aleathiel | (no subject)

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Okay, two days before I have to start writing, I'm having a bit of a re-think of my plans for my Nano novel.

Basically, I have to choose between the two plot outlines below. They're completely different types of novel and I'm not sure in which direction I'm currently leaning.

1.
As yet untitled. Parallel stories about a youth called Gareth, one being his first term at university, the other being his last Christmas vacation before his finals. It's about his family, his friends, his future. And yes, there are more than a few skeletons in the closet. I want to write this one because it's new and fresh, I've only begun thinking about it in the last couple of weeks. It's more personal, more realistic (obviously) than the other outline. But, it's underdeveloped, I'm not quite sure what it's trying to say and I'm worried about running out of plot because it isn't a plot-based narrative and I'm not sure how well I can sustain it under the write-every-day pressure of Nano. However it's probably the better of the two novels.

2.
Lighter hearted and less 'literary' than the above. This is the story of two characters, Raffael and Morgan, who I've had in my head for ages. It's basically a futuristic whodunnit, but not entirely futuristic in the laser guns and space stations way, it's set on a world afflicted by the changes of global warming and the affect that's had on the earth and it's people. It's plot driven and a little bit silly, which I suspect would make it an easier Nano project than a more serious novel. But, and it's a giant but, there are huge gaps in the plot. I don't really know what happens after about the first quarter of the outline.

So, what do you think? Which outline do I spend two days beating into shape to start writing on Wednesday?

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*g* I know what you mean. I'm much better at organising someone else's plot than dealing with my own!

I'm a deadline-needer too. Sometimes a self inposed one works, but quite often it doesn't. I'm best if I'm writing for someone's birthday or another fixed point. And, as you've just experienced, life has a nasty way of getting really hectic at just the wrong times!

Good luck with your Nano plot! I'm happy to give as much encouragement as is required :P

Finished my ghost story, yay! :D I'm reading it over and will probably post later today. [pantpantpant] Over seventeen thousand words, and that's another reason I didn't get it done on time -- I'm lousy at estimating how long a story's going to be.

If I start blathering about my NaNo plotlines in my journal once this story's up and posted, feel free to jump in and blather with me. [grin]

Angie

Well done - and that's a pretty hefty length. Was it ever intended to be a 'short' story or was it just write it as it comes and it ends up however long it ends up?

I'll be happy to make comments, probably some a lit less helpful than others, when you start working on your nano. Are you intending to post it as you go along? I thought I'd make a friendslocked journal for mine, because if I insist to myself that I post it then it will be further encouragement to work on it :) Problem is I don't have a title yet. Okay, small problem in the great scheme of things, but still bothering me.

I'm making some headway with my outline now, thanks to you. I might well stick with this one for Nano if I continue making progress.

Journal, right, need a journal. :P I'll probably just call it AngieNaNo or something like that -- that way I can use it again if I ever do this a second time. Also I'm awful at titles and rarely think of one until I'm well into a story, so....

What I'm thinking of doing is posting the raw verbage to my NaNo journal (open -- I don't Flock stuff, never have) for anyone who wants to wade through the unpolished roughage. Then if it turns into something worth continuing/finishing/polishing, I'll post the polished chunks to my regular journal later. That way, people who want to crawl into my writerly brain as I frantically pound out wordcount can do so, and people who are only interested in reading stuff that's actually, like, fit to read :P can wait for the final version.

Hopefully that makes sense. [laugh/glance]

It also lets me post whatever I've got at the end of each day without committing to where to actually do chapter breaks until I have more of a handle on things. The online habit of thinking a chapter is "Whatever I feel like posting today" is one of my pet peeves; I'd rather give my structure a bit more thought than that and it'll be easier to do if I can just bang out pages now and actually post in chapters once I've finished and know what I've got. :)

Angie

I absolutely agree with the posting of whatever's done attitude. I'm well aware that it's going to need a hell of a lot of work after Nano's over. However I think I am going to have my Nano journal locked (I pretty much never lock posts on this LJ) because I'm not quite brave enough to let everyone see the outpourings of my brain. That is, I'm happy to let people read them, but I'd quite like to have an idea of who is reading them!

