The Trilogy Effect

Writing is turning out to be a never ending learning process it seems, and the fun fact for today is: Trilogies are damn hard!

It has been a little while since I finished the rewrite/second-edition of The Keepers of the Key and so I have set-to with working on its sequel.  After finishing writing Book 1, I thought that Book 2 would be an easier, more carefully thought out process and that I would not fall foul of all the pitfalls that I did first time.

Wrong.

Ever since I settled the plot for Book 1, many years ago now, I have had the “grand plot” reasonably straight in my head.  I knew what would happen in the next 2 books, what the over-arching themes would be and which of the characters would return where and for what purpose.  With all that in mind I finally got about 50% of the way through writing Book 2 when, thanks to the input of my unpaid, unofficial (though much loved!) editor, I realised that I was going nowhere.  My plots were riddled with holes and failings of logic, certain characters lacked any depth or real function within my world and were being tagged along simply out of habit and, generally, I was on a hiding to nowhere.

So, before Book 2 is even anywhere near complete, I am starting a rewrite.  About 50% of what I have so far written is being scrapped and I am now pitching at a very different set of themes with a  tweaked cast and rather different end-game.  How I came to be quite so lost in the wilderness is genuinely beyond me.  The notes I have made for this book are 5 times larger than those of Book 1 and while Book 2’s plot is far more complex, I really though I had a handle on it and would be able to just push through, but all that I had thought to be cut, dry and set in stone is rapidly coming undone once I get down to the actual writing.

I know Book 1’s legacy was going to leave me with work to do, as several of the “main” characters were under-formed due to there being simply not enough space to really give everyone their day in court, but I thought the familiarity of already known and liked characters would balance that out.  What it in fact has done is made everything ten times harder.  When brainstorming for Book 2, this familiarity has essentially bred laziness in me, leading me to conjure nebulous ideas that sound great in theory, but lack actual substance or depth when I came to write them.  It is as though I have written the trailer for a film without actually having any clue how the envisioned scenes link together.

To say that I am starting to see why so many writers bemoan series and complain about the difficulty of actually getting them done is a wild understatement.

Anyway, time to go and write chapter 10.  Again. =/

A worrying yet pleasing development

When, as you write along one fine day, you suddenly clatter to a stop and squint at your latest page of text while uttering the words “wait: isn’t that character dead at this point in my history?”, you know you are probably in trouble.

Realising that you are in danger of making a hash of your own mythology and then having to sit yourself down to write out timelines and lists of “historical” events within the universe you created is an odd and yet somewhat pleasing sensation but nothing compared to the realisation that perhaps you should have written all this supporting material long ago.

That said, the fact that I have a mythology is a fairly amusing thing.  Having now written out a first draft of my mythology’s timeline, I am…well flatly, I am bloody impressed.  Seeing such a big picture – a picture I carry about in my head each and every waking moment – written up in a succinct, definitive form is oddly pleasing.  I am the kind of person who takes enormous pleasure in flicking to the back of great tomes like The Lord of the Rings and idling away the hours reading the genealogical tables and timelines so having my own version of such things makes the nerd within squee more than a little!

To carry this thought forward, it now also occurs to me that I have a legitimate reason to have appendices of my very own!  If I am getting a touch lost in the 8000+ years of history in which I wade, I have no doubt that others will do the same, so a few appendices to aid the reader would definitely be in order.  Is it particularly sad that I also find this to be rather pleasing?

Masochism

Yea gods – why am I doing this?  Why must I torture myself so?  Is life not filled with enough trouble and strife that I must actively seek out more, just to ensure that levels of misery are constantly at their maximum?

And yet I’ve done it.  It has been requested – paid for no less – and it has arrived and now here it sits, staring at me.  The source of a year’s worth of frustration, simultaneously a concentrated pool of genuinely useful information and a seemingly endless supply of despair.  Never has something that caused me so much excitement when I first received it, that filled me with such hope, that taunted me with such dreams and aspirations turned out to be something I would literally despise and cringe at the sight of

And yet, here it sits: The latest edition of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook.

