Origins of Totalitarianism a few months ago and dropped it because it was pretty intimidating.)
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