Mundane Art

So, I have about 3-4 posts lined up to follow up my last one, but after the events of last weekend, I wanted to make a little bit of a detour to talk about my writing process a little bit, because people seemed to be curious.

Last Saturday, at the invitation of my friend John Herman (real name, not a pseudonym: as a general note if I'm involving last names I'm usually using someone's real name, unless otherwise noted), I took part in a project that's probably the closest I'm ever going to get to performance art.  In literal terms, with the help of Google Documents, I and 22 other writers and an illustrator wrote a novel in 24 hours, all the while broadcasting live both on the web and in a gallery in New Jersey that sponsored the event.  In a way, the experience was very ordinary for me, but in many other ways (and I hope this doesn't sound too cliché) it was both extraordinary and unique.  It made me realize a lot of things about my writing process, which I am going to attempt to rectify here in this post.

The short answer to the question "What is my process?" is that it is quick, intense, and runs on a combination of jealousy, dread, and self-discipline.  I am part of a local writing group of about 30 or so regulars (of which John is one of our co-chairs), and one of the most frequent subjects at our get-togethers has to do with how much and how often we write.  On a typical day, I will write between 2000 and 4000 words over the course of about 3-4 hours in the morning, usually at a rate of about 1000 words an hour, though sometimes that can almost double, and sometimes it only goes about half that speed.  The highest single-day word count I've ever achieved is about 9100, and the greatest weekly word count I've achieved is about 50,000.  On Saturday I wrote about 8500 words after receiving a very brief outline and character description at midnight the night before, which is a typical length when I'm on a deadline.  Generally speaking, on first drafts, I'm more concerned with working efficiently and getting the story down on paper than I am the details, though that's more of a guideline than it is a universal doctrine.  I've had first drafts take me as few as eight days, and as many as eighty.  This apparently flabbergasts many of my friends in the group, and they want to know how I do it.  I'd like to say this comes about through the power of positive thinking, but that would be a lie.  Generally speaking, the better I feel about a story, the less that gets done.  My claim to fame was that I wrote a 320,000-word trilogy in a summer.  What nobody knows about that feat was that the whole reason I wrote it that quickly was to try and beat the TV show Dollhouse to the air, which I was convinced had ripped off my idea (and, to be perfectly honest, helped in principle to inspire it just a little bit once the story got going).  The first book of that became known as THE WONDERS AT YOUR FEET, my first published novel (the second, OVERFLY, was written in collaboration with John Herman's 24 Hour Novel Project last weekend).  I like deadlines with real consequences: they get me to work more efficiently.

Of course, the first draft is, ultimately, probably the least of all the stages of writing a novel, though certainly one of the most important.  My friend and fellow author Clark Knowles likes to speak of re-writing as the best part of novel-writing, and I'm inclined to agree.  The truth of the matter is, there's only so much I can get done in most drafts.  If it's a plot-driven story, the first draft is always about hashing out the plot.  If it's character-driven, it's about figuring out the character dynamics, and even then sometimes only the most important.  I don't believe you HAVE to write a shitty first draft and then work your way up: every story has a certain potential, no two stories are alike, and each story requires its own process to fulfill its potential.  For me, that's usually 2-4 drafts, but again, those numbers aren't doctrine.  For the early drafts, I just pick a part of the story to work on and take everything else along with it.  I think the two most important thing new writers need to understand about novel-writing is how to be flexible enough to follow the story and its needs, and how to be patient enough to see fulfilling all those needs through.  Some drafts are brilliant, some are messy, you may even have to take one step backwards to take two steps forwards.  All of the above have happened to me at some point or another.  There is nothing glamorous about this, either: it's hard, difficult, often thankless work for very little immediately tangible reward.  I don't believe in this "writing because you have to" mantra, either.  Nothing makes me write.  I write because I enjoy it, and it's a very good way of sorting out complicated thoughts and emotions in my head.  The more magical you try to make your art, and the more important you try to make it to you, the harder it's going to be to work on it, let alone finish it.  My process works precisely because I treat it as something mundane -- just work by any other name.  That isn't to say that it isn't extraordinarily fun and entertanining work.  My fiancée can certainly attest to that, given the number of rants and raves I've subjected her to about it over the years.  But it is just another job nonetheless.  All writers would do well to remember that, regardless of their level of experience.

