Your Books that are Interesting (National Novel Writing Month 2012)

I was going to blow it off this year, because extending a novel I already extended once in last year’s version seems kind of cheesy, plus I am still cogitating how to proceed with that story – now at 90k words, and looking like it will be 150k eventually.

But I had an idea for something else, so perhaps I will do that instead this year. Maybe I can even write the whole thing in 50,000 words… I must say, though, that 50k words is not even close to novel length; it’s a novella, and thus would be rather hard to sell in paper format.

I’ve done Nano a few times, but never really on this board. In fact, in past years’ threads, I gave people grief because they “weren’t taking it seriously enough.” My attitude is much different now that I’ve realized I was simply insecure about the fact that I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. So I’ve shelved my dickish pretensions about artistic purity, and I want to use this thread to document the process and mechanics of a novel as it’s happening. (At the very least I know Pogue will be reading along.)

I want to do this because I’m 200 hours into a novel, and after 120k words, I have no real sense of how I got from point A to point B. By now it’s pretty much all of a piece, but I can’t remember how I fit the thing together, and it’s hard to say you’ve learned lessons when you can’t articulate what they may have been.

So I’m going to use the 2012 Nano as a laboratory for a new plotting technique I’ve been working on, and as a respite from the main project. I think it will be interesting enough to document in this thread.

What’s the technique? In short, I’m trying to combine ecology and narratology. It’s called, you guessed it, narracology. So far it feels like a pretty great theory, but the test of any theory is if it’s predictive, meaning in this case: “does this help me tell better stories?” For a true test I’ve got to go in blind, which means I’m going to start this November with a legitimately blank page. Should be exciting, hopefully I’m not the only one.

Care to go into more detail about the admixture? Since I don’t know much about ecology or narratology, I think I’d have an especially hard time imagining how they’d mesh.

No worries if you don’t want to get into it, but, well, you do seem to be taking it more seriously than the next bloke and I find that intriguing.

Not at all. It helps me clarify my thinking, and maybe these little techniques will provide some benefit to others. So let’s get into it.

Since we’re on a gaming board, a game example’s probably best. What video games tell the best stories? It’s not whatever RPG has hired the guy who writes the Drizzt books. It’s Civilization, Dwarf Fortress, X-Com. In my brief experience with X-Com, the RNG assigned me two soldiers with the same last name. I thought “lame job with the name generator, Gollops”… then noticed the soldiers were a man and a woman. So suddenly I had this married couple on my team, and when Sergey Romanov (or whatever his name was) went down, I actually felt compelled to send his wife into a foolhardy berserker rage. The tragedy of the Romanovs is one of my favorite stories in gaming, and it was told to me by a computer – not a person.

These games tell great stories by not worrying about plots as singular artifacts to be manipulated and massaged, but by designing systems and algorithms with lots of interaction: writing through emergence.

There’s a very old idea of the author as god. Instead of playing the Old Testament god, fashioning each creature at his celestial workbench, I want to be that Deist god, winding up the universe and then setting it down to see how it runs. The idea is basic, then: don’t micromanage the story, micromanage the conditions that create the story. Put another way: if you focus on the parts, the sum takes care of itself.

There are some major benefits to this. First, my favorite part of the writing process these characters or situations you’ve set up combine in ways you couldn’t have foreseen. Second, novels are too complex for me to intelligently design; my writing process feels a lot more like the blind groping of natural selection. Third, I think readers despise authorial contrivances (like deus ex machina), so they would appreciate emergent stories. If, as the writer, you’re aboveboard with each micro decision, the macro decisions will necessarily make sense.

Which is why I turned to ecology. We’re animals, right? I love nature documentaries, which can mine amazing drama from “characters” that can’t even talk. I thought that if I resorted to a scientific model I’d sidestep the cultural and generic biases built into other methods. There’s incredibly complexity in nature: what are the rules underlying that complexity?

I quickly found a superficial correspondence between both disciplines. I noticed crossover in the terminology, which suggests some fundamental similarities. Look at the etymology of evolution – it means an unfolding or unrolling, like a good yarn. Stories have climaxes, ecosystems do too. The probabilistic model of succession struck me as a rich drama. Disturbance creates biodiversity in habitats and initiates drama in stories. Game theory (we know the prisoner’s dilemma and chicken, biologists have the hawk-dove game) could help me understand the mechanics of conflict. And finally there are biological interactions: mutualism, predation, commensalism, parasitism, competition – I could apply one of these to any character relationship I could think of.

I don’t want to flood the thread too much right off the bat, but you or anyone else is interested I’ll detail some of the stuff I mentioned in the previous paragraph during the run-up to November.

Damn man. I will hand it to you that that is pretty intense at the very least.