Why is it here?  That’s right, boys and girls, it is here because I am going to try once again to get a publisher interested in my work.  Over a year has passed since my last attempt at this and in that time I have published my book through two digital distributers, produced an even more error free edition and secured artwork for both it and its sequel.  Does this raise my chances?  Probably not.  The publishing industry is still in its death throes and the UK is in the middle of a financial depression: hardly a sterling time to be getting people to spend money.

 

But you know what? To hell with all that.  I still believe in my work, more strongly now than ever in fact.  During my (seemingly endless) stretches of editing, I have actually come to appreciate what I have created.  Enough time has passed since I finished writing it for the work to become unfamiliar, allowing me to view it through the eyes of its audience instead of its author, and you know what? It turns out I don’t suck.

So, with one book out and selling, another in the pipeline and a further 8 planned novels, I feel I have as good a chance as any to tickle some publishers particular fancy.

Time to print out lots and lots of sample chapters and write a fantastic cover letter.  Like I said in my first post here to a chap who made a comment: we can’t let the bastards get us down!

Giving the game away

This blog is stalling badly but not for want of things to write.  Every day, with every chapter I write of the new book, I have 5 things I want to blog about but every last one of them would involve talking about the plot of said book and giving away far too much before I release the damned thing!

The process really is fascinating to watch from the drivers seat as you feel totally out of control.  Constantly I am having characters say things I never planned or making decisions I never envisaged, as I discussed last post, but it is utterly startling each and ever time it happens.  It is a wonderful thing to see something you wrote be so immediately unfamiliar and to know that when you stop stressing over the writign and just let it happen, it really does happen.

The book itself is chugging along though it seems to get more complex by the day.  So far their are 8 distinct threads in play, all following very disparate paths and all to be brought together later in the book.  One thing I am very glad of is the removal of considerations or worries about the length of the book.  As I said earlier, KotK kept getting trimmed in an attempt to get it down to a more “publisher friendly” length but as this book will go straight to electronic publishing, I have no such concerns.  Probably a lucky thing too given that all I have written so far is a large chunk of introductions (for the 8 threads) and a few sections of back story and it is heading for half as long as KotK!

In the meantime I am really enjoying writing The Keepers of the Fire.  It is good to be back to these familiar characters and it is good to be expanding those who got rather short shrift in the first book but above all, its just good to be writing!  It is still the most dazzling experience I have ever had and I only can hope it remains as such.

Remembering the forgotten

The actual process of writing a book of fiction is, as has been said at length in many places, pretty damned hard but what is striking me more and more is not the difficulty of the task but the utter weirdness of it.  While planning out your opus can be tricky, ensuring that your plot unfolds in an interesting way can be tough and actually sitting your ass down and just doing the work can be outright difficult, all of these things can be overcome with simple, dogmatic determination.  Force yourself to sit at the keyboard long enough, set yourself goals and markers, reward yourself for your achievements and the words will come.

The bit you don’t know about from the outside, the bit that you simply cannot imagine before you begin work and the bit that I had entirely forgotten after writing book one, is the utterly baffling feeling you get when you actually write.  Let me see if I can explain this, though I am not certain I can.

You have a plot.  You have characters. You have scenes, ideas and an over-arching design for your story.  You  are good to go.  The thing is that no matter how anal-retentive you are about your planning, your note making and your designing, it is not until you come to actually write a given section that you give form and flesh to your ideas.

This may sound obvious, that you have not written it until you have written it, but it is far more than that.  Your charters are alive, in very, very real terms.  Many is the time I have sat down to write a chapter, absolutely comfortable in the knowledge of how it will play out, only to find that, upon writing it, something else takes over.  Your characters simply refuse to do as you tell them and instead, happily amble off in a  somewhat different direction, apparently making their own damn decisions.

