LAST DIARY ENTRY FROM OLD SITE

I tried searching online to see if there is a term for when firefighters set off an explosion to put out a forest fire. The explosion sucks all of the oxygen out of a specific area which immediately sucks the life out of the fire and helps them get control of it.

My writing works in the opposite way. When my writing fires are burning, they rage pretty good, and things go well. Whenever a major event happens, be it a breakthrough, or the recent decision to rethink the entire beginning , it makes me rethink everything, progress stalls.

LIke, if I decide to change the book and move what was going to be an inciting incident that was being built up toward about 40ish pages in, and now make that the opening image of the book (which I did), well, the book can’t just flatline to get to the next major event because I changed the plan, everything has to change as a result. More things have to get folded in. More has to happen. Starting the book bigger means setting expectations higher to begin with, and that means they need to be met.

I know I’m supposed to ascribe to the notion that this is art and I need to do what is pure and right for the story and all of those things. But, honestly, I am writing for readers with myself as the most demanding reader in the bunch. I like authors who use plain language and tell good stories, rather than people who use lofty language to masquerade for substance. Stephen King is a hero to me, although I haven’t read as much of his stuff as I would like. But, he bangs it out, never uses 50 cent words when a 5 cent one will do, and the payoff is in the story, told well.

Stephen King said that his goal at one point was to have a huge, monstrosity of a writer’s desk to work on, and when he found success he finally got it, and it took up a huge center of his room. Eventually, he got rid of it, and replaced it with a desk that is pushed into the corner of the room, and it is where he still works. He said it was important to reinforce that life is a support system for art, and not the other way around. I teeter a bit too much to the desk in the center of the room philosophy at times, although thankfully living in San Francisco, I can’t afford a place where I would be able to have an entire room with a huge desk only in the middle of it.

So, reading between the lines here, writing isn’t going as well, because my head is still trying to wrap around the challenge of the weekend. How can I make this book bigger? What needs to change? What needs to be added? What do I as the current audience surrogate need to know about the character and when? Or do I care?

The book has a lot of (hopefully) dark, ironic takes on mass culture and basically sets an identity story against that backdrop, so it is a constant battle to make sure the balance remains perfect. That the character isn’t tapping his foot in the wings waiting to step out and tell more of his story while I’m making sweeping statements about the culture. It has to just flow.

Other things I am exorcising: no plot in dialogue. No information that advances the plot should be told in dialogue, because dialogue is better served for character development. Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule, because every rule can be broken, but I saw a lot of this lazy shorthand in the current draft and I want it gone 90 percent of the time, if not more.

I mean, people say things like “I have something to tell you,” in everyday life, and it’s fine conversation. But, it’s lazy fiction. Show as much as possible. Body language, use that to show the narrator already knows she has something to say, etc., etc. because then what she says will color her character, and not just set up the narrator to say, “What?” Yawn. If people want to hear boring conversation, they can hang out in public, in parks, on buses, in restaurants. This isn’t why people pay for books.

Oscar Wilde’s language wasn’t the language of his time, it was the language he invented. But when it is delivered, it feels so wholly realized, that you just want to live there. You don’t question it.

I seem to have no problems waxing forever about writing on this diary, it’s just the actual sitting down and doing the actual writing that seems to be the issue. Of course, I only keep writing about the things flowing through my head as a means of purging them, thinking them through, because ultimately, the things I am thinking about are all there for a reason. Stephen King’s desk, and Oscar Wilde’s language, and all of it are in my head for some reason related to what I am trying to accomplish with my book at this moment. So, I never question the time I spend here and not staring into Word hypnotically. I think there is a connection between it all. And, if not, well I’ll never know that either.

Jeff

Of course, the weekend had consequences. The first of which was my sleep schedule. Sunday night, insomnia refused to let me fall asleep, which let to me missing the gym workout with my trainer Monday morning. And by the time work ended, I also was starting to wear down and not feel like doing a workout then, or write when I got home.

