1.

I hate getting ahead of myself, I really do.

Now I have to go back and stitch things back up together.

I can't believe I forgot such a major plotline. Bah.

2.

This will probably jinx me but I have not forgotten to refer to myself as Emily rather than anything else for awhile.

3.

I hate writing action scenes.

I really really do.

I told @redrobinreader I'd attempt some fancy paper art with sharp objects and paper silk. I may make a model and people cut-outs and see where that takes me. But anyway, I've skipped the rest of the action scenes, and will write the pivotal scene so I can continue on.

That should take me past 30k!

Process

1.

My process involves a lot more thinking and waiting for things to piece themselves together in my little head than I would like.

So I spend a lot of time moaning about how if my writing process was more like how I work out the rest of my life, the world would be a better place for me.

2.

Elizabeth Bear:

I've been meaning to blog for a while on writing-related topics, but you know, the funny thing is, as I get better at this writing gig, it gets harder to find things to talk about. One is that historically I've always blogged about what I was learning, and these days, while I am still learning about writing (and I imagine I always will be) the writing curve is a lot flatter, and a lot more of the skills have moved into the realm of unconscious competence. I can still tap into that knowledge when teaching, editing, or critting, but I'm no longer having to work it out for my own self on a daily basis.
And the stuff I am having to work out is much more arcane and of more limited application.

I’ve tried several times to rephrase this analogy in a more compact way with less back-story, but I’m afraid we’re stuck with this rather clunky one.

My undergraduate education has been in economics, with a focus on econometrics; for those of you who are not so well-acquainted with the dismal science, you may substitute statistics for econometrics.

There are lots of formulas. There are lots of proofs you have to go through to understand why those formulas work (kind of). There are lots and lots of criteria as to when and where you can use those formulas. Lots of little bits you must weigh in the pros/cons columns and then decide what your final method will be.

So finally, you can have a long, erudite and technically complex argument as to why you have done it one way rather than another in your study, but really, it boils down intuition as much as anything else.

It’s the same thing with writing, I bet.

There’s only so much you can learn by reading what other people have written on the subject – or taught etc.

There’s so much more to learn by doing. And so much of learning by doing you cannot learn by having it taught to you.

3.

Recently, I taught a friend to cross-stitch. I bought everything, the chart, fabric, thread, needle and frame.

I sat her down, and gave her the basics. I barely managed to restrain myself to the basics. I itched to discuss railroading, linen vs Aida, cotton vs silk, stretch frame vs scroll frame vs Q-snaps vs hoop vs in-hand.

At its very basic, cross-stitch is simply the physical act of making little crosses with needle and thread on a ground (fabric).

Similarly, writing is stringing words together. A monkey could do it. But it doesn’t mean a monkey could do it well.

4.

There are lessons to be learnt each day in doing, and each day in doing, one internalises both those lessons and the lessons one has learnt from classes, critiques etc.

That internalising is what makes for effortless excellence.

Immersion

1.

I’m a write-every-day kind of writer.

It took me three years to earn that kind of discipline, and I’ll be damned if I let it disintegrate now.

2.

But I think it’s not really about writing-every-day.

It’s about Thinking About The Work every day, because it’s what keeps you ‘plugged into your work’. Sort of, if your novel’s a ‘flow,’ then it’s just easier to tap into it if you do it every day.

Pretty sure some people can do it without writing every day, but I’m also pretty sure it’s easier just to write every day – barring time constraints, of course.

3.

I started one of my old blogs to keep my hand in, so to speak. Just to make sure that I wrote something every day.

It kind of worked. I wrote every day, though I didn’t post usually post what I wrote the same day – it got to a point where I was writing my posts up to a week or more in advance because I just blogged, blogged, blogged.

On the other hand, it was the perfect procrastination-from-fiction tool*, because I could tell myself ‘I’m still writing.’

But I wasn’t.

4.

If there’s anything similar to blogging, it might be writing vignettes and other types of short-form fiction. They are like doing the hundred meter dash every day, just on different athletic tracks – somebody will probably want to smack me for this analogy, but I don’t write short-form at all so forgive me.

Novels are marathons. Plod plod plod.

5.

Actually, strike that.

Novels are more like obstacle courses. Sometimes you run into a wall, a mud pit, something you have to climb over, or crawl under…

You need to deal with them, and you need to deal with each of them intelligently. You don’t want to expend more effort than necessary, but sometimes, you gotta bring out the bulldozers.

But here’s the thing. Books are organic objects, whether you’re a plotter or not.

If you dig up something to dump it and you dig it up by the roots? It’ll jostle the foundations of the rest of your constructions.

I think only if you’re truly immersed in your book can you see the rough edges, sand them off, and put the pieces back together to form a new pattern.

6.

So breathe your work. Dream of it. Wallow in it. Hold it deep within your heart.

Immerse yourself.

Commitment

1.

Starting a book is a commitment.

It’s a commitment to telling a story.

2.

And it’s like getting married.

You work at it, you cry over it, and you scream at it. You fight with it, you love it, and you want to kill it.

You don’t give up, unless the alternative is a billion times worse.

3.

If you do quit, if you do decide that it’s not worth it any more, you may feel guilty.

But you also feel incredibly relieved. Which possibly makes you feel even more guilty.

4.

Whether you quit or not, your self-worth takes a hit, because you must have done so many/everything wrong otherwise it would have been much easier…right?