For example:  The other day I was writing a chapter for The Keepers of the Fire in which Julie and J from book one were working with a Denier (a “class” of demon from the first book whose purpose was not explained therein) to, essentially, save a man from dying.  I created the idea of Deniers years ago, had planned out how they looked, how they “worked” and what exactly it was they did.  When I came to write the chapter, a chapter that gives the reader their first insight into these creatures, my whole construct went out the window and a new back-story, demeanour and role suddenly emerged from nowhere and casually wrote itself across my screen.

I honestly had to stop and sit there, blinking in utter confusion, and read back what I had just written as I had no bloody clue what was going on at all.  I even tried to rewrite it, forcible jamming my characters back into my original plot but no matter how hard I tried, it simply would not go.

The feeling of disassociation this induced was incredible.   And it is not the only place I feel it.  Clearly, as I said at the top of this post, I have forgotten a lot of the process that created the first book as, when I reread The Keepers of the Key (as I do quite often) I am struck over and over by one question: who the hell wrote this?  I recognise my characters and my plot but in many, many places, it feels as though someone else took my ideas and ran with them.

It really is like having a ghost writer that simply steps in and inhabits my body at times, merrily doing as he sees fit with the insides of my head.  Clearly whoever this other chap is knows what he is doing but it would be nice to get a little warning before the bugger decides he is gonna rewrite entire story-lines!

 

Making it up?

Continuing my theme of “things that drive writers quietly insane”, it seems I have grown bored of the usual pitfalls and foibles and begun making up a whole new pantheon of insanities to keep myself distracted:

While writing away the other day, happily banging out a few more pages of the next book, I noticed an upcoming problem with what I was working on.  A decision I had made in the planning stages, months before, had now, now that I had actually come to write the story and let it unfold as it needed, turned out to be inappropriate.  What I had planned for this particular moment simply didn’t make any sense when I finally arrived at it.  I needed to rethink my plan.

Sensible idea no?  Your plan needs altering, so you alter it?  But no.  My brain go completely stuck, like a gearbox with a chainsaw through it.  I could not find anything that worked.  Every idea I had was rejected before it had even fully formed, thrown aside with sneer of contempt for daring to infringe upon my consciousness.  I worked and worked, making notes, performing all the usual menial chores that jog my creative centres, but after a week I was no further along.  I could not find an amendment to my plot that I could accept.

And then I saw it.  I caught it out of the corner of my eye and slowly tracked it around to the front of my vision.  I stared at it open mouthed, unwilling to believe it existed. But it did.  My problem was not that I could not come up with any good ideas but rather that I could not accept the thought of any changes!  I was mentally blocking myself from, and I actually caught my mouth about to frame these exact words while talking to my partner, “making stuff up”.

I was so committed to the plot I have, so entrenched in it, I forgot that I had, at the beginning of it all, made it up.  In one form or another, The Keepers Trilogy has been with me for nearly 20 years.  Its characters are constant companions, its world comfortable and familiar – so comfortable in fact, that I had almost forgotten they were imaginary.

Within ten minutes of realising this, of working out what was  really preventing me from moving on, I had solved my plot problem (with very minor changes as it turned out) and was merrily writing again.

Writers have enough things working against us.  Could our minds at least  pretend they are on our side?

I wrote that, right?

There are many psychoses that afflict writers but the weirdest I have yet encountered is the Unfounded Sensation of Unintentional Plagiarism.  Its very bizzare, very annoying and tends to screw with my writing schedule no end.

What do I mean by USUP (pronounced “you-sup”)?  The overwhelming  feeling you sometimes get upon finishing a section of work that the idea you were so proud of a few hours ago is not your own.

You plow through the writing, all pleased that it is going so well and that you finally got passed that bit you were stuck on, but then, as you stop, a feeling creeps over you…

“Wait…this is my idea, right?  It seems bloody familiar…”

I’ve had this a couple of times now and each time I have been frantic with worry, desperately trying to remember where on earth I read the idea in question before.  I Google myself silly, cut out sections of it and mail them to everyone I can think of, asking if they recognise it.  Every single time though, I have come up empty.

“Never read this before in my life” they say, staring at me blankly “How much coffee have you had today, exactly?”

