Following Dr. Write's inspiring lead, I've decided to dedicate July to the resumption of the novel. I took a movie that starts on July 30 so hopefully this'll motivate me to get going.
The problem? I've admitted to myself that my plotting is sucky, with way too many characters and way too much going on, so I've decided to stoop down into Hackworld and use traditional plotting for mysteries and detective novels as a skeleton. I'm not really writing a mystery and I'm certainly not doing a detective novel, so what's the point? Not sure, but it does seem to be solving some elemental problems.
The big issue now is reconciling the new need for intricate plot planning and puzzle-making with the old Forge Ahead No Matter What yawp that is NaNoWriMo. I started forging ahead but I am finding that this is not the best way to form an efficient, tight, satisfying plot. Indeed, I am still trying to undo the freeform damage that my frist draft laid out so messily.
So, it feels like a copout but I've got the index cards on the floor and the How-To books from the library and I'm devoting the first week to actually sorting out the narrative. Instead of doing actual writing.
Is this work? Hm. It certainly takes time.
I mean, I don't think it's unproductive. But it's not really productive, either. It's somewhere in between. Semi-productive?
Really, it feels like an excuse for just not sitting down and doing the work.
Lollygaggin.
5 comments:
well, here I am at 3 a.m. thinking about you and your novel problems. did that sound tart? I admire certain writers immensely for their plotting, such as Elmore Leonard. I love his ear, but even if you turn the sound all the way down, the elegance of the structure still gleams. Also, George Eliot, as in Middlemarch, plotted intricately, actually quite a while before she began writing, if I remember correctly. She kept notebooks. Big notebooks. You just go ahead and keep working with those index cards, it's not cheating, I don't think.
Not that you didn't know who George Eliot is. I'm just saying. George Eliot. She's one of the Novel Pantheon for me.
MB knows of my curious collegiate attraction to George Eliot. I never could understand it--a former high school b-ball player reading MM in a hippie outpost in Olympia. It wasn't for a class, but I still have notes on the novel I took on 3x5 cards. Strange.
On the writerly anecdote front: Virginia Woolf used to write standing up at her lectern. There is a joke in there somewhere, but it is probably crass so I won't tell it.
I like the idea of taking a skeleton of a pot boiler and doing something else with it. Crying of Lot 49 is kind of based on a detective thriller, isn't it? It might be interesting to take the standard picaresque novel of the 18th century and turn all modern. Moll Flanders or Tom Jones traveling through modern day America? Hmm.
I think I'm where you're at, though I've lost some energy. The plot of my "just write it" novel is not going where I want it to. So I feel the need to stop and regroup.
I need Queen Latifah to come over, write some note cards, and then organize them. That's why I can't write.
And organizing, planning is writing.
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