What Does It All Mean?

I started this post like two weeks ago. Sorry it took me so long to finish. I've been busy.

So last time I mentioned Theme as part of the Holy Trinity of storytelling, along with Plot and Character. (This wasn't my idea, I got it from K.M. Weiland.)

Since the past two posts revolved around plot, and then character, it seems appropriate to tackle theme today. Trouble is, I don't really understand theme.

It's one of those things that make high schoolers hate English class. You can't just read a book. You have to deconstruct it, figure out all the symbolic subtext, and then write an essay on the underlying theme. It's this nebulous thing that seems pretty subjective, but your English teacher assures you that there is a right answer.

The Name Maketh the Man

I'm working on stuff, I swear. I'm just not making a ton of progress that would be exciting to hear about.

I've done a little bit on plot stuff since last time, mostly I've been figuring out character stuff. Like giving them names. And faces.

So in my rough draft of Cold Blooded, I gave the serial killer a name, but it only mentioned once, kind of after the fact, and I kept forgetting what it was. So I've given him a new name and started to figure out his place in the story.

The vampire hunter never got a name at all. Until now. And just by giving him a name, I've started to understand his background, and where he's coming from. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. It's all a big mess of pieces, but once you snap a couple into place, you start to see where the others go around it.

Screaming Fruit at Water

Right now I'm trying to lay out all of my scenes for Cold Blooded. I'm going to need a lot of them, judging by how long my scenes tend to be, and how long this book needs to end up. I'm talking like 80 scenes, which, frankly, seems like a shit ton. I'm basing this off of what I learned from this blog post. I tend to write very short scenes, probably because I refuse to describe anything that doesn't look like a crime scene. But that means I need about 10 scenes before I even get to the inciting incident. Or less, longer scenes. Either way, this is all just setup. For an 80,000 word book, I need about 10,000 words of setup. Does that sound boring? I think that sounds boring. But what do I know.

My system right now is just figuring out the basic progression of events. So I have three things to determine for each scene:

• What needs to happen? How is the plot going to be progressed in this scene? What characters and elements need introduced?
• Who needs to be there? Technically, this is who else needs to be there. As the novel is in 1st Person POV, the main character is there by default.
• What could go wrong? Not necessarily what will go wrong. Just because things could go sideways at a given moment doesn't mean they will. But I want to keep my options open.

Breaking Through

That's right, I'm still alive. I told you I'd be back in April sometime.

I really haven't gone anywhere, there's just been a lot going on. Not a lot of time or brain power for creative pursuits.

I did manage to set a goal for Camp NaNo of 5,000 (a meager amount, but whatever), and I've just finished with 5,028. So, I've accomplished something. I wound up with two short stories revolving around portals to a sort of shadow dimension. I watched Stranger Things finally, and it's infiltrated my brain.

But the real goal was to get my mind off of my vampire novel, in the hopes that ideas for it would come when I wasn't trying. So there I was, last night, 40 words short of my 5,000 word goal, and I find myself working on my novel outline.  The distraction seems to have done the trick.

I still have all these subplots I'm not sure what to do with, and random scenes I'd like to incorporate, so I'm not in the home stretch by any means. 

Changing Direction

April is nearly upon us, and with it, Camp NaNo. If you're not familiar, it's a diet version of National Novel Writing Month. You can set your own word goal, write a short story, or a script, or a revision, or just… whatever really.

So I could use it to work on my revision of Cold Blooded. But I'm not going to do that. I'm not giving up on it. I just need to work on something else for a little while. I find that I get lots of ideas for stories when I'm not working on them. It's like when you're trying to remember something that's right on the tip of your tongue, and it suddenly comes to you when you stop thinking about it.

Organizational Challenges

Where have I been? Well, that's a valid question.

I've been mucking about with this revision of Cold Blooded for… quite some time, with very little progress. Well, little visible progress.

I have a plot outline… outline. Or a template or whatever. I got it from Helping Writers Become Authors. It has all the plot points and everything, and where each major event is supposed to happen. Okay. Super. I have some of my plot points, from my rough draft, stuck in there, where they feel like they should logically go.

But then I have all these other things, and I have no idea where they fit. 

Quietly Plotting

I've been reading lately, instead of writing. And yet, it's still helping. I've been at a standstill regarding Cold Blooded, completely devoid of ideas, until I read something completely unrelated. I read John Green's Paper Towns, which is a young adult novel that has nothing to do with vampires, or murder, or ice cream. And then I couldn't sleep because new ideas for my book kept popping into my head. Now, I'm in the midst of Jim Butcher's Storm Front, which is the right genre, but I had a random idea about interpersonal relationships that has nothing to do with the supernatural elements.

I'm not sure why this is working, but I'll take it.

I can watch tons of TV and movies, and maybe I'll think of random plot ideas I'd like to write one day. But I read one book, and it's like it cracks open an artesian well of creativity. Issues I've been wrestling with suddenly have answers. Like, it doesn't clutter my brain with extraneous ideas, it focuses the ideas I have.

So that's where I've been.

I haven’t had much to report, and just saying the same nonsense over and over doesn’t make for good entertainment. And at this point, I don't think anyone is reading, so I haven't felt compelled to keep creating content that much.

I'll see you, I don’t know, sometime.

I Reject Your Reality

I don't write nonfiction.

On at least two occasions, someone has said to me, "Oh, you're a writer? You should write my tragic real life story." And then I have to find a nice way to say that I don't want to do that. I'm not interested in the confines of reality. That's not really my kind of thing.

What I really want to say is that their story is not interesting to me, and I don't want to write it. But that makes me sound like a dick. So I just have to awkwardly try to convince them to drop it.

I don't want to write a story that's about a real person who is then going to read the story. That's way too much pressure.

The Great Scene Excision of 2019

This is what I'm looking at right now.

 

It's every scene in Cold Blooded, or rather, in the rough draft NaNo abomination that is going to become Cold Blooded. I took my list of scenes, and starting putting notes on them, determining the fate of that scene. Then I color coded them, because colors are pretty.

Looking Back and Looking Forward

Step One is complete. I have broken the rough draft into 41 scenes, or scene-like entities. Technically, "Scene" 41 is just all the extra nonsense at the end, but I've been putting in section breaks at each scene change, so I can jump straight there, so Scene 41 is just where I would go if I want any of that.

So I have 40 scenes, really. Some are long, some are short. Some are probably several scenes crammed together, while others are just random events. But they're all broken up and catalogued. Now comes the tricky part: Figuring out what to keep and where to put it.