Tim`s Blog Jan-Sep 2010 ( document)

Transcription

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Resolutions
January 4th, 2010
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Making New Year’s resolutions is a mug’s game that, ninety percent of the time, just leaves us
disappointed in ourselves as we cross off one bright, shiny commitment after another.
But here we are, not only with a fresh new year in front of us — not a footprint in sight — but a fresh
new decade. The old what should I do with it? question presents itself and won’t go away. We’ve been
given this time, and the strength and wit to use it well — maybe improve the way we approach
something, or maybe try something completely new. So what should we resolve?
I’ve made five. I could talk about each of them for paragraphs, but I won’t. Here they are.
1. To aim high and to try to exceed my expectations.
2. To go to gratitude rather than resentment when the world challenges me.
3. To listen more than I talk. (That one’s going to be hard.)
4. To increase my exposure to beautiful things.
5. To live more widely, not to allow my life to shrink to unchallenging routines.
What are yours?
This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 7:42 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
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11 Responses to “Resolutions”
1. Lisa Kenney Says:
January 4th, 2010 at 10:43 pm
I like yours. Can I have them? Oh, wait. Maybe I need to resolve not to be so lazy.
I’ll give it some more thought. Happy New Year!
2. Suzanna Says:
January 5th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Really wonderful resolutions Tim. Your list is sort of the maximum super strength
version of the five I came up with on New Years Eve.
1. Exercise every day. Hope springs eternal.
2. Make more time for friends.
3. Creative life — pursue, engage, grow it!
4. More kindness, more compassion toward myself
and others.
5. Last, but not least, notice when my ego is
is trying to get in my way and try to quiet it
down well before I act. (Your second resolution
says it a lot better.)
Would love to hear more! Happy New Year everyone.
3. Larissa Says:
Hm…that’s a nice sounding list there of goals. I have a few that I think are
attainable…(c:
1. Travel more and consistantly.
2. Allow myself time to really work through creative ideas through
experimentation and play. (i.e. don’t procrastinate on projects and then just do
“good enough”)
3. (I’m stealing yours because it’s mine too) Learn to listen more and talk less.
4. Start meditating consistantly. Regardless of how much work it seems like
sometimes.
5. Indulge my curiosity whenever possible.
4. Usman Says:
I’m borrowing all of the above suggestions. Even if 50% works, I have it made.
5. Jen Forbus Says:
Your list is wonderful, Tim, as are the others that have been added here. Mine will
echo some of the other sentiments.
I’m working on:
1. balancing. I need to make sure I have time for exercise and reading and other
fun – not just one of them.
2. carrying the spirit of Christmas with me every day, not just Dec. 25th
3. challenging my fears instead of hiding from them.
4. ORGANIZING! My home has turned into a collection of clutter and I’m going
to get it reduced and organized.
5. Working everyday to find at least one thing that was great, beautiful and/or
inspirational.
6. Cynthia Mueller Says:
1. I will learn to resist the urge to explain the exact solution to other people’s
problems. And more specifically, learn how to relax and let others enjoy their own
problems.
2. I will expand my bubble. New tastes, new smells, new sounds, new sights, new
books, new walks, new routes, new friends and plenty of art.
3. I will look up from the concrete while walking and wave to my neighbors (I see
them every day, after all. And maybe I’ll work up to “Hello.”)
4. I will start writing down the flashes of brilliance when they occur, instead of
just letting them dissipate.
5. I will drink a lot more water.
6. I will take deep breaths, really full breaths, and enjoy all that free air hanging
around.
7. I’ll stop biting my nails.
8. I will read books with notepaper and a pencil close at hand, so I don’t forget the
deep thoughts I think when I read.
9. I will tell my loved ones that I love them, and not just assume they know. And I
will look for little ways to show them how I feel.
10. I will finish the first draft of my book.
11. I will finish reading “Anna Karenina” (about 100 pp left) and read “War and
Peace.”
7. Judy Schneider Says:
The above resolutions are tempting — like the commenter Usman, I want to
borrow them all. I need to exercise, listen more, and balance. I also specifically
want to commit to finishing my novel. Stating such a resolution early and often
will help with my productivity and accountability, won’t it?
Thanks for an inspiring post!
8. Sylvia Says:
I’ve got a pretty specific list of goals (which I think break down by month) which
I may change my mind about but seem achievable at the moment.
Except for the losing weight bit, that’s been on the list the previous two years too
and I’ve gained instead of lost. :/
9. Timothy Hallinan Says:
Hi, everyone, and thanks — lots to think about here. What surprised me when I
looked at my list was a sort of delayed reaction — at first, I thought most of them
didn’t have much to do with writing, and then I realized that they all do, in one
way or another.
LISA — You’re welcome to take my resolutions, although the last word I’d use to
describe you is “lazy.” How about “generous” and “mentally adventurous”? Those
both work better for me.
SUZANNA — Yours are all on one of my lists (especially the one about
exercising). I made lots of lists, but these were the ones that stuck. If I can keep to
most of these most of the time, and you can do the same for yours, we’ll both be
in better shape in 2011.
RISS — Great resolutions. Meditating daily is about the best single thing I can
think of. For me, with a mind that’s never seen a piece of mental clutter it doesn’t
want to keep, meditation is the only way I know to get clarity and perspective.
USMAN — Adopt away. Haven’t heard from you in a long time. How are you?
Everything okay? (We all worry about you, but then I have friends in Thailand
who worry about me living in Los Angeles, where the LETHAL WEAPON
movies are set.)
JEN — I don’t know how you balance anything, given the amount of energy you
pour into your site and all those books, but I have faith you’ll manage. And
organizing is absolutely a spiritual exercise. I looked at my house on New Year’s
morning and saw maybe 350 objects, and that didn’t include books on shelves. By
7 that evening, I’d cleared out every single thing that wasn’t necessary or
beautiful, or both. I feel so much more clear I can hardly express it.
CYNTHIA — I personally find that water goes very well with fingernails, so I
don’t know why you want to stop biting yours if you’re going to drink more
water. And I know how hard it is to let other people enjoy their problems,
especially when the solution is so evident to us. And if you don’t finish the first
draft of your book, I’ll finish it myself. Oh, wait . . .
JUDY — Welcome to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, which was named long before
tea parties became 12-step meetings for birthers. The thing about finishing your
novel, if you don’t mind my saying so, is that it requires a daily commitment. I
believe, after writing maybe 15 novels and teaching more people than currently
buy my books in hard cover, that if you don’t work at least five days a week, at
least 3-4 hours each session, the odds against your finishing are much, much
higher than they are if you build a fence around your writing time: it’s essential
and not to be intruded upon. There’s a LOT about this in the FINISH YOUR
NOVEL part of this site. Or e-mail me via the “Contact Tim” buttons that are here
and there.
SYLVIA — I gained 60 pounds in the two years since I quit smoking, and I’ve
now dropped 29 of them. If I can do it, anyone can. Just remember, it’s all about
the balance between the number of calories you take in and the number you burn.
I’ll support you from here, where I’m presently hungry.
10.Cynthia Mueller Says:
Fingernails and water? Is this some kind of celebrity diet?
BTW: 9 1/2 days into this year and my fingernails remain unbitten. I’ve drunk a
few gallons of water, take quite a few deep breaths and finished reading “Anna
Karenina.”
I’ve waved to many strangers in my tract and haven’t been shot. Yet.
I’ve looked up “piebald” and “subaltern” in the dictionary while I was reading this
afternoon. And I’ve written two paragraphs in my book. Two. 2. But they’re not
bad.
And I ate something really, really icky at dinner tonight. Some kind of mushy goo
that smelled like garlic, but wasn’t. And I didn’t die. Yet. So much for broadening
my culinary horizons.
11.Usman Says:
Tim, I appreciate your concern for me. Yes , I am living dangerously these days.
Never know where a bomb will go off…literally like Lethal Weapons. I loved
those movies, but not living them out.
Resolutions
January 4th, 2010
Making New Year’s resolutions is a mug’s game that, ninety percent of the time, just leaves us
disappointed in ourselves as we cross off one bright, shiny commitment after another.
But here we are, not only with a fresh new year in front of us — not a footprint in sight — but a fresh
new decade. The old what should I do with it? question presents itself and won’t go away. We’ve been
given this time, and the strength and wit to use it well — maybe improve the way we approach
something, or maybe try something completely new. So what should we resolve?
I’ve made five. I could talk about each of them for paragraphs, but I won’t. Here they are.
1. To aim high and to try to exceed my expectations.
2. To go to gratitude rather than resentment when the world challenges me.
3. To listen more than I talk. (That one’s going to be hard.)
4. To increase my exposure to beautiful things.
5. To live more widely, not to allow my life to shrink to unchallenging routines.
What are yours?
This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 7:42 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
11 Responses to “Resolutions”
I like yours. Can I have them? Oh, wait. Maybe I need to resolve not to be so lazy.
I’ll give it some more thought. Happy New Year!
2. Suzanna Says:
Really wonderful resolutions Tim. Your list is sort of the maximum super strength
version of the five I came up with on New Years Eve.
1. Exercise every day. Hope springs eternal.
2. Make more time for friends.
3. Creative life — pursue, engage, grow it!
4. More kindness, more compassion toward myself
and others.
5. Last, but not least, notice when my ego is
is trying to get in my way and try to quiet it
down well before I act. (Your second resolution
says it a lot better.)
Would love to hear more! Happy New Year everyone.
3. Larissa Says:
Hm…that’s a nice sounding list there of goals. I have a few that I think are
attainable…(c:
1. Travel more and consistantly.
2. Allow myself time to really work through creative ideas through
experimentation and play. (i.e. don’t procrastinate on projects and then just do
“good enough”)
3. (I’m stealing yours because it’s mine too) Learn to listen more and talk less.
4. Start meditating consistantly. Regardless of how much work it seems like
sometimes.
5. Indulge my curiosity whenever possible.
4. Usman Says:
I’m borrowing all of the above suggestions. Even if 50% works, I have it made.
5. Jen Forbus Says:
Your list is wonderful, Tim, as are the others that have been added here. Mine will
echo some of the other sentiments.
I’m working on:
1. balancing. I need to make sure I have time for exercise and reading and other
fun – not just one of them.
2. carrying the spirit of Christmas with me every day, not just Dec. 25th
3. challenging my fears instead of hiding from them.
4. ORGANIZING! My home has turned into a collection of clutter and I’m going
to get it reduced and organized.
5. Working everyday to find at least one thing that was great, beautiful and/or
inspirational.
1. I will learn to resist the urge to explain the exact solution to other people’s
problems. And more specifically, learn how to relax and let others enjoy their own
problems.
2. I will expand my bubble. New tastes, new smells, new sounds, new sights, new
books, new walks, new routes, new friends and plenty of art.
3. I will look up from the concrete while walking and wave to my neighbors (I see
them every day, after all. And maybe I’ll work up to “Hello.”)
4. I will start writing down the flashes of brilliance when they occur, instead of
just letting them dissipate.
5. I will drink a lot more water.
6. I will take deep breaths, really full breaths, and enjoy all that free air hanging
around.
7. I’ll stop biting my nails.
8. I will read books with notepaper and a pencil close at hand, so I don’t forget the
deep thoughts I think when I read.
9. I will tell my loved ones that I love them, and not just assume they know. And I
will look for little ways to show them how I feel.
10. I will finish the first draft of my book.
11. I will finish reading “Anna Karenina” (about 100 pp left) and read “War and
Peace.”
7. Judy Schneider Says:
The above resolutions are tempting — like the commenter Usman, I want to
borrow them all. I need to exercise, listen more, and balance. I also specifically
want to commit to finishing my novel. Stating such a resolution early and often
will help with my productivity and accountability, won’t it?
Thanks for an inspiring post!
8. Sylvia Says:
I’ve got a pretty specific list of goals (which I think break down by month) which
I may change my mind about but seem achievable at the moment.
Except for the losing weight bit, that’s been on the list the previous two years too
and I’ve gained instead of lost. :/
Hi, everyone, and thanks — lots to think about here. What surprised me when I
looked at my list was a sort of delayed reaction — at first, I thought most of them
didn’t have much to do with writing, and then I realized that they all do, in one
way or another.
LISA — You’re welcome to take my resolutions, although the last word I’d use to
describe you is “lazy.” How about “generous” and “mentally adventurous”? Those
both work better for me.
SUZANNA — Yours are all on one of my lists (especially the one about
exercising). I made lots of lists, but these were the ones that stuck. If I can keep to
most of these most of the time, and you can do the same for yours, we’ll both be
in better shape in 2011.
RISS — Great resolutions. Meditating daily is about the best single thing I can
think of. For me, with a mind that’s never seen a piece of mental clutter it doesn’t
want to keep, meditation is the only way I know to get clarity and perspective.
USMAN — Adopt away. Haven’t heard from you in a long time. How are you?
Everything okay? (We all worry about you, but then I have friends in Thailand
who worry about me living in Los Angeles, where the LETHAL WEAPON
movies are set.)
JEN — I don’t know how you balance anything, given the amount of energy you
pour into your site and all those books, but I have faith you’ll manage. And
organizing is absolutely a spiritual exercise. I looked at my house on New Year’s
morning and saw maybe 350 objects, and that didn’t include books on shelves. By
7 that evening, I’d cleared out every single thing that wasn’t necessary or
beautiful, or both. I feel so much more clear I can hardly express it.
CYNTHIA — I personally find that water goes very well with fingernails, so I
don’t know why you want to stop biting yours if you’re going to drink more
water. And I know how hard it is to let other people enjoy their problems,
especially when the solution is so evident to us. And if you don’t finish the first
draft of your book, I’ll finish it myself. Oh, wait . . .
JUDY — Welcome to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, which was named long before
tea parties became 12-step meetings for birthers. The thing about finishing your
novel, if you don’t mind my saying so, is that it requires a daily commitment. I
believe, after writing maybe 15 novels and teaching more people than currently
buy my books in hard cover, that if you don’t work at least five days a week, at
least 3-4 hours each session, the odds against your finishing are much, much
higher than they are if you build a fence around your writing time: it’s essential
and not to be intruded upon. There’s a LOT about this in the FINISH YOUR
NOVEL part of this site. Or e-mail me via the “Contact Tim” buttons that are here
and there.
SYLVIA — I gained 60 pounds in the two years since I quit smoking, and I’ve
now dropped 29 of them. If I can do it, anyone can. Just remember, it’s all about
the balance between the number of calories you take in and the number you burn.
I’ll support you from here, where I’m presently hungry.
Fingernails and water? Is this some kind of celebrity diet?
BTW: 9 1/2 days into this year and my fingernails remain unbitten. I’ve drunk a
few gallons of water, take quite a few deep breaths and finished reading “Anna
Karenina.”
I’ve waved to many strangers in my tract and haven’t been shot. Yet.
I’ve looked up “piebald” and “subaltern” in the dictionary while I was reading this
afternoon. And I’ve written two paragraphs in my book. Two. 2. But they’re not
bad.
And I ate something really, really icky at dinner tonight. Some kind of mushy goo
that smelled like garlic, but wasn’t. And I didn’t die. Yet. So much for broadening
my culinary horizons.
11.Usman Says:
Tim, I appreciate your concern for me. Yes , I am living dangerously these days.
Never know where a bomb will go off…literally like Lethal Weapons. I loved
those movies, but not living them out.
The Jung and the Reckless
January 10th, 2010
Okay, it’s a stupid headline. But I thought you’d enjoy the following excerpt about creativity from a
Jungian analyst.
Gilda Frantz has been involved in Jung’s work since the 50’s and has been an analyst for 33 years.
She has worked with a broad spectrum of ”creative individuals such as photographers, writers,
weavers, actors, directors, landscape architects, architects, potters, sculptors, composers, musicians,
interior designers, as well as those individuals whose very lives were an expression of creativity.” She
practices in Santa Monica, California with a little help from her terrier, Spike.
Franz wrote the piece from which the following paragraphs are excerpted for Psychological
Perspectives, A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought, vol 52, issue 1. Chaos and Creativity, published
by Taylor and Francis.
What professional artists experience before they put paint to canvas or words on paper is what Nancy
Mozur refers to as the void, in her piece on the artist. What the non-artist who tries to paint or sculpt
of write a story meets is unyielding criticism from within. It’s as though all the critical comments heard
over a lifetime suddenly form a loud and authoritative chorus that stops any attempt at creative work.
The professional artist expects to encounter the void, the abyss, the dark nothingness and has learned
to be patient and wait for it to pass, or possibly to apply techniques learned in art school to get around
that wall. But the so-called ordinary human being is staggered by the chaos and is stopped dead from
proceeding.
