Category Archives: writing

What’s next-ish?

writing

Sometimes a story flows along in order. I have the beginning situation, I think I know the ending, and as I finish each scene, the next scene is quite obvious. The ending I reach isn’t always exactly where or how I first imagined. And during re-writes I may cut out a few scenes entirely and/or add new scenes. But, generally, there is a feeling in some stories almost as if you, the author, are merely a witness to a story that played out for itself. Your decisions amount more to deciding which events to include, which to skip over, and how to frame things.

Then there are stories that are much more a struggle. I know the problems confronting my protagonists. I have an idea how it will end (but sometimes it’s no more than whether the protagonist triumphs or fails). Scenes are written, but sometimes with no idea as to where in the sequence of events they happen. Rather than witnessing a tale, the author is more like a detective or an archeologist digging around a messy place, collecting and cataloging pieces until there is finally enough to get an idea of the broad outline of the tale. Your decisions are more complicated. Is this thing you unearthed even part of the story? Is it even a “thing,” or have you mistakenly glued several unrelated fragments together into what appears to be a clay pot?

A lot of my stories fall somewhere between those. Lately I’ve been writing a lot of scenes that clearly have a sequence, but I’m not sure they all belong. And sometimes I’m a bit worried that I’m digging in the wrong spot entirely.

There’s no way to tell until I reach an ending. And that will just begin a different kind of digging, assembling, and evaluating.

Sometimes I wonder how any stories ever come together.

Predictable

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When I was in my teens, Agathe Christie’s Curtain, Poirot’s final case, was published. A friend read it before I did, and told me there was no way I’d figure out the ending. We had had discussions before about mysteries. I had been a big mystery fan as long as I could remember—not surprising, since my mother had read Heinlein and Christie novels aloud to me as a baby and toddler.

We ended up in a bet about whether I would figure it out. He bought a second copy of the paperback and rigged it up with a seal covering the last fifty or so pages. I would read it to that point, stop, and then not read further until I had told him my guess.

I did it. He was carefully examining his seal when I told him who the killers were and what had happened. He stared at me, open mouthed. “You swore you wouldn’t read another copy or ask anyone how it ended!”

I insisted that I had done neither, and asked him if I was correct.

He threw the book at me and stomped out.

I tore the seal off and finished the book. I had gotten it right, not quite down to every detail, but I had definitely solved it.

For at least a year afterward he would occasionally accuse me of cheating. Other times he would bring it up, say he believed me that I hadn’t cheated, but still couldn’t understand how I did it. He would tease me that I should become a cop instead of pursuing my writing dreams.

I want to be clear here that I did not cheat. I didn’t peek. I didn’t overhear anyone talking about it. I didn’t find another copy. I didn’t ask anyone about it in any way.

But, it could be argued that I had a some possibly unfair advantages:

1. I literally had been listening to and reading mystery stories for longer than I could remember.

2. I had been intentionally studying the art of crafting mystery stories: reading countless articles in magazines like The Writer and Writer’s Digest, getting books on writing fiction in general and mystery in particular through interlibrary loan, writing mystery stories of my own. I was exceptionally well-versed in the tricks of the trade.

3. I was familiar with Christie’s writing in particular.

Those probably weren’t unfair, really, however:

4. I knew that Agathe Christie had written this book 30 years earlier intending it to be the fitting end to Poirot and Hastings’s careers. She’d originally stuck it in a vault to be published after her death. She agreed to the publication in ’75 because she knew she was dying and would never write again. That narrowed the possibilities of how the story would end.

5. I knew that the ending was something which this friend, who was no dummy, had thought was completely unforeseeable. Again, that made it easier to pick from the possibilities that occured to me as I contemplated the clues. Another way to look at it: that prompted me to at least contemplate possibilities which might otherwise seem too outlandish to consider.

This friend once asked me how could I enjoy mysteries at all if I often figured them out before the end. He is hardly the only person to ask that.

For me, part of the fun of a good mystery is finding the puzzle pieces in the storyline and admiring how well they are constructed, or how good a job the author does of putting them in plain sight while not making them obvious.

Sometimes I am completely blindsided, and if that happens without the author cheating, that is just as much fun as figuring it out before the reveal.