And yeah, I can see my journal being AleathielsNano or something.

I'm thinking that if people are watching I'm less likely to wuss out and give up. :P The more public it is, the more likely I'll actually do this. I need all the kicks in the ass I can get, especially since I'm going to have to go at least a few days without writing much of anything because of Thanksgiving. My mom'll have me baking cookies and making stuffing and helping decorate her house and I won't be able to get out of it for at least three or four days there heading into the holiday. So that means I need to write more earlier (or later [blanch]) rather than just trying to keep it up at a steady pace all through.

So the more people who wander through with baseball bats, the better, LOL! Although I have a feeling most people won't want to. I'm pretty fanatical about editing, and since I'm an edit-as-I-go type what I post probably won't be totally sucky from a mechanical POV, but still, I have no clue how this is going to turn out as a coherent story and I doubt many people will be interested in sticking around for the whole thing. Which is probably just as well, but.... [headdesk]

Angie

Ah, I understand the audience-as-motivator thing. It's one of the reasons I stuck with fanfic for so long (with the exception of Rubies, which somehow got left along the wayside even with people asking for more) however, I'm just as likely to write on the motivation of one reader as twenty five. Actually, maybe more likely, because I get the the feeling I'm letting that specific person down when I don't update!

And I understand about Novemeber not being a good month. It's the reason I've never done Nano before. We don't celebrate Thanksgiving over here (well, my Mum's American, so we do have a dinner, but not much more than that. Some years we have a gathering of displaced Americans we knoe in the area!) so at least I don't have that on my time, but November isn't like August in that it's likely to contain a holiday or anything. In the last few years it's always been a melee of deadlines pre-Christmas. This year that isn't true, so I thought I'd have a go at Nano, although I am working three part time jobs which leaves next to no time off! However, my perhaps not terribly cunning plan is that while I'm working this job (it's in an academic bookshop) I'm often not really busy (as you might have noticed today) so I might use my time at this job, interrupted as my concentration will get, to write my novel. We shall see how well that works out! But it also means an unbalanced spread of time through the week - I'll only be writing when I'm on this job as opposed to the others. And hopefully at the weekend.

Ack! Good luck with your writing at work plan. I'll keep a set of virtual fingers crossed for you that you don't get a sudden run at the shop or something like that.

Holidays in general aren't a problem for me, but I spend Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas up at my mom's, a week or ten days or occasionally two weeks at a shot. I can write up there, especially since I got the laptop, but Mom seems to think that if I'm going to fly a few hundred miles to see her, and since I only do it three or four times a year (sometimes I go up to visit in the summer, too), I should spend a lot of my time up there actually doing things with her. [wry smile] I know I can write there, I just don't know how much. [biting fingernail]

*g* We shall see what happens. It being an academic bookshop it isn't usually too busy at this time of year - most of the students have bought what they need for this semester and don't have their reading lists for January yet.

I can see your Mum's point about you spending time with her - not a problem I have because even when I am at home, as I am at the moment, both my parents are at work all the time. If we're lucky we all eat together in the evenings. Are there times of day when she has something she likes to do? When we go on holiday everyone in my family (if we're not out specifically doing something in the evening) likes to spend the evening reading. In that time I've always taken to doing a bit of writing. Or first thing in the morning when everyone is faffing about having showers and breakfast before we leave to go out for the day. But I guess I'm still at the point where I'm used to having my parents dictate some of my time (although when I was at univesity I used to hate it when first came home for the holidays, always made me feel like a child again, although I know they were trying really hard not to make me feel like that) and when you are used to organising your own life and dividing your time as you want to I can imagine it's difficult to have an extra demand on your time, even if it is a valid one.