Chaos is a procreative condition and is expected to be part of the process of art-making. You know
what I’m talking about, because I am sure a majority of readers have had this experience. Keep trying,
respect the chaos, and wait in front of that blank paper until it turns into creativity.
This is the first time I’ve heard the “chaos” referred to. It’s obviously part of the creative process, since
that process is essentially bringing something out of nothing and then organizing it. That nothingness,
the chaos, is like the Biblical Void, over which darkness hovers and within which nothing can be
differentiated from anything else. The work of a writer or any other kind of artist (I think) is to fish
that void until there’s a faint (or, sometimes, strenuous) tug on the string, and then to pull that string up,
very carefully indeed, so that it doesn’t break. And all the time, whether you’ve written twenty books
or none at all, there’s that “authoritative chorus” telling you that you haven’t got the skill — that this is
the one that will get away.
From my perspective, as someone who does this pretty much every day, the difference between a
professional artist and an amateur is that the professional keeps working no matter how authoritative
the chorus grows, and no matter how much it seems like his or her personal pond has been fished out.
Every time someone gets a character from point A to point B or gets some pigment on a canvas, or
comes up with a creative solution to a life problem, as far as I’m concerned, an act of courage has taken
place. I believe that all creative acts are acts of courage. Every time we do it, we make the leap and
grow our wings on the way down. as Yoji Yamada puts it.
So it’s reckless. Could there be a better way to live?
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 4:21 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
14 Responses to “The Jung and the Reckless”
I love this explanation of that feeling of the void. I remember the unbearable pain
of art class in junior high school, standing in front of a lump of clay or a blank
sheet of paper. The whole class working away merrily in the background…and
me, frozen, trapped and empty.
I never experienced the void while facing a blank page with the intent to write. I
feel a swirl, a wild tug in several directions and as soon as I submit….stuff
happens. And I can’t stop until it’s done. And sometimes it’s not half bad!
Thanks, Tim.
CAPTCHA: frantzen rity
2. Usman Says:
That describes me for sure, where the chorus of chaos has brought me to a halt.
POV, character, tone? What do I do with all these different aspects of my story?
What have I done…Written a first draft, and hit the wall.
All advice welcome, as well as criticism; since self flagellation is at an advanced
stage.
3. Suzanna Says:
Usman,
Do you have a trusted friend who could read your first draft and help you figure
out some of the questions you have about your story?
Please don’t beat yourself up. You’ve written a first draft. That’s a big
accomplishment!
4. Dana King Says:
This is why I prefer edits to first drafts. I’ve done it before, so I understand about
the chaos, but it’s still a little scary, and a tedious process. Molding something that
already has some form is a lot less intimidating.
5. Usman Says:
Suzanna, thanks for your advice. At this point, I am radically changing the
storyline. I realized there were some inherent flaws; the biggest one being that the
ending was too melodramatic, without the necessary ingredients for melodrama.
To answer your question, I am unfortunate that I do not have a readily available
beta reader. Living in Pakistan makes that a bit of a problem.
I have to indulge in self-criticism myself. And that is a terrible form of self doubt
that eats at you.
Thanks for the encouragement.
6. Stephen Cohn Says:
Interesting in this regard: “Chaos Theory” in physics finds repeating patterns and
designs (like fractals) in natural phenomena of all kinds ranging from micro to
macro, that were previously assumed to be completely random. So what appears
to be or feels chaotic is really just a matter perception at the moment and isn’t the
underlying truth.
If we, like Usman was saying, know that we retain the freedom to keep changing
what we’ve written until we don’t feel the need to change it any further, then some
of the fear of the chaos becomes unnecessary – as we know we will resolve it one
step at a time.
These are great responses, and I thank Gilda Frantz for kicking it all off with her
essay, from which I lifted only two paragraphs.
Cynthia — I have no idea where a painter or sculptor (or composer — what about
it Stephen?) gets his/her ideas. Stories always begin for me with a person, even
just the glimpse of a person — in the cast of what may be the new Poke book, a
six-feet-tall male angel walking through a Bangkok slum and going into a bar.
Don’t know where it came from, but for now I’m following it (him) to see what
happens. But other forms of art — I don’t know what form that first sliver takes as
it emerges from the void. (Anyone want to answer that?) One thing I am sure of is
that we all hover over chaos (or at least obscurity) when we begin to work, and
that the keys to the work are retrieving something and finding the form for it.
Usman, it’s terrible you don’t have someone to sit beside you whenever you need
to try something out — but I think that’s a late stage in the process, because first
you need to have something to try out. I understand being stopped by the chorus.
It happens to me all the time. The thing (I think)) is not to respond to that
emotionally, but rather to be as analytical as your nature will let you be: back up,
outline what you’ve done; ask yourself where it went off the track; ask “what if”
this or that had happened in the story, and follow it. ABOVE ALL, go back to the
germ — the thing that interested you so much that you thought a story could be
woven around it, and ask yourself how (or whether) each part of the story you’ve
written presents or sharpens or furthers that germ. If a scene or a chapter doesn’t,
then cut it and replace it with something that does. And be ruthless without
freaking out — you created the first pass, and it’s you who’s improving it. There’s
no failure involved until you give up. And even then, you can learn from the
experience and it can help you stay on point next time. And I’ve read your work,
and you have a lot of talent, which you should always remember.
Stephen, you’re right, as always. The world isn’t actually random, although it
appears to be — there are underlying patterns of order, of cause and effect. And
certainly, no idea our minds pull from the void is without order, since I think the
primary function of our minds is to find or impose order on the world in which we
live. Whatever we pull up is going to have a center, the little shiny bit that
attracted us in the first place, and the challenge (it seems to me) is designing and
executing the setting for the shiny bit.
And I think we all get lost every time we do it. I love Dana’s approach to editing
that first pass — it’s the easier part, and (of course) it’s inevitable that what we
produce is going to require editing, or even a complete rewrite. I personally enjoy
writing the first draft much more than any of the processes that follow, although
it’s always fun to see what my editor thinks and to try to impose her changes on
my work. It’s kind of like being handed a flashlight that picks out the ratty bits.
And we all produce ratty bits.
8. Stephen Cohn Says:
Tim,
Re: Where a composer gets ideas:
Since music is such an abstract and flexible medium, the initial spark can vary
almost without limitation. It can be a fragment of melody that suddenly appears in
the inner ear – or a rhythm pattern, a novel scale pattern, a thought about how a
series of chords will connect or a totally intellectual concept about the use of
musical materials that cries out to be tired. Anything that moves the composer to
sit down and start the process will do the trick. Of course, external factors like
having an assignment, and internally being well tuned physically, spiritually,
emotionally are important in readying the composer to face the music.
9. Usman Says:
Tim, thanks for the great advice. I have been analyzing my work, and realize there
are places where I’ve pushed too hard: that is made my characters do something
they couldn’t/shouldn’t have.
Also I’ve realized, the story needs a bigger concept. The initial germ of the story
is still there, but there needs to be more ooomph…or a higher concept. The search
for that high concept has lead me into territories that I fear to tread. Perhaps I need
more self belief. Your kind words about my talent certainly help.
Thanks a bunch.
PS: the day I start rewriting my blog, my link here shall be activated.
10.Usman Says:
Stephen, I have recently started to hear music with an ear for the notes. Before I
just listened.
Like you say music is so flexible, and I agree; it is almost liquid in that you can
take it where you want to (?) How do you decide the final shape, the composition;
where shall the guitar speak out, loud or quiet? Is it all intuition, or is it something
more formulaic?
I am trying to learn how music/lyrics may be reflected in writing prose.
11.Stephen Cohn Says:
Usman, you can take your musical ideas where you want to but, like Tim says
about his characters, they have a will of their own -(with music it’s harmonic and
melodic gravity)- one can bend this will but ignoring it often produces
uncommunicative results. At first in my process, it’s like taking dictation – I hear
ideas and I write them down. Ultimately, intuition is the referee that looks at all
the material that has been freely accumulated and put into a ball park structure and
then decides what’s going to move the piece forward and what’s indulgence – or
what’s missing or not convincing. As you implied, reserving the freedom to keep
throwing stuff out is vital to the process, often brings clarity where there was
murkiness and helps to keep priorities in order.
For me, the “final shape” and all the multitude of decisions within, are dictated by
the music. I keep shaping it until I can go through it without being stopped by
either something that isn’t working or by seeing (hearing) a way to squeeze more
music out of a passage or make a transition more convincing. It’s never a
formulaic decision.
There are many parallels between writing words and music. In both, the sense of
flow and rhythm is vital and I think, having learned from either, it can be
transfered to the other. Also, the creative processes, as we’ve been discussing,
apply to both and seeing the similarities, I think, is freeing.
12.Usman Says:
Thanks Stephen for a great reply. I loved your point that ignoring the ,internal
demands’ of the process is counter productive.
I guess the learning curve tells us what to keep and ignore. Your answer is useful
for me, since one of the problems I am having is trying to discover the voice I
need to use for this WIP.
13.Larissa Says:
Wow. I am constantly overwhelmed and amazed by the amount of wisdom that
gets dropped on this blog like spare change out of a leaky pocket. It’s great! And it
keeps happening!
Tim: thank you for posting those excerpts. It’s an interesting perspective on things
and it’s really true. That moment of freefall when you think that you’re either
crazy for trying or you’re so consumed by a curiosity or a concept like Stephen
was talking about that you step off and sort of forget that you’re going to be
falling for a while before anything makes sense…
Self-expression is something that a lot of people put a high value on-almost as if
it’s a commodity or a talent instead of something that is inherent to everyone. I
know I revere singers-or almost anyone who can bring themselves to sing in
public or in front of their friends even-to me it shows both a level of confidence
and of self-expression that I am striving towards achieving. I’ve just recently been
able to take people that I feel are truly expressive and creative off of their pedestal
and realize that I can get there too…I just have to apply the butt to the seat and the
brush to the canvas and all that other good stuff.
It truly is chaos in a lot of ways. But it’s beautiful. (c:
14.Timothy Hallinan Says:
Vot a bunch. Great stuff, great dialogue, and Stephen is, as always, clearer than
most of us on his creative process. And it shows in his work.
Usman, you have the chops, the talent, and the energy. What you need to do is
stop letting the inner critics get to you. Haruki Murakami, one of my two favorite
living novelists, says about running a marathon: “Pain is inevitable; suffering is
optional.” And it applies to writing. The inner critics can make you sting, but you
don’t have to let them make you suffer. The important thing is to ignore then
while you’re getting it all down, and when you do finally pay attention to them,
just be dispassionate — see what you can use, and toss the rest. We all do it every
day, even in the way we arrange our rooms or choose our clothes, and we don’t let
it make us suffer.
Heyyyy, Riss! I’m lucky to know a lot of creative people, and I’m happy to sit
back and stir the conversation from time to time. “Freefall,” as you call it is for
me simultaneously the most terrifying and the most liberating part of the process.
You let it go without knowing where you’ll land. I think it helps to consider the
possibility that the entire work already exists, complete and perfect, somewhere in
your mind, and that you’re actually uncovering it as much as you are creating it.
As my friend, Robb Royer, said on the CREATIVE LIVING thread, he thinks of
himself as more an archaeologist than an architect; it’s there, and his job is to
uncover it.
All of this is a GREAT lead-in to what’s coming later this week — the great
PLOTTING VS. PANTSING thread, in which a bunch of really good novelists tell
us whether they plan in advance or just sit down and make it up, why their
particular choice works for them, and where they think their stories come
from.
Coming right up,
COMING SOON: PLOTTING VS PANTSING
January 17th, 2010
Okay, how do you do it? How do you actually make up a story?
Novelists generally fall into one of two categories, plotters and pantsers. Plotters work through their
stories, often in detailed outline form, before they actually start to write the narrative. Pantsers do it
by the seat of their pants; they begin with a basic idea, a character, an image, and follow it until they
have a story.
There’s no right way and no wrong way. It’s really a matter of temperament. Both plotters and
pantsers can produce wonderful books. When the book is good, I think it’s impossible to tell which
approach the author took to making the story.
On the other hand, it’s often possible to tell whether a bad book was written by a plotter or a pantser.
Plotters tend to turn out bad books in which the plot becomes a box for the characters, a rigid floor
plan in which structure takes precedence over psychology and/or emotion. A bad book by a pantser is
likely to be meandering and formless, a kind of story spaghetti in which the characters interact and
tangle to little effect, and the whole mess swims in a sauce of undifferentiated emotion.
I’m a pantser, a more or less pure pantser. I almost always begin with a moment, an image, a voice in
my ear, or a character in a situation, and then I watch the story develop as I tell it. Some of my favorite
writers, and some of the writers I like best personally, approach it from the opposite end of the
spectrum: they not only have an outline of the story; they even have outlines of the scenes. I can’t
imagine how they write that way. They can’t imagine how I write my way. And yet we like each
other’s writing, most of the time, anyway.
Beginning this week, every Wednesday, a first-rate novelist will talk about how he or she makes story
and why that method is best for him or her. They’ll talk about how they personalize their approach,
and where they think story comes from. I have the advantage of you in that I’ve read many of the
pieces that will appear here, and they’re all fascinating.
First up will be Stephen Jay Schwartz, author of BOULEVARD, possibly the darkest Hollywood noir
of 2009, and a novel with a pace so fast that it’s hard to hold onto the book. Schwartz knows a lot
about the darker reaches of Los Angeles and the darker regions of the human heart, and he shines light
on both in his highly praised debut novel. So how did he write it — did he diagram it or wing it?
Almost all of us who choose to write long-form fiction are interested in how others approach their
plotting, and I’m sure that aspiring writers will be interested, too. Make it a point to be here beginning
Wednesday January 20 as these courageous writers air their laundry.
And they’re all good company, too.
your own site.
13 Responses to “COMING SOON: PLOTTING VS PANTSING”
I’m a stuck “plontser”. I try to plot, then my pants rebel. I can’t wait til
Wednesday!
2. Rachel Brady Says:
I like Cynthia’s word and definition. Perfect.
3. Phil Hanson Says:
Count me in, Tim; I never pass up an opportunity to learn.
What Cynthia said makes sense. I often struggle for days to accumulate enough
coherent sentences to make a decent blog post, but if I had to keep herding my
piece back into the box I’d built to contain it, I’d never get anything written.
4. Larry W Chavis Says:
I’ll be here. Plotting/pantsing is my greatest stumbling-stone. Looking forward to
it.
5. David Jenkins Says:
I’ve done it both ways, and I think it really depends on what you’re writing,
whether it be a novel, screenplay, magazine article, etc. I think it’s a lot more fun
writing by the seat of my pants, but I often have to go back and force structure
upon it, and that’s not much fun at all.
Hi, everybody — The pieces keep coming in, and I think they’ll all have
something of value for each of us.
Cynthia, the image of your pants rebelling is one I’ll carry with me for a while.
Stephen’s opener is really good. I think they’re all really good. And everyone will
come back to answer questions.
Should be fun.
7. Usman Says:
Plot vs Pants. Sounds like WWE. I’m all excited for this.
Cynthia you have the bull by the pants.
8. Earl Staggs Says:
I’ve tried outlining but could not stick to it for more than five minutes. That
makes me a pantser for sure. Maybe I should try outlining again, maybe this series
will teach me how to do it right and I’ll be a bettrer writer, maybe not. Anyway,
I’ll be here every Wednesday to find out. Thanks for doing this, Tim.
9. Sylvia Says:
Oh hurray – I loved your last series of guest posters.
I’m a pantser although right at this minute? I’m not very happy about it. Tamera
has gone to confront her sister and she will finally find out the truth!
…if only I knew what it was.
10.jenny milchman Says:
History will show (how exalted I am making myself sound!) whether this method
is a good one as my “first” novel is on submission right now…but I am a total
pantser who relies on trusty readers to show me everything I missed by not
plotting in advance. Oh, the woe I feel when that fantastic twist I came up with
while flying by the seat of my pants turns out to have holes as wide as the Grand
Canyon in it! But it’s awfully fun and exciting during the delusional first draft
period, and I have to hope some of that excitement will translate to the story, even
if I do wind up doing an awful lot of revising…
11.Bill Jersey Says:
not just for writers we documentarians face the same choices
Usman — The first piece is up, and the writer, Stephen Jay Schwartz, is a
dedicated plotter. Read it and see what you think.