Bad mysteries aren’t bad simply because they are predictable. They’re bad when they are too predictable. When the author (or author and director, in the case of a movie or show) clumsily gives things away or relies on cliches, there is no delight in the reveal. If the author cheats by simply withholding information, or otherwise pulling something bizarre and shocking out of nowhere, that also spoils the fun.

And, as in all stories, if the author makes us care about the characters, even if the puzzle isn’t terribly difficult, we can still enjoy the battle of wits between the detective and the same puzzle.

Don’t over think

writing

The first week in July is often a wash for me. Because my day job is in cubicle land, I have had Independence day as a paid holiday for nearly every one of the last 24 years. So it’s a short work week. One you can turn into a nice little vacation without using too many vacation days.

Even if I’m not taking extra time, since my job always has lots of dependencies on co-workers, enough of them take extra time off that projects enter a kind of limbo. Work days are usually less stressful, and one would expect that I might get more writing done at home.

But I seldom do. This year I had the excuse that warmer temperatures and weird humidity fluxes had my hay fever in overdrive all week.

But that isn’t the whole story.

Most years the manner the holiday breaks up my work schedule also messes up my usual bill-paying routine, so I would often pay one or two things a few days later than I meant. That’s become much less of an issue now that I use online bill paying through my bank. But it still indicates that some part of me considers that time around this particular holiday as somehow sitting outside the normal time space continuum. Too bad I don’t own a Tardis, eh?

The thing is, I don’t know if the whole story matters. Maybe I just need to accept that for whatever reason, the first week of July is often not productive, and just move on.

It’s not as if thinking about it is going to get any real writing done. Right?

Re-writing

writing,

One of the projects I’ve been spinning my wheels on for a few months is a novel, tentatively entitled The Trickster Entanglement. I’ve completed 7 of a planned 20 chapters, have much of chapter 8 drafted, and numerous scenes meant for later at least partially finished. (And I’ve had a rough draft of the climactic battle in chapters 18 & 19 done for a looooooooong time)

However, Entanglement is a sequel. The first novel in this planned series, The Trickster Apocalypse, has been in rewrite for a while. I had a short list of things I knew I still needed to fix, and then I need to go through the whole thing once more to track remaining loose ends.

So, I spent most of the weekend doing that. And then, in the middle of the day Sunday, I suddenly knew what the missing part of chapter 8 of the second book needed to be. A scene I hadn’t previously thought of that 1) moves one subplot forward, 2) ties said subplot quite firmly to the main plot and two other subplots, 3) points the way to chapter 10.

I think this trick has worked. Now I need to find one for each of the other stalled projects…

Not writer’s block

writing

I’ve been stuck on several stories for a few months. I write some lines of dialogue in one, but it just doesn’t gel into a scene. So I try another set of characters, and suddenly I have a complete scene… Except it isn’t part of this story, or not obviously so, so I stick it in the fragments file and move on.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

So now I’m at the stage where I’m reading all those disconnected scenes and asking myself if this is a completely different story that wants telling. So far, I don’t quite see it.

I’ve been increasingly tempted to significantly rewrite the incomplete tales in question. My usual rule is that I can’t rewrite a scene until I’ve written a new one. Otherwise I fall into a never ending loop of rewriting the existing bit, instead of finishing it.

Time to pull out a new trick…

Semi autobiographical

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I once read a book review that began, “If I have to read one more semi-autobiographical novel about a gay boy coming of age in the rural south, I’m going to scream.”

I know the feeling.

And I say this as a someone who was a gay boy growing up in a rural setting. It was the Rocky Mountain states, rather than the south, but it was also in the Southern Baptist Church. Plus, the tiny town where I was born (and later returned to attend middle school) was—due to economic and historical circumstances too complex to go into at this juncture—inhabited almost entirely by people who were either from the south, or their parents were. Which makes me sympathetic to the phenomenon, but not blindly so. Continue reading Semi autobiographical →

Elbow room

people, writing, ,

I was running late, then the bus was late. When it arrived it was much much much more crowded than usual, so we were packed in like sardines.

This is day four of antibiotics for me, and I’m feeling more human each morning. I wasn’t the only person in the office either working from home because of illness or taking sick days over the last two weeks, so everyone’s asking each other how they’re recovering, et cetera. All of which caused one co-worker to point out that a good method to get a little space on a crowded bus is to sneeze.

