I want to thank myself. You know that part in the first draft when you're stuck and because you don't want to disrupt the flow of the story you leave yourself a note so that you can fix it later - I just hit that part in Theatre. It confused me at first as all I'd written was:
(old man?????)
And there are two old men in the chapter. God bless NaNoWriMo. I wonder how many more notes I left for myself. I'm almost a third of the way through and trying not to rush the process. I mean, the synopsis can wait. Gulp. I have an idea where I want to send it when I'm done, but I don't know if I'm brave enough.
I got back from Australia and realised that the Waterstones story cards were meant to have been completed and returned by last Friday. They were sent out on April 14th, but due to human error, mine didn't reach me until I was in Melbourne last week, and I didn't even look at the date, just read it hastily, went "Well, that can wait until I'm not touring Australia any longer and I'll have lots of time to think about it...".
But, I discovered, I didn't have lots of time. I have about 24 hours, as it has to be in London at the end of the week. I looked at the card, guessed that I could fit about 250 words on it, and wrote a 250 word story (using the Pelikan flexnib that Henry Selick gave me from http://www.richardspens.com/. I'd been waiting for something to write with it, and this seemed perfect). I have two more cards, in case of disaster, and I might do a second draft tomorrow before FedEx comes. Or I may not. But I find myself, for the first time, a bit envious of Margaret Atwood and her Long Pen...
In response to your bee picture, my eleven year-old daughter said "It looks like an angry penguin." (Me)"Are you sure it doesn't look like an angry bee?" (Her)"Nope, an angry penguin."
Take care!
Gina
I love my job.
Hi!
I have a question about writing. I read your advice, and the thing is, I don't do it like that at all.
For one thing, I don't write a first draft completely, then edit it several times. I work with scenes. I write a scene, I correct it, a re-correct it, I edit it and so on. I usually have a story planned out in my head entirely, so I end up writing the scenes in any order, really, although it's mostly chronological.
I'm guessing your advice would probably be "whatever works for you", but the thing is, I don't know if it works for me. I've never finished a novel yet. Actually, my first novel (which is uncomplete) is resting right now because I met my husband, who's Canadian and couldn't speak French, and I stopped writing in French. I just though, what's the point of writing if the person I love the most can't even read it? I want him to read it /before/ everyone else, not years later.
So I started writing in English, and man is it hard. You think you're fluent in a language, and next thing you know you're struggling to find synonyms or words that have the right connotation, and your characters all speak the same way, because that's they only way /you/ speak. So I'm extremely slow.
I'm just worried that my approach might just be plain wrong, and lead me to never finish anything. I don't know who to ask for advice so I'm turning to you.
I guess my question really is, should I make sure to finish a first draft as soon as possible, even if what I write is crap and has to be rewritten later, or can I polish each piece, put them all together, then polish the result? Is it very important to have a whole to work with, and can that whole be in your head rather than written? (I always spend several months just thinking about a story for hours every day before writing it. By which I mean, that's the way I did it for the only two "real" novels I've started)
Sorry I wrote that much. Feel free to take an aspirin.
The biggest problem I can see with the way you're doing it is that it doesn't seem to give you anything finished. (If it was working for you I'd have no suggestions. There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right, after all.) The second biggest problem is that if you're writing a novel scene by scene, trying to get each scene perfect, you don't get to see how anything works when you put it all together, and that's important. A novel is more than just a sequence of scenes put side by side. It has its own rhythms, and you have to bow to them; a novel, or any long story, is something that has to work when you put the whole thing together.
If you're being forced by the nature of what you're doing (episodic comics or serial television, or even writing a novel at 200 words a day online or in a newspaper) to just write and hope it all works out, that's one thing. But if you're writing a novel determined to make each scene perfect before you go on to the next, and you're writing the scenes out of order, then you're making something that's either going to work or not work when you put it all together. (That's still "write the first draft any which way".)
But it won't excuse you from doing a second draft, because you'll get to the end, and put all the scenes together, and then you'll still have to do a second draft, if only because when you read it you notice that you've got two Wednesdays coming together, and someone's name or eye-colour changes between scenes. Or your heroine seems like a bitch, although that wasn't your intention, because you don't have a scene there that shows her humanity. Or a great scene you wrote and rewrote and honed and rewrote and polished till it shone just doesn't fit anywhere because the thing that's happening at the same time loses all vitality if you cut away from it.