Earl — I’m with you. The hardest part of writing a book for me is the book
proposal because it’s essentially an outline, and without giving my characters
room to move, I don’t know where they’re going to take me.
Sylvia — You’ll learn the truth when Tamara does. Nobody in my books has any
idea how things will turn out — why should they in yours?
Jenny — Good luck with the book — hope it knocks them sideways. I think that
pantsing may simply be the natural choice for more improvisational people while
outlining is the best approach for the more methodical among us. Both approaches
turn out good books. The third post in this thread, I think, will be from Brett
Battles, a terrific thriller writer who’s actually in the middle of going from one
approach to the other. You’ll have to wait for it, though. (More about the joys of
pantsing next week, when Bill Crider takes a swing,
Bill — I’ve wondered about that since you, unlike the novelists who are
responding here, are stuck with real events, which inescapably have a chronology.
(For those who don’t know, Bill is an Emmy- and Peabody-winning, Oscarnominated documentarian whose work is relentlessly intelligent and always
absorbing.) Bill, would you like to read the first couple of pieces and do a piece
from the documentary filmmaker’s perspective?
January 21st, 2010 at 10:33 am
David — Your post slipped in and got stacked above my answers to the earlier
ones — I wasn’t skipping you. I know what you mean; if I’m writing, say, a book
proposal or a pitch letter of some kind, I have an outline in mind at all times, even
if I don’t write it down. For me, fiction comes from a different place. I know
exactly this much about fictional structure: 1. A work of fiction needs a beginning,
middle and end. 2. Characters, settings, and situations are introduced in the
beginning, elaborated upon in the middle, and resolved in the end. 3. Generally,
it’s a good idea if the stakes are raised as the story nears its climax and resolution.
4. When in doubt, as Raymond Chandler says, Have a man come through the door
with a gun in his hand.
Operating within that mental outline, I just follow the characters. One of the nice
things about the novel is that it gives you space to do just that.
Our first blogger, Stephen Jay Schwartz, argues that a detailed outline helps him
not only structure the book but also develop the characters. Check out his post.
Plotting vs. Pantsing 1: Stephen Jay Schwartz
January 19th, 2010
Los Angeles Times Bestselling Author Stephen Jay Schwartzpent a number of years as the Director
of Development for film director Wolfgang Petersen where he worked with writers, producers and
studio executives to develop screenplays for production. Among the film projects he helped
developed are Air Force One, Outbreak and Bicentennial Man. Stephen’s writing credits include
Inside the Space Station, narrated by Liam Neeson, for The Discovery Channel.
Boulevard, a very dark crime thriller set in present-day Los Angeles, is Stephen’s first novel. His
second novel, a sequel to Boulevard, is due out in Fall 2010.
I’ll Take a Road Map, Thank You Very Much
I spent years writing feature screenplays before leaping into BOULEVARD, my first novel.
Screenplays are nothing if not plot. Structure is king and there’s simply no room for fat.
Screenwriters are used to writing very detailed outlines and treatments before starting the script. A
treatment is a short story version of the film, basically a one-paragraph description of every scene
without dialogue. The treatments I write for screenplays usually run between fifteen and twenty-five
pages, single-spaced.
I wanted a different experience when it came to writing my first novel. I wanted to jump right in—no
outline, no treatment—and wallow in the magic. And I did, and it was incredibly freeing. Characters
and situations seemed to download into my mind from a universal, collective unconscious, and the plot
points and character arcs evolved organically. It was wonderful. Until I wrote myself into a corner.
Until I got stuck.
I had too much information swimming in my head. I couldn’t effectively foreshadow and pay-off my
plot points because I had no perspective on the story as a whole. I was lost in the tangents. My
characters were coming to life, but they were wandering, tripping over themselves. I needed an outline.
As I wrote the outline I felt compelled to include more detail. And so the outline became a treatment.
And I realized I preferred it that way.
Some authors find this process boring.
I feel exactly the opposite. The detailed outline actually frees me to fully explore the scene. The
treatment provides guideposts that anchor my scene, allowing me to journey further into character
motivation while remaining confident that I won’t take the story on a hundred-page tangent. I let the
characters be themselves and say what they need to say and often, very often, I’m surprised by what
comes out. Sometimes what comes out actually changes the direction of the scene, which results in a
change in the direction of the story from that point forward. (Or backward, if the case may be). If it
feels good, I adjust my outline or treatment to accommodate the new direction my characters want to
take.
I just finished my second novel and there was a point in the writing where I became completely and
utterly lost. I was working with a very loose outline, seeing what would happen if I let the character
dilemmas carry the plot. They ended up carrying the plot into a big pile of shit, is what they did. I
ended up throwing out 90 hard-fought pages. It was terribly frustrating. I went back to the 3 X 5 card
thing, posting them onto a large, pushpin board. When I had all the scenes on cards and all the cards in
some semblance of order, I put it all into an outline, and from there I wrote a very detailed treatment.
Only then did I feel the story would work.
This process gave me a birds-eye view of the entire canvas—I saw beginning/middle/end in a glance,
with every subtle brushstroke in-between. And it worked. I had the freedom to explore within the
scene, and I discovered that much of the exposition I had “front-loaded” into the early scenes could
actually be drawn out over the course of seven or eight scenes, and a lot of it could be eliminated
entirely. I suddenly had perspective.
It also gave me the freedom within each scene to explore quirky character traits and minor character
sub-plots, knowing they would work in conjunction with the more important expositional beats I’d
already plotted.
Once I saw that the whole story worked on paper, I experienced a tremendous sense of relief. I was on
deadline for my second novel and I didn’t have time to write and rewrite the book, over and over again,
the way I did with my first novel. I spent 3 ½ years writing BOULEVARD, and I was contracted to
write the sequel in about a year. I spent six months of that time getting lost in the magic of research,
and another two months writing myself into corners, before deciding to fully jump on the outline
bandwagon.
At the same time I believe the process benefits from different approaches, depending on how much
time I have and what the particular story requires. I allow myself the freedom to do some “seat-of-thepants” writing early on, as an exercise to help me discover the story’s central motifs. To bring character
back-story to life. To determine whether this is a story that absolutely needs to be told.
But once the scenes start piling up, I want to get them into an outline as soon as possible.
It all comes down to rewriting, anyway. I’m either rewriting the outline and treatment or I’m rewriting
the entire novel. And I’d much rather kill my outlined scenes than suffer the pain of tossing fullyrealized chapters into the trash. That’s an agony I try to avoid.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 7:26 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
28 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 1: Stephen Jay Schwartz”
1. Sylvia Says:
This is fascinating stuff. I’ve realised that for the idea I’ve got bubbling in the
back of my mind, I’ve started what you describe as a treatment. It makes sense
that throwing the outline of a scene away must be easier than throwing out 1,500
words that you now realise don’t fit.
I think I’m going to buy some index cards this weekend.
2. Usman Says:
I’m a born pantser, I know it it in my heart. Probably, that is why I’ll never be rich
and famous (sigh).
I agree that outlining the plot has it’s benefits, in terms of time, energy, and
frustration saved, versus the ‘OTHERS’.
I’ve always wondered though on how outlining effects characterization? (And I’ll
ask this question of every unlucky writer who posts here; this question is driving
me nuts.
3. Stephen Jay Schwartz Says:
Sylvia – I do love the discovery process of writing by the seat of my pants, there’s
really nothing more freeing than that. Someday maybe I’ll really try to write a
novel that way. But I think I’m a born plotter and I’ll always want to sneak back
to my outline. It just gives me that sense of security. Let me know how the index
cards work out for you.
Usman – I’m questioning your question. What is your concern about how
outlining effects characterization? My experience is that it helps…I can plan the
character arcs of all the players and know where I want them to be from beginning
to middle to end. I like all of my characters to change, even though the story is
told through my protagonist’s point of view. Outlining helps me juggle those
changing arcs.
Thanks for your comments, guys!!!
Stephen — As a pantser — not, I think, because of any judgment on my part, but
more because I don’t know how to outline — I have a variant on Usman’s
question. You know where your characters are going to wind up before you
actually begin to write them. I have no idea where they’re going to end up before I
begin to write them. For me, story is where they end up, and writing story is
following how they get there. How do you know them well enough at the outline
stage to know where they’ll wind up, since that’s essentially the result of a bunch
of smaller decisions made on the basis of who they are?
Does that make sense? And if it does, can you help me clarify it?
5. suzanna Says:
Thanks for sharing the secrets to your creative process. I think it’s interesting to
get a sense of how your screenwriting experience lends itself to writing books.
Having a clear idea of your story content and characters by writing a treatment
and using the cards to get the structure in place gives you a good framework but
you also leave yourself plenty of room to alter things as you go along. Sounds like
you’ve got the best of the pantser and plotter styles working for you. Looking
forward to reading your books.
Good variation on the question, Tim. Gets me thinking. I feel like there’s plenty of
room between the lines to discover new character traits and motivation while I’m
writing. And, if the characters are pulling me in a direction that goes against my
outline I will go with it and see where it takes me. If it takes me in the right
direction I’ll change my outline and trust the characters. It all works in concert,
eventually. But I guess I’ve made the decision early on that I’m going to be the
one who tells my characters what the overall plot of the book will be. But that plot
is ALWAYS based on human motivation — what would a character DO in this
situation? The plot follows from that question. So, I determine the situation, and
my characters tell me what they would do, and it’s this long give-and-take
process. I agree with Suzanna in that there really is a combination of panster and
plotter lurking in my approach. However, I really don’t trust myself to just go off
the top of my head…I’m not a good chess player, and I can’t keep all those moves
in my head all the time. The outline helps me create depth. Without it, my stories
would be awfully linear.
7. Usman Says:
January 21st, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Stephen,
To clarify myself: I’ve found that outlining is the best way to achieve the plot, the
way the story unfolds.
My point was that once you have the plot in order, and though you can change
that order; does it in some way restrict your mind from changing what you want to
do, or should do. For example, while writing, you discover that the character arc
in no way matches the plot outine. But, you have the urge to tell the story the way
you have pre-decided.
Of course you can change horses, but that is what pantsers do. Not dissing
outlines, I’ve learned enough to understand the value. I’m just trying to see how a
plot outline, pre-conceived, would effect other elements in the book.
Have I explained better?
8. Philip Coggan Says:
January 22nd, 2010 at 2:30 am
Stephen, the big question for me is: what does an outline look like? You say it’s a
scene-by-scene approach, one para per scene, no dialogue: is that right?
From something else you say I get the impression that you concentrate, at that
early planning stage, on major plot-points – sort of “we really MUST arrive at
THIS scene, sooner or later.” I know some writers do it that way – they write
major scenes first, then go back and fill in the gaps. Sounds very difficult to me –
but is that what you mean?
You mention the 3×5 index cards. I think this is what movie scriptwriters use, isn’t
it? They have different coloured cards, and they pin them on a board, and move
them around/replace them till they’re ready to go. Is that what’s done – the onepara scene summaries one per card like that?
More to that last para: on my first/last novel, I created a summary – but after the
first draft was written. This had one page per chapter and two columns. In the left
column (wide) I wrote a summary of each scene in the chapter, headed with the
time of day it happened (each chapter took up one day), the place, and the
characters both present and mentioned (ie, who’s talking and who they’re talking
about). Then dot points detailing important content for the scene. The right
column was for notes to myself – does this scene conflict with some other scene,
should something be added here, etc. I can see how all this could be done on index
cards – but I sort of like the way Word lets me search key words that are important
to the story (like, I want to know how often my hero visits a certain place, I can
just look it up with Search). Can the index card thing be done on a computer?
Thanks for sharing with us by the way, it’s much appreciated.
9. Gary Says:
Tim’s right. We all have different approaches.
It’s great to see sucessful authors who both plot (Stephen) and pants (Tim). Maybe
in the final analysis there’s not a huge amount of difference: if you cling to the
belief that the plot of any story is pretty much resident in the writer’s mind before
the writing starts, then it probably doesn’t matter if it’s written down in detail on
index cards or just left lying there in the subconscious.
Simenon was a notoriously detailed plotter: in preparation for writing his Maigret
stories he would work out detailed floor plans for each locale and equally detailed
backgrounds for each character, whether this detail appeared in the final product
or not. And that’s what worked for him.
My own limited experience of what works is to start with a situation, filled with as
much tension or potential tension as possible, and populate it with interesting
characters. Then just step back and let it all start to happen. Often, as Stephen has
testified, this can lead you into a whole pile of shit – but wasn’t it Hemingway
who said that the first draft of anything is shit? – and then you just back up a ways
and set off again.
I freely admit that this approach can lead to a whole lot of stuff getting written
that later doesn’t get used. But I’ve had exactly the same experience with plotting
a scene in detail: when it comes to actually writing it the action heads off in a
completely different direction, and the detailed plotting ends up as nothing more
than a starting point after all.
Stephen and Tim?
10.Stephen Jay Schwartz Says:
Thanks for the clarification, Usman.
Well, I can’t stick with a plot that doesn’t work sensibly. If my instinct tells me
(through my character’s desire to take a different route than what I’ve planned)
that the plot isn’t working, I’ll change the plot. Which means changing the outline
or treatment. I don’t ever want to be held hostage by my early battle plan.
Everything must be fluid. My big fear is that my characters might feel like stick
figures if I don’t let them grow on their own. On the other hand, they might feel
like stick figures if I don’t plan them out from the get-go. I think I’ll change my
process many times through the course of my career. I’ll do some experimenting,
providing I have the time.
January 22nd, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Everyone — this is the perpetual topic, as far as I’m concerned, largely because it
can be discussed at all. The roots of writing are (to me, anyway) such a mystery
that I wouldn’t know how to begin to talk about them — not where an idea comes
from, but how it mutates in the creative process, how the people spring into being
with their personalities, hopes, fears — all that stuff is just magic. But we can all
talk about how we get it down: do we outline, do we pants, and why? And what
are our work habits, how many times a week, etc. etc.
I think Stephen and Usman together raised a question I should have asked plotters
and pantsers alike: what do you do (a) when your story wants to move in an
unanticipated directions and/or (b) you become aware that it kind of stinks. These
are questions I’ll be asking future bloggers to consider.
I’m going to write more about these last posts (including yours, Gary and Philip)
but right now I’m written out, having spent a day — grrrrrrr — outlining for a
book proposal. Stephen I don’t know how you do it.
January 22nd, 2010 at 10:49 pm
Well, Tim, I’m not looking forward to outlining for a book proposal. It’s not
something I’ve done before. I sold BOULEVARD after I wrote it, and the 2nd
book was simply added to the contract as “sequel to BOULEVARD,” so I didn’t
have to give my publisher anything. Kind of exciting and scary at the same time.
I’ll be writing a proposal soon, for my third book, which will probably be a
standalone.
I’m sorry I didn’t get back to Gary and Philip – I was out all day and just came
back on-line. So I’ll address them now.
First of all, great comments and observations from both of you, and from Tim as
well.
Gary: I recently saw Ellroy speak at The Mystery Bookstore and I asked him if he
outlined his books. He said that he did something like a 300 page outline for a
thousand page book – I can’t remember exactly, but it was close to that. That, to
me, seems excessive. But, by God, does he know every detail! I would never want
to plot a book out to that degree.
Philip: The scene by scene description of the entire plot, one paragraph per scene,
no dialogue, is called a TREATMENT, not an outline. I start with a basic outline,
as you described, by first identifying the crucial scenes. This is usually a few
scenes to start off the book, then selected scenes that pop into my head; scenes of
conflict, turning points. Then maybe a scene or two that takes us into the climax,
then maybe a scene to end the piece. Just simple bullet points. As I think about the
story I begin to fill in the spaces, again, just as bullet points in this basic outline.
As this outline begins to fill out I start to write it as a treatment, which means that
I fill in all the blanks. It looks kind of like a short story. It will end up being ten to
twenty pages or so. At the same time I might have started writing the book from
the beginning, knowing that I at least have the first few scenes in my head and I’m
itching to get started, to get creative. And so, I kind of juggle the treatment and the
novel together for a while, sometimes going back to the outline to get a broader
view of things.
I actually get pretty frustrated with the 3X5 cards after a while, too. They are
pretty much a last ditch effort to get organized.
I really like the way you describe your plotting using a Word document. I’d love
to see a sample of what you do — I like the idea that you put the “time stamp” on
each scene, so you know where you are in the day-to-day story. I always lose
track of the days and nights that actually pass in my story. And I love the way you
can check up to see if you’ve had your character enter a location one too many
times, or if you’ve described a character’s “red hair” every time you see that
character. That’s a great way to avoid having to pick through the manuscript at the
very end of the process, before you send it to the copyeditor. My wife reads
behind everything I write and she does a great job of catching that.