As far as my chapter in OVERFLY goes, I wrote the story I was given.  My characterization doesn't tend to show up until the second or third drafts of a really plot-driven story like my assigned chapter was, and for that I feel tremendously self-conscious about it.  I feel like I was basically asked to write a really crazy episode of Scooby Doo, and so that's what I did.  Quite frankly, while my chapter was the longest, it wasn't the best, and there is a competitive, ego-driven part of me that's pissed off about it.  But that in no way diminishes the actual experience of working with so many other talented authors on such a collaborative project.  At the end of the day, the high I got from it was as great or better as some of the best rock concerts I've ever been to, and it's that high from creating something -- bringing something from your head to life that makes writing so enjoyable and rewarding to me.  Like all things, there's a positive and a negative side to it for me, and it's only by acknowledging both that I can feel truly in touch with my creations.

Emma

The note was forwarded to my Gmail account, from a name I'd never heard before.  It didn't look like spam.  It was from a man named Tim, and he sounded pretty mad.  He said he knew who I really was.  He wasn't angry or anything, but he didn't want to talk to me anymore.  He said I was sick and needed help, and he was concerned for my safety.  Confused, I sent an email back, not knowing what had led up to this. This was how I met Emma.

I knew I was dissociating.  I'd been dissociating since February.  I can't speak for others who've dealt with it, but dissociation is one of the most misrepresented psychiatric phenomena in popular culture.  Forget the stories of hypnosis and crime.  And forget the popular image that people somehow enjoy it.  I remember that morning, as I learned that Emma (one of my alters) had been carrying on a quite bizarre sexual relationship with the man named Tim (who was only a few years younger than me) over the internet.  It didn't take me long to find evidence of Emma's handiwork: AIM logs, a Gmail account in her name, fetish forums and Flickr searches in my browser history, and a cache of unusual porn.  I was reminded then not of the movie K-PAX or old Law & Order episodes, but of the movie Fight Club, right when Edward Norton realizes that he and Tyler Durden are one in the same.

I should explain.  At the height of my madness, there were four of them: Jennifer, Emma, AK, and Haley.  Jennifer was their unofficial leader and spokesperson, and my self-proclaimed protector.  Jennifer also thought she was a robot, though she also possessed enough self-awareness to know that she wasn't real, and therefore was good at keeping herself hidden.  Talking to Jennifer was like giving my ability to be rational and reason a name and conversing with it.  An imaginary friend who occasionally took control of my body when I didn't want to.  It could be an awfully convenient arrangement at times.

Emma, however, was a little bit different.  Emma was my emotion and insecurity, who one day woke up and decided she was an eighteen-year-old girl.  There was simply no stopping her.  I certainly couldn't control her.  Emma did not share Jennifer's self-awareness, either.  As I pieced together what had happened with Tim, I discovered she'd created an entire virtual life for herself.  Tim was not the only relationship of hers, either.  There was Steve, and George.  The former was an auto mechanic in Calgary, Alberta; the latter a musician in Scotland.  A few checks of various places and I determined that Tim was the only one who'd figured out she wasn't real.  However, Emma was having internet sex with all three.

I didn't really have a system of calling them.  Jennifer spoke for the other three, but she had trouble controlling Emma, too.  As it turned out, however, calling her wouldn't be necessary.  In my panic, Emma came to me.  She thought she had died.  I charged my Droid and prepared for a very, very long walk.  I wasn't in control of myself, and it was going to take a lot of concentrated effort to get myself back under control.  Looking like a stark-raving lunatic, I walked down to the waterfront.  This was more or less going to be the most difficult thing I'd ever had to do in my entire life, at least thus far.