I guess that's one reason I like things like NaNoWriMo -- it makes people write and finish things, helter-skelter and however. And once something's finished, you can always fix it. (The first draft of Good Omens took about 9 weeks. The second draft took MONTHS. And it wasn't until we came to rework it a little after that for the US edition that we realised that we had indeed, without noticing, created a week with two Wednesdays in it.)
Incidentally, I'm in awe of anyone who would even attempt to try to write fiction in a language not her own.
As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But -- and I wish it were otherwise -- books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.
So think all you like, but don't mistake the thinking for the writing.
...
The National Doodle Day auction has begun. Proceeds will benefit
Neurofibromatosis, Inc. (nfinc.org). Gillian Anderson's (Scully of The
X-Files) brother suffers from NF. Click here
(http://www.gilliananderson.ws/charities/nf.shtml) to read about
Gillian's involvement with the cause.
We have 175 doodles on the auction block including many from The
X-Files "gang": David Duchovny, Chris Carter, Annabeth Gish, Mark
Snow (composer of the well-known X-Files theme music), Mitch Pileggi,
and various XF Alumni.
You can easily check out all the available doodles by looking at our
Doodle Guide at:
www.gilliananderson.ws/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?id=EkEpElAEEkjBVPEsLl&style=print
And it's a family affair for Gillian. We have doodles by her sister,
Zoë, her 13 year old daughter, Piper, and Piper's Dad, Clyde Klotz who
also used to work for The X-Files.
To immediately access the eBay auction --
http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZnfinccharity
Direct Links to Neil Gaiman's doodles plus his fave doodles on the
auction block:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Neil-Gaiman-Original-Doodle-1_W0QQitemZ260237234380QQihZ016QQcategoryZ58QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.com/Neil-Gaiman-Original-Doodle-2_W0QQitemZ260237234398QQihZ016QQcategoryZ58QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Kendra Stout:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Kendra-Stout-Original-Doodle_W0QQitemZ260237933406QQihZ016QQcategoryZ58QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Cat Mihos:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Cat-Mihos-Original-Doodle_W0QQitemZ260238652157QQihZ016QQcategoryZ58QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Fred Hembeck:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Fred-Hembeck-Original-Doodle_W0QQitemZ260237233696QQihZ016QQcategoryZ58QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Sergio Aragones:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Sergio-Aragones-Original-Doodle_W0QQitemZ260237234568QQihZ016QQcategoryZ58QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Gahan Wilson:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Gahan-Wilson-Original-Doodle_W0QQitemZ260237933298QQihZ016QQcategoryZ58QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
There are some other pretty nifty ones as well I'd not seen the last time I posted about it (Simon Pegg! Robin Williams!). I was vaguely happy to notice that my first doodle, of something vaguely ifritish, seemed to be attracting more voters than the sort-of-Sandman I did next (thinking, they probably expect a Sandman).
...
So, this just came in from Geoffrey Long, Communications Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies :
Hey, Neil --
Just saw the note on your blog about the tickets to the Schwartz event:
It looks like tickets for the MIT talk on the 23rd are going fast -- http://community.livejournal.com/millionyear/34688.html -- although I believe that MIT are keeping tickets back to sell on the day.
Alas, no -- it doesn't look like there will be tickets available at the door after all, due to their selling like hotcakes at the local shops like Million Year Picnic. ...I'm afraid when the tickets are gone, they're gone, and many of the local shops are already sold out.
The microsite for the event is here: http://cms.mit.edu/juliusschwartz/
Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing you soon!
Cheers,
Geoff
Which seemed a bit daunting, given that the hall seats 1226 people but is nonetheless true, and I'm taking it as a good omen for the first Julie Schwartz Lecture (who was Julie Schwartz? you ask. You can read about him here and you can read what Alan Moore wrote and I read at Julie's memorial here).
I've asked Geoffrey to let me know where tickets are still to be found for any of you, at MIT or in the Boston area, who want to come.
The Birdchick and her team won the Birding World Series, which is good news, and "Platypus" Bill Stiteler blogs yesterday's bee stuff along with what he did today (while I slept like a large, moss-covered, jet-lagged log) over at http://www.birdchick.com/2008/05/simple-plan.html -- and because I'm rather proud of it, I'm putting up a dancing bee photo I took yesterday. (Bill put it up as well, but it's much bigger here, or it will be if you click on it, and I pushed the brightness up so you could see the expression on her little bee face as she waves her leg around. What good are bee photos if you can't see their expressions?)