I’m pretty sure the index card thing can be done on computer. There are programs
like this for screenwriting – Final Draft and Movie Magic. But I really like your
process, what you’ve figured out on your own. Maybe that’s how I’ll write book
three…if I can get through the proposal.
Question for Tim – how long is your book proposal? Single or double space? Is it
for a standalone or another in your series? I need a little guidance I think before I
step in.
Well, this is just amazingly interesting. I’d also love to see some actual outline
approaches, because, as I said, I pants because it’s the only way I know how to
write, and that means I often find myself following what I think is a freeway and
ending up at a dead end in Dogpatch.
By the way, Philip just got an agent to represent his first thriller which, when it’s
published, will be the first I know of to be set in Phnom Penh, a town I know very
well.
Gary, didn’t know that about Simenon, although it doesn’t surprise me. Ellroy
flabbergasts me — I never would have guessed that he was anything but the King
of the Pantsers. And, Gary, your working process is much like mine, except that
mine can also begin with an image. I’m currently working on a book proposal that
begins with a six-foot, fully winged angel walking down Khao San road.
Stephen, the proposal will wind up being 12-20 pages. I begin with condensed
scenes, complete with dialogue, supposedly to give my editor a sense of the
characters, but actually because I don’t know how to write any other way. These
scenes shorten as characters reappear, and they’ll build to the point at which the
two main story lines in the book converge and then it will descend into some
foggy enthusiasm about unforeseen reversals and stunning revelations and about
their being an invisible hand behind it all. Those things are all true, but I don’t
know what they are yet.
And, yes, I’m writing two of these buggers for Poke 5 and 6.
Ugh, 12-20 pages. That sounds too much like work. Sounds like a fully realized
plot and set of characters. I get it, though, I totally know that last couple pages of
“foggy enthusiasm about unforeseen reversals” stuff. I’m sure I’ll be doing a lot
of that – it just can’t be avoided when the story hasn’t been developed yet.
Congratulations, Philip, for getting published. I can’t wait to see you at The
Mystery Bookstore and pick up an autographed copy.
Thanks again for this great opportunity, Tim, and everyone here who visits Tim’s
site. I’ve had a great time and I’ve enjoyed the dialectic!
15.Dana King Says:
Dang, I go away for a few days and miss a lot of stuff.
I’m happy to see Stephen’s system is much like mine. I have little sketches of
each chapter/scene in advance, done of 3×5 cards for sequencing, then transferred
to a Word table. All that tells me is what needs to get done in that chapter; how it
gets done is a game-time decision, and I can take whatever route makes sense.
My characters are chosen with the plot in mind, to some extent. If I’d like to make
something a key plot point, I’ll cast a specific person for it, not unlike watching
Peter Graves pick through pictures at the beginning of the old MISSION
IMPOSSIBLE shows. Specifics and foibles can be tweaked as I go and the
character comes better into focus.
Dana – ah, an ally! I like your Mission Impossible analogy.
I also find that everything is up for grabs when you’re writing a novel, and a
writer cannot discount anything that works. I tend to wallow in research. The
good ideas will stick, while the average ones will be forgotten.
This discussion has been everything I ever hoped it would be, and then some, and
I doubt it’s over yet.
Stephen, I hope you don’t feel ganged up on. It seems to me that all of us are
looking kind of hopefully at the other writer’s approach, since each of us is so
deeply familiar with the limitations of our own. At least, I know I am.
Writing a book proposal like the one(s) I’m currently agonizing over just makes
me deeply envious of you — or any writer who can envision a story in units as
you do, and know that in the end, it’ll seem as though the entire plot came directly
out of the characters’ souls. BOULEVARD certainly does — and for any of you
who want to see how deeply felt an outlined book can be, check out Stephen’s
first, which feels like he’s been writing novels for years.
Dana, I really love your idea of “casting” characters. I sometimes come at that sort
of backwards — I’ll realize that it’s easier for me to hear a character’s speech if I
have a specific actor’s voice in mind. But it’s a revelation to me that a writer could
have the recourse to a sort of stock company of actors he/she can envision in
different roles, sort of the way the old studio system worked(or Ingmar Bergman,
whose movies I’m watching nightly now.)
And, in passing, I also outline, but I do it retroactively, and the primary purpose of
it is to make sure my chronology is straight. Every scene begins with day, time,
and location, and the first time any character appears is marked in red. It’s a nice
way of getting the 20,000-foot view that I’d imagine Stephen has when he
outlines at the beginning of his process.
So I want to thank you, Stephen, for getting this off to such a terrific start — and
anyone who has more to say, please chime in.
18.minervaK Says:
I’m coming in late to this discussion, and of course I want to throw in my $0.02,
as I am fresh from a Learning Experience (TM) along these very lines.
I started my current novel without an outline, about two years ago. Then I started
it again, and then a third time. That third time, I got about halfway through it
before it melted down. So I started it YET AGAIN, doing some character sketches
and minimal plot research first. That got me an excruciatingly-almost-finished
draft. Which I started rewriting AGAIN a few months ago.
Last week, I realized it was getting close to melting temperature.
So I stopped working on it, and took a couple of days to write what I’d call a
‘narrative summary’ of the story, with a major change to the situation of the
protag, because I could tell that what I was doing wasn’t working (only took me
five re-writes, woo-hoo).
What I learned (see my blog) is that the change to the protag wasn’t going to fix
the problem — but writing this ‘narrative summary’ very well may. So I’ll be
doing that, on my almost-finished novel, in the coming weeks. Back-asswards, but
there you have it.
I dunno if I’d call this an outline — the one I did last week is about fifty pages,
and pretty detailed. To you pantsers that probably sounds horrific, but there was
something very freeing about it. I think it may be because I didn’t try to make it
‘outline-y,’ if that makes any sense. That is, it doesn’t go “Chapter 1, Scene 1:
Protag arrives at scene of the crime. Chapter 1, Scene 2: (etc.)” It’s more like a
stream-of-consciousness revelation of the sequence of events in the book,
including all the surrounding ‘stuff’ that goes with those events (the characters’
reactions, feelings, and behaviors; possible side plots; the ‘tone’ I want a certain
scene to set; off-stage facts, scenes, and situations that affect the storyline; etc.).
So, I may very well be a plotter. The question that comes to my mind is whether
pantsers and plotters are divided at all by genre. I write in the mystery/crime vein,
and I often think that those kinds of books conform themselves to outlining in a
way that literary fiction might not. What do you Hemingway types say?
Thanks, guys, for keeping the dialogue going. I’m thoroughly enjoying this. And,
Tim, don’t worry, I definitely don’t feel ganged-up on. If anything, I really envy
the pansters–I would love nothing more than to sit and write without any plotting
or planning. I desire that kind of freedom. Unfortunately, I’ve learned there’s a
price for that freedom, and the price is that I have to throw out so much of what
results from that process. And that’s just hard to do.
I love Minervak’s comments, because that was exactly how I wrote my very first
screenplay. I wrote it four, five, maybe six times over the course of about four
years. By the time I did my final pass I’d managed to learn how to write a
screenplay, and the project benefited from my perseverance. It ended up winning
competitions and getting me my first film agent. Which, ultimately, didn’t mean
anything, of course, because it’s the film industry, which is filled with lies and
illusion. Yep, you can tell I’m happy to be writing novels. But I did get a lot out of
writing all those screenplays, I got the paradigm I needed upon which to build
story.
And, Tim, you are so kind. Thank you for your wonderful words about Boulevard.
I respect your work so much, you are such a fantastic writer, and so your words of
praise mean that much more to me.
Another note to minervak – you might be onto something regarding the genre
thing. If I were to write a Hemmingwayesque novel I might go panster all the
way. But a complicated crime plot requires that I know every detail beforehand.
I’d love to know how your novel works after you finish your detailed outline. It
sounds like you’re going to nail this next draft. I hope it’s the one.
20.Philip Coggan Says:
How Pantsing Works
This is how it happened:
I started with an image: a helicopter crashing during a monsoon storm. I got that
image from real-life – it happened, it killed the Minister for Police.
So said to myself, wow, that’s dramatic, I’ll make that the climax. Where’s the rest
of the story?
So I looked around and found a situation: a guesthouse that’s been videoing
customers with prostitutes using spy-cameras. Note: this was a real situation. So
there I had a situation that could lead to the climax, but I still didn’t know how.
But the police minister is a politician, so let’s go politics. Let’s have Mercury,
messenger of the gods, outline the situation. And what’s a credible modern-day
Mercury? A newspaper-boy. I knew a real one, his name’s Michael, so he gets to
be the first voice we hear.
But who’s he talking to? The reader of cource, but addressing thee reader directly
would be too post-modern, so let’s give him a Hero-figure. I know a guy owns a
bar, so he’s my Hero. So opening scene, Michael talks to my hero about…what?
About someone being thrown in jail because someone else bribed the police.
Again, a real situation, or at least one that was around as gossip about ten years
ago. So that’s scene 1: Mercury tells the Hero that the McGuffin is in jail.
Then what? Well, if someone got McGuffin in jail, then Someone is important.
More about him – another scene. Who can be in it? The Hero has to have a
Helper, heros always do. So the Helper arrives and the Hero talks to him, about…
well, how to get McGuffin out of jail of course.
And if there’s one Helper there has to be another, because Helpers always come in
twos, a short talkative one and a fat stupid one. Always.
And that’s how it’s done. Real-life provides the situation, archetypes fill in the
gaps, and sheer impetus keeps it all moving. More exactly, it’s memory of reallife. Just be careful not to fall off the highwire into (a) libel, or (b) stereotypes.
(By the way, when I got to the end I found there was no helicopter there and no
police minister – the characters took me to a different place entirely).
And now I’m looking at book 2. I know there’s a ghost buried under the floor of
the hero’s bar, and I know there’s a boy who’s staged his own disappearance, and I
know it all ends in the National Museum, but so far I don’t know the bits in
between.
That is awesome, Philip. I basically do the same thing, but at a certain point I
begin outlining it.
I love the fact that, in the end, there was no helicopter crash.
This discussion should win some sort of award. It’s opened up a whole new idea
to me — a series of guest blogs in which writers talk about how they approach the
various components of a novel: such concrete things as setting and character
development, to slightly more abstract areas such as pacing, structure, finding a
story’s starting point, etc.
Anyone got a topic to nominate? If we did this right, at the end of, say, a year,
we’d have the a sort of permanent archive: the thoughts of a bunch of fine writers
on virtually every aspect of writing a novel.
Who’d read this? Can we have a show of hands?
And minervak, you wrote “see my blog” but I didn’t see a link. Wanna send it to
us?
I like the idea Tim. I wonder whether writers actually know how they write? But it
would be interesting to hear about it.
24.minervaK Says:
If you click on my name above, that’ll get you to my blog. Thanks for asking! I
have a poll up…
25.minervaK Says:
Oh, yeah, I thought of another question:
Do you guys think that there is a prejudice in the writing profession against
outlining? Especially among those who aspire to be ‘serious novelists?’ I ask
because I find myself wondering why on earth I ever thought I could write a book
without an outline, and the only answer I can come up with is that I somehow
gathered that ‘that’s how professional writers do it.’ I don’t know where I picked
up this idea, but it’s certainly there in the back of my mind that only talentless
hacks have to resort to outlining.
I mean, I know it’s bullshit, but I just wonder if that’s an attitude anyone else has
encountered, in the ‘published writer’ world?
minervak – That’s an interesting observation. I actually thought the opposite, that
editors and agents would expect their authors to outline. Maybe that’s what the
book proposal means to them. I’m with you – I can’t imagine not outlining. In
fact, I’m just beginning to brainstorm for my third novel, a standalone, and I’m
finding myself placing the stand-out scenes in order on the page with bullet
points. I’ve started with describing a few central characters, and then I put the
dramatic turning points down in some semblance of order. I’ll keep adding and
adding until I have a story that makes sense to me.
The funny thing is that I’m not an organized person at all outside of my writing.
My car and house is a mess, my finances are abismal, I don’t even keep a
checking log, and there’s dogshit in my front yard.
But I outline.
…and I go back to correct my mistakes, too. Like “my car and house ARE a
mess,” and “abysmal.”
28.minervaK Says:
Stephen — I’m the same way. My physical environment always looks like a
tornado just went through it. My head usually does, too, so maybe that’s why I
need that organizing step before I launch into something.
Next Up: Bill Crider
January 24th, 2010
If you haven’t gotten in yet on the discussion kicked off by Stephen Jay Schwartz (an outliner/advance
plotter with a screenwriting background), go to the post directly beneath this one and weigh in.
Coming this Wednesday is our second guest, pantser deluxe Bill Crider.
Bill is the author of more than seventy novels and only the deity knows how many stories and articles,
and the winner (twice) of the Anthony and Derringer Awards. He’s also been nominated for both a
Shamus and an Edgar. He’s got a lifetime of writing experience, and he’s generous with it.
In his other life, he was until recently the Chair of the Division of English and Fine Arts at Alvin
Community College in Alvin, Texas. Texas is also the setting of his long-running Sheriff Dan Rhodes
mysteries, the first of which appeared in 1986.
You’re going to love Bill.
your own site.
3 Responses to “Next Up: Bill Crider”
I already love Bill. Can’t wait.
2. Derrick Soames Says:
I think I’ve heard of this guy, he was on a panel when I went to a mystery
convention in Albuquerque, I think it was. Tony Hillerman was there. I never
knew he wrote so many books, though. And in Texas they put English and Art in
the same department? Goodness sakes.
3. Bill Crider Says:
Hi, Rachel!
Derrick, Texas leads the way.
Plotting vs. Pantsing 2: Bill Crider
January 26th, 2010
Bill Crider is one of the most prolific writers I know of — an inspiration to anyone who, like me,
agonizes over each book and thinks more or less continually of doing something safer — whitewater rafting or sky-diving, for example. If Bill has his demons, he knows how to manage them:
he’s written seventy-five or so novels in several genres, plus dozens and dozens of articles and
stories.
Bill lives and writes in Alvin, Texas, where he was once the Chair of the Division of English and
Fine Arts at Alvin Community College. He’s been nominated for an Edgar and a Shamus, and
he’s won a couple of Anthony awards and a Derringer. He’s best known for the Sheriff Dan
Rhodes series, but he’s had several other series and written a number of standalone books. His
books, he says, “have sold tens of copies in a couple of countries. Maybe if he’d learn to outline,
he’d do better.”
When it comes to writing, I’m a seat-of-the-pants kind of a guy. Here’s why. When I started writing, I
didn’t know any better. I thought writing was like telling a story, and I thought that when you told a
story, you just started telling it and found out what happened as you went along. That’s they way I told
stories when I was a kid. It was the way my aunt told stories to me and my brother and my sister when
she visited at our grandmother’s house in the summers. I had no idea that anybody would actually sit
down and plan a story before it was told.
Even after I started writing and selling, I didn’t know any better. The world was different in those days.
No Internet, no e-mail, no writing conferences. Those things were in their infancy, and before too long
they’d be accessible to everyone, but I was just a guy living in Alvin, Texas, teaching college during the
daytime and writing books at night. What did I know? Nothing much, except that when I was in college
student myself, there was a reading room in The University of Texas library with lovely decorated
rafters. Besides being decorated, the rafters had quotations on them, and one of them was this, from
Alice in Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” It seemed
like great advice to me, and I thought it applied to storytelling, no matter what its context in Lewis
Carroll’s book.
That’s not to say I’ve never used an outline. I have. When writing under house names for a certain
fiction factory, I was supposed to provide a lengthy outline for the books I turned in. I believe that
thirty pages was the required amount. As I recall, I always came up a little short, and that was in spite
of my taking up at least three pages with a cast of characters.
Around that same time, I wrote a few novels in the M.I.A. Hunter series. Steve Mertz, the originator of
the series, always provided an outline for me. The outlines were only a couple of pages long, though,
which seemed perfect to me. They allowed me plenty of room to tell things my own way.
For that matter, so did the thirty-page outlines. After they were approved, I hardly ever looked at them
again. I just started at the beginning and kept on going.
It doesn’t take much to get me started. When I wrote Dead on the Island, the first novel in my series
about a private-eye named Truman Smith. All I had was the opening line: “There was no one on the
seawall except for me and the rat.” I’d been inspired by my young niece who’d spent some time in
Galveston, staying the oldest and grandest hotel on the island, swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, and
playing on the beach. When I saw her, she didn’t want to talk about any of that. The thing that had
impressed her was the rat she’d seen on the seawall. I told my wife that someday I’d use that rat in a
book, and a couple of years later I sat down and wrote that first line.
