Does not rhyme with "theme"

[mrissa]

madwriter and yhlee got me wanting to do this: ask me anything you want to about my writing. Anything on any part of it. I will do my best to approximate an answer. Or (and this bit is mine) tell me something you think is interesting about what you're working on right now, whether it's a writing project or some other cool thing you do. Or, hey, do both, question and answer.

(I asked madwriter about his writing madness and yhlee about what she was most looking forward to writing, to give you an idea of how I take this question. But you can take it any way you want.)

ellameena, dear, just don't use the m-word. Think of it as a circulating question if that makes you feel better.

Comments

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

"Memoid." ;)

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

Nonfiction writing, such as term papers, is not difficult for me. But fiction is torture. I have done some fiction writing in the past. I have reasonable story ideas. My problem is that I cannot manage to write anything longer than a short story, because this is what happens:

1. I get an idea. I do some character sketches. I get some time to write.


2. I sit down to write. I get about three paragraphs in.


3. I edit the heck out of those three paragraphs.


4. I decide that the three paragraphs are crap, that my whole idea is crap and has probably been done to death elsewhere.


5. I resolve to persevere and write two more paragraphs, then edit the whole thing until I am thoroughly sick of the five paragraphs.


6. I abandon the project with my self-confidence in tatters.

The only way anything makes it to short-story stage, if that, is by taking a writing class and having a deadline. and maybe that's the way to go, someday when I'm not already in school for other things. But... how do you stand it? How do you get past the five paragraphs and write a whole book? Do you have to write with your monitor off? Do you employ sheer force of will? What's the secret?

As for me... what I'm working on... Here are two projects that are interesting to me:

• I have to work on a joint paper/presentation with a classmate. The subject, which was given to us yesterday, is laser revascularization of cardiac arteries. Joint projects in general give me the willies, because it is so easy to get saddled with the lion's share of the work, so I made sure to hook up with a classmate who is smart, personable, and hard-working, so this should be a good project.


• My 4-year-old daughter and I are slowly working on a cookbook of simple recipes she likes (e.g. oatmeal). I figure this will fuel her interest in trying new foods and learning to read/write. We're adding a couple of recipes every month, since that's all the time I have and all the attention she has. :-)

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

*laugh laugh laugh* Good EME, Mrissa!

Here's a question? What is your emotional arc like when you write? Is it:

UpUpUpUpCrash--start a new story UpUp etc

Or is it:

UpdowndowndownUpUpHooray!I'm done!!!

Know what I mean?

Mine is the first. My lowest point is when I'm completely done with a story. All the shiney newness is off of it, and I've done some revising so I know it's seriously flawed. My NEXT story is the one to save me.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

If you were offered a $5 million contract to publish a crap draft of a novel as-is, would you do it?

Riffed from Mkille's question

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

You've just been offered $5 million to spend the next couple of years (or more) writing any novel you want. What will you write?

(Give as much detail as you like--or as little, if you're worried people might swipe your ideas. If you are worried, I won't laugh, as I'm the one who puts such things in locked entries.)

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

Which comes first, plot or character?

How do you know when enough research is enough research?

[porphyrin.livejournal.com]

When you write non-sequentially, do you ever write bits-- okay, whole scenes-- that don't make it into the next draft?

And if so, do you get frustrated with the non-sequentiality of it all?

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

So, do you find the physics background useful at all or utterly pointless?

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

To what degree do you pre-plan your fiction writing? How much of a plan or structure to a work do you need before you can begin it?

How much of the end product evolves from the initial kernel, and how much was planned from the beginning?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Some things get planned as series. Mostly series arcs seem to happen to me naturally, though. I wrote Fortress of Thorns and Dwarf's Blood Mead and Reprogramming as stand-alones, but the way things go around them is very clear to me. As timprov pointed out last night at dinner, Megan (from Fortress of Thorns) isn't 13 in my head, she's a whole range of ages. She's all the ages she ever gets, and so are the other people in her life.

This gets to be a problem when I look at one notecard for Sampo and say, "Oh, that leads into a related novel about one of the minor characters." Not that that happened yesterday. Ahem. More on that in a later question's answer.

Anyway, then there are things like the series including Thermionic Night, Sampo, and the partially-drafted Midnight Sun Rising. When I started writing it, I was fool enough to think it was one book. TN is currently 114K, Sampo is 120K, and MSR is 40K without being even close to finished. It is a very large story. So in that case I had it planned, in rough outlines, from the very beginning; I was just wrong about what needed doing with it.