To be entirely honest, I’ve always been bad at the “Take 1 part characters and 1 part situation, mix until combined, write results” school of plotting insofar as, for whatever reason, it is very difficult to accomplish the slight mental trick it takes to treat characters in your mind as quasi-autonomous entities whose preferences, beliefs, and decisions you can query at-will.

I find this extraordinarily limiting and I find it makes me an odd man out at gatherings of writers in the same way that the fact that I completely lack a visual imagination does. I simply don’t see pictures in my head for 99% of the things I can imagine (I can recall very blurry still images of extremely common sights–my car, my girlfriend, etc.), so as you might imagine, everything from complicated fight scenes to even the visual appearance of any of my characters is entirely beyond me to envision.

Combine these two and most of my writing tends to be extremely descriptive and most my narrative is entirely plot-driven. I need to describe in order to convey what I think people should see that I myself cannot–perhaps more than they need, because to me, a description is nothing BUT a string of sentences replete with adjectives–and I need to follow a plot because frankly, I’m not entirely certain that my characters would do much of anything without some degree of contrivance pushing them along.

It is entirely possible that my writing sucks because of this.

Haha, I know – probably a little too intense. I kind of roll my eyes when anybody talks about systems or methods of art production, so I’m skeptical of myself. November should be a good crucible, but at the very least, even if the methodology is useless, developing the methodology has given me some worthwhile insights.

And by the way, I should explain that I haven’t always been a zealot for this style of writing. I used to be a writer who just tried to turn sweet sentences. My plots were a handful of fuck-yeah moments I tried my best to build up to. But after reading the self-publishing thread on here – and I believe Crusis figured largely in that – I thought, “Why can’t I write a book people will buy for 99 cents?” Then I realized that the fantasy ebook fans don’t really care so much about sweet sentences, so I had to start caring about propulsive plots and drama and all of that. This overly analytical approach is my attempt to navigate here outside my comfort zone.

By the way, what are you goals for this year’s Nano, Armando? Of course “just finishing” is always number 1, but is there anything else you’re trying to work on?

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing, but I think I want to write one book that doesn’t prominently feature violence.

Lot to digest there, thanks for the taking time.

Somewhat related: my work in progress (which I be pushing forward with NaNoWriMo) is based on a fictional baseball league (and fictional world) that I created for Out of the Park Baseball. One (minor) plot line, in fact, is solely determined by the outcome of a season that the game simulated. Many of the characters are players and coaches who were created in-game, though I of course am attempting to make them into full characters.

Like the games you’ve named, OOTP is a strategy game. But it can be used to create worlds, and storylines.

Reinvigoration and reexamination. My life’s not been what I’ve wanted it to be for a few years now–jobs that are a poor fit I take just to keep my head above water, losing time for my hobbies, etc.–and I really want to return to what was once a great love: writing. It bought me a lot of joy and I spent a great deal of time thinking about it and practicing it when I was younger, but that has tapered off as “adult life” has consumed my time more and more as of late.

It might just end up being some much-needed personal release. . . or perhaps it will be the spark that lights the fire of a renewed interest in seeking publication and a new career.

Most of all, though, it’ll feel good to just get one of these many stories out in full form now that I am older, wiser, and hopefully a bit better at writing!

Go for it!

I have wanted to be a writer since I was 12 or 13 but as you put it, adult life got in the way. I got married, had kids, and certainly thought about getting back to writing but it took me a LONG time. At 38 I decided to take a writing class and it was a life changer. I spent a year in classes, sold a few stories, and wrote my first book (well second - the first was crap).

In the last 4 years I have been lucky enough to see a number of books published and it’s been a tremendously rewarding experience but it’s not a very good way to make money. For every success story you read there are a thousand writers struggling to sell a few hundred books. Even with a publisher, realize that you are going to get a pittance of the money your work brings in.

Nano is a great way to discipline yourself to get in the habit of writing every day. If you can do 1,700 words per day then you can surpass the 50K goal but you have to commit to it.

So it’s never too late, trust me on this one.

I get the OOTP stuff. It’s pretty much a spreadsheet with some algorithms and there’s so much life to it. I had a similar thing with NBA 2k. Had a franchise that I played so much my friends knew every player on my roster. Have you seen Brian Phillips’ story about Pro Vercelli, his football manager team? It’s a really fun story.

Damn – I thought you were going to say dialogue or description. I like that answer better. I am pulling for you.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Suddenly, a DICK rang out!

PORN! I mean, <ahem>, erotica!

I’m not sure I’ll get to play this year after all. I have two journal papers and a few postdoc applications to get out this November (10k words each, so that’s basically a work of nonfiction).