And that was all I had. That line, and the idea that I was going to write a first-person private-eye novel.
I typed the line, and then I kept on going until I came to the end.
The same thing happened with another book, Murder Most Fowl. One day I jogged past and nursing
home and a little old guy yelled at me from the porch: “Somebody stole my teef!” A good many years
later, I sat down to write a Sheriff Dan Rhodes book. I typed that line, and, well, you know the rest.
Is it scary to begin with only a single line and nothing more? You’re durned tootin’, but sometimes
that’s the way it works for me. Sometimes I have a little more. I have a situation that I want to write
about or I have a crime that I think would make an interesting starting point. Sometimes I even think I
know how the book will develop and what the ending will be. Usually when I think that, I’m wrong.
There are times when I really wish I were an outliner, a meticulous planner who’s always in control of
a book’s direction. But I’m not. I seldom even know what characters will turn up from page to page.
They just appear and start acting or talking, and I try to keep up with them. Usually by the time I’m
about halfway through the book, I do know pretty well what’s going on and what’s going to happen, but
even that’s not a sure thing.
So if I just start with a line or a vague idea, where do the books come from? Am I drawing from some
deep well of the unconscious? And if I am, should I start paying my unconscious 10% of the take? I
honestly have no idea how to answer those questions. Sometimes I think that if I could answer them,
I’d have to stop writing. That might prove to be easier than I think. If I never wrote that first line, I’d
likely never think of the rest of it.
By the way, in case you were wondering, I wrote this little essay the same way I do everything else. As
an old English teacher, I should probably be ashamed.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 5:25 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
23 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 2: Bill Crider”
1. Suzanna Says:
You make it seem so fun and easy. If you’re not careful you’re gonna inspire
many more writers to take a crack at this book business. Enjoyed your post a lot.
Thanks, Bill.
Side note: my captcha phrase could not be more fitting: story about
2. Benjie Says:
Best advice I got about my writing came from Bill–and I passed it on to my
students later: “Keep writing!”
Thanks again, Bill.
3. Usman Says:
Thanks Bill.
What’s the trick to your free-writing? And how much anguish, if any, does this
cost you when editing?
This pretty much what I do too. What I’m really not sure of how it starts – for sure
with real-life situations, incidents and people. More than one of each, too – the
thing is that they get recombined to make something new. Or they don’t, and you
get a libel case.
Just a question: How long does it take to turn out a novel this way, from first word
on paper to the moment when the publisher says it’s ok?
5. Dana King Says:
I don’t know you, Bill, never met you, but I have an idea of how you speak and
what you sound like just from reading this. I suspect that is not unrelated to
making things up as you go. I can do this for short stories–and, now that I think
about it, the voices in my short stories vary more than those in my longer stuff–
though I need the net for longer things.
Good food for thought. Thanks for provoking me.
Great post, Bill. It left me wondering . . . where is my next rat?
I thought I was a pantser until I read this. The idea of basing a novel on one
opening line is incredible to me. That is true pantsing!
Great perspective on the craft. I guess another thing that concerns me about the
pantsing process is that great, silent wall of editors and agents waiting, waiting,
waiting to see the book when it comes due. I somehow want to assure them that I
have a workable story. I guess I want to assure myself the same thing. It’s scary to
wait until the very end of the process to find this out.
Thanks for all the comments, folks. Let me see if I can answer a few of the
questions.
Philip, I never know how long it’s going to take me to write a book. I once wrote
one in 17 days, but that one was based on a two-page outline provided by
someone else. Other books have taken much longer. Sometimes it depends on the
deadline.
Usman, I’ve never experienced any anguish. Usually everything falls into place
for me about halfway through the book. If that didn’t happen, THEN I’d
experience anguish.
Suzanna: Fun, yes. Easy? Maybe not as easy as I made it sound. I try to make it as
easy on myself as I can, though. I don’t need anguish. (See above.)
Stephen, you’ve probably sold a lot more books than I have. At my level of the biz
(lowlist is the way I describe it), editors and agents don’t worry so much. I’ve
been very lucky to be able to write a lot of books doing pretty much whatever I
wanted to do.
That being said, I wouldn’t advise anybody to write like I do. I figure people are
all different, and we have to find our own ways of getting it done. To quote Robert
Frost, “Some have relied on what they knew;/ Others on simply being true./ What
worked for them might work for you.” Or, to quote me, “it might not.”
Ohhh…no, I don’t think so, I know you’ve sold many more than the two I’ve
sold. I think perhaps I’ll relax my style a bit after I realize I can deliver
consistantly.
Thanks for your great blog. Very happy to see you here!
Bill, this is pretty much my process, too, although the book always threatens to
collapse on me about 40% of the way through and then it threatens to explode,
and then it threatens to engulf and vaporize me. And then, most of the time, I
finish it, but it’s like getting dental implants from a Nazi dentist.
What I want to know is how you keep things so blithe. This line: “Sometimes I
even think I know how the book will develop and what the ending will be.
Usually when I think that, I’m wrong” describes an experience I have multiple
times in each of my books, but to me it’s sort of threatening, at least when it’s not
being terrifying. The only way I know how to deal with it is to do what Benjie
says — keep writing. Eventually, if I do, the mists clear and I see where it’s all
really going, and it’s usually better than what I had in mind.
I mean, seriously, don’t you ever feel like the whole book is about to crash and
burn? And if you do, how do you deal with it?
Another pertinent captcha: avidly leader
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the process of writing. I sometimes think I’m
more fascinated in reading/talking about the process than in actually writing. But
then I realize I’m just procrastinating–again.
captcha: careful mokellar (Now there’s the start of a description of a next door
neighbor.)
12.Annelie Says:
I enjoyed reading, not just this article, but this blog (and website) and I’ve found it
all very helpful.
I tried to write without an outline and it’s turned into a disaster, which I am now
trying to fix.
I can safely say that I need an outline that I am sticking to. If I make a small
change that’s not a problem, but if I make a big change I need to go back to the
beginning and start again.
I learnt this the hard way.
13.Rachel Brady Says:
Cynthia: “I sometimes think I’m more fascinated in reading/talking about the
process than in actually writing. But then I realize I’m just procrastinating–again.”
I feel exactly this way. Exactly!
14.Bill Crider Says:
Cynthia, I’m a world-class procrastinator. I’d rather procrastinate than do
anything.
Tim, I’m not always so blithe, but I’ve never felt that the book might explode. I
just keep on writing. After having written so many books, I figure everything will
work itself out eventually, and so far it always has.
Just checking in to see the recent comments, an dnoticed the Captcha: from
totality. That pretty much sums up your blog, Tim!
This will probably close things out, and it’s a final example of the weird way I
work. Two weeks ago exactly, I turned in a book to my agent and publisher. Last
night I sat down at the computer and wrote a title and the words “Chapter One.”
So far that’s all I have on the proposal for my next book. It just happens that this
time a title came to me. Whether a book will ever be attached to it is another
question, but I’m sure that at least a proposal will. Ask me in another year, and
we’ll see about the rest.
Not so fast, Bill.
But this is a good time to say thanks for going so far beyond just writing the blog,
and jumping into the conversation on a regular basis. I think it makes a huge
difference when the blog is essentially an invitation to a conversation rather than a
speech. You’ve been terrifically generous with your time.
I should also say here that Bill’s books are as delightful as his presence here
would suggest. They’re warm, often funny, meticulously observed and reported —
to the point where I have to believe the entire world, especially of the Dan Rhodes
books, must exist in its completion in Bill’s head somewhere.
I think pantsers like Bill (not that there are many pantsers as carefree as Bill) can
serve as a valuable example to writers of something I know to be true, no matter
how often I forget it when I’m writing: If you keep writing and remain true to
your idea and characters, the book will emerge. This is something that those of us
who have heebie-jeebies about writing, or whose personal demons are especially
efficient, should say aloud eight or nine times a day. The book IS there, but not if
you don’t keep writing it.
Bill, have you ever trashed a manuscript, either partway through or when it was
finished? Just looked at it and decided, “Ummmm . . . nahhhh.” Or, in your world,
is that just a prompt to improve things?
February 2nd, 2010 at 5:16 am
I have to admit that I’ve never trashed a manuscript. Even if I stop writing on one
(extremely rare), I save it for later. The first rule is “Always finish what you start.”
The second rule is “Never throw anything away.”
Thanks again for inviting me to do this, and I’m looking forward to the next
installment.
19.minervaK Says:
February 8th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
I’ve never experienced any anguish. Usually everything falls into place for me
about halfway through the book.
I officially hate (envy) you, Bill Crider.
20.Sylvia Says:
February 13th, 2010 at 4:17 am
I am sorry I’m late to the party but I have questions too!
never trashed a manuscript
find a way for what you have so far? Have you ever ended up having to put a draft
on ice before the halfway point because the plot just didn’t come together?
Also: It seems to me like its hard to write a short premise or “log line” writing this
way – whereas the people with the really sharp ones seem to know what the story
is ahead of time. How do you take the finish book and describe it with a simple
declaration?
I’ve never put aside a manuscript unfinished. Usually these days I’m writing on
contract, so I’m pretty much required to finish. Someone (E. L. Doctorow) said
writing is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as the headlights
extend, but you can make the whole trip that way. That pretty much covers it.
As for those “log lines,” you’re right. I can’t write one of those things to save my
life, and I can’t do synopses worth a darn, either. Just ask my agent.
22.Sylvia Says:
It sounds like a great leap of faith but it’s interesting to hear your process is such
that it gets you there in the end!
*mutters unhappily about synopses*
One last word. I saw this today in an article about Dick Francis. It sounds as if I
said it. No wonder I like his books so much. Here it is:
Sometimes Francis claimed that he would begin a book with no preconceived
plans at all: “I just start with a first line. With Enquiry (1969) we said ‘What’s the
worst thing that can happen to a jockey?’ and I wrote down: ‘Yesterday, I lost my
licence.’ The rest of the book just followed from that. There is no going back. I
start on page one and go straight on to the end. I never scrap a chapter or change
my mind halfway.”
Next Up: Rebecca Cantrell
February 1st, 2010
Rebecca Cantrell is the author of an amazing novel set in Berlin in the early 1930s, A TRACE OF
SMOKE, which Publisher’s Weekly calls “unforgettable.”
Her next book, A NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES, also features journalist Hannah Vogel, the protagonist
of A TRACE OF SMOKE, and will come out in June of this year. Her guest essay, which will appear
on Wednesday, is one of the clearest pictures of one artist’s creative process I’ve read in a long time.
It’s a kind of modified pantsing, but . . . well, I’ll let Rebecca tell you. I know you’ll enjoy it.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 11:30 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
Plotting vs.Pantsing 3: Rebecca Cantrell
February 2nd, 2010
Rebecca Cantrell writes the critically-acclaimed Hannah Vogel mystery series set in 1930s Berlin,
including “A Trace of Smoke” and “A Night of Long Knives” (due out June 22, 2010). Her
screenplays “A Taste For Blood” and “The Humanitarian” have been finalists at Shriekfest: The
Los Angeles Horror/Sci-fi Film Festival. Her short stories are included the “Missing” and “First
Thrills” anthologies. Currently, she lives in Hawaii with her husband, her son, and too many
geckoes to count.
Pantser or plotter?
Don’t tell my editor, but I write the first 50 pages blind. I have no idea who the characters are or what
they will do. This is in spite of the fact that I had to turn in a synopsis of the book to sell it. I figure
nobody read the synopsis and, if they did, they won’t remember the details a year later or bust me for it.
So far, this has worked. Don’t spill the beans.
Because I write historical fiction, I do know when the action takes place and where the characters will
be. In fact, I will have researched the era and place for hours and hours and hours and…you get the
picture. I have a notebook full of trivia I gleaned from reference books, diaries, newspapers of the era,
movies, and pictures I found on the Internet (not that kind of pictures). From that I extract some ideas
of cool or truly awful historical events, characters, and facts I might want to put in a book. But that’s
all.
I sit down with all that background and write 50 pages. I fuel it with soy chais and a soundtrack whose
sole purpose is to shut out the noises of everyone in the coffee shop or house around me. I try not to
think about what I’m writing or even re-read it at this point. It might never make the final cut, and I
don’t want to get too attached to it.
I also have a writing journal that I start at about this time. Into it I put:
• All my whining: why did I pick 1930s Berlin? What kind of underpants did they even wear?
• My insecurity: What made me think I could be a writer? I have no idea where I’m going with
this and it’s all going to collapse in a big stinking pile and I’ll have to give back the advance or
even worse it’ll get published and I’ll be thrashed by reviewers and Amazon readers and some
old lady will make her dog pee on my shoe, it’s so bad.
• Plot ideas: what if I have that zeppelin get jeppelin-jacked? Do you think that means I’ll be able
to convince some zeppelin company to give me a free zeppelin ride? How explosive were those
things? If you shot a gun inside, what would happen?
• To do lists: must fold the laundry so that we can find the living room again. Mail off those
books. Buy vegetables, and not broccoli again.
After I finish those 50 pages I read them to see if they might actually be part of a novel. If not, I throw
them out and write another 50 pages. If so, I start to outline. I outline the whole book, beginning to end.
I use index cards that I stick to a board and they fall down and I lose them and also step on the pushpins
if I get really lucky.
Then I write another 50 pages. At the end of those I discover that my outline is wrong. The outline is
wrong both going forward (i.e., things I haven’t written yet) and going backward (i.e., things I have
written that weren’t in the original outline). More outlining. I write another 50 pages and…you get the
idea.
Looking at it put down here, it seems totally crazy, but it is my process. After having sat through many
classes on “the writing process” I’ve discovered only one truth: Your process is your own. Figure out
what your process is and honor it.
If you think outlining sucks all the fun out of writing, don’t make yourself do it. And remember, they
don’t really read that synopsis, so don’t work yourself up into a frothing frenzy writing it either. If the
thought of embarking on a year long journey of novel writing without any damn idea of what you’re
doing gives you hives, by all means write an outline. Neither approach is wrong, despite what you may
hear.
When I’m all done I match up the outline to the book I wrote so I can keep track of what actually
happened. By this point it’s all in a calendar. Despite being in a calendar, my timeline invariably gets
screwed up and a meticulous member of my writing group always gleefully catches it (thanks, Karen!).
Writing groups are a big part of my process. Without my group of trusted readers, who knows if anyone
could understand what comes out of my head.
After I get to the end of the book I start rewriting. I rewrite tons as I’m one of those weird writers who
writes too little and always has to add new scenes (as opposed to the writers who write too much and
have to delete scenes).
Once I have all the scenes I need in the correct order, then I go in and polish my language, my
dialogue, my characterization, and my shoes (just checking to see if you finished the sentence). This is
painstaking work and not for the faint of heart, but it is absolutely necessary as I don’t put down one
golden word after another. Maybe someday.
There it is: the good, the bad, and the ugly. My process. And remember, don’t tell my editor.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 10:50 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
21 Responses to “Plotting vs.Pantsing 3: Rebecca Cantrell”
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:08 pm
Now that’s what I’d call an unusual process. But I agree entirely. People have to
write the way that works best for them. Never try to write the way someone else
does. Unless it works for you, of course. And by the way, how much will you pay
me not to call your editor?
2. Suzanna Says:
Thank you for writing about your process. I found nothing ugly or bad about what
you do. On the contrary it sounds like you are very careful to keep your writing
process well supported. You posed a question in your journal that I am curious
about: What drew you to 1930s Berlin? Thanks again.
Synopses: it would be interesting to ask your agent or editor just what does
happen to the synopsis. I think they do get read, but I don’t think anyone really
expects them to result in a book exactly like the one described.
4. Jeremy Duns Says:
I found this very interesting, Rebecca. Reading Bill and Stephen’s pieces, it seems
almost as if you combine both approaches: pants and the plot a bit, and then repeat
and rinse. So: just like the laundry. I’m more of a pantser, but I think that while I
don’t do it quite as systematically as you seem to, I also have moments where I
shape it all up and try to get it in more of an order, and then start again. Otherwise
you really are writing yourself into a corner. And the process seems to change a
lot as the book progresses. I have an irrational fear of index cards, I think linked to
exam revision, but now that I’ve written a large chunk of words for my current
novel I find that I have a basic outline I will follow, even if it’s not on a card. Then
again, perhaps it’ll all change next week.
Thank for sharing how you do it – all of these have really made me think.