Oh, sure, I see Mom's POV too, although she takes it to extremes at times. [wry smile] I have no problem spending time with her if we're actually doing something, but she's grouched at me for going upstairs in the evening to get on the computer for hours at a time. Except that during that time she's downstairs with the TV on and a book. I don't watch most of the shows she watches and even if I did and if I were down there, we wouldn't be talking or anything anyway, so I get frustrated with her desire to have me there occupying space in the universe a few meters nearer to her when we're not actually interacting. [headdesk]

My mom's retired so she doesn't go to work, and she doesn't go buzzing around shopping or visiting friends all that much while I'm there and when she does she wants me to go with her. I don't always but you know the guilt thing parents can do? :/ She has arthritis in her hands and when it flares up she can't do much with them, so she doesn't crochet or paint anymore. We hang out and talk sometimes, or we spend a lot of time in the same room reading, although I can't read with the TV on so that's a limitation there.

It's just that she likes to have me within sight whether or not we're doing anything together and I get impatient with that. [sigh] She doesn't usually treat me like a child anymore -- and thank whomever since at forty-three I'm quite sick of it :P -- and we do manage well enough for a week or maybe ten days. Longer than that and I start wishing very hard to be home again.

I'm just trying to figure out exactly how much writing time I'll be able to carve out while I'm there without triggering the Guilt Attack of Doom, LOL!

Angie

Oh dear, that sounds like a lot of fun! Can you write on your laptop when she has the TV on or is it too distracting? I guess you just have to find the balance, which I imagine is something you've been trying to do for years...

Right, I get to go home now for a whole half hour before I have to go to my evening job (I keep reminding myself that I'm doing this for travelling money, otherwise I'd be curled in a ball in my room). It's pouring with rain and dark and it was so beautiful this morning that I don't have a raincoat with me. Oh joy. :)

No, unfortunately I can't do much of anything when the TV's on, at least nothing that requires concentration. If I'm cooking or something then I don't care but for reading and writing having the box babbling in the same room drives me nuts. :P

Have a fun, umm, half hour and try to stay dry! [wave/hugz]

Angie

That was me obviously. For some bizarre reason it appears to have signed me out of my own journal!

LJ's been doing that, apparently at random, for a few months now. I hate it. It makes me want to fly up to their office and kick them all in the shin. [glare]

Angie

Oh, and I was initially thinking short story, like four to five thousand words, maybe ten thousand, somewhere in there. But it was only a fuzzy idea and that's just as well. I usually just start writing and keep going until I'm done and whatever length it turns out is what it is. Hopelessly disorganized, I know, but I've never had any luck with doing enough advance planning to really get a handle on how long something was going to be. The only time I ever did a full outline for a novel it came to a screeching halt and I was never able to do anything with it. :( I don't outline school papers either -- even upper division history papers with fifty-some pages and over a hundred footnotes. I just surround myself with books full of bookmarks and scribbled notes and photocopies of stuff with hilighter all over it and start typing. It works, too; I got As on almost all my papers. I've never been able to push it so far as a finished novel, though. :/

Angie

Wow, I'm both impressed and completely horrified! Most of my fiction is in the 5-10 thousand words area and while I can sustain something of that length without to much of an idea where I'm going with it, I know that something 50000 words long would become too rambly and lost if I didn't at least have reference points to aim for.

As to the academic stuff I am completely amazed. The one thing I did always do with my work was write a solid outline. Sometimes that took almost as long as writing the paper itself. I had that (not literally!) beaten into me at Cambridge. We had one 3 hr exam where we weren't supposed to start writing more than notes for the entire first hour. And my dissertation? If I'd got myself better organised with structure and argument in the first draft then my third re-write wouldn't have involved cutting it into pieces and rearranging it spread out on my floor!

I know that something 50000 words long would become too rambly and lost if I didn't at least have reference points to aim for.