That was April.  By August I'd more or less stopped dissociating, but Emma was never gone.  She may no longer have been independent, but she was still an integral part of me.  Controlling my emotions has always been one of the hardest things for me to do, from childhood right up until now.  People who know me know what kind of outbursts and mood swings I'm capable of.  They make me feel deeply embarrassed and ashamed.  That was in its own way the driving force behind my dissociations.  I was being forced to feel things that I was either unwilling or unable to admit and acknowledge, and so I outsourced them to imaginary friends who could feel them for me.  Until I could admit my insecurity for myself, she'd always be there, and I'd always feel her.

In my experience, you can only really see things for what they are after you've let go of them.  It's taken me a year, but I think I've finally let go of her.  It wasn't some epic psychotic battle that they make movies out of; I didn't go catatonic.  I spent most of my life desperately trying to convince myself that I didn't care what other people thought of me.  I had a real shell I could put up around myself, a tough, angry-looking shield that could keep people from getting in and letting me feel the shame and embarrassment.  I pretended.  In the end I probably wasn't very convincing, either.   But I do care.  Maybe that makes me shallow or petty, but I care very deeply about my image.  It was only by admitting to it that Emma ever really went away.  It was, in the end, a very bittersweet experience.  When I realized she was gone, it was like I'd lost a very close friend.  And there is a mourning process for friends like that, imaginary as they are.  Letting go of her is letting go of a part of myself I'd clutched to with white knuckles for most of my life.  I'm tired now.  Whether the reader understands it the way I do or not, this is a huge step for me.  I'm in uncharted territory.  But it still feels good, like I've freed myself of something heavy.

That's not quite the end of the story, though.  Emma was simply too rich a character in her own right to simply abandon.  So, being a writer, I did what I knew best.  I'm proud to announce that Emma has been reborn, as the protagonist of my new novel, which is currently about two thirds of the way done.  I'm excited about it, because this novel is unlike anything else I've ever written.  There aren't any robots or lasers or death-defying combat scenes (though there are aliens).  It's just an honest look at the art of letting go, heartbreak, and a nice clean take on the apocalypse.  I'm not ready to share too many details just yet, but I think now you'll be able to know how personal it is for me to write this story, and hopefully that'll really show through in the character and narrator.

So that's me, Saturday May 21st, 2011.  I'm at the end of one phase and starting another.  Now if you'll excuse me, I believe the rapture is scheduled for a few hours from now, and I'd like to go loot me an iPad.

The State of My Writing Career

Once upon a time I wrote a book. I've actually written close to fifteen manuscripts at this point in my life of varying quality and stages of completion, but only one of them ever truly saw the light of day. It was fun for a while, I could go around saying I was a published author, pretend I was famous. People even seem to have enjoyed it. I had originally intended to sell it as a series called The Academy, and it had some robots in it and some James Bond-esque characters running around assassinating bad guys and spying on people. It was fun. I had spent the better part of three years working on my book and its two sequels, and it had come to define me.

Truth be told, my only aspiration as an author was to write good, solid beach novel thrillers with a major sci-fi bent. I grew up on the adventure novels of Clive Cussler and the techno-thrillers of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. They satisfied my need both for violence and savagery as well as my desire for the exotic. There's a certain lightness to the writing of a good thriller that keeps you from truly getting emotionally invested in it, thus allowing you to relax and have fun. That was what I really wanted to write about: things people thought were fun. That's a funny thing about well-laid plans: they rarely work out like you intend them to.