Rebecca…good to see you here! I did not know you would be contributing.
I love your process. Sounds like a headache, but what isn’t?
I’m going nuts right now because I’m right at the beginning again – trying to
decide what my new standalone will look like. It’s an exciting place to be, but I
feel so insecure. And I have to write a friggin’ book proposal, with chapters and
everything. Now, that ain’t right.
I do the fifty pages thing, but then I go back and rewrite that fifty pages, and then
I go back and rewrite that fifty pages, and then I go back…
I don’t feel comfortable until I have a rock-solid foundation. Then I go on to the
next 50 pages. This, of course, after I’ve already outlined and 3X5ed and written a
few versions of the treatment. God, does it ever get easier? But all I really want to
do is research. To me, that’s the best part. Of course, I don’t have to transport
myself back to 1930s Germany, and I always know what kind of underwear my
characters are wearing (if they’re wearing any at all…)
6. Rebecca Cantrell Says:
Bill: Realizing that someone would in fact tell my editor instantly after this was
Suzanna: 1931 Berlin was the moment that world was lost to the Nazis and the
entire 20th century was slammed into another direction. It’s a fascinating time of
transition that defines us all today.
Philip: I hate to think what happens to my synopses. I like to think they get read,
but I’ve seen little evidence.
Jeremy: Embrace the index card. They’re lovely. You’ll see. Right now mine are
making a beautiful mosaic in the corner of my bedroom on the floor.
Hey Stephen! Books could be written about your characters and their underwear.
So, really we’re researching the same thing, just in different ways.
I don’t know if it ever gets any easier. I’m only 4 books in. So far,the process isn’t
easier, but now I actually trust that it will work in the end, so the stress level is
lower and I think I move through the stages a little faster (that sound in
background is my husband laughing at my denial).
8. Annelie Says:
Rebecca, I love the way you work. It sounds really interesting and definitely
worth a try. I don’t know if it will work for me, but it will be fun finding out.
I love this thread. I could read all day about the way writers work, especially as an
alternative to doing any actual writing myself.
Rebecca, for those of you who haven’t read A TRACE OF SMOKE (which I
finished last night) is prodigiously good. If she’d said she writes hanging by her
knees from a gravity bar or backing up her car at high speed on a winding road,
I’d be tempted to give it a try.
I love diving in with those first 50 pages, and I love the fearlessness of tossing
them later if they don’t work. So many of us treat what we’ve managed to get
down as though we’d had to cut the words in stone and would need a chisel to
delete them. All this reluctance does is protect our bad writing and, possibly,
weaken what’s to come. But to have this discard process actually built into her
writing routine — well, I learned something.
Actually, I learned a lot, as I have from all three pieces thus far. By the way,
Jeremy Duns, whose response is up there somewhere, is another terrific writer,
and in fact is our next contributor. (Hi, Jeremy!)
I’m curious, Rebecca, about what you’re looking for in those first 50 pages. Is that
the work from which your central situation/characters/the mood of the book/
emerges? Since, as you say, you write short, how much will you expand on the 50
pages you actually keep — in other words, how condensed are they? Do you write
whole scenes on that first pass or start and then condense them so you can move
on?
And today’s Captcha is too good to pass up. Those of us who pants, or who, like
Rebecca, just dive in and write to get started, should recognize this as an integral
part of our process:
from puree
10.Usman Says:
Rebecca, really interesting the 50/50 idea. I’m tempted to give it a try next time
around.
Tim, your image of chiseled tablets works well to highlight a big challenge of the
writer: Loving to death his work.
11.Gary Says:
“Your process is your own. Figure out what your process is and honor it.”
Thank God someone has said it at last!
I SO hate those writing courses which attempt to prescribe exactly how you’re
supposed to do it. And then aspiring authors try to do it exactly like that and it
doesn’t work for them, and then they get completely discouraged and never try to
write again.
And that’s so sad.
12.Rebecca Cantrell Says:
Gary, I agree totally. I think a good writing course can help you to find your own
process or show you a variety of different ones so that you feel comfortable trying
out your own. But if you look at the amazing books produced by people who
rigorously outline and the amazing books produced by people who fly completely
by the seat of their pants, you eventually have to realize that there is no size fits
all.
Tim, did we lose a comment?
Annelie:Thanks! it’s amazing the crazy processes one has to try on to find one that
works. Good luck!
Tim: glad you liked SMOKE. As for how much I keep, it depends on the 50
pages. Sometimes most. Sometimes now. For SMOKE Hannah was a male
detective in those first 50 pages. Clearly that’s not how she ended up and I had to
scrap almost all of it (including a scene where her brother got that tattoo that I
quite liked but could never work in). I work hard not to fall so much in love with
my words that I can’t see through them to the story. If it doesn’t support the story,
it has to go. Period. My writing group calls me “The Slasher” because I am
ruthless about that.
Usman: Hope it helps!
Rebecca, I’ve looked through the unapproved comments, which this software
thoughtfully and uselessly saves, and there isn’t one from you in there. Sometimes
the Captcha mechanism screws up, and when that happens the comment doesn’t
get stored anywhere.
And I’m not worried about your not having brilliance at your fingertips. You’re a
prodigious writer.
And I more than liked SMOKE. I ate it in about four bites and hand-carried it
down the block to a guy who’s 84 and an amateur expert in the Berlin of the
1930s. He’s turned me on to a bunch of good writers, including Alan Furst, John
Lawton, and David Downing, and it was my pleasure to return the favor with your
book.
Great advice, by the way: “I work hard not to fall so much in love with my words
that I can’t see through them to the story.”
Hannah was a male? This is sort of a fundamental change. What brought you to
it?
Seriously, originally Hannah was a male detective investigating the case when no
one wanted him to because the victim was gay. But then I realized that I wanted it
to be very personal, personal in a way I couldn’t get with a cop doing a job. So, I
made Hannah his sister (brother didn’t work right, somehow) who helped to raise
him.
16.Marilyn aka; M.E. Kemp Says:
Rebecca’s advice to find your own method is “write-on.” I’m a real pantser but
I’m lucky in that i’m writing a series (historical mysteries featuring two nosy
Puritans,) so I may not have my plot or most of my characters, but I do have my
two main characters down cold. I’ve lived with Creasy and Hetty so long I pretty
much know how they are going to react to a situation. That’s the big advantage of
a series. Marilyn aka: M. E. Kemp
Hi Marilyn! It is easier when you know your characters well in advance, isn’t it?
I’m just finishing book3 of the Hannah Vogel series and I do have a much better
idea of what she’ll do now, although the minor characters keep surprising me. And
she keeps changing so she’s harder to pin down than I would have expected.
I wonder what Jeremy’s process is going to be. I’m guessing pantser.
Hi, all I hate to barge in here, but I have to.
Rebecca, you’ve been great, and let me once again URGE everyone to read A
TRACE OF SMOKE. And I can’t wait for A NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES.
Please don’t feel this conversation needs to be cut short, but I’ve got to start
saying things about Jeremy Duns, our next brave blogger.
These pieces so far have gone up one week apart, and it feels like that’s a
reasonable interval. Does anyone think they should go up more or less frequently,
and if so, why?
19.minervaK Says:
Wow, fascinating. I did the 50/50 thing (write some, outline some, write some
more, outline some more) on one of my drafts and enjoyed it. If only it had
resulted in a readable book. Sob.
20.Suzanna Says:
Here’s my penny’s worth: I think that the frequency of the blog posts is perfect.
The one week turnaround leaves enough time to start a good back and forth and
by the end of a week I’m eager for the next installment.
21.Sylvia Says:
I rewrite tons as I’m one of those weird writers who writes too little and always
has to add new scenes (as opposed to the writers who write too much and have to
delete scenes).
I do this! I write lots, throw away half and end up with a really short draft. I get so
upset at all the advice to ruthlessly cut because I’d end up with no manuscript at
all!
I definitely need more index cards to keep up with this series.
Personally, having fallen behind, I like the week gap as it means I have a chance
of catching up – if they were more frequent, it would be overwhelming.
Next Up: Jeremy Duns
February 8th, 2010
Well, so far, so good. It’s been fascinating to read the three approaches so far and to see how everyone
responds, and it’s not about to get any duller.
Jeremy Duns, our next guest star, grew up in Africa and Asia and currently lives in Sweden. His 2009
espionage thriller, FREE AGENT, was published in America by Viking Penguin and in the UK by
Simon & Schuster, neither of which is noted for putting out tripe. And, sure enough, the book’s gotten
a great reception; Publishers Weekly called it a “terrific debut” and likened Duns to the early John
LeCarre, and no less a writer than William Boyd (on my personal list of the five best living novelists)
called it “fascinating and compelling.”
And it’s the first of a trilogy, which implies vast organizational capability. So how’d he do it?
You’ll find out Wednesday night.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 10:52 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
One Response to “Next Up: Jeremy Duns”
1. e.lee Says:
just read the entire ‘Finishing Your Novel’ section.
Frank but timely advice. Talent will only get a writer so far but not for the long
haul.
Plotting vs. Pantsing 4: Jeremy Duns
February 10th, 2010
Jeremy Duns hit the ground running with his first novel. FREE
AGENT. The espionage thriller has been called “terrific,” “wholly engrossing,” “superior,” and
electrifying” by critics and by writers as diverse as William Boyd and Christopher Reich. Duns was
born in 1973 and grew up mainly in Africa and Asia. He read English literature at St Catherine’s
College, Oxford, after which he worked as a journalist. His work has been published by The Times,
The Guardian, The Independent, Mojo and Time Out. FREE AGENT is the first in a trilogy of Cold
War-set spy thrillers featuring Paul Dark. Duns lives in Stockholm, Sweden.
Get there
I’ve written two novels and am now writing my third, and each time it’s been different, but generally
speaking I’m a ‘pantser’, ie I write by the seat of my pants. I usually write a synopsis that takes me
through each chapter, but I don’t go into too much detail and it changes a lot as I go along. Writing the
novel is my outline. I wrote my first book in a more linear way, and got into problems as a result. Now
I start by writing tons of notes, ideas, fragments of scenes, snatches of dialogue, and when I’ve built up
a large body of words, 40,000 or so, the structure starts to solidify.
At this point I tend to lose a lot of material as I realize that some scenes weren’t as exciting plot
developments as I thought they would be, or simply don’t fit with other developments that I prefer.
That can be frustrating, but I console myself with the thought that if I had prepared a very detailed plot
outline in advance I’d have made the same or similar mistakes, but with heavier consequences: I
usually cut material that is still only partially formed, so it’s less of a sacrifice. One of the reasons I
don’t writer very detailed outlines is because I’m worried I’ll change my mind later. Something might
seem perfect right now but in three months I might wake up in the middle of the night with the
realization that it’s completely wrong. Or perhaps not even wrong: perhaps I’ll just be bored of the idea
by then.
I want to write the kind of books I like to read, and they involve suspense. I’m writing a trilogy in the
first person, and my character is a secret agent in trouble: so to a certain extent I also have to be in
trouble. I like twists, but I find they’re often most effective if, like my narrator, I don’t see them
coming. I want to know my protagonist, inside and out, but then to throw him into impossible
situations and see how he gets out of them. I find plotting out too much in advance can suck the
spontaneity and intensity from my writing, and I value both of those features above most others.
That said, I usually have a few plot points or scenes I want to include going in. With my first novel,
Free Agent, I knew before I started writing that it would be set in the Biafran War and told from the
perspective of a double agent. I also knew roughly how it began and ended, and had an idea of what
kind of novel I wanted it to be. I nearly wrote ‘clear idea’, but it wasn’t really clear. It was strong. Just
as you can wake with a very vague or even no memory of the dream you just had, but nevertheless
have a very powerful sense of the mood of it, I had known in my gut what I wanted to write. I can
articulate it now as, roughly, something that had the following elements and tones:
Taut
Lean
Gripping
Spy thriller
Set in the late 60s
Cold War tensions to the fore
In Africa – feel the heat and the culture
Suspenseful action scenes that can match Bourne and Bond
But also character studies that are more like Greene or le Carre
So no silly gadgets or explosions
Dark, gritty and bleak
Conflicted and trapped first-person narrator
Laconic humour laced in
Real Cold War and espionage history integrated and revealed
Real history of this forgotten civil war
Unusual love story/obsession
Along with a few specific plot and character ideas and sense-memories from my childhood in Nigeria, I
carried most of the above with me the whole time I wrote Free Agent – without ever writing them down
as I just have. But when my drafts were nowhere near reaching the above, my instincts pushed me to
make it happen. I felt that as long as I kept writing I would be able to fill in all the gaps and make the
impression I had of the novel a reality.
With my second and third books, I wrote down a lot more about what kind of novels I wanted them to
be before I started writing. But I still wanted to keep something of the feel I was looking for
unarticulated, held back in my subconscious. With the second, Free Country, my thoughts about setting
changed early on, which entailed a lot more research. But in each case I’ve had clear ideas about the
beginning and end, some strong impressions of the tone of the books, of the mood of my protagonist
and what’s at stake for him and those around him.
My methodology changed somewhat between writing my first and second novels: it became less
structured. I wrote Free Agent in the evenings and weekends, handing in new chapters to a writing
group as I went along. I wrote my second as a full-time author in a year. I was naturally worried that it
wouldn’t be as good as my first, which took me seven years to write (albeit with a full-time job and no
external deadline). So I attacked the second in a very different way: I thought a lot and researched a lot,
then worked out a very rough synopsis and started writing, 1,000 words a day, throwing anything and
everything down. It helped that I felt I had succeeded in my goals with Free Agent. Not only had it
been accepted by a publisher, who had then shown faith in me by buying the next two books in the
trilogy, but I felt that I had written the book I had wanted to. So I had a lot more faith in myself that I
would get where I wanted, eventually. This helped when I became blocked or encountered problems.
Not having a very detailed outline means you will encounter problems, but I don’t think you can
necessarily work your way out of them with outlines. At least, I don’t think I can. I think in drafting a
novel it may be that there comes a point where structure, character and plot are almost irrelevant, or
rather that they are no longer concrete or tangible to the writer. You can prepare very carefully and
research and plot everything out, but at some point your instinct comes into play. For want of a better
word, you feel the book. You realise what it needs, what it’s missing, and you set to work giving it that.
You’re not really thinking about why a certain idea or scene or even line will make sense. You just feel
that it will. Sometimes I can be blocked for weeks, and wish I had been more organized at the outset
and had done a ‘proper’ outline of the book, scene by scene. But then I can make enormous strides in
minutes, changing the book with
very radical decisions that months earlier I would have been terrified of making, but which now,
somehow, I now know will work. This isn’t something you can put on index cards. It’s about living the
book, with all its problems and setbacks. Index cards and detailed outlining work fantastically well for
some writers, but they’re not for me, and there’s no shame in it. All writers are working around a group
of ideas until they manage to craft a piece they are proud of and prepared to send out into the world – it
doesn’t really matter how we get there, as long as we do.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 4:57 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
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21 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 4: Jeremy Duns”
Hi Jeremy!
I knew you’d be a pantser! Although I’m not sure why, since it all looks the same
in the end, if done well.
Isn’t it nice to reach the stage where you trust your own process, for better or
worse? It isn’t any easier, mind you, but I have more of a belief that I’ll get
through it. My husband runs Ironmen races and I think it’s like that: the race is
still very hard, but once you’ve done a few you’re confident you will probably
finish (although you don’t always).
(my captcha was cited matured, which does some up the explaining of process and
its development nicely)
Thanks for sharing your process with us, Jeremy. I can’t wait to read your work! I
admire writers who can explain their creative process in a lucid and coherent
manner. My own process resembles laundry (dump stuff into the machine, add
goop, press some buttons and hope a red sock didn’t sneak in…and when I
discover the darn red sock amongst a load of pinks…I cry and rail and rage and
rewrite to work it in.
3. Vincent Eaton Says:
Can’t recall the author, another pantser, who said, in writing his fiction, “If I don’t
surprise myself, how can I expect to surprise the reader?” Yet Nabokov, a very
non-pantser, said, “All my characters a gallery slaves.” Which, when I read him
now, I have lots of nice images and noticing of things, but no surprises. And these
days I go to art (or entertainment) to be surprised.
4. Andy Duggan Says:
I want to have my cake and eat it with the novel I’m working on. Want to be
surprised by unexpected developments, but want to feel completely in control as
well. ‘Pantsing’ – great word! Saw a Harold Pinter talk the other night – said he
usually started stories with nameless charcaters A and B, they have an exchange
and then his job as a storyteller is to make sense of that exchange.
