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18,701 / 100,000 (18.7%)

Today I looked at a variety of pages cataloguing the typical cliches of the fantasy genre (which, somewhat inexplicibly, I find myself writing). These included The Grand List of Fantasy CLiches and The Not So Grand Cliche List. These are amusing, but also instructive, of course.

I am of two minds about the cliche. I realize, on one hand, that the idea is to avoid cliches at all costs, because if you’re using them your story isn’t terribly original. But on the other hand, cliches are cliches for a reason; they do something useful, they stir something in us (if well executed, of course). I’m interested in cliches, I’ll be honest. There’s nothing like a retelling of a powerful fairy tale, there’s nothing like that sense of satisfation when a story ends just the way you felt it should, and nothing quite so annoying as when a character does the exact opposite of where you felt she was going (ahem, Little Women). It seems to me that cliches, on the bright side, are that feeling; cliches scorned, that’s the real mistake.

I’m inspired by cliches, to be perfectly honest. I love to write stories that are based on something so well-worn you think there’s nothing salvagable in them. I learned long ago that it’s no the cliche that’s boring, it’s relying on it to take you all the way home that doesn’t work.

Maybe this is the difference between people who want to be surprised by a book and those who want to see the process. I don’t really care about how a book ends; I’m more interested in seeing how we get there. Likewise, I don’t care if a storyline is cliched. I just want to know if it works, if it’s satisfying. There are only so many stories, isn’t that true? We’re all writing the same story, metaphorically speaking. But only we can put ourselves in ours. So they’re all bound to be different in a million little ways.

A one star review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, as posted on Amazon.com:

I bought these books to have something nice to read to my grandkids. I had to stop, however, because the books are nothing more than advertisements for “Turkish Delight,” a candy popular in the U.K. The whole point of buying books for my grandkids was to give them a break from advertising, and here (throughout) are ads for this “Turkish Delight”! How much money is this Mr. Lewis getting from the Cadbury’s chocolate company anyway? This man must be laughing to the bank.

Too funny. Just like how the New Testament is full of advertisements for those “30 pieces of silver” Cadbury is trying to sell us. Good times.

Amusing one star amazon reviews for famous books collected here.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I am taking up writing again. Writing is an all-consuming activity in my experience, and I’m not sure how real writers keep up with their lives while cranking out novels. I’m moving pretty slowly on mine, which is probably a good speed for someone as impatient as me. Having other things to do forces me to look at what I’ve done and not skimp on each part. Savour every little scene as it’s before me, that’s the ticket.

At any rate: I want to record my progress.

13,463 / 100,000 (13.5%)

My goal today was to get about halfway through chapter three, but all I did was add 1000 words to chapter two. Yes, those 13,000 odd words represents two chapters and exactly three days of otherworld time. I’m concerned about overly-lengthy chapters, but I guess that should be the last thing I worry about. I’m hoping for no more than 100,000 words. Possibly that’s undershooting this thing, who knows.

It’s funny, my friend June mentioned that it must be easier to take stuff out rather than put it in, and that made me realize that the exact opposite is true for me. I can always expand on something. Taking anything out is pure torture. I’ve been writing this thing much the way you would paint a picture; put the bones out first, and then go over and over it with different colours until it looks about the way you want it to. At this point I can’t really re-read what I’ve written without adding another layer.

I’m taking some management advice on this one: only get it to 80%. If you’re only working to produce something that’s 80% perfect, then there’s room for that 20% to come from others without causing pain and personal damage in the process. We’ll see how that goes.

I’d just like to note that there is exactly no relationship between writing and being a librarian. I know that seems odd, but really. No relationship there at all.

This post has nothing to do with librarianship. I started keeping a blog in 2001, and while my life has always had one dominant theme or another, I’ve never had a subject-specific blog. Since librarianship is my bread and butter these days, that’s covered most of what I’ve been posting about lately.

But this is a slight diversion. I’m working on a manuscript at the moment, so I’m going to use this space to talk a bit about that as well. The process of writing is strange, sometimes enlightening, but sometimes completely crazy, and I think getting a bit meta about the process will help to keep me sane.

The story of the manuscript: I started writing this thing at the recommendation of a wise reader. I used to write a quite a lot in amateur online writing communities, and I really really enjoyed it. I like writing, what can I say. So when I started to get significant feedback from professionals in the publication industry telling me to stop writing for the web and start something I could actually publish, I took them very seriously and started working on it. I looked at the expectations of publishers, took stock of what sort of thing got published these days, and reformatted some of my ideas to fit. I did a lot world building, a lot of character sketches, and then I started writing.

