you just start and you keep going until you’re finished

I’ve had this idea for a short supernatural horror story for years, but never actually committed to writing it. I guess the idea of the thing was so pleasing to me, I didn’t want to risk ruining it by writing it badly.

But a few months ago, I wrote an entirely different story, and showed it to a friend of mine who is a fucking amazing author who had offered to take a look at anything I wrote, if I ever wanted his feedback.

So on this other thing (which is called The Magician’s Path), I just wasn’t sure if it worked. I wasn’t sure if it all held together, or if it even told the story I wanted to tell. I sent it to my friend, and told him that if he thought it sucked, it would be really useful and helpful if he could tell me why it sucked, so I knew where to focus on developing my skills as a storyteller. He didn’t reply for a few days, and I thought, “Jeeze, I guess it sucks even harder than I thought it did.”

Then he texted me and told me that he really liked it, and didn’t think it needed much work. He hadn’t replied to be because he had gotten busy. Let that be a lesson to all of us about the things we presume based upon incomplete information.

As it turned out, he was coming to LA, and he offered to come to Castle Wheaton and go over it with me, so I could understand what I’d written from a structure standpoint, a story standpoint, a prose standpoint, etc.

We sat in my kitchen and went through it (it’s not long at all, like 4000 words) and while he showed me things, I began to feel like I was more capable than I thought I was. My instincts were good, my ideas made sense, and while the draft didn’t exactly need anything, if I did a couple of things to it, it would help it be better.

I want to say that it was like learning to walk, but it was more like suddenly having the confidence to stand up and stop crawling. My friend unlocked this thing inside of me that I’d been holding back because I was so afraid of failure, and all these ideas that I’d had for years started clamoring around inside my imagination to get out and become proper stories.

I started and abandoned a couple of things, because they weren’t the right thing for me to be writing at the time, and finally settled on the thing that was a short story that became a novella that wants to be a novel and still really needs a good title. Neil Gaiman says that each thing you write teaches you how to write it, that you have to learn while you’re doing it, and that every story is different. While that thing was teaching me how to write it, it was also teaching me how to just write the idea I have, without fear or judgement, and keep going until it’s finished.

Around the second week of October, I had to write a really difficult scene in that story. Without getting too precious about it, I just had to walk away from it for a little bit, and my brain was all “Why don’t you write the swamp story, and release it around Halloween?”

There isn’t a swamp in the story anymore, but I was like, “Good idea, brain,” and I got to work. It ended up being more than I expected, and I didn’t come close to making that Halloween deadline. But I finished it on Friday, and I’ve been deliberately taking this weekend off from it, even though I really want to get back to work on it and do the rewrites.

I’ll probably finish the rewrites sometime next week, and then I’ll go back to the novel, which feels like it’s about 90% finished, because I want to finish the first draft of it by the end of the year.

When it’s finished, I’ll go back to my whiteboard and pick the next thing that’s going to go into the collection of short stories that all of these things have come out of, and if everything goes according to plan, I’ll have at least one book (and hopefully two) published early next year.

pages upon pages

From my Tumblr ask thing:

It’s kind of random, but I just wanted to let you know that you’re helping me not lose my drive for writing. I’m doing nanowrimo and I’m already worried about making the 50k word count, but then I look at your posts about your novella and how even your word count varies and it’s totally normal to not write the same amount of words every day. Anyways, I hope you have a great weekend and thanks for unknowingly helping me de-stress about my writing.

This ask made some stuff wake up in my brain, and I wanted to repost it here for easy reference in the future, when I need to be reminded. I said:

So first off, I’m really proud of you for doing something you love, even (especially) when it’s hard.

If it makes a difference, I advise you not to worry about making the 50K word count, because the important thing is to be creative, to tell your story, and to push through the challenging parts so you can get to the parts that are fun. I’m relearning this almost daily, while I work on the short story that wanted to be a novella that is trying to be a novel.

