I've gotta tell ya, I've had a hell of a time of late coming up with anything to say around here. My brain's so preoccupied with finishing the first draft of DH that I'm lucky I'm not walking into walls and coasting through red lights. I've been bumping around with my head in the clouds for weeks - or, more accurately, in my own private land of make-believe. (Hey, who says you've gotta grow up sometime? Lame-ass grown-ups, that's who.) It's funny; I want desperately to get this story told, but there's also this hesitation, this reluctance to let it go. Which leads me to my topic of the day.
DH, as I may have mentioned a time or twelve, is a pretty actiony book. But the last thing I want is a book that's nothing but action; action, on its own, isn't conflict, and 300-odd pages of things going boom could wind up being pretty damn monotonous. No, what I want is a story with brains, with heart (and not just splattered across the pavement. Because, you know, yick.) I want to create characters you root for, characters you identify with. I want a book you don't forget the second you put it down, and action alone just ain't gonna accomplish that.
So here's the problem. I'm smack in the middle of a huge action scene, and the writing's kind of dragging. (I mean to say the actual writing of it is taking a while, not that the writing itself is bad.) It's kind of frustrating, because I've got a killer set-piece, some decent tension, and the stakes are certainly high enough. The thing is, it's not the scene I want to be writing. The one I'm fantasizing about, the one that keeps me up at night, is the next scene. If the scene I'm writing is the big action climax of the book, the next one is the emotional climax. Sure, it's full of the talky-talk, but I'll be damned if it's not a thousand times more interesting to me than the explosiony goodness I'm writing now.
So who knows - maybe I am growing up a bit. I mean, in the great debate of Talking versus Explosions, Explosions wins hands-down, right? Only here I am, writing explosions and thinking about dialogue. Or maybe I'm just fooling myself, and this slow-down is just my own subconscious way of delaying the inevitable - that moment when you've got to leave the high of creation behind, and turn your attention to the task of revision (which, for the record, is where the story goes from a neat idea to actually readable). Somehow, though, I think it's the former.
Still, my obsession with the talky bits aside, I suspect I'll never turn my back on the action entirely. After all, it is my own private land of make-believe, and that means if I say so, there's room enough for both.
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When I run into that I'll put a placeholder with a few quick notes saying what it is that needs to happen ("Bob dies a horrible and painful death from a Garden Weasel (tm) up the rectum") or something, highlight it in red (if I'm using Word) and go onto the next one.
Then I can go back later and fix it.
You're a more disciplined writer than I, Stephen. I discovered in my first serious attempt to write a novel that if I skipped ahead to the bits I wanted to write, I had no impetus to go back and write the other bits. I'm much better at finishing if I write in a straight shot, using the scenes I can't wait to write as the carrot that drags me through the ones I don't much feel like writing. So for now, I'm stuck hammering this one out, though it'll doubtless look a whole lot better when I polish it in revision.
And how the hell did you know how Bob's supposed to die?!?
i was gonna say the same thing as SB. I leave myself notes in brackets everywhere in lieu of the scenes i don't feel like writing or don't know enough to write or whatever. This worked pretty well until the last book, when there were more brackets than scenes...and they were getting a little threatening, too, like [resolve the cincinnati thing by now for fuck's sake]...i was most dispirited to come to the end and discover it was only 56k long...that would be the fault of all those empty scenes. That sure dampened the thank-god-i-finished-it euphoria.
so *this* time I'm actually cleaning up the prose as i go. Guess what i found out - it's *hard* and it takes a *long time*. Could it be that I'm becoming a grownup too? Cool, Chris, we can go to the meetings together! :)
- a fellow *adult*/writer (different, I suspect, from "adult writer")
Sure, we can go to the meetings together, although I expect the "adult writer" meetings are a hell of a lot more entertaining than the "adult/writer" ones. And I love the idea of angry, chastising brackets. I can't help but laugh at the thought of being brow-beaten by one's own manuscript.
Much left-coast love on _holm today! Must be the Mainers are all out enjoying the lone beautiful day before we're once more plunged into darkness and despair...