Given that I will be traveling for part of November I’ve decided to cheat and get an early start. The first dozen pages or so are not encouraging. Unlike the last two tries, I’m attempting genre fiction this time – fantasy. A few things I have noticed so far on this attempt…

  • The cardinal sin of writing is to be dull. Everything else is forgivable…

  • Every time I write prose I am just fragmenting myself into bits of various characters and bouncing them off of each other. Each novel attempt is a different sort of self portrait

  • It is very hard to write consistently in a different voice than the one you’re familiar with. As an educated man of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I am at sea trying to describe the world through the perspective of a medieval soldier. If you are limiting the expression to dialogue, it becomes more manageable. Maybe I should switch to the third person.

  • My late excessive reading of Civil War primary sources has contaminated my prose style with damnable Victorianisms. Hemingway as a tonic? Or Chaucer?

  • When writing about another (and in this case nonexistent) era, in a language which isn’t even really supposed to be English, you suddenly become hyperaware of how words sound and what feelings they convey. In particular, the distinction between Latinate and Anglo-Saxon words jumps out at you. It doesn’t feel right that these men should speak excessively in a Latinate vocabulary… it implies whole buried edifices of social climbing, invasions by Frenchmen, filligrees of propriety, centuries of embedded history. Yet no matter which (non-fictional) language you write in, you are inevitably going to be hemmed in by the baggage it carries with it, the myriad signposts of a culture that actually exists and creeps into the reader’s mind overriding the illusion of another universe. I begin to understand why Tolkien felt he had to invent languages – why, indeed, the invention of story was to him a tertiary concern, after the invention of a) language and b) landscape.

  1. Agreed, but you can’t tell if it’s dull until the end, because you will have new ideas along the way. Sometimes you just have to connect the dots or you will never get anywhere.

  2. You are evidently reticent to create characters with elements similar to people you know. But this is very common writerly behavior, after all. And as you say you can take fragments of characters and fiddle with them.

  3. I think it sounds refreshing to give fantasy and historical characters a modern voice. I mean, in a church-bound world, you don’t make the character a freethinker unless it’s a plot point, but I suspect people haven’t really changed all that much in the last few thousand years. If you had a chat with Cicero he might sound like anyone else, especially after a few drinks. So for example I think GRRM’s characters and their “modern” attitudes are the only really decent part of A Song of Ice and Fire.

  4. Could be worse, but also consider Orwell whose SOP was to use only simple words and remove anything unnecessary from his prose.

  5. This is a nice point, but you do after all have to write in English, like Tolkien, and so even if neither a Germanic, Latin, nor Greek influence is what you want in a word, you have to say it anyway. IMO in a completely alien world, the thing to really avoid is words whose etymology is closely tied to Earth places or people. Like “stygian” is a funny way to describe “black” in a world with no Styx. But most readers won’t notice anything related to this point at all, so I’d say that while it’s very much worth considering when you choose words, you shouldn’t fret over it if the only word for some barbarian tribesman to use happens to be from the Latin.

  1. You are evidently reticent to create characters with elements similar to people you know. But this is very common writerly behavior, after all. And as you say you can take fragments of characters and fiddle with them.

My supporting characters tend to be based on other people in my life, so perhaps I misstated that point. The protagonists are usually self-portraits fragmented or distorted through a lens of some kind, in part because I need to get more deeply into their minds. In my last nano I had three main characters (one a woman), each of whom represented aspects of myself. None of this is a complaint, just an observation. So far, in this book, I have only introduced three characters. Two are elements of myself, while the third is more the representation of a personality that I envy.

Is there any evidence that Orwell edited his work that way? In his Politics and the English Language, he lists six rules:

[ol]
[li]Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.[/li][li]Never use a long word where a short one will do.[/li][li]If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.[/li][/ol]
etc.

But then writes:[INDENT]I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.
[/INDENT]

Ha, that is a palpable touch.

I guess he could have used tool, hiding, and stopping instead of instrument, concealing, and preventing. But the shades of meaning are quite different for all those pairs.

I think that following those principles I would go along with using tool instead of instrument, though instrument gives the notion of more delicate skilled work, rather than some mechanical procedure. Because I think we currently use tool in a more abstract way (thanks probably to software and psychology terms of art) than was used in Orwell’s time, it’s probably the better choice to go along with his dictum. But I’d say hiding and stopping are too far from concealing and preventing to be appropriate here, and as you quoted, he said to use the shortest word that will do, not the shortest word at all times.

Orwell wasn’t talking about literature. He was talking about political speeches, business writing, etc.

I understand that since you pointed it out, but I thought it was funny that the line you quote could perhaps have been edited down, so I supposed you were also being a bit sarcastic.