I think for me the series arc has to be very clear when I write book 2. Fortress is reasonably stand-alone, but once I sat down with The Grey Road, I knew what goes in the other two books in the series, and that it would have to be a four-book series. (It can be two four-book series, I think, but the arc of the first is clearly ahead of me.) Perhaps a basic geometry issue, two points determine a line etc.?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The "good Lord, this sucks" point is one of the hardest ones for some of us to overcome, and I was one of them. I had more first pages than you could shake a stick at. (I still do now, actually, but for different reasons.) One of the things that really worked for me in letting go of that perfectionism was freewriting. If I just sat down and scribbled in pen in a bound journal (so the pages couldn't be easily ripped out and disposed of without leaving evidence), I wasn't going to be able to make it perfect; the medium did not allow for it. Nor was I going to be able to get frustrated and make it go away. I had to just write, and it was imperfect, but it was going somewhere. I wrote my first novel longhand in my journals and did most of my second one that way, too. The medium was very important to me. Now I'm used to writing what Anne Lamott calls "shitty first drafts," and I'm much better about just letting them come.

The other thing that helps me in getting past the first five paragraphs is that I write non-sequentially. So I don't have the psychological block that this is what people are going to encounter first and does it all follow and is everything perfect? because of course it isn't. It's got huge gaps. But it's not possible to make an unfinished short story perfect; completion is part of perfection. So I draft first and polish second.

By now I'm excited to start on a new project, and by the time that wears off, I usually have too much to get obsessive about whether what I've got is perfect or not; much better to keep the forward momentum and fine-tune later.

I also think I have a much more adult attitude about what's "fine-tuning" than I did when I started. My word count on Thermionic Night yesterday was a net -1000 words. I have short stories shorter than that. And it isn't even most of what's being cut in this book. You don't get -1000 in a day by cutting adverbs and "Well"s. Entire scenes count as "fine-tuning."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

(with sound effects)

1. New idea? Crap. What do we need with a new idea? We have pages of good ideas, and now this one is nagging the brain? Harumphharumphharumph.

2. But this one is kind of shiny...in fact, if we do this bit of research...oooooooooooh......

3. Look at the nifty bit I just got to write! Looky! Looky!!!! Eeeee!

4. What if this sucks? Maybe I should take up fingernail-biting...nnnnngggggnnnn.....

5. No, it does not suck! It is mighty! It is my story! And I am strong and a Viking woman and I will triumph over the story! Attaaaaack! Yarrrrrg!

6. It may suck. It may indeed suck. But it is still my suckage and not anybody else's, and I am responsible for it. Sighhhhhhhhh.

7. It's done! Wheeeeeeeeeee!

8. Revisions. And revisions are their own extremely complicated arc, I'm afraid.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

A crap draft...hmm. Does that mean the best I could do without editorial input, or does it mean digging up the first draft of Fortress (which was at least four drafts ago)? In the former case, yes for $5 million but not for, say, $5K. I've seen what editorial insight can do to improve a book, and it'd take a bit for me to forego it voluntarily.

In the latter case, no; I wouldn't deliberately publish less than the best I could do on my own, even if I was foregoing professional editing due to some weird clause in the $5M contract.

(Who would do that, though? "We want to pay you more money, and in exchange we'll make sure we're taking a much bigger risk than we have to and will forego our experts, who are employed specifically for the purpose." Umm...weird. Not sure I'd want to work with that kind of person long-term.)

Re: Riffed from Mkille's question

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See, this is the sort of question that makes a lot more sense when you're talking to someone who has been constrained by a day job, by insufficient help in taking care of their kids, etc. Me -- I pretty much do write what I want. I have some contract work I'd probably forego, but that's about it.

I'm not under contract for any novels as yet, and $5M for free is not the same thing as a contract. Specifically, it doesn't give me access to an audience. So while I would love to write The Mark of the Sea Serpent, I'd still want to hold off on that if at all possible, because it's not going to have an audience until Dwarf's Blood Mead does.

So what do I want to write next? I want, intellectually, to write Zodiac House (a children's fantasy) or the YA SF adventure on Europa (YA SF) or something else in a category I like but haven't got anything written in yet. That's not necessarily what's likely to eat my brain in the next couple of years, though. And that I can't predict very well. My current likely guess is the Aesir noir novel (grown-up fantasy), but it could be any of a number of things. One thing I do not lack is novel ideas.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I don't generally write physics-based hard SF. I don't see that changing for more than maybe two books' worth. So in that sense it was not at all useful.