Spring vacation for the boys here but we did enjoy the sun.
Action is the mass transit system of any novel. We walk along with these characters getting to know them. We reach the bus stop and we let them ramble on. Thankfully the bus comes along and our characters are swept up into it. Their destination is the next place we get to learn more about them. Why are they here? Why did they get on the bus? How was the bus ride? Was there anyone new on the bus? These questions are great launching points for the touchy feelies to follow.
I think you're right to want to get to the emotional climax but we can learn a lot about the final destination from the trip there. Don't discount the importance of action. I've never heard of a page turner (not that there can't be) where you have two characters sitting on a bench exchanging niceties.
I think you need to look at this last action scene a little differently as well. This action scene is actually part of the emotional climax. Yes for structure sake it is a separate scene but ultimately the consequences of this time between bus stops sets up the tension you'll need to carry out a strong emotional release in your characters.
My personal belief is get all your characters on the bus and blow the F'er sky high.
Off to drown worms with the boys today.
Enjoy the fishing, Lyman -- looks like you've got some perfect weather for it.
I couldn't agree more, that the action (if done well) is all about putting pressure on your characters and seeing what happens; it's what gets them where they're going, and it serves to define who they really are. And DH is, without a doubt, the biggest, craziest action I've ever written; the fact that I also (most of the time) think it's the best thing I've ever written should tell you all you need to know about my tastes with regard to action. I think what I'm experiencing now is a sort of action-fatigue, where I've written scene after scene of gleeful mayhem, and now I want to throw a serious emotional gut-punch into the mix. Believe me, if I thought of the action as just the spoonful of sugar to force the reader to swallow some BIG IMPORTANT MESSAGE, then this book just wouldn't be worth writing.
Actually, talking it out here has helped to shift my perspective quite a bit. You're right -- the two scenes are connected, and neither of them would be effective without the other. With luck, that alone should speed things along.
I'm with you, Chris - start at the start and keep your head down 'til it's done. I've never tried putting placeholders in for a scene, but I know if I did, it would probably never get done. Also, one of the delights of writing for me is when different threads magically intertwine, from things that were seeded in earlier parts of the work. I'd be scared of missing the opportunity to reference something in a later scene because I hadn't written the earlier scene yet. But that's just horses for courses - I'm not a methodical writer.
On action vs other stuff - to be honest, I've never really distinguished between an action scene and any other kind. They're either pushing the story forward or they're not. And if they're not? Well, you know...
There's a scene right in the middle of my novel that is mostly dialogue between two main characters, one holding the other at gunpoint. The dialogue itself churns through a chunk of story, and reveals a lot about them as characters, and is full of tension (because one is about to kill the other, and they both know it) and that tension mounts until it explodes with violence. I don't know which is better - the action, or the anticipation of it.
To cut a long story short - I like action, I like dialogue, I like character development - and they all go hand-in-hand, they're all equally important.
Yeah, I'm a junkie for those moments when threads begin to intertwine, and I think that's a big part of the reason I prefer to write straight through. Also, I think it forces me to take the same journey my characters do, which winds up reflected in their speech, their actions -- both changing slightly as the characters themselves change. I always worry that if I write scenes out of order, I'll lose some of the texture that really makes a broad character arc hit home.
Exciting times! Fortunately for me my action climax and emotional climax, I daresay, were one and the same.
The challenge for me was getting through the full chapter, which had lots of exciting and near-climax scenes that I wanted to savor as much as possible, but it's hard when you know something even bigger is right next door.
We're working in parallel, by the way. I just finished my climax this week! With my epilogue already written, I have only one chapter to go.
Congrats, Jim! It's huge, crossing that finish line; I remember being sort of overwhelmed when I finished the first draft of THE ANGELS' SHARE, because from that moment on, I could never again say I someday hoped to write a novel. Sappy, sure, but most writers are marshmallows underneath it all. (Maybe not Hemingway. Or Mailor. Or Hammett. Okay, maybe it's just me.)
Oh, and thanks for stopping by!
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