Hmm…

So is this just generic paranoia leaking into a startling specific mold?  Who knows!  We writers have paranoia to spare I should imagine, but here I sit, netbook in hand, reading the chapter I’ve just written and for the life of me I cannot shake the feeling that I have ripped it off some other author….

Maybe I could start a charity drive? “USUP is a serious problem.  Parents: speak to your children.  We need to let sufferers know that they are not alone…”

Till then, I am sure another espresso will help…right?

The thing I miss most is my mind

I started this post about 20 minutes ago with a specific, cathartic aim in mind.  15 minutes in, however, the process of writing managed to jog some tired old memory and solve the dilemma about which I had begun my post.  Brains huh? 

I’ve left the start of this as it was originally drafted so you can see where I was going…

I have been stuck for a while now.  Not a writers block kind of stuck: far from it.  I have more plot than I know what to bloody do with!  All the characters from The Keepers of the Key are returning to The Keepers of the Fire, but this time, those that got short shrift or just dwelt in the background are being flung into the spotlight and given their very own stage on which to strut their stuff.

The actual, central plot for Fire has been with me since I started Key as it is, in many ways, an origin story for some of the characters and a larger slice of the pie that, along with Key, will become The Keepers of the Truth.  I had always planned to delve into all that I am currently writing but the issue I am facing was one of cohesion – trying to marry all my separate threads together while not getting lost in back-story (all very well coming up with a convincing and believable history for your characters but resisting the urge to blather on about it for chapters is another thing entirely).

To put it simply, I had forgotten what some of my characters were supposed to be doing.  Now this may sound stupid…and that is because it is.  But forgotten I had.  I knew what they were all doing in the larger sense – what was happening to them that would move them inexorability toward the conclusion of the book – but now what they were doing now, as the book started, and as the plot was being unfurled.

I’d looked through my “notes” (20 or so, badly typed text files with unhelpful names and filled with idiotic sentences) but gotten nowhere.  Apparently, at some point, the flash drive I keep all my writing on had been altered or corrupted and I’d lost the main notes document and the first draft of a few chapters so they were no help.

I was seriously starting to get bogged down.

Then I remembered.  Before I had all my files on this flash drive, they were on my netbook, and before I blanked my netbook to stick a different version of Linux on, I backed up the entire thing to my server….. =/

20 minutes later I have the lost chapter and the missing notes sat before me and the cloud that has followed me around for the past week is slowly lifting.  In two, glorious lines of text, I had summed up the plot line I had forgotten and all the other threads had snapped into place.

So remember children: backups are only useful if you actually remember that you have the damned things! (also, get an online storage system and put EVERYTHING on there ‘cos you know at some point you’ll do something stupid with the copies you have)

History gets in the way

Facts.  Bloody facts.  Who needs ’em?  They just get in your way.

Hours you spend, carefully crafting plot, artfully designing situations into which you can place your characters and astutely balancing your action scenes for maximum whizz bang.  Your whole scene is planned out and timed perfectly.  Fight scenes tumble along with poise and grace, revelations shock and awe: your high’s sparkle, your lows tug heart strings.

Its great.

“Wait.  What’s this?”

“What?”

“This ship you’ve got them on.”

“I dunno.  ‘s a ship.  They use it to escape.”

“Yeah, but its got 2 sails and a 2nd deck and is steered with a wheel.”

“Right?”

“Ships like that weren’t in use until about the 15th Century. You’ve set this in the 12th Century.”

“Okay…”

“Also, you’ve got them using a compass?”

“Right…?”

“Wrong. ”

“…Bollocks.”

Point is, while writing the 2nd book I am making certain I know what I am talking about.  Much studying has been done regarding New York (specifically Manhattan), the NYPD (fascinating stuff about how wrong most police procedurals are), the tunnel systems of New York (can you guess where book 2 is set yeah? Eh?) and continental drift in and around the Pacific Ocean (what?  Its relevant, I swear!).