I forced myself to stay awake until 9 p.m. and then feel right asleep. But at 4 a.m., I woke up perfectly rested, as I knew I would. So, here it is, 6 a.m., and I’ve already done my grocery shopping, and am about to dry my second load of laundry. My trainer had an opening at 8 a.m. today, so that still awaits me before work.

On the writing side, I just finished going through all the additional chapters I had marked up in hard copy over the weekend, and made those edits in the word documents. So, we’re off to a good start for tonight.

The good news is that I still really like the draft of the first chapter, and I sent it to a few people and the reaction has been good. Still needs to be tightened, and some experiments I tried in it that didn’t work need to be exorcised when I get home tonight.

So, the plan tonight is to tighten chapter one, and then carry that voice through chapter two and see what happens.

Jeff

Since I’m doing the experiment this weekend, it seems only right to document it. My Internet access has been yanked, so I’ll just write it all on my desktop and post the text when my access is restored.

It is late Friday night or early Saturday morning as start to I write this. All the clocks in my apartment are taped over with black electrical tape, the computer set to not display the time in the menu bar. So, I really don’t know the time. My guess is after midnight, the activity level seems to have dropped as far as neighbors walking around, voices outside, music, etc.

I shut everything down around 2 p.m. Thursday. All that was really left was the phone and Internet, a pretty easy task to unhook. Most of Thursday I wrote a 20ish page chapter for the book. As well as napped for a bit. The weekend is very much about responding to desires. If I want to relax, I draw a hot bath. If I am hungry, I eat. If I get a bit tired, I take a nap. For the most part, though, I work on the book.

Friday morning, I woke up mid-morning, I think. It’s actually amazing how often I check the time of day, because I find myself constantly looking to places that typically tell me the time. Friday, I read aloud and made line edits to every chapter of the book to date, except for the one I wrote Thursday. That needs more polish online before it’s worth printing out for fine tuning.

Friday evening, I worked on the first chapter of the book. It is the biggest thing driving me crazy right now. With books I like, I find the first chapter just has an authority that carries through the entire book that says I know what I’m doing, just keep reading. My book doesn’t have that yet. I think it might be due to the fact that my protagonist changes significantly 3 chapters into the book, and I know that voice best. I need to find his voice before all of that occurs.

I have no doubt I will find this voice, but it’s kind of been my Friday night obsession. And, as I’m getting tired now, I’m guessing it will be my Saturday morning fun as well. Trent Reznor has been singing here for hours, on repeat, and I think I’m close to figuring out how to start the book properly. But not fast enough to beat back sleep over it. So, that can be Saturday’s good time.

I think nailing the character’s voice in chapter one, will make the transformation more of an adventure. Kind of like seeing someone’s yearbook photo after you get to know them, and wonder who that person was.

I’ve always been obsessed with the first chapter, though. In the book I was writing before I abandoned it for this book, all of my time was spent on the first chapter. I think I wrote 30-plus drafts of it, until I finally nailed it. One draft, though, had the seeds of this current book, and they germinated much faster and stole my attention. But, let’s face it, first chapters are where it’s at. When I buy books online or in the store, I read the first chapter to make my decision. I don’t flip to the middle and pick a random page.

So, liking the middle more than the beginning is rather problematic. Everything else I’ve written I may not necessarily love just yet, but I know I can fix it. Right now though, everything I’ve written seems like something I’m capable of writing. The goal is to get it just past my abilities. Like putting something on a high shelf and just flipping it up there slightly past your reach, or singing a song and hitting that high note that you know is out of your range, but you’re glad it came out somehow.

I want to read every paragraph and wonder where it came from, because it is beyond my everyday ability. Of course, that is just a relentless task of revising and writing, and just trusting to know when you’ve hit the target. I think not knowing the character in chapter one has made him less three-dimensional later in the book. He is told without history, without the insight that the book requires. The book has the broad strokes down fine, but I need a broader palette of subtlety to paint from.