Thank you for signing my books after the literary dinner in Melbourne, I get a sense that you were tired, but I appreciate how generous you were with your time. It is always a treat to meet you (that was the second time I have met you the first was a few years ago at comics r us in Melbourne) though I get a bit nervous, don't know why but I do.
The episode of "I should be writing" where they list one of the three pieces of advice is to find Neil Gaiman and he will look into your soul and tell you what you need to hear is Episode dated 9/04/08 the third piece of advice.
Your advice was "keep doing what you are doing" and that was exactly what I needed cos I had not been writing very much up until a couple of weeks ago so that helped me keep faith.
I really wish that I could find more advice on second drafts I mean I got a lot information on how to complete a first draft and now I have to get a second draft finished.
What is the best advice can you give a writer about the second draft of a novel. I mean you spend months on the first draft and you finish it and let it lie for a while, and now you have to work with this thing that is a rough lump of clay, how do you form the book out of this mass of intention and thought.
Thank you for your time.
KarlThe second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do.
So you write it. Then you put it aside. Not for months, but perhaps for a week or so. Even a few days. Do other things. Then set aside some uninterrupted time to read, and pull it out, and pretend you have never read it before -- clear it out of your head, and sit and read it. (I'd suggest you do this on a print-out, so you can scribble on it as you go. )
When you get to the end you should have a much better idea of what it was about than you did when you started. (I knew
The Graveyard Book would be about a boy who lived in a graveyard when I started it. I didn't know that it would be about how we make our families, though: that's a theme that made itself apparent while the book was being written.)
And then, on the second and subsequent drafts, you do four things. 1) You fix the things that didn't work as best you can (if you don't like the climactic Rock City scene in
American Gods, trust me, the first draft was
so much worse). 2) You reinforce the themes, whether they were there from the beginning or whether they grew like Topsy on the way. You take out the stuff that undercuts those themes. 3) You worry about the title. 4) At some point in the revision process you will probably need to remind yourself that you could keep polishing it infinitely, that perfection is not an attribute of humankind, and really, shouldn't you get on with the next thing now?
Does that help?
With heartfelt thanks to those who have served this country and who are serving still on my behalf.
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Perhaps you thought of including a third...?
And... go for it. Be brave! :)
I figured it out - eventually. I'd forgotten to include one of them (he only has a bit part).
I do this all the time, only with Post Its. I can't use Track Changes because I find myself getting confused easier.
Send it where you want, it's the only way you'll know!
I am just confused all the time. My wife used to find it endearing but now it just annoys her.
Be brave, so brave. This world is already choked with cowards.
I'll hold your "cyber" hand if it helps :)
The worst that can happen is a "no" - you can handle a "no". It's the "yes" I'd worry about, can you handle a "yes"? If you can, send it.
In the immortal words of W. Shakespeare, "'tis better to have loved and lost, than sent your story off to an FTL market and been pissed at yourself because you knew it was better than that."
Can't remember what play that was.
I can't leave myself cryptic notes. I'm too much of a control freak. The most I do is write myself directives--"no steps," for instance, meaning I put steps in a description and it turns out there shouldn't be any steps, and it will HAUNT ME until I do actually go in and take the steps out of the description.
Hey, aim for the top when it's done! Otherwise you'll always wonder what would have happened.
Barry - I use post its, track changes, handwritten scribbles - you name it. I confuse myself even when I'm still working on the draft.
Natalie - It's more I'm afraid I'll have pestered one too many times.
Jamie - LOL!
Aaron - And I am one of them :0
Kim - that is a very good question, and one I did ponder on for a while last year.
Jeremy - I thought that quote was Shakespeare too, but I've just googled it and it's Tennyson. Weird. Scratching my head in confusion.
KC - They're not cryptic at the time. Only after the fact :)
Send away. If you submit a good enough query and samples each time, any agent will continue to keep an eye on you.
You have a track record of gaining interest so they know you're on the right track.
I do that as well. I leave notes and then when I come back to them I can't figure out what on earth I meant. In those cases I wish I had a time phone so I could call myself up and say 'what were you thinking!?' :) Good luck with finishing your edit and sending it off.