A dune with a view

My “office” view

Work schedules, plus a fast approaching freelance deadline, have temporarily left me in the creative lurch. I’m not sure why. I always thought late July and August were slow times at work. People were either going to leave for vacation, currently leaving for vacation, or long gone on vacation. Not so this summer. All of a sudden, the work load has exploded in intensity which means my creative output has slowed.

But I haven’t stopped. I may be turning out fewer words than planned but I’m also doing other things like research. Earlier this week I played hooky. Yeah, the deadlines got to me and I just had to get away. Luckily, I took my camera because I walked by some amazing old Victorian houses. They are perfect descriptor-helps when I start writing about That House Everyone Knows But No One Talks About.

I’ve also been reading other mystery/thriller novels per Stephen King’s advice in his book, On Writing.  He suggests reading everything – the good, the bad, the ugly. And boy, is it all out there. The good thing about reading crappy novels is the fun quotient in an otherwise stress-filled day. Another is the simple realization of, this person got published?

Then there are the days when I stumble over pure gold, like John Katzenbach’s The Wrong Man. If you’ve never read it and if you are a mystery fan, get a copy. If you are a writer, get your hands on a copy. You won’t regret it. I read a LOT of books but the plot line and more importantly, how this story is told is so intriguing and original, I couldn’t put it down. It gave me so many ideas of how to better structure my own writing.

This brings me back to the actual writing. Thanks to this weekend’s dune with a view, I rewrote my prologue. Sure, I’d promised myself to not slack off into rewriting until the whole novel was done (just write the thing, darn it!) the flash of insight was too good to pass up. The original prologue was overly dramatic and typical and dated.

The restructure is simpler, cleaner, and offers hints of a dark something shoved away, but not quite forgotten.

Fabulous.

Kickin’ it old school

At the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is look at a screen.

Unfortunately, that’s not very helpful where part-time noveling is concerned. I try to convince myself that it doesn’t matter as long as I write something. But it does. After structuring tightly scripted logical patterns (read technical documents) for eight hours, I just can’t face the screen anymore.  So I made a decision to go retro.

Really retro.

I started writing the story longhand. Once the writing jones passes, I take a break and then come back to transcribe my notes.

Seriously?

Yeah, you heard right. Trust me, it wasn’t a decision I made lightly.  I’ve had to practically re-learn the art of longhand because I type almost as fast as I think. Writing longhand is a challenge. Writing longhand is slow. Writing longhand makes my fingers cramp.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s good to slow down.

Or maybe I’m just trying to convince myself that I’m doing the right thing. At least I don’t have crappy penmanship like most people so I can actually read my notes.

I don’t know for sure about this experiment but so far, it seems to work. I easily cranked out 2,000 words in about an hour and half this past weekend–much faster than when I’m looking at a screen. And it was a pretty decent 2,000 words, too.

So maybe there’s something to this retro kick. After all, I remember how endless stories flowed out of my head when I was small and all I had to write with was a pencil nub and scrap paper. So maybe it doesn’t matter how I write as long as I write.

Let’s see how this retro weekend goes.

I needed a man

There’s a saying out there:  “Don’t change horses in mid-stream.”

Usually it’s very good advice but in this case, I’m ignoring it. Nope, the novel plot is still the same, the twists are still the same (although I added a new one this past weekend) and the original outline pretty much remains the same. What’s different is the main character. How did this happen?

Well, this past weekend, I indulged in the luxury of a nap.

Wonderful thing, naps. Can’t understand why I don’t take more of them. The only problem is that when I woke up, I knew I had to dump my current main character because she just wasn’t the right fit. Sure, she was making the plot good but her behavior was too typical, too expected, too not-quite-hitting-the-mark. The answer was simple.

I needed a man.

Yup, to really make the plot sing better, I needed to showcase a man as my main character.  Someone more down to earth, someone who doesn’t quite know the ins and outs of the stuff going on. Someone who would be forced out of his comfort zone into something completely new.

Unfortunately, it means a lot of story restructuring and brushing up on a long-rusty expertise. I had to think about that for a bit. Sure, I could leave the main female character in and end up writing a decent novel. But if I swapped in Stan, I could see the potential of going from decent to great. Yup, lots more work involved but a much more believable character.