Jeremy — I love the idea of listing the qualities you want the book to embody.
I’ve learned from every one of these pieces, and it’s difficult for me to imagine
that most writers won’t feel the same way. And the idea of “feeling” the book
expresses exactly the sensation I have (rarely, I’m afraid) when I know the writing
is in the zone. I’ve thought of it in musical terms — as though I’d been singing
out of tune and now had found the key — but feeling it is better because feeling
encompasses all the components of a novel. If character, story, setting, structure,
narrative, language, etc. don’t add up to a feeling in the reader, we’ve failed.
And Andy, I love the Pinter quote. That’s a great description of a certain kind of
creative process.
Vincent, in line with the Nabokov remark,Raymond Chandler said that the best
way to keep the reader from knowing whodunnit was for the writer not to know,
either.
Had some problems with captcha! Thanks for the comments, everyone. Vincent, I
can never remember who that quote is from but I nearly included it in the piece
because it is how I feel. No surprise in the author, no surprise in the reader.
Rebecca, how did you guess?
Cynthia, I’m not too far away from that, but I try not to dwell on the rage. In fact,
I try as much as I can to hold all my anxieties about the book at bay and plough on
regardless, feeling my way. It’s not always easy to do, but I found with my first
novel that too much fretting or looking back was killing the book. So I try to stop
myself from doing that until I get to the end of it. Then I have a pretty bad spy
thriller. So I read it again a hundred times and make it, hopefully, a decent one.
Thanks very much for having me, Tim! I’ve also learned a lot from the
contributions.
Wow. What a beautifully written blog, Jeremy. I’m a plotter, but you’re enticing
me to go the other way. I love how you define the mood and tone of your book
before you write it…I’m in that process right now, as I toy with ideas for my third
book, which will be a standalone. I think I’m going to use your words as a guide.
However, I still have to write a proposal and a few chapters to get the next deal.
How do you balance your panster style with the required eight-page book
proposal?
I can’t wait to read “Free Agent.”
That’s extremely kind of you to say, Stephen.
I’ve never done an eight-page book proposal, so perhaps when I have to I’ll have
to rethink! I sold the trilogy on the basis of the first book and half-page synopses
of the second and third. And those weren’t all that accurate, either.
way. It’s like some people start with a very strong structure and then play around
with it; others play around until they create that structure. Those are the two
extremes, but between them there’s a lot of blurring. I sometimes plot scenes very
meticulously in my head, for instance.
Anyway, thanks very much for your comments.
I do agree that we all come to the same place eventually. I do feel more secure
with a map, but maybe that’s because I haven’t come to fully trust my inner storyteller. When I look at the most effective, visually stimulating scenes in Boulevard
I realize that these were the ones where I was “pantsing.”
I printed out your blog yesterday and, last night, my wife and I read it over again
and thought about ways to apply it to my process. So, it’s been a good tool for me.
This, being my third book and the first standalone since my debut, is giving me
the opportunity to grow. I want to allow my style to evolve. It can be anything,
which is both exciting and frightening. I’m even considering writing it in the
Present Tense — the way Tim does. By the way – I’ve been meaning to ask Tim
about that…why do you write in the Present Tense? Does it come from writing
screenplays, which are always in the present, or is it a nod to the Thai language,
which, as your latest book informs, has no Past Tense?
Thanks again for your post, Jeremy, it’s been extremely helpful.
Stephen, I think BOULEVARD reads as though it was burned into the page, one
line at a time. The mechanics are invisible, as they should be, and the characters
completely drive the story. Your approach obviously works great for you.
What I like best about this thread is that I’m learning not only from the posts but
also from the comments. It’s having a sort of aerating effect on my own process,
which at the moment is being tested by writing not one but two proposals.
Stephen, when I sat down to write the first Bangkok book (one that I never
submitted to anyone — it was just to explore the landscape and characters) it just
arrived in the present tense. I realized when I read it over that I liked it for two
reasons. First is that past tense carries with it a sort of assumption that somebody
survived to write things down, and second was that action scenes and emotional
confrontations seem more immediate in the present tense.
You’re right, it’s filmic, but that hadn’t actually occurred to me.
11.Jeremy Duns Says:
I’m glad it helped, Stephen – it’s helped me a little as well, because I think I can
see more clearly now why I do it this way, and how to adapt to it.
I’m interested that you feel you haven’t come to fully trust your inner story-teller.
In your post, my mind sort of jumped when you said you got into a mess, and so
you sat down and wrote a treatment. I don’t have an inner story-teller that can do
that. Short synopses, sure. But detailed scene-by-scene stuff? I don’t think I can
do it. I’d just be staring a the walls going crazy, not having a clue where to take
the story. I find plotting very hard work indeed, and can’t seem to reach the part of
my brain to think it all through very logically in the kind of bite sizes a detailed
treatment would require. So that’s the part of my inner story-teller I just can’t
access. I plunge in, and I also get into a mess, as you did. But it’s in the digging
myself out of the mess/block/frustration that I eventually (hopefully) manage to
see the way through.
But perhaps it is just the order in which we do certain tasks, and there’s not *that*
much difference in the end between the two. To have a satisfying finished novel,
you probably have to have both plotted and pantsed at certain stages.
12.Sylvia Says:
Now I start by writing tons of notes, ideas, fragments of scenes, snatches of
dialogue, and when I’ve built up a large body of words, 40,000 or so, the
structure starts to solidify.
That’s interesting. I have a premise that I don’t have time to work on (yet) so I’ve
got a file where I’m just writing bits in as I think of them, so that they are there for
me later. It’s about 4k words now and I wondered if I was really going to regret it
I wrote down a lot more about what kind of novels I wanted them to be before I
started writing.
This is really fitting for me, right now. I’ve been struggling with focus and sitting
down to get a handle on what I want my book to be, in a general sense, strikes me
as what I’ve been missing.
One thing I really don’t understand:
if you are writing without an outline, how can you hand over chapters as you go
without lots of “actually, when you read this chapter, I need you to forget that
John killed the hedgehog in Chapter 7, because I’ve realised that hasn’t happened
yet.”
I just can’t imagine anyone making sense of my plot before *I* know the whole
story. I’m quite happy with the first draft of my novel being a crazily extensive
outline (or zero draft, as I recently heard it referred to) but I can’t see how anyone
could make any sense of it. Although maybe having that 40k of notes is what
makes the difference?
13.Jeremy Says:
Hi Sylvia,
Do you mean handing stuff to a writing group? I’m not in one anymore, and it’s
partly for the reason you bring up – it now strikes me as absurd to ask people to
comment meaningfully on my work before I’ve even written a proper draft. Once
I have a more or less coherent draft, I do show it to people, but not in a group like
that, and certainly not chapter by chapter.
With my first novel, Free Agent, I did hand chapters to a writers’ group. As I
wrote in my post, I was much more linear in my approach with that book, but it
did get me intro trouble, because I did indeed have to tell people to disregard
earlier occurrences. But because of the gap between everyone submitting work,
which was six weeks I think, by the time I was submitting Chapter 18, people had
usually long forgotten the contradiction in the scene in Chapter 9 anyway – they
had pretty much forgotten Chapter 9 in its entirety, and so I also had to explain
backstory sometimes. It became much more about people commenting on each
chapter as though it were a self-contained story, and in fact I started to write it in
that way, so that in each chapter my protagonist had a goal for just that chapter,
and he might make it or not.
There were disadvantages to being in a group that mean I won’t do it again, but at
that point it helped my writing in other ways. One was that I met published writers
for the first time, and realized they weren’t mythical creatures – and that it wasn’t
silly to think there was a chance I could join them. The other, perhaps more
important, was the stuff that Tim has devoted a portion of this excellent site to,
namely finishing the novel. Having a deadline to submit chapters, and knowing
that a group of people I respected would be irritated if I didn’t make it, was a great
incentive for simply writing the stuff. So I sometimes sat in the sessions listening
to criticisms of my submission and feeling they were valid, but not really
minding: much more importantly, I had a working skeleton of another chapter. I’m
not sure I would ever have completed a novel if I hadn’t been in a writers’ group.
But… I’m not sure I’d complete another one if I did it again!
Free Agent is working its way to the top of my TBR pile, and I’m eager to read it.
You may be a pantser, but you’re a lot more organized and have a lot more
material when you begin than I do.
15.Jeremy Says:
Thanks, Bill – I hope you enjoy it. I’m a mix of organized and chaotic, I think.
Perhaps you have to be to write novels.
16.Sylvia Says:
Right, that makes sense. Thank you!
I’m not sure I would ever have completed a novel if I hadn’t been in a writers’
group. But… I’m not sure I’d complete another one if I did it again!
17.Jeff Abbott Says:
I will so be pointing people to this blog when I get asked about outlining vs not
outlining, these are great articles. I was lucky enough to read Free Agent before it
came out and very much enjoyed it, and was interested in read about Jeremy’s
process.
Jeremy, thanks for the compliment about the site. Writing groups work, I think,
mainly because they require actual writing. Same with writing classes. I’d hate to
think anyone who was in any of my classes lived or died by anything I said to
them, but for ten weeks they had to produce something new every week, and lots
of them actually managed to finish a book. (In fact, one of them had her first
novel published on the same day as one of mine.)
Sylvia, for what it’s worth, I think that kind of bucket file, into which you throw
everything you think of about a new project is invaluable, and I think it should
also be used for the kind of list of attributes Jeremy identified for FREE AGENT.
That was a great insight for me.
Jeff, glad you’re liking the conversation. For those of you who haven’t read Jeff
Abbott, what are you waiting for? TRUST ME, CUT AND RUN, A KISS GONE
BAD, the Jordan Poteet books — Jeff’s great.
Coming up this Wednesday, we’ll have the extraordinary Gar Anthony Haywood.
You won’t want to miss him, and you really NEED to buy his newest book,
CEMETERY ROAD.
19.Jeremy Says:
Thanks very much, Jeff (and thanks again for giving me that killer quote for Free
Agent before it was published).
And thank you for having me, Tim! It’s been a pleasure, and very interesting. I’m
looking forward to reading Gar’s contribution on Wednesday.
Jeremy – thanks for being here! I hope to meet you soon.
21.Beth Terrell Says:
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:19 am
Jeremy,
I enjoyed reading about your process. One thing I’ve been fascinated by is how
self-aware everyone in this series has been about his or her creative process. I feel
like I’m a plotter, but there are so many things in the panster posts that strike a
chord.
I think you nailed it when you said a successful book is written with a blend of
pantsing and plotting.
I especially liked the way you listed the traits you wanted the book to have,
including more abstract elements like the tone and feel of the book.
Next Up: Gar Anthony Haywood
February 15th, 2010
Coming Wednesday, one of my favorite American thriller/mystery writers, Gar Anthony Haywood,
will reveal his secrets.
People talk all the time about someone being “a writer’s writer,” but Gar really is. His new book alone,
CEMETERY ROAD, was praised by Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Laura Lippman, Lee Child, and
George Pelecanos. Not only are all of those people remarkable writers, but they’re also very, very good
writers. And they’re very different writers, so the praise means something extra.
And if you haven’t read CEMETERY ROAD, I really think you should look again at how you budget
your time.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 1:09 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
Plotting vs. Pantsing 5: Gar Anthony Haywood
February 16th, 2010
Gar Anthony Haywood is, for my money, one of the best. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s
Booklist in their starred review of his absolutely killer new novel, CEMETERY ROAD: “It’s been too
long between books for a writer who has always belonged in the upper echelon of American crime
fiction.” No argument from me. Haywood’s six Aaron Gunner novels (the first, FEAR OF THE
DARK, won the Mystery Writers of America’s Shamus Award for Best First Novel, and Booklist named
the sixth, ALL THE GOOD ONES ARE DEAD, as one of the year’s ten best mystery novels) are gritty
thrillers that read like they’ve been written with flint. His two much (much) lighter Lou and Dottie
Loudermilk mysteries make “empty nest syndrome” an active verb as the Loudermilks push their
Airstream trailer to the limit to stay in front of their five pestiferous kids. He also wrote two standalone
thrillers as Ray Shannon. Along the way, he won an Anthony Award and write for television. And until
now, I’ve had no idea how he did it.
One of the most amazing things about becoming a published author is how instantaneously you
transition in the eyes of some from know-nothing wannabe to Professional Literary Figure. One minute
you’re reading Lawrence Block, wondering if you’ll ever live long enough to write a sentence as well
as he writes an entire book, and the next you’re trading emails with the man and calling him “Larry.”
That check somebody made out in your name for the honor of publishing your next novel or short story
has suddenly made your opinions about the act of writing worth paying attention to, even though
they’re the same opinions you had the day before, when no one would have given a rat’s rear end about
what you have to say on that or any other subject.
So it is that at times like this, when I’ve been asked to write something smart and pithy on the “creative
process” as if I’m some kind of expert, I agree to do so with some degree of trepidation, because I’m
still not sure—even eleven published novels in—that I have any real wisdom to impart. I know what
the creative process is like for me; that’s about it If a hundred aspiring authors followed my method of
writing to the letter, like the proverbial “infinite number of monkeys” in a room full of typewriters and
bond paper, eventually one of them would write a salable manuscript and become a professional author.
But that wouldn’t be my method proving its worth—that would just be the law of averages doing its
thing.
Still. Tim’s asked me to write this guest blog and he’s a relatively smart man, so what the hell—here
goes.
Where I Get My Ideas
Every published writer I know has at least one snide and thoroughly useless answer to this question
because we hear it so often it’s impossible to take seriously anymore. It’s like asking a composer where
he finds all those great melodies. But it’s a fair question to ask, obvious or no; an idea is where all
creative endeavors begin, so why wouldn’t any investigation into the process start there?
Most people, I think, ask the question hoping to find out where writers look for inspiration;
newspapers, movies, craigslist personals? But some are really asking another question altogether,
which is: How in God’s name do we find the needle of a great story idea in the mountainous haystack
of sight and sound that is everyday experience?
And my answer to that question is, “We just do.”
It’s like this:
A Non-Writer and a Writer are walking down the street. Both take note of a mismatched pair of
running shoes dangling from their bound laces over the back of a vacant bus bench.
The Non-Writer thinks:
“Hmm. That’s funny. I wonder what that’s about?”
The writer thinks:
“An all-clear sign left by one criminal conspirator for another.”
“A poor man training for his last marathon before cancer takes his life has just boarded a bus and left
his only pair of running shoes behind.”
“A grifter’s wife is throwing his worthless ass out again, tossing his clothes out a window of their
fourth-floor apartment, starting with shoes she’s been careful to tie up in mismatched pairs just to twist
the knife.”
You see? And none of this is particularly deliberate. It just happens. It’s how our minds work. We see or
read something that piques our curiosity and runaway extrapolation occurs. Mind you, it isn’t always
great extrapolation (as the three examples above probably indicate), but every now and then, something
genuinely wonderful results from it.
So where do I get my ideas? Everywhere. The thing is, they’re only “ideas” because, as a writer, I’m
able to perceive them as such; what the Non-Writer dismisses as mere oddities I latch onto as seedlings
that could grow stories in a hundred different directions.
Go figure.
My Writing Process
Once I have an idea that so excites me I can’t do anything but develop it into a novel, I usually just
jump in, sans outline, and let the writing take me where it will. Characters and plot lines fall naturally
into place as I go, everything in perfect order…until I’m inevitably forced to stop, step away from the
laptop, and admit that I’ll never escape the impenetrable gulag I’ve imprisoned myself in if I don’t
draw myself a little map, showing the way out. So I do.
This last part can be fun, but it generally isn’t. In fact, I’d compare it to putting a puzzle together
without the aid of the picture on the box. Patience and a lot of trial and error are most definitely
required.
And there you have it. Gar Anthony Haywood’s unique take on the creative process. I could go on and
on describing it, laying it all out for you like the blueprints to the Kingdom of Heaven, but Tim’s not
paying me a dime for this post and there might be a bestselling e-book in the material somewhere down
the line. So I’ll just sign off for now and leave you wanting more.
I believe that’s the “Dan Brown” version of the creative process.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 11:11 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
14 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 5: Gar Anthony Haywood”
Great stuff, Gar. I look forward to that e-book.
2. Dana King Says:
That’s as good an answer as I’ve read for “Where do you get your ideas?” Even
the most innocuous actions can have sinister or strange causes if we think about it
a bit. The stories I like best aren’t the thrillers that grab you by the throat on page
One, but those that grow of out of things that seem like no big deal at the time.