So, the goal right now is to nail chapter one tomorrow when I wake up. The other mission is to experience the book from the perspective of the secondary characters and nail their motivation. Right now, they are in scenes for window dressing a lot of the time, and I need to understand why they are doing what they do so that I can make them fully-realized. Prior to this experiment, I re-read Stephen King’s On Writing, because I think he is a good writer. Occassionally great, but consistently good, which is a damn good goal for anyone. But anyway, in the book, he mentioned something that got the wheels turning. He mentioned how in Misery, Annie Wilkes couldn’t just be crazy, because then audiences would lose interest. We had to be able to identify with her and see her perspective on the world, and once we did that, she was even more terrifying. Her character can be crazy to the protagonist, and everyone reading, but she needs to make perfect sense to herself in her world. I don’t have a clear antagonist, because it is an identity novel, but I think it will flesh out the book if I bring every other character to life more.

So, I think I’ll crash now, and we’ll see what Saturday brings.

SATURDAY

Sometime in the afternoon…

Deciding to rewrite the first chapter of a book, which will then subsequently require re-tweaking of additional chapters to reflect this change is daunting. Because, of course, I’m already steeped in the character’s voice post-chapter three. So, it’s not just a matter of slapping together a new setting and writing away, it’s exploring who this character is at this point in time, and charting how he got to this point, and then how this character will evolve throughout the book.

Needless to say, it hasn’t been just a matter of me sitting here and banging it out. It’s been more thinking about writing than actually doing it. It also brings us back to the pesky issue of research. The new opening of the book is basically just me making things up, whereby there was a semblance of research for the previous version.

I also know that, because of this getting into my head, I can’t merely just go write one of the later chapters that was on queue for the weekend. This is the issue now, and it will get resolved next, whenever everything lines up to make that happen.

In the back of my mind, I’ve also started thinking about whether the book should start at the beginning. But that is a larger issue that doesn’t really impact what is the true first chapter of the book that I now need to write. If I decide to add a prologue of sorts, it would still need to dump into this new chapter anyway.

It seemed like such a minor change. It is the same setting, same group of people, same situation (somewhat), the only change is that he is entirely devoid of the bravado that he uses in the rest of the book, and we will now need to see how the bravado comes to be. OK, not a very minor detail, but still… it has ground productivity to a halt. Of course, if I were writing other things now, it would potentially be stuff I might not want in the book anymore, because this change will require me to fiddle extensively with the beginning and middle chapters.

Voice is the hardest thing to nail, so every time I write a few paragraphs on the new first chapter, I know it isn’t right, and I have a hard time pushing through. I tend to just stop. When I hit it, it will be an easy chapter to write, as a lot of the information I’ve used before gets recycled, just a new cause/effect, and different social hierarchy between the characters.

The character never had much backstory before, so I guess this is work that needed to be done. I think I’m going to just write a ton of horrible nonsense now and see if something resonates when I’m done…

* * *

Blah, long unproductive day, although I suppose if it was going to take this long, I may as well get it out of the way this weekend… I did a lot of staring at the screen, until I eventually relented and watched Fight Club (with the Chuck Palahniuk/Jim Uhls commentary track playing), since they talk primarily about character development.

After the movie, six pages came out, replacing the 20-page chapter I no longer like. It is on the right direction, just still rings hollow. It is way too literal. There is no bouncing back and forth between the action and the narration. And I still don’t get enough of a sense of the protagonist. It jumps in too quickly, but I also like the bravado the character has in the rest of the book better. So, I’m toying with ways to get bravado protagonist to open the book, and then somehow get this backstory out of the way quickly. The book shouldn’t open this version of the protagonist, though. Ack…

I’ll probably take some more time away now, take a nap, lay on the bed and think, and then return to this.