I wish I’d thought of that this morning. Continue reading Elbow room →

Identities

life, writing, ,

It has not been a fun weekend. Friday morning I was rudely shoved out of denial1 that I was sick. The sinus headache that woke me up before the alarm went off was so excruciating, I had to put an ice pack on my head2. I had a deadline, a document that needed to be in a draft suitable to email to a person responsible for training some customers by the end of the day. So I couldn’t take a sick day, I needed to work from home.

Many of my work projects can be handed off to colleagues in my department, but this one isn’t one of those. I started out in technical writing without formal training in the field. Oh, yes, I’d had lots of writing, communication, and journalism classes, as I kept changing majors. And I’d been actively writing (and studying writing) since I’d made the decision when I was six to be a writer34, but I was hired as employee number 6 in a small startup. Tech writing was only one of my duties, and I approached it by asking the question: if I had to use this, what would I want to know? Then I played with the software and the hardware until I knew everything5, and wrote it up.

When we started hiring people with prior experience in tech writing (as the company grew), I learned that many tech writers were very uncomfortable writing about hardware, for instance. And if they had their druthers, avoid understanding programming logic altogether. To be fair, in well designed consumer products, users should not have to understand programming to use the product. But many of the products I’ve supported over the years have been enterprise, server-side applications and the platforms and hardware they run on. My users are usually administrators and installers, not end-users.

The upshot of all this is, within every tech writing group/department6 I’ve been in, I’ve been the hardware guy. The person assigned to write installation guides and the other super-techie docs no one else wants to do. This product is one of those.

And we’re still in the process of changing our production tool. I and the other Principal Tech Writer are still configuring the new repository, stylesheets, and support tools while we’re working. And this particular deliverable type is not fully defined and developed. So I’m also having to work on that end at the same time. All with an insanely short delivery time.

In addition to being the hardware/operating system/programming guy, I’m also the fix things guy. If I had a dime for every time a co-worker has said, “If you can’t figure it out, I don’t know who could” when we’re talking about software misbehaving, I could retire to the Bahamas.

That’s really just another manifestation of my study-it-until-I-understand-the-inner-workings trait. While in an ideal world, a user shouldn’t need to understand programming logic to use a consumer software product, in the real world, understanding that logic can help. Particularly if you can also grok the fundamental paradigm of the product7, you can figure out how to make it do things the designers didn’t plan on, and you can diagnose problems they never anticipated.

Related to that, I’m always the one who figures out how to use new systems, implement them, stretch them to meet our needs, and so forth.

I like doing all of these things. I like explaining. I try to teach my co-workers how to do all the things I do. Tasks that they have to do frequently they learn. But there is always a lot of stuff that folks only vaguely remember I showed them. And the whole “think like a programmer” or “think like a troubleshooter” thing seems to be something you either have a knack for, or don’t.

Which means I’m always going to be “the only one who knows how to do that” guy.

And that’s not fun when you get so sick you have to cancel the monthly writers’ meeting and the game I run, but you still have to squeeze in work from home time to make the deadline.

Footnotes

1. These symptoms are just hay fever because we’ve had really high pollen counts

2. And took cold tablets and went back to sleep for a bit…

3. I asked Mom where books come from, and she found a great explanation of the publishing industry in some sort of kids’ encyclopedia during our next visit to the library, and I was hooked!

4. And I made my first fiction sale at the age of 16, so I was a pro long before I got into tech writing.

5. Relatively speaking. It also helped that my other duties included testing the software and hardware.

6. Although I worked at one company for over 20 years, over the course of that time I had 6 different supervisors, as the company grew, shifted direction, grew some more, shifted direction, was split in two, et cetera.

7. For instance, the paradigm of the now nearly-gone word processor, WordPerfect, was the typewriter and how a typist used it. Text and commands for formatting are processed linearly, much like a mechanical typewriter. The paradigm of MS Word, on the other hand is a mutated cascading stylesheet8.

8. Yes, I know Word has been around longer than CSS. Of course I do. I’ve been using Word (and supporting other people using Word) since before Microsoft released Windows. But that’s the paradigm9.

9. Mutated. Because while it gives the illusion of having taxonomic behavior, it also works as a reverse taxonomy, and occasionally as a non-Euclidean hierarchy. But that’s a story for another day.