But having that kind of background, being able to whip out back-of-the-envelope calculations on surface temperatures or orbital mechanics or whatever, that's useful. Being conversant with all kinds of math and background physics is useful. And having gone through the physics program I went through is very, very useful to me. It was a major influence on me personally -- not always in a positive way, but often, probably even mostly. Those guys are right up there with my parents and my books in "major early influences."

I also think it's good for a writer to know something besides books. Writers, serious, good writers, will find and read books. That's just a given. Having some other perspective seems like a good thing, and a physics major was one of the first and biggest other perspectives I chose.

Also, applied math was good for my brain. I miss it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Neither. Relationship comes first. I don't know my characters or their actions in isolation. I know them in a web of human relationships. So for Fortress of Thorns, it wasn't that I got Charlotte and then figured out Miri to be her best friend, it was that I got them together in my head, Charlotte-and-Miri and their whole history as friends. And then that implied certain things about their relationships with other people and with other things.

In a few of my lower-level physics classes, we used a sheet of spandex and some balls of varying weights to talk about gravitation in a deformable spacetime, and I often think of character relationships that way. We didn't first detect extrasolar planets by just looking -- we looked at the variation in the position of things we could see and worked out what must be there from that. Characters are like that, too, and dynamic, and then you've got plot.

Enough research...umm. That's a hard one. For novels, I'm more inclined to dive in after a few overviews and make notes of what I'm missing as I go and then do that. I had to check a history of electronics standardization for TN a few weeks ago -- better that now, in the revisions, than stopping writing entirely while I was drafting so I could dig up the information. On the other hand, if a major plot point had centered on resistor coding, I'd have gone out to find it at the time.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, there are bits and whole scenes that don't make it into the next draft. A few of them come from writing non-sequentially, but most of them come from the normal editing process: some scenes get cut. That's just the way it is.

I don't get frustrated with the non-sequentiality of it all for two reasons: 1) because it's not something I decided to do because it'd be nifty, it's just how I get things done; 2) because if I do, I can just go to the earliest completed point and work forward from there until the feeling passes.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

What are your current thoughts on your Arthurian novel?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I plan a fair amount. I outline after I've done a few initial scenes, and I always know how it's going to end.

Of course, I'm often wrong. I seem to need to blunder in getting things wrong left and right and then let it straighten out in the process. Not the easiest thing for a perfectionist to learn to do, but it seems to work best that way, a combination of obsessive advance planning and gradual evolution.

That's for books; short stories usually come pretty well fully-formed or else not at all.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You would no longer recognize it as such. I will have to tell you which one it is when it's done.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Have you told me anything about it in its currently-unrecognizable form?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Not that I recall.

It's become a Joe Haldeman homage.

Now anyone reading this is rightly hoping I will warn them so they can run away from it veryvery quickly, because if there are two words that don't go together, I think "Arthurian" and "Haldeman" are they.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is where I wanted to say: I got smacked with a "related novel" idea when I was writing notes for Sampo, because there's a minor character whose life looks like it's deforming a strange amount of spacetime off to the side, and her interactions with these books' major characters are a little odd. And it starts to look like there's a book-shaped amount of odd over there. And I start to understand how someone can write a bazillion novels in the same universe, because people keep relating to people who relate to other things and sometimes places that contain more people....

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Also, I am apparently unable to close an italics tag this morning.

[greatestofnates.livejournal.com]

Have you written about a character who was divergent from your own personality and who later became integrated with your own self/views?

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

Interesting. (I spent 8 years as a physics student.)

I think I'd find physics more useful if I wrote hard SF, or any SF at all. I do like to dig up fun things for my fictional alchemy lab.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I meant a novel that you thought wasn't well done in its present form, but for some reason, some publisher wanted it as it is. I'm not sure why they would do that either, but given that crap (in my opinion) continues to be published and purchased along with non-crap...

I guess I'm always curious to see whether people are more likely to see "doing their best" as a conscientiousness issue or a pride issue, and whether that has a determining effect on their decisions. (Not that conscientiousness and pride don't have a certain amount of overlap in practice).

I know, not the most craft- or experience-related question about your writing. Sorry.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Integrated with is a hard standard, so on that I'll have to say no. But I think I've expanded my ability to empathize with a fair range of people by writing about some of them. I surprised myself with one of the adult characters in Fortress of Thorns, and while I still think she's a jerk, I understand people like her much better now and can see where they're coming from. (Unfortunately, I think people like her are probably pretty darned common.)