It sounds like you’re on your way to enjoying the journey and telling the story, but you inspired me to share some thoughts about my current process and progress:

I have to constantly remind myself that it isn’t about the word count or the number of days in a row that I write (I realize NaNoWriMo is set up to make those things important, but stay with me for a sec). I have to constantly remind myself that this is the first draft! This is the puke draft. This is the draft where all the ideas come out, all the bits fall onto the page, and I just go until it’s finished. We have to remember that this draft is going to have big holes in it. We’re going to come back to it in a month or so and realize that we wrote the same scene twice, or that we had something in our brains that we forgot to tell the reader, so this scene doesn’t make sense. But all of that is okay! We can fix it when we do our second draft, and the second draft is so much easier than the first draft, and almost always more fun.

But! We’re never going to get to the end of our story if we worry about how close to finished the first draft is. We’re never going to get to the end of our story if we judge ourselves the whole time we’re writing the first draft. We’re never going to get to the excitement and satisfaction of doing the rewrites if we don’t let ourselves just WRITE.

So try not to worry – wait, there is no try, only do and do not – DO NOT WORRY about the word count. Some days are going to be epic word dumps (Scalzi does 10K words in a day from time to time, for crap’s sake) and some days are going to be epic struggles to finish with 290 words that we aren’t that crazy about but at least it’s something.

Maybe you’ll get to 50K by the end of the month, and maybe you won’t, but if you focus – wait. WHEN you focus on telling the story and listening to your characters, when you test and challenge and reward them, the total word count is a bonus. But the story, as they say, is the thing.

Keep writing!

If anyone cares, I’m currently at 37970 words on the short story that wanted to become a novella that’s trying to be a novel and still needs a good title. I wrote a thing two days ago that I like. It sounds like this:

“Are you okay? You seem weird today.”
I didn’t seem weird. I was weird. And hormones and pre-teen angst and my general level of constant anxiety were all just wrecking me.

Those two lines capture precisely who I was when I was 12 so perfectly, it’s almost embarrassing and maybe even a little painful to read them.

I’m somewhere in the third act of this thing that refuses to cough up a title. I have two main story things that I need to wrap up, one character thing that I want to put in but don’t need to put in, and then I leave it alone for a day or two before the rewriting begins. It’s equally frustrating and exciting and scary to be this close to finishing the first draft, and that’s okay. It’s a good place to be, practically and emotionally, because it’s what I have to do before I can get into the part where it starts coming together into one whole story, instead of a bunch of things that may or may not hang together.

But, anyway, for everyone out there who is writing a story and feels like they’re never going to get to the end, or that it’s no good, or any of those things our brains tell us to protect us from taking the creative risk of finishing something: you’re not the only one. Hell, I bet even Neil Gaiman feels stuck and frustrated from time to time, and I’m pretty sure that he’s an actual, living god.

So just keep writing until the words pile up around you, because that’s when you take the words and rearrange them into something beautiful.

only sometimes I question everything

Photo from image-archeology dot come — Photo from image-archeology dot com

I’ve been busy in 1983 for the last couple of weeks, working on this thing that I thought would be about 3000 words, but is now ten times that, and isn’t as close to being finished as I thought.

Yesterday, I worked really hard to get out not a lot of words (under 400), but that’s okay, because I was working on a scene that’s super important to the rest of the story, and if I got it wrong, it would be like one of those mathematical errors that’s may be only slightly off, but compounds over time until your spaceship ends up crashing into the sun instead of landing gently on Titan.

I was still unsure about yesterday’s work when I started today, and I’m unsure of it right now, but I decided that I have to trust my instincts, not overthink it, and just keep going. I even said to myself, “the only way to keep going is to keep going and the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.”

Once I accepted that it may not be totally right, but was not totally wrong, I was able to get back into the narrative. We’re still at Universal Studios. Here’s a little bit from when the tram drove through the backlot exteriors.

It was totally magical to me. They were all just facades, and none of the sets were dressed with anything more than signs painted on the windows, but I thought it would have been the coolest thing in the world to be on any one of those streets when they were being filmed. To look around and pretend that I was in New York, or Chicago, or the Old West, or wherever Dracula was from – Bulgaria, I thought? – and only have to use my imagination a little bit, because set dressing and lights and costumes would do most of the work … that was incredible to me. At this point in my life, I’d only done a couple of small parts in some little things that have been lost to time (they don’t even exist on YouTube, and I know because I’ve looked), and a handful of commercials. I didn’t want to be an actor as much as my mother wanted me to be an actor, and most of the time if you’d asked me I would have told you that it wasn’t something I wanted to do when I grew up. But riding past all those fake buildings and seeing all that movie magic –

“What’s wrong?” Evelyn said.

