Writing the final book
Mar. 10th, 2005 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ksmithA recent discussion in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aireon's group about seat-of-the-pants plotting, outlining, and the transmutation that occurs when converting thought to written word led me to comment about the difficulties I'm having writing the (AFAIK) last book in the Jani series.
I'm required to turn in an outline and sample chapters as part of my contract, but while the money received for this is a good thing, the process is about as much fun as a sharp stick in the eye. The sample chapters aren't horrible--I'm usually certain that they will change by the time the book is finished, but they consist of actual writing that if nothing else allows me to purge some of the garbage that I need to get out of the way as I work my way to the final form of the book. It's a variation of that (apocryphal?) tale about Michaelangelo, in which a patron supposedly asked him how he set about carving David from a block of marble, and he replied that he simply
chipped away everything that didn't look like David. The book is like a big block in my mind (get your blockhead comments out of the way now thankyou), and in the process of yorking it out, a lot of stuff gets on the page that isn't the final book. A little bit may simply require smoothing and polishing, but for the most part, it's hammers, chisels, and the occasional carefully-placed explosive. Extruded block from brain through hands to keyboard and display, with all the inefficiency, irritation, occasional pain, and thick layers of dust that this implies.
The outline had up to this point not served the same function. Every time I've written an outline, I've felt fairly comfortable with it, certain that I could make most of it work. Then I would try to write the story as outlined, and I would find myself running up against barrier after barrier that would eventually lead me to tossing the first 200 pages of the wip and starting over from scratch as the process ground to a halt and I couldn't for love or money or deadlines get it started again until I realized that the story I had written up to that point wasn't the story at all. Wrong plot, sometimes. Wrong antagonist, other times. Sometimes, the realization that I was trying to get Jani to do something she wouldn't do. The act of writing the outline didn't trigger the uh-ohs and wait-a-minutes that the actual writing of the scenes did. It was a forced storyline from the conscious part of my brain, constructed sans percolation, meditation, and steeping in the subconscious brain brew that only occurred for me during the 5 pages a day process of actually writing the story. Because I needed to work through this process, the story that developed always seemed fairly fresh to me. I usually had a good idea of the ending, but the beginning and middle was pretty much up in the air. At this point, I would set aside the outline and pretty much never look at it again, then get on with the business of writing the second-kinda-sorta draft, which would then be rewritten either wholly or in part. By the end of this inefficient, frustrating, and utterly wasteful process, I had the Book, which in some ways was very new all the way to the end.
Then we get to the wip, Jani 5, tentative-and-*will*-be-changed-so-help-me title ENDGAME. I was in an odd frame of mind when I wrote this outline, the details of which I can't discuss mostly because I'll give away major sections of plot by doing so. Suffice it to say that said frame of mind informed my plot. Add to that the fact that as the last book in the series, story arcs that have coursed along through four books will be coming to an end. In order to end in a satisfactory manner, these arcs will end in certain ways that I was able to determine even at the outline stage. It's like this series was a *very* big block, 80% of it has been chipped away by the writing of the first four books, and what remains, even though it is in outline form, is pretty much as the statue it is meant to be. Which means that there's not a whole lot of birthing/discovery/uncovery left to experience, which in turn has taken the edge off my desire to keeping plugging away.
In many ways, for me, this story is completed, and as a consequence I'm having a devil of a time applying myself to the polishing, chipping, and grinding.
aireon's group about seat-of-the-pants plotting, outlining, and the transmutation that occurs when converting thought to written word led me to comment about the difficulties I'm having writing the (AFAIK) last book in the Jani series. I'm required to turn in an outline and sample chapters as part of my contract, but while the money received for this is a good thing, the process is about as much fun as a sharp stick in the eye. The sample chapters aren't horrible--I'm usually certain that they will change by the time the book is finished, but they consist of actual writing that if nothing else allows me to purge some of the garbage that I need to get out of the way as I work my way to the final form of the book. It's a variation of that (apocryphal?) tale about Michaelangelo, in which a patron supposedly asked him how he set about carving David from a block of marble, and he replied that he simply
chipped away everything that didn't look like David. The book is like a big block in my mind (get your blockhead comments out of the way now thankyou), and in the process of yorking it out, a lot of stuff gets on the page that isn't the final book. A little bit may simply require smoothing and polishing, but for the most part, it's hammers, chisels, and the occasional carefully-placed explosive. Extruded block from brain through hands to keyboard and display, with all the inefficiency, irritation, occasional pain, and thick layers of dust that this implies.
The outline had up to this point not served the same function. Every time I've written an outline, I've felt fairly comfortable with it, certain that I could make most of it work. Then I would try to write the story as outlined, and I would find myself running up against barrier after barrier that would eventually lead me to tossing the first 200 pages of the wip and starting over from scratch as the process ground to a halt and I couldn't for love or money or deadlines get it started again until I realized that the story I had written up to that point wasn't the story at all. Wrong plot, sometimes. Wrong antagonist, other times. Sometimes, the realization that I was trying to get Jani to do something she wouldn't do. The act of writing the outline didn't trigger the uh-ohs and wait-a-minutes that the actual writing of the scenes did. It was a forced storyline from the conscious part of my brain, constructed sans percolation, meditation, and steeping in the subconscious brain brew that only occurred for me during the 5 pages a day process of actually writing the story. Because I needed to work through this process, the story that developed always seemed fairly fresh to me. I usually had a good idea of the ending, but the beginning and middle was pretty much up in the air. At this point, I would set aside the outline and pretty much never look at it again, then get on with the business of writing the second-kinda-sorta draft, which would then be rewritten either wholly or in part. By the end of this inefficient, frustrating, and utterly wasteful process, I had the Book, which in some ways was very new all the way to the end.
Then we get to the wip, Jani 5, tentative-and-*will*-be-changed-so-help-me title ENDGAME. I was in an odd frame of mind when I wrote this outline, the details of which I can't discuss mostly because I'll give away major sections of plot by doing so. Suffice it to say that said frame of mind informed my plot. Add to that the fact that as the last book in the series, story arcs that have coursed along through four books will be coming to an end. In order to end in a satisfactory manner, these arcs will end in certain ways that I was able to determine even at the outline stage. It's like this series was a *very* big block, 80% of it has been chipped away by the writing of the first four books, and what remains, even though it is in outline form, is pretty much as the statue it is meant to be. Which means that there's not a whole lot of birthing/discovery/uncovery left to experience, which in turn has taken the edge off my desire to keeping plugging away.
In many ways, for me, this story is completed, and as a consequence I'm having a devil of a time applying myself to the polishing, chipping, and grinding.