*Inspired by Nadia’s recent marriage to Evil Hero Material, henceforth known as her better half. *g*

1.

I want to write a book with wizards in it.

I am not, however, going through a Harry Potter phase.

But wizards! Funny hats! Beautifully embroidered robes!

2.

My sooperwoman’s mind is like a fortress. I can’t see into it at all.

There are scenes when you just know that they are meant to be written in her POV, but you can’t. So you either you skip it – which I generally try to avoid – or you write it in some other POV, which just feels wrong – which I also generally try to avoid.

So it’s making it difficult for me to write.

3.

I need to think about patterns. It’s something that should have come to mind earlier, given that I sew, but it didn’t and I feel like a million times an idiot for it.

4.

I’m not really making my daily minimum goals. It’s more like not writing, not writing, not writing, and bang! make up for several days at once.

Futuristic

1.

My current novels are set somewhat in the future.

I’m not sure that I know how to deal with that.

2.

After an urban war, I can’t imagine that any city would look the same again.

I thought that would make it easier for me, to set it in London.

It hasn’t, really. Especially when one of my brighter ideas was to have Imperial College, London ‘reused’ as some other kind of building – Imperial being only an example, but I had/have plans for other university buildings in London and other cities.

Maybe not after all.

3.

There’s the technology. It’s not something I really thought about at the time, when I decided to pick up the story wholesale and set it down fifty years later.

I was writing a scene today and I wrote about the books that filled the shelves of my sooperwoman.

Then it occurs to me that maybe she doesn’t have books. Real books, that is. And it’s ironic that I wrote that because I love ebooks more than I do print.

4.

The structure of the sexual relationships is surprisingly archaic.

At some point, said sooperwoman becomes sooperman’s mistress. The stereotypical Other Woman.

In sooperman’s circles, pretty much all marriages are contracted for politico-economic reasons. In regular people circles in the same part of the world, it’s usually because the couple is genetically compatible.

Sooperman’s marriage, in particular, was contracted because of the first, though the latter also held true.

Then in the next section, which begins a minimum of 20-30 years after this one, the pendulum swings the other way. All the other way.

5.

I think when you’re writing something like that, at some point, your past/present will collide with the future you are creating.

In my construct – a term I prefer to world – reincarnation is a continuous process, and given certain conditions, each person (character? damn. this gets confusing sometimes) remembers all of their past(s).  So that collision happens almost constantly.

I don’t know how to handle that either.

Focus

1.

Some people call it in the zone. Writers like Justine Lee Musk call it ‘writing deep.’

In one of my favourite books, S.L. Viehl’s Blade Dancer, a trainer at the assassin school the protagonists are studying at comments that Sajora (I don’t have the book with me, so it might be Jakol instead) has found the ‘sword within herself’ (again, the book’s not with me, so this is most probably a paraphrase.

For me, it boils down to this: Don’t Think, Just Do.

2.

This latest exam period, I discovered just how difficult some people find it to reach that state of mind, and how much more difficult many people find it to stay there.

3.

You need to push.

For some people, it’s all rather Zen.

I think of it as The Push – I suspect this I stole from Lilith Saintcrow’s The Society series, because one of the protagonists is able to ‘push’ people into doing stuff.

Having said all that, I tend to think of life as a war rather than a path, etc.

4.

You can learn how to Push yourself.

Successful creative people aren’t just creative people. They do things that help support what they create.

For a writer, this might include PR, web design, networking and bookkeeping.

I think something that successful people often are able to do, but is rarely talked about, is the ability to direct creative energy outside their preferred outlet of expression.

5.

You can do wonders if you just have the energy and the willpower to get it done.

And if you can commit that much for writing, you can do the same for the rest of your life.

Courage

1.

I need some.

In fact, I think I need loads of it.

2.

I’m seriously contemplating Dutch courage. Except I don’t think it’s good for me to do stuff that could lead to addictions.

I already have an obsessive personality. If I add addictive to that, I think the rest of my life will just go down the toilet.

3.

I have been driven to this because I’ve realised my barrier to finishing this book is me.

I mean, I’ve always known that. It’s generally true of everything one wishes to accomplish.

4.

The difficulty that I mentioned a few days ago has become clearer to me, if not at all simpler to resolve.

I have the ‘small story’. By this, I mean the storyline of the characters in the novel. But I haven’t yet been able to put the ‘big picture’ into writing.

If the small story is what’s on the chessboard, then the big picture IS the chessboard.

Don’t ask me how I play chess without a chessboard because I will hurt you.

5.

I sent a brain-dribbling-out email to Nadia a few months back, maybe late summer last year, and looking it over, I’ve realised that all that was in there was the small story.

I know I have the big picture. It’s In My Head.

It just never appears to translate into what’s on the screen. Or if it does, it’s buried so deep even I can’t see it.

I acknowledge that this has always been a problem for me. How else would I have achieved partial manuscripts with only 2 characters?

But I’ve never felt this as keenly, maybe because I never had enough of the small story to realise that there was still stuff lacking.

6.

So back to courage.

I need some, I think, to get the big picture out of my head and in words.

Doesn’t matter how awful, or how bad it is. I need to get it out where I can see it so I can tear it down and fix it.

Which sounds so easy, and is probably why all the writing advice ever given to me boils down to:

Write the damn thing. Fix it later.