As it turns out, I don't write very good adventure stories. I write very emotive and psychological parables that happen to have some science fiction in them. I can point the finger of blame in many directions. There was my former professor at UNH, Alexander Parsons, who spent the second half of my college years teaching me how to be an artist. He invested a considerable amount of time and energy into helping me develop my craft, at times even at his own personal expense. Certainly he helped me to correct a lot of the flaws in my writing. I used to write incredibly shitty characters. I was very embarrassingly and publicly called out on it, and I spent the next two years in the single-minded pursuit of good characterization. There was the chip on my shoulder that I came out of college with about my writing, that led to another round of crafting, a competitive streak I've had to work hard to bleed out of me. There is a certain base level of arrogance to it, too, which I've at times struggled to contain. But all these things just will ultimately get me what I want, which is to publish a successful book, no matter how good my writing is.  More likely they'll just feed back on themselves and magnify the flaws in my writing all the more.

This is really the problem with the The Academy, and where I'm at in my writing career. I have no doubt that my writing is up to snuff. Feedback – professional and otherwise – confirms my confidence. My writing was probably good enough three years ago. I'm not only a quick worker, I'm an efficient one as well. This is not to boast or brag about it: I put a considerable amount of effort into effectively managing my writing time. In the process, I have neglected virtually everything else that a writer needs to do in order to be successful, and in effect, it's killed The Academy.

Yes, The Academy is dead. I've pulled the plug. I had finished a sequel to my published book, which has not yet been edited, and I will look at avenues of getting it out to people who are keen to find out what happens to Rebecca and company after the end of the first book. However, due to a combination of tangled copyrights, mechanical difficulties with the story itself, and the nature of the business, I am unable to pursue this story any further in the market short of self-publishing, something I'm not keen to do. For what it was worth, it was fun, and I am very close to the character of Rebecca. Rebecca helped me through the past two years as much as anyone else. I am very close to my writing, and particularly this story. Too close, as it turns out. As Jim, a friend and mentor who is himself a major award-winning published author said to me “You've gotta break up.” That's just how it goes, unfortunately.

This is not to say that the story is gone. I've got two new universes, in which I am writing novels, short stories, and novellas, one of which was directly inspired by The Academy. I would not be surprised if my audience found some material that made it my Academy books in some of my new stories, though perhaps (or even probably) in some other form. This was not an easy decision to make, but I feel that it's for the best. In keeping with the original concept behind The Academy, I am attempting to tell its successor story entirely in the short form, though hopefully in a much less serialized way than how it originally turned out.

I also do have a new series, and I think it's one with a lot of potential. I'm about two-thirds finished with the first draft of the opening novel, and I have the outlines of several short stories to follow it. These stories may or may not ultimately predate the novel in publication, but that's dependent on a lot of things beyond my control. I won't say too much about it just yet, only that it's written in the first person, the narrator is a teenager, and there are aliens and my usual dark, brooding emotive passages. I can get all excited about it, and I am, and the people that read and like my fiction should as well. But already I can see the problem staring me in the face right back again.

Herein is one of the central conundrums of my writing career: I can't not care. My writing only works when I'm very close to my characters, feeling what they feel and letting them take the lead in the story. It's a fine place to be when you're writing fiction, but a very difficult and awkward place to be when you're publishing. I didn't want to put myself through the emotional wringer in the state I was in when I finished The Academy. I played it too safe, and accepted something I probably shouldn't have. Which is not to say that I'm totally to blame here, either. My publisher completely botched the PR for my book, and at the time I was in no state to do the legwork required to get the word out. Quite frankly, I'm amazed as many people found it as they did.

That's really all right, though. I learned a lot from the experience, and I can take that and put it into my next experience. So yes, The Academy is dead. Long live The Academy. It was a good story, but it was ultimately doomed. In addition to my own errors in marketing it, there were substantial mechanical flaws.  I've learned from my mistakes. It will be reborn in some other form in the near future, the flaws corrected, though not necessarily with the same cast of characters, and given a proper chance to be marketed. In the meantime, I can't wait to tell you more about my other story, but perhaps I've said too much already. I'm in that classic fluid first draft period where details are up in the air, and I don't want to state something for the record that gets changed. But rest assured, my writing career is not dead. I needed some perspective, and I needed a break from what I'd been working on. I've gotten both now, and now I want to get back to doing what I love: writing really good fiction.