I did every single thing wrong. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t. I didn’t plan enough. I didn’t pay enough attention to the thing as a whole. I wrote one version, got some feedback, and then did a serious revision. Then I sat on it for a few months, returned to it, did another serious revision, and vowed to write one more chapter of a conclusion and that would be it. I had taken all the advice I’d gotten. I had fixed the things that bothered me, and fixed the things that bothered others. I had added characters just to kill them, added drama, cut characters, revised some basic assumptions. It was all done. And then I started my library school co-op and dropped it altogether.

I really thought I was done with writing at that point. I just couldn’t take the nitpicky tedium of it by then. I had other fish to fry. When I was writing, I really wanted to be a writer. The librarian thing might work as a fallback, but I wanted to be a writer, at least in the short term. But once I got really into librarianship that seriously changed. Librarianship is the only profession I’ve ever felt really passionate about, and once I realized I actually wanted to be good at my job and change the world in my own little way (rather than just get a steady pay cheque), my writerly dreams fell by the wayside.

So now I’m 4 months deep into my new job, I’m learning a lot and enjoying myself, and suddenly I’m feeling the pull of this manuscript again. Or, at least, the idea of it. It’s not the idea of being a writer that interests me, or even the idea of publishing. I don’t want to change my profession, I don’t want to quit if the writing thing works out. It’s this story, these characters, and the simple fact that I still really enjoy writing that’s bringing me back to it.

I never returned to the original files of my last revision. They’re zipped up and on my hard drive, but I haven’t even opened them. When the ideas, the scenes, and the characters came back to me, I decided to simply catalogue them. What were the elements of this story that I really liked? What were the events that I wanted to write about? What were the pieces of it that made me return to thinking about this story? I picked up a nifty piece of software called Idea Knot. It lets you jot down ideas and then organize them into categories (single ideas can fit into multiple categories, if you like, it’s pretty flexible). So I just wrote down everything I liked and the things I wanted to see. I re-imagined the characters, I interrogated and challenged the decisions I made the first time. I developed new answers to old problems. I discarded characters that weren’t fundamental to the plot. I massively revised the geography, added art and religion, reconceptualized the order of events. And as the list of elements grew, I started filing them into some kind of chapter order. I made notes about elements of the story that should be clear in each chapter. I talked to some writers I know about my concerns, about constructing good characters and the pitfalls of some of my plot elements. I turned a heavily event-driven story into a heavily character-driven narrative. I found a committed beta reader (thank you Caitlin) who had already sat through versions one and two and would be a soundboard for some of the crazy directions I thought the story might take. I pasted my emails to her into my collection of notes, ideas, and character sketches. And eventually I had a fairly detailed outline for a mostly (but not entirely) different story.

Now I am (slowly, carefully, hesitatingly) starting to write again. I have a solid framework for the first three chapters, and I’m going to write them. And then I’m going to look back over my three chapters, consider my plan of attack, and look at getting a solid framework for the next three chapter that will work well with what I’ve already done. Small steps!

The last time I sat down to write I could hammer through a 6000 words like it was nothing and then just keep going the next day. This time I think I’ve gone so far in the other direction that I’m almost organizing myself into some kind of creative straightjacket. The first day I sat down I ended up with about 600 words and couldn’t believe how slowly it was coming. It wasn’t painful, it was actually just as enjoyable as before, but I was so aware of how much I want this story to really work that I’m so much more careful word by word. I’m not clinging to a darling sentences anymore; I’m less sensitive to criticism and more committed to the story itself than to the individual words. By the time I was done that first night I had 1500 words and forwarded them all on to my beta reader. We discussed it, I did some expanding and editing, and now I have 3115 words. At one time I had 96,000 heavily-revised words; it’s amazing how proud I am of this 3115.

But I’m writing this story because I want to write this story, that’s it. I’m not going to look at what’s publishable or what audiences tend to like this time around. I don’t care. Now that I’m gainfully employed (and loving my job), I’m not doing this because I’m trying to change my life, or make a name for myself, or embark on a new profession. I’m going to write this story because I want to, and I’m going to write it the way I think it should be written. If someone wants to see it after that, I have no objection. But I ain’t quitting my day job either way. But it’s wonderful to be wrapped up in a story again. It’s pure delight. And as my beta reader points out, my delight seems to be shaping up into a better story.