Writer's Block!

[gumboot]

I found Heinlein's rules. I understand your comments, but at least for me too much revision is a way to avoid finishing and then, well, facing criticism.

http://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm

This actually seems to be the gist of Heinlein's rule. Stephen King made a similar observation, and I've found it to be true as well. Even if I have to "XXX" a spot and write myself a note to come back to later, I do it rather than interupt the flow of my writing. I prefer to have a first draft that I can start "real work" on rather than twenty well-edited pages of a story that will never be complete.

Ah, I see the context of his rules now. I agree thoroughly with them. Most of my rewriting comes down to two aspects:
1) I started it when I was essentially a kid so the early story and actual writing is simply bad
2) It's fantasy and the actual world itself has only really locked into place in the last couple of years

So the rewriting is A) about bringing my writing up to the level of an adult and B) about bringing the story in line with the world in which it is set.

You could think of the first six or seven years as just practise writing, in which case I really only am doing one draft.

I like his rules.

I am curious if any of this has helped you, gumboot?

I think in a way it did. I am writing again; that's the main thing. However this last weekend I also bought a drawing tablet and I have been using it to work on my maps and to do some rough sketches of various styles of dress from the different cultures, so I think that has played a big part.

My great frustration as a writer is that I really do tend to write best in fits and starts. When writing my first draft of the current book it barely got touched for three years while I was studying at film school, and then about six months after I finished, after being stale for almost four years, I abruptly finished it, writing 65,000 words in 10 days.

I still have a long way to go before I have really mastered the discipline of writing a little every day (I can do it, but my story often tends to stagnate in the process).

 

[gumboot]

If you're not changing the plot too much, but you're changing the setting, then you'll be fine as long as you reveal the setting via the actions that are happening.

The basic plot remains the same but the details have changed quite a bit.

Of course, if you try to insert description, the action will stop and folks will put it down.

Yeah I try to avoid that. There's some writers in my genre who are particularly bad at interrupting the flow of the story to describe how that flat mountain over there has names in fourteen tongues and was pivotal in the legend of Maghar the Mad King of Yore. No thanks.

But as long as you're not stopping to describe, as long as the setting reveals itself as the characters interact with it in ways that advance the plot, then you're fine.

That, hopefully, is the plan. In fact that's part of the reason I am rewriting rather than revising - I don't want to take the old version and simply insert in this big paragraph where I'm explaining how these people dress, and insert another page in that spot describing how their houses are designed. Because I want to filter it in slowly it's just easier to rewrite it all from scratch and just use the old draft as a guideline for the major points.

That means introducing plot details sometimes which don't really get you much farther down the road, but if those moments are funny, or reveal character, or are beautifully said, you can get away with that.

I often find my screenwriting training to be very useful. Screenwriting has to be much more economical than a novel, because you simply don't have the time to add fluff. So every scene is doing four or five things at once. I try to apply the same mentality. Instead of having long chunks of narrative that describe long lumps of activity I try to write out lots of brief scenes more directly and illustrate the point that way.

The only time I really pass over things with long narrative is when I need to pass a substantial length of time (I haven't really worked out a good literary translation of the film montage!). Otherwise I just "jump cut" to the next pertinent moment.

I try to use the protagonists unfamiliarity with the culture to slip in little details here and there, rather than interrupting the plot - so he and a friend might be walking along a corridor, and a particular heroic painting catches his eye so he asks his friend about it, who briefly explains "that's a great hero of our past who was betrayed to his death" then later he'll see a statue of a warrior woman who is weeping and ask about that and the friend explains "that's our War Goddess, she's crying because her son, that hero, was betrayed. That's why she became the Goddess of Vengeance"... that sort of thing, so you slowly flesh out an important culture feature in brief glimpses rather than halting the story and having the protagonist receive an hour long lecture on the matter.

 

[Piggy]

I often find my screenwriting training to be very useful. Screenwriting has to be much more economical than a novel, because you simply don't have the time to add fluff. So every scene is doing four or five things at once. I try to apply the same mentality. Instead of having long chunks of narrative that describe long lumps of activity I try to write out lots of brief scenes more directly and illustrate the point that way.

Well, that's certainly the way to approach it now.

When I was a kid and I noticed that sometimes I would have dreams that were like watching it all play out on a screen, I thought to myself, y'know, nobody would have had a dream like that a thousand years ago.

We all have cinematic minds now.

And look at Dan Brown. One of the smartest things he did was to write bus-stop chapters. Divide it up into small chunks for readers who are on commutes, on breaks, on lunch hours, waiting for haircuts.