—

No naps for me. Instead I pulled out my Robert McKee “Story” book, as I’ve taken his seminar twice. There are two chapters that focus primarily on character, and I think the problem I’ve been having is that I’m fixated on characterization instead of deep character for the first chapter. Whether a character is honest, or fat, or loving, or a workaholic… these things are characterizations. True character, however, can only be shown when the protagonist makes a choice in dilemma. I don’t think my character, at this point in the book has a defined dilemma, so there is no way to show his character. Or rather, the way I currently have the chapter set up doesn’t allow him any point to make a choice. He is too passive. Perhaps, that is his character, but I haven’t been showing him as passive, he has just been passive.

—

More craziness. For the past 30 minutes, I have just been grabbing books I love off my book shelf and reading how they begin. Leroy, Salinger, Spanbauer, Palahniuk, Karr, Chabon, Ellis, King, Franzen, Reidinger, Safron-Foer, Fitzgerald, Capote, Lethem, Warren, O’Neill, Rice (the kid, not the mom), Heim… and it was a good exercise. In nearly every case, reading the first paragraph of each book immediately brought the book into total focus for me. In many books, some of the recoccuring image systems are brought up in the first sentence. The raccoon penis bone in Sarah is in the first sentence, the missing time of Mysterious Skin, arriving in New York City in City of Shy Hunters, immediately setting a time, place, and tone in The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, noting that “something terrible was going to happen” in the Corrections.

Some books I pulled off the shelf I haven’t even read yet, but I still got a sense of the book from those first paragraphs. I still didn’t read the first paragraph from Palahniuk’s Lullaby, not even for this exercise, because I know I’ll just keep reading and that will be the rest of the weekend gone right there.

So, I guess I’m debating now whether chronological order is the way to tell this story. I think the book gets interesting in chapter two, and that chapter one only exists to setup chapter two. But who cares if readers don’t know the character yet? Hook them first, then flesh it all out. I guess I’m wondering if chapter two should be the start of the book. Skip the foreplay. If it’s important, we’ll get back to it. Fold it in later. Start the book on action. BAM!

I’m also wondering whether I’m in a frame of mind to be making that decision now. On the upside, it gets rid of my current problem, which is not knowing the character before the inciting incident. If you start with the inciting incident, that is one structural mess avoided. But am I making my story more coherent, or my work easier?

Reading the books reinforced that most of my favorite books begin memorably, with image systems and lead characters foreshadowing most of the book. A lot of the books end with the same image systems in play. My book begins setting up a scene and characters that are never returned to again, because the lead character loses his job. So, who cares? Let’s start with him angry and his job behind him. We can always flashback or sprinkle things in to add backstory if it seems like it needs it. The character is still pathetic enough in chapter two, it’s not a 180.

OK, I guess that is my gameplan then. I’m going to toss chapter one into a folder and get rid of it for now. I’m also going to rework chapter two to start the book off.

Let’s see how that works.

—

Sunday

OK, the book now has a beginning, and I’m really digging it. I worked all morning on it, and it has really come around. Some of it is the same, but it’s also really different. I think my anxiety about making this the first chapter was having 30-plus pages that I’d written and didn’t want to use anymore. But, reading it, it is certainly the right decision. It seems to grab you by the throat now and say, READ ME!

Of course, I’m not necessarily in my right mind to make a call on that. But that’s what it seems like anyway.

I think I’m going to call the weekend on this, since it is an obvious turning point, and a lot of progress. I’m actually amazed how early it is, since I just looked at my watch for the first time all weekend. I was hoping it was late in the afternoon, to justify calling the seclusion quits, since I have been up and working on this for a while, but it’s only like 1:30, which means I must have been awake pretty damned early and writing, since it certainly seems like I’ve been at this for a few hours.

No matter, unwinding is a good thing, and I’m feeling really good about everything, so seems fine to turn on the computer, the phone, remove the black electrical tape from all the clocks.

I really feel like I have a strong opening for the book now, and that has been plaguing me for a while.

It’s certainly been an interesting holiday weekend.

Jeff