“Huh?” I said.

“You … you look … sad.”

This still happens to me. I think about things, I get lost in my imagination and in my own thoughts, I retreat from the world and the people who I’m close to, I’m told that when I go to that place in my head, I always look sad, even when I’m not.

“I’m okay,” I said, “I was just thinking.”

This is a work of narrative fiction, mostly stuff that didn’t happen with stuff that did happen mixed in. Some of it, like my memories and thoughts about working on a backlot, are real, and other parts of it are … less real. It’s fun to imagine and remember, remember and imagine, and listen to the characters when they have something to say or do that I wasn’t expecting.

In real life, I was always disappointed that there wasn’t more of a backlot at Paramount when I was working there in the 80s. There is now, and it’s pretty cool, but back then it was just a single facade for the TV show The Bronx Zoo. When I go to work at Warners for Big Bang Theory, I always drive through the backlot, and I’ll even go for walks through streets I know from The Twilight Zone, The Dukes of Hazzard, even Casablanca, when I have long enough breaks during production. I don’t think I’ll ever become immune to the magic of a studio backlot, or a set that’s totally immersive, a little bit of imagination made real on a soundstage.

The version of myself who is in this novella probably doesn’t grow up to be an actor like I did. I’m pretty sure he grows up to be a writer, because … well, that’s all in the story and I should probably just leave it at that.

As I get closer to finishing this thing, I don’t plan to keep doing updates like the ones I’ve done the last week or so, because I want to keep the story behind the curtain more than I have. These parts have been fun to share, though, because I enjoy knowing that they spark some of your memories about the early 80s.

“a full day of hollywood, from the other side of the camera”

I took the weekend off from writing, and though I wanted to write yesterday, I had too much stuff to do out of the house to get anything done. I woke up this morning before my alarm, and I got to work as fast as I could, because I wanted to know what happened next in my story.

I think I have identified the complete three act structure, more or less, and I’ve also figured out how this story can loosely follow a Hero’s Journey. That’s not to say that I’m following a formula, just that understanding how those structures apply to this story will help me know where I am in the narrative when I get there, instead of having to look back a few thousand words and compare.

Last week, I thought I’d finish this up around 30,000 words, but I know it’s going to go longer than that. On the one hand, that’s cool because it means I’m putting together a much bigger story than I thought possible when I started. On the other hand, if it doesn’t all hold together, that’s a lot of words that aren’t necessarily going to see publication.

But I’m not worrying about that now. Right now, I’m enjoying every step of this process, and having a really good time as I level up my ability as a writer and storyteller. Even if this whole thing ends up being cut down by half or something, it will have been worth the time I spent writing it, and I’m pretty sure that, once it’s finished and I get some fresh eyes and perspectives on it, I can polish it up and ensure it holds together in the rewriting process.

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slips into the sea, eventually

This thing I started writing a few weeks ago, which was supposed to be part of a short story collection, has completely taken on its own life, and instead of being a quick 3500 word thing about a single event, it’s become (as of today) a little over 21,000 words about the fragility of friendship, and what that means when we’re at that weird time in our lives between elementary and middle school.

I’m pretty sure that I’m in the middle of the second act, so maybe this will finish up in another 10,000 words or so. Once that happens, I’ll set it aside for a couple of days to let my brain get some perspective, and then I’ll go over the whole thing to see if it even holds together.

I started writing this because I loved Stranger Things so much, and it made me remember a bunch of stuff about the summer of 1983, when I was 11 years-old. It was the first time I had a real crush on anyone, the first time I learned that adults can be horrible even though they’re adults and they aren’t supposed to be horrible (especially to kids), and what it’s like to lose friends who are important to us.

Some of it is true, most of it isn’t, but all of it has been incredibly rewarding and fun to write. Today, I’m finishing up a thing is on one level about making a sandcastle, but is also about something else entirely. I thought I’d share some of it:

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