Then he took advice from Dickens and made each chapter a cliffhanger, and from Hollywood and made them all chase scenes, and from Conan Doyle and always had someone on hand who needed things to be explained, and wrapped it all up in the strings of public domain folklore, add a sprinkling of American stock characters, and voila!

Cinematic setting, mystery, clue, villain, chase, cliffhanger repeat.

That, and he knew how to write that stuff and how to market it. He earned all his money.

But if it had been more cinematic -- less reliant on exposition -- he would have earned a lot more. Cause then the movie wouldn't have sucked.

The only time I really pass over things with long narrative is when I need to pass a substantial length of time (I haven't really worked out a good literary translation of the film montage!). Otherwise I just "jump cut" to the next pertinent moment.

Yeah, if you have a strong, interesting narrator (anonymous or not) then sometimes it's better to just tell what happened for a little bit than to try to search for a device to reveal it, which could sidetrack the action later on.

I try to use the protagonists unfamiliarity with the culture to slip in little details here and there, rather than interrupting the plot - so he and a friend might be walking along a corridor, and a particular heroic painting catches his eye so he asks his friend about it, who briefly explains "that's a great hero of our past who was betrayed to his death" then later he'll see a statue of a warrior woman who is weeping and ask about that and the friend explains "that's our War Goddess, she's crying because her son, that hero, was betrayed. That's why she became the Goddess of Vengeance"... that sort of thing, so you slowly flesh out an important culture feature in brief glimpses rather than halting the story and having the protagonist receive an hour long lecture on the matter.

One thing I always try to do is to link it to a character, because people are only interested in a plot if they care about the characters involved in it.

So maybe instead of a painting or a sculpture, heck, I'd have a love interest be in the cult of the godess, and then you've really got a reason for the hero -- and the eavesdropping readers -- so prick up his ears and figure out what the heck that's all about, getting a sly dose of historical exposition in underneath.

And when you get down to it, if it doesn't matter to your characters, it doesn't matter to your readers. And if it matters to your characters, it should be in the scenes you choose to write about.

ETA: But yeah, I hear what you're saying... the most difficult stuff to get across is the information that would be so understood among the fictional culture that they would never have a conversation about it, any more than we would have a conversation about what "states" are.

 

[alfaniner]

The

 

[gumboot]

One thing I always try to do is to link it to a character, because people are only interested in a plot if they care about the characters involved in it.

So maybe instead of a painting or a sculpture, heck, I'd have a love interest be in the cult of the godess, and then you've really got a reason for the hero -- and the eavesdropping readers -- so prick up his ears and figure out what the heck that's all about, getting a sly dose of historical exposition in underneath.

Funny you mention that because that's precisely what I'm doing. The initial tid bits are really just primers - throw away lines so that the mythology is always there in the background, even if you don't actually know anything about it. Later on, when some details are revealed, it's via more direct means - quite literally a cult to the goddess.

And when you get down to it, if it doesn't matter to your characters, it doesn't matter to your readers. And if it matters to your characters, it should be in the scenes you choose to write about.

Quite true. My protagonist, at this point, is really mainly concerned for getting revenge for early events, so he has a vested interested in a vengeance cult dedicated to a vengeance Goddess.

ETA: But yeah, I hear what you're saying... the most difficult stuff to get across is the information that would be so understood among the fictional culture that they would never have a conversation about it, any more than we would have a conversation about what "states" are.

Yeah this is very true. The writer Robin Hobb has an interesting take on this in her Farseer books - there's copious historical references to these ancient peoples, but the characters are frustrated because none of them actually describe what these beings look like - any more than someone mentioning a horse in a story is going to stop to describe what a horse looks like. I guess that's why the role of the outsider is so useful.

On the same topic, one of the most useful books I've ever read was Tom Shippey's book The Road To Middle Earth which is about how Tolkien created Middle Earth and his books.

A particular point was that Shippey talked about how immersive writing has to give you hints at things beyond the immediate story without actually filling out the details. It creates the illusion that the story is set inside this vast world. He referred to it as "far off vistas". This is why Lord of the Rings was so effective - Tolkien was constantly able to allude to his other work without ever actually spelling it out, so no matter how deep you delved into the world there was always something else, just out of sight.

Shippey thought that this was part of why the Silmarilion didn't do as well - it was those far off vistas, and with nothing else behind it to hint at deeper and more distant things, the entire illusion of a vast world fell apart.

So I try to keep this in mind in my writing, and keep giving the reader hints of this bigger world beyond the immediate story.