See, that's kind of what I'm afraid of. [nod] I mean, I can manage quite a lot by the seat of my pants. Outlines are counterproductive for me; I do better without one and always have. When I was in high school and we had to turn in our outlines, I struggled for a while, then hit on the idea of writing the paper first and then the outline. [wry smile] Ridiculous but it worked.

I loved essay exams -- I always did very well on them, once I got the hang of it somewhere in high school. I never scribbled an outline, although a few professors encouraged this, but sometimes I'd just sit there and stare at the wall for a few minutes and get my brain organized. Close enough, especially for such a short piece. :)

But I've had two novel-length stories just peter out on me, not counting Hidden Magic which I started working on again while I was off cruising. [crossed fingers] The one I mentioned a couple of comments back, I'd written about twenty-five chapters and had worked my way into a corner but I knew what I needed to do to fix it. I'd have to start over but I had more of an idea of what I was doing and where I was going and I was optimistic that the second start would work out. I decided to be prudent and do an outline first, so I did. It was like... fifteen or twenty pages long? Something like that. With notes about what was happening on which day so I didn't trip over my calendar, and which characters appeared in which scenes so I could identify and eliminate superfluous characters (I had too many and did end up cutting a few, merging their story-functions in with other characters) and by the time I was done it was a thing of beauty, perfect. Anyone could have written that novel. Anyone except me, because I apparently wrote the damn thing completely out of my system. I sat down to write my second draft and nothing would come -- not a word. [headdesk]

I really liked that story, too. My second novel was a prequel set in the same universe a few hundred years earlier (the first one was SF, the second contemporary) and I'd planned on doing a bunch of stories in that universe, sort of like Robert Heinlein or Gordy Dickson. That one story was dead, though, once I'd outlined it.

It's been long enough now that I might be able to try again. I don't have anything of it, my first draft or the outline or any of my notes, and there's not all that much left in my head except a general storyline and a few character names. I'd be pretty close to starting over so maybe it'd work. It'd be cheating to do it for NaNo, though, so if I want to see I'll have to wait. :)

But anyway, I know that I can do just fine with shorter stories (and papers) without an outline, and even longer pieces. But at some point I will write myself into a corner, or at least I have in the past. I don't know where the dividing line is, though. :/ I suppose it's possible that if I just tried a few more novels I'd eventually get the trick of it, be able to write all the way through by the seat of my pants (I've known pros who work this way) or at least write until I crash and then start over with a new draft but without an outline. Hopefully NaNo will be the beginning of finding out.

Angie

Ah yes, it's a delicate balance. I have one novel that I've been working on for years - it's got complicated multiple storylines and I keep coming up with new things to add into the mix. I wrote about 30 000 words of it at one point, before scrapping that entirely because the writing by the seat of my pants approach really wasn't working. I think I then over analysesd the plot and got myself so thoroughly fed up with it that I've put all the notes into a box and not looked at them for approaching two years. That might, as with yours, now be something I can face reappraising. But it might take longer!

I think that you should go back at some point and have another go at your other novel. Without a previous draft or anything you wouldn't be going back over anything that was stale and you'll probably find that the experience you've had with writing in the intervening period means that it naturally is better now than it was the first time you wrote it. Either that or you just write it off to being a good experience and helping you develop and you never look at it again (which is kind of what I think might happen to mine, fond as I am of the characters).

I think Nano is a test for me too, to see whether I can actually get a novel to work as opposed to filing it in with all the other outlines for which I wrote about the first third before becoming disenchanted and giving up. I naturally find short(er) stories easier, I weave them tighter and I have a better idea of what works and what doesn't. I hope that in Nano I learn how to put together a novel, or at least begin to find out what doesn't work and learn from it that way!

I probably will -- maybe some time next year. [nod/ponder] There was a lot I could do better now, definitely, but there were some bits I liked a lot that might be worth keeping. :)

Angie

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