Hopefully the same pitfalls I ran into first time round that resulted in me having to rewrite 4 chapters can be avoided, if only because my flashbacks this time are in a period of prehistory that we know nothing about.  That’s the trick you see – write about stuff that is totally made up and no smart-arse can catch you out.

Bloody know-it-alls…

ePubli…wait! Not yet.

So the next step was ePublishing.  The companies I should have been able to turn to, to market and promote my book were…otherwise engaged, so it was down to me to get my product out there.  Cue: Amazon.

But it is not that simple, is it?  While you may have worked hard – damned hard – on your manuscript, it will not yet have  received a good editing.  No one has sat down and crossed the T’s, dotted the I’s and pointed out that your spell-check is, in fact, quite, quite insane.

Trouble is, editing is job numero uno  for the publisher that takes you on.  They pay an army of little nitpickers to take your beloved work apart, word by word, sifting through each and every page with the mother of all red pens.

Problem is YOU are your publisher now, kiddo, so break out your own red pen.

So I did.  I bought a cheap laser printer and ran out a 2-pages-per-page copy of my book.  Sitting down, red pen in hand, I thought it would be quite nice to see my own work as a reader for once.  It would be enjoyable.  I’m pretty handy with a word processor and I’m already that guy who annoys his friends by correcting their grammar and telling them when they use commas incorrectly.  This will be a breeze!

First run through was a breeze.  I just looked out for the really obvious stuff: problems with speech-marks, extra spaces, duplicate words, capitalisation and so on.  No worries.  The red marks grew at an alarming rate but, well, that’s to be expected, right?  I may know how grammar works but I’m a lousy typist.  It’s all good, right?

Wrong.  To cut a very long story short, I was astonished – nay, appalled – by the sheer volume of errors I found. Mistakes related just to typing must have numbered close to 500 – and those were the ones I managed to find.  It was the other mistakes, the ones you only spotted by slowly and carefully reading and digesting every single word in every single sentence.  You have to grasp each tiny section of the story in its entirety and not only make sure that it makes sense, but that is also makes sense in relation to everything around it.

You see the thing is, as I learned very quickly, it is deeply, deeply difficult to edit your own work.  Not only are you snow-blind to the text as you have done nothing but stare at it for 18 months, but you know what it is supposed to say.  Your brain tricks you, filling in missed words, overlooking swapped words (I swear, form rather than from) and in fact Spackling merrily over huge holes in logic.  It wasn’t until the third full read-through of the book that I realised there were 3 glaring timeline errors buried in here, with characters either doing things impossibly fast or ludicrously slow and it wasn’t until the eighth read-through that I realised I was calling a character by 2 different names!  In the end I stopped, 12 read-throughs later, as I was really quite certain my eyes were going to explode and that I was on the verge of loathing my own characters.

Safe to say that my respect for those who proof-read professionally has gone up exponentially.  The sheer determination and unflinching focus it must take to read through so much text, pulling it apart and making sense of it, staggers my brain.  Even now, now the book has been on sale for some months, I still find errors!  I know that, as books go, mine is not short, but it is not War & Peace either.  How on earth one would go about editing a genuinely massive work (again, looking at you Neal Stephenson) is simply beyond me.

So: did I learn anything?  Hells yes.  The two most important things I have taken on-board as I write the sequel are:

1) Planning is paramount, especially when your plot gets complex or convoluted.  I planned a great deal for the first book but never with enough detail to stop me running fowl of my own attention span.

2) While writing, don’t walk away mid-section or at least, if you have to stop, make notes about where your thoughts are.  Having looked back through the book to see where the worst mistakes were (track changes – gotta love it), I notice that they seem to occur right in the middle of a chapter or a sequence.  My best guess is that I will have stalled or become frustrated and simply got up to do something else, possibly not returning to write for days at a time.  By then, of course, the buzzing cloud of plot ideas and character actions will have quietened and I will have gone on to finish the section differently than I originally planned.

Hopefully this will make a difference when I am at the point of editing the second book but, to be frank, given that this book is looking to be much longer, with more characters and a more complex plot, I cannot say I am that convinced.  I guess we shall see…