FULL BLEED: HIS TRICK IS YOU AND ME, BOY

I know. A second entry this week. Wild stuff. Last one wasn’t really much of much.

So I’ve been writing a book called (right now) The Missing Pieces. Another Hazeland thing. I think I can give away that it’s a haunted house story, just not like most other haunted house stories. I’ve kind of done this before, with the first story in Fake Believe, about a house that’s become the sanctuary for a neighborhood full of ghosts whose homes have been torn down in the name of redevelopment. The redevelopment of Bunker Hill in the 60s-70s in particular. I’m hoping I have something new to bring into things.

Anyways, I got about a hundred pages into the manuscript and hit a wall. I can’t tell you why, just that forward progress was stopped. I let some stuff become a distraction instead of working on the book. That’s not great, but it’s not like I’m on a publisher’s timetable. Yes, I should have had the book done now. It’s not. Because I simply couldn’t push ahead. I went ahead and dug in on the outline of the middle chunk (it’s broken up into basically four large sections overall) and expanded stuff out and thought “Yeah, that’ll do it.”

It did not. All I did was add distractions and some slice of life stuff as a way to deliver character setup and have some comic asides that honest would have worked better on a movie screen or comics page than in text. They’d have worked, just not been ideal. But I thought that’s what it needed. Even so, coming back to work on things, I just couldn’t push through on it. Anchor was lodged on a shipwreck or alien obelisk or maybe in the maw of some much larger critter under the surface. I wasn’t going anywhere.

I looked at things and said, okay what’s the best way to invert what I did. Look at it from the other side altogether. Why not. What I’d done wasn’t doing it, so do the opposite.

I should jump in here and say that I’m not a pantser (ugh, I hate that term.) I do outlines. I have to on anything bigger than a short story (and I usually plot those out as well.) Hey, you do you. If you can just sit down and write and get a whole novel out of it, I’m in awe, but I’m not jealous. But then I’ve never figured out halfway through that I have characters who should be two or one of them that should be edited out entirely. Or that there’s load-bearing plotlines that don’t resolve. Or there’s a whole section that needs to go, fully-written. If you just let it rip and have everything work magically, again, awe.

I need the outline. I need something to hang off of and then maybe deviate from. Yes, the book usually doesn’t throw major surprises at me, but there’s lots of textural surprises or sometimes character actions that change pacing that I don’t have to fight because I know how it all balances out. It’s not that the work loses all spontaneity, just that’s it’s a little more controlled. I like to think of it as doing an underpainting or a pencil sketch. Well, probably more like underpainting. But this way I know that all the pieces will fit in the frame more or less.

Consequently, development takes a long time. Drafting, not so much. Unless there’s issues. It used to be that I’d start on something and I’d have a nagging feeling like “You don’t need to do this. This part doesn’t need to be explained out or even better it’s actually a distraction.” And I’m generally right about this. But then my first drafts and subsequent revisions aren’t generally all that far apart. (Though I have a tendency to make first chapter flashbacks and that’s bad, so I often need to straighten out time flow issues.) In other words, I’m doing the structural revision before I’m drafting. Changing pencil lines instead of full oil paints.

And I think with this one, I was just a little desperate to make sure I had enough, so I added in-depth stuff with all the characters in the house when there’s only three important ones, a handful of ones already delineated who drop in and out, and a handful of new ones who are interesting side characters but not the focus. It was just too much. Unless I was writing a very different kind of novel, or again, a screenplay for a season of TV or a comic series.

“But you can make novels any length you like.”

Or you can make them too goddamn long. I’d rather err on just a little short.

So I erased a bunch of stuff in the middle (which is where 99% of a story’s problems lie.) I drilled down to focus on two-maybe-three characters. And instead of little day trips out of the house for character antics, I’m limiting the locations past a certain point. That’ll drive urgency, it’ll drive the weirdness and maybe even the meanness up a little more. Less is more. And now I lose maybe twenty pages of double-space outline instead of who knows how many pages of prose that will need to be stitched together.

But it took a long time chewing on this. And I know it’s still not done. Other stuff is gonna occur to me as I bang away on the keyboard. And maybe this won’t even work. I don’t like thinking about that prospect. Not at all. But it is one to consider. That’s fun. Writing is fun.

When it isn’t a lot of work. Which it is. And sometimes it’s very slow work. Which is incredibly frustrating and draining really. It’s tough to sit and grind on some stuff that won’t even boil out to more than a couple of sentences on a document that nobody will ever read (and no, I will not ever post outlining materials because wow what a mess). But without those bones, all the muscles and tendons in the world wrapped in all the pretty skin you can muster up, none of those will matter.

Back to stitching. Back to skeletonizing.