“I’d compare it to putting a puzzle together without the aid of the picture on the
box.” Exactly!
I liked it too, Gar. Thanks.
4. Jeremy Says:
Excellent – a man after my own heart. I love the description of drawing yourself a
little map to get out of the prison you’ve written yourself into.
I haven’t been asked where I get my ideas yet, but I already have my snarky
answer prepared. ‘In the shower.’
Gar, great to meet you at last, though I’m still waiting to see you in person. Which
I’ll do at Left Coast Crime.
I’m lost in the moment you described, looking around at my environment for
those little tid-bits of visual information that might lead to the idea that might lead
to the theme of my next novel. Even driving on the way to work today I wrote a
sentence in my head that would be a very fine first sentence for a novel, and that
might be the thing that creates the entire thing. It wasn’t where I thought I was
going, but it felt right and it might be the catalyst that starts the process. Then
again, maybe it won’t hold up when I revisit it tomorrow. Or, maybe I’ll spend the
next year writing a book based on the momentum of that first sentence, and then
change the sentence before it goes to the copyeditor. Who knows.
Thanks for your post. It got me thinking.
6. Gar Says:
Thanks, Bill.
Dana, I actually love it when a book grabs me by the throat on Page One. But
those “slow burners” can sometimes be even more suspenseful, if they give you
just enough on Page One to know that something wicked this way comes (if you’ll
just keep reading).
You’re welcome, Rachel.
Jeremy, haven’t gotten a usable idea in the shower yet. But the bath…
Stephen, I look forward to hooking up at LCC. Your Murderati posts are great
reads. And yeah, it’s a killer searching high and low for the stuff we gather to
ultimately make a novel out of. The killer for me is when I have the perfect
character to center a book around…but I don’t have the story to tell about him!
Arghh!
7. Usman Says:
Hi Gar, thanks for the advice.
My question : what do you do when the story gets stalled, and yet the bones are
rattling their crazy heads off in your brain.
Captcha: wooden fumbler.
Apt, since I’m stalled.
Gar and Stephen,
Glad to see that you guys will be at Left Coast Crime. It’s always nice to finally
9. Sharai Says:
Tim, I love this series, thanks so much to all the great authors for participating.
Every one of them have been new to me and I look forward to reading them. I
really liked the way Mr. Anthony used the qualifier ‘relatively’!
February 21st, 2010 at 9:56 am
Thanks, Gar — I’ve read all your books except the two Ray Shannons (I didn’t
know he was you) and I wouldn’t have bet a nickel either way on on which
approach you took to plotting. Your stories have two qualities I try to imitate,
which is that while I’m reading them I have no idea what’s coming, but afterwards
it all feels inevitable, as though each turning point were the only possible
development.
And I should point out that I DID pay Gar, and I have the canceled check for
$3.75 to prove it. I want a piece of that e-book.
Sharai, glad to hear from you and happy you’re liking the series. I love it, too, and
I don’t even have to do any work.
Usman, just write it wrong. You’ll have gotten past one bad way to do it, and
something else will present itself. Gar may come in with completely conflicting
advice, but that’s what I do. Oh, and I think about it in the shower.
My captcha is WAKE NOT. Ummmmm . . . .
11.Gar Says:
February 21st, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Usman:
I find that if a story get stalled for too long, it’s probably for a reason, Something’s
broke, and I’m just spinning my wheels unless I bite the bullet and go back and
fix it. Tim’s right that you can push ahead anyway, and sometimes that works, but
in my experience, if I can’t find a comfortable way out of the rut I’m in, it’s
because I took a wrong turn somewhere to get there and a little backtracking is,
much to my regret, necessary.
Rachel:
I very much look forward to meeting you at LCC, as well. Please don’t let the
convention come and go without stopping me to say hello.
Thanks for all the kinds words, Tim. Making your plot turns seem inevitable is
always the goal, because that means they make perfect sense. It’s a tough trick to
pull off, though. It’s also one of the ways we get a big kick out of our own
writing, when a twist or turn we didn’t see coming suddenly dawns upon us and
we realize that it makes all that’s gone before more logical and credible than ever.
12.Usman Says:
Thanks Gar and Tim,
Showers…I take them power style, quickies. The toilet seat does come to mind.
Tim, I leave for Chiang Mai tonight. Are you by any chance in the neighborhood?
Would love to meet you. I sent you an email about my visit, didn’t get a reply.
Hence the mention here.
Usman, I never got that e-mail or I would have told you that I’m staying in the US
for the foreseeable future because of a project here.
Don’t know when/whether I’ll be in Asia this year — if not, it’ll be the first year
since 1981.
Sorry to have missed you.
March 3rd, 2010 at 8:23 pm
Gar, I love your description of where ideas come from. That’s exactly the way it
works. My husband and I went to the Aquarium Restaurant, and of course, the
first thing that popped into my mind was, “What if the person who takes care of
the aquarium came in one morning and found a body floating in it, half-eaten by
sharks?”
I suspect every mystery writer who ever went into that restaurant had the same
thought.
Thanks for the insights.
Next Up: Helen Simonson
February 23rd, 2010
Helen Simonson is currently living through the most exciting week in a writer’s life. Her first novel,
MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND, will be published — by Random House, no less — on March
2, and it’s already number 142 at Amazon (as of this very minute), which is absolutely phenomenal.
The reviews have also been phenomenal. It’s gotten stars everywhere and was the weekly pick at
Publisher’s Weekly, which wrote, among other things, “The author’s dense, descriptive prose wraps
around the reader like a comforting cloak, eventually taking on true page-turner urgency . . .” Library
Journal called the book, “”irresistibly delightful, thoughtful, and utterly charming and surprising.”
I’m also really, really happy to say that Helen turned to some of the stuff in the FINISH YOUR
NOVEL section of this site when she needed a little push. So I feel like I actually wrote the book
although Helen did all the work. And her take on the plotting challenge will knock you out. You can
read it here tomorrow.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 4:39 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
One Response to “Next Up: Helen Simonson”
Is it tomorrow yet?
(It’s 11:55 pm here. Isn’t that close enough?)
captcha: of gingrich
Hmmmm….Could that be a category on Jeopardy?
Plotting vs. Pantsing 6: Helen Simonson
February 24th, 2010
Helen Simonson’s first novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, will be published by Random House on
March 2 and is already attracting the kind of attention that usually attends the publication of a breakout
book — great reviews in the trade, a nod from Janer Maslin in the New York Times, and Amazon
numbers in the lowest of the low three digits, even before release.
Did I say this is a first novel? Well, it is. Helen Simonson was born in England and spent her teenage
years in a small village in East Sussex. A graduate of the London School of Economics with an MFA
from Stony Brook Southampton, she is a former travel advertising executive who has lived in America
for the last two decades. A longtime resident of Brooklyn, she now lives with her husband and two sons
in the Washington, D.C. area. And a few years ago she sat down to write a novel, and here it is, and I
can’t wait to read it.
Plot or Panic?
No, I don’t outline. I am so suspicious of structure that I don’t have a regular grocery shopping day, or
a grocery list, and our family laundry tends to pile up until everyone is out of underwear at eleven pm
on a Sunday night. I always viewed ideas of structure and time management as some kind of
government propaganda designed to keep the middle classes ‘living lives of quiet desperation.” I
always wanted to be a free spirit. I wanted to be Auntie Mame, and Pippi Longstocking; and to be like
the man in that old American Express commercial – at the airport with just a credit card in his shirt
pocket.
Of course, I am not a free spirit. I am merely a disorganized mom who is always ten minutes behind her
own life. There are always appointments I drop or double-book; missing homework I should have
monitored; dinners I forget to make. Once, when we lived in New York and had a blackout, the local
diner sent a man on a bicycle to check up on my well-being because I hadn’t ordered food in two days.
This is a long way of saying that I was probably never destined to be a writer who outlines or plots
before beginning a story.
My writing style can be best described as procrastination plus panic. It took me five years to write my
debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, and it might have taken a lot longer, had the crashing
economy not made it vital to finish my MFA thesis and go find a ‘real’ job. I will draw a gauzy veil
over the final six weeks of terror in which self-doubt appeared as a very hairy little goblin woman who
sat on my left shoulder and screamed abuse in my ear (‘you suck’ being her mildest incantation) and
my world shrank to the three gray walls of a fabric cubicle and the glow of a laptop screen where Tim’s
‘Finish Your Novel’ pages would remind me that only the butt in the chair and the tapping fingers on
the keyboard could save me.
Sometimes I really like the writing. What I like is the completely blank mind that comes …after I have
said aloud the awkward meaning of what I am trying to say, only ungrammatical…and just before the
perfect phrase pops up; syntactically shiny and glowing with freshness. Those moments make me get
up from my office chair, numb-bottomed in my jeans, and do a little jig of joy. I also like the thrill of
pages fresh and hot from the printer, with numbers in the footer and my name on the top left; Helen
Simonson. It’s the name on the page that makes most of us write, isn’t it? It’s our own ‘Kilroy was
here’ graffiti which we attempt to scrawl across the world in non-fading ink. I have written only one
novel so far and I am horrified to report that it began with the slightest of ideas. I had a moment of
clarity in which I decided to write something for myself – an afternoon treat with no calories, just for
Helen – and my mind immediately produced a small brick house in the country and an older man,
wearing his dead wife’s housecoat, answering the door to a stranger. I believe this moment of authentic
self – in which I refused to care what others would think of me – was important to me and will be to
you. We’d all like to be Tolstoy or Chekov, or Alice Munro, and sometimes we want that so badly that
we reject our own voice – the one with the tendency to humor and a hokey desire for English cottages.
However, at best we can expect to produce somewhat competent pastiches. To write something unique,
I now believe, we can only go with the voice we have and hope that it is enough. When I wrote for
myself, something sprang to life that I had not been able to create before. Give it a try.
Once I had a few lines, I just tried to keep going. Writing is like making one of those awful mosaic
tabletops with broken plates and grout. Small shards of ideas, experience and images seemed to funnel
from my head into my fingertips. I wrote linear, chapter by chapter; I also made visual story webs with
fat markers on large sketchpads, as if I were in middle school. What I refused to do is to jump around
and write all over the place, hoping to fit it together later. Many people like this method but I found it
too scary.
I don’t believe it matters whether we write in a writing studio or a park bench and no one really needs a
laptop newer than five years old (it’s just word processing). What we all need is just to pile up pages. I
find the biggest problem in piling up the pages is headspace. If I so much as look at email, consider the
dirty dishes in the kitchen, sneak into the refrigerator or fight with a telephone marketer, my head fills
with noise and my writing is over for the day. I try to write in the mornings and to set aside anything
else that pops into my head (call the plumber, pay the mortgage, am I picking up a kid or is he going to
Crew?) by writing it in a daily planner under the heading ‘call after 1pm’.
I think that any kind of space and support you can build around your writing will help it survive. A set
writing time, a writing class, a weekly editing group, a brief writing window carved out lunchtime at
your ‘real’ job– all these can be useful. As my pages piled up, I found that they provided a foundation
of support under the idea that I could be a writer. For those paying attention, this might seem, at first
glance, to be complete acquiescence to the importance of having structure in my life. Sad, isn’t it?
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12 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 6: Helen Simonson”
1. Larissa Says:
I was actually rather amused at the “finding support for your writing” line given
the distaste for structure. (c: But I agree-on both points. I keep working towards
finding that great zen where everything flows around all free and lovely and yet
still manages to…well..work.
Writing for oneself is a beautiful idea. I think I’m afraid that I am going to sit
down and there’s not going to be any voice there at all waiting to get out. It’s not
true but the idea of being greeted by a vapid silence is pretty tough to handle.
Wonderful piece. I have to find time to sit down and read the ones I’ve missed…
I was in NOLA for Mardi Gras…:-D
I can’t wait to read your book, Ms. Simonson. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your
process description as it so most closely resembles my own. To date, I haven’t
faced the dreaded silence, but I do struggle with the incessant buzz of thought
fragments, voices, bits of description, dust, lint and cat hair that swirl around my
head.
When I feeling too overwhelmed by the buzz to do any “real” writing, I can trick
myself into just scribbling in my notebook/journal. Then, when I’m not looking, I
sneak over to the keyboard and start “actual” writing.
My goblin is named Mrs. Bostwick, in honor of my fourth grade teacher. As I
poke at the keys I can hear her tsk, tsk, tsking as she shakes her head. Somedays I
can hardly bring myself to print out what I’ve written so I tell myself that she
can’t comment/edit until I print it out for her to read.
And I haven’t been bold enough to actually put my name in the header of my
pages. What a concept!
Thanks for the glimpse into your writing routine!
captcha: inhaled and
ps to Tim: This installment was well worth waiting for! Thanks…
Helen,
First let me say that I love the cover of your book.
And, congratulations on having finished it, and having it published, and for all the
excitement that has already been generated by it.
I couldn’t agree with you more, concerning the emphasis on writing for oneself.
I’ve only just finished my second novel, and when I wrote that first one I had the
exact same attitude as you – I wrote for myself. I didn’t care about being liked, or
about being popular. I just wanted to write the best book I could, and something
so dark and intense that only a small niche gropu might gravitate towards it. I
believe it has accrued a larger audience than I had expected because it came from
my heart, because I wasn’t thinking about trying to accumulate readers.
I wonder how you will approach your next book. Do you have one in the works?
Are you under contract? Will your process change if you have one year to write
your second book, after you spent five years on your debut? Will the schedule
require that you become more of a plotter than a panster?
And I also agree that there’s only so much space in my head, and I want to fill it
with writing. When the errands get in the way, the writing suffers.
I can’t wait to read Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand!
4. Julie Lomoe Says:
What a wonderful description of the writing process. Your personal voice comes
through vividly and makes me want to read your novel. Even better, your
description inspires me to buckle down to my own writing.
I heartily agree about the set writing time. Setting a time for my writing was about
the only thing I was organized enough to do. But then the time was more or less
forced on my because I had a day job. The only times left for writing were early
morning (no way was I getting up at 5:00 to write) or in the evening. So 7:00 P.
M. became my starting time.
6. Sylvia Says:
This is the strongest argument for “trust your voice” that I’ve seen in a long time.
Still, I’m amazed that you were so strict about writing linearly without having a
clear view of the line!
7. Helen Simonson Says:
Dear Friends of Tim,
Thank you so much for the illuminating comments. I’m immediately planning on
naming my goblin! I suggest that everyone start naming, titling and making cover
pages for what they write. If you wait for some outside force to name you a real
writer – well the wait is long and the way is cold! I hope my second novel will
move faster because I have less excuse to think no one will care. However, it will
take how long it takes – I have no intention of trying to plot an outline just to
make it go faster. I may get an office space outside of my home (that home office
is just way too near the refrigerator). This is the most exciting week of my life but
I can’t tell you how exciting it was to be able to write to Tim H. last April to tell
him my book had sold. Regards, Helen S.
8. Sphinx Ink Says:
I am really enjoying this series, Tim (and guest writers). I especially like Helen’s
essay, because her “method” is most like mine! Helen, much success to your
book, and I will look for it.
Hi, everybody –
I knew you’d like Helen. During my occasional correspondence with her, it was
clear to me that she had a real voice: clear, warm, humorous, sane, and reassuring.
Exactly the qualities you want in a writer who’s ultimately going to sandbag you.
Like all of you, I can’t wait to read MAJOR PETTIGREW. And like Stephen (and
my wife), I love the jacket. Helen, what was your first reaction to it? Mine is
almost always despair, followed by gradual acceptance. Once in a while (the new
one, THE QUEEN OF PATPONG,for example) it’s startled joy.
Sphinxy, thanks. I’m enjoying the series, too. We got a great lineup of writers.
Riss, I don’t think you have to dread the silence — you’ve got too much energy
and insight. And anyway, you can write about the silence.
Cynthia, I agree that naming the goblin is a great idea. Give it a name that irritates
it so you can diminish it jsut by saying its name. Amazing, isn’t it, how many of
us carry scars on our creativity from bad elementary-school teachers? I also have
to thank one who encouraged me in fifth grade and without whom I might never
have written.
More to come, everyone.
10.sharai Says:
Wow! I too love the cover and can’t wait to read the book! Just as Tim has
inspired me to recently start writing for myself, Ms. Simonson has me all excited
about writing more and better for myself. Thanks again for all these great ideas!
March 12th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Helen, this is a lovely description of the creative process. I can hardly wait to read
your book, as that image of the older man answering the door in his dead wife’s
housecoat immediately captured me.
captcha: was quailing
A fine description of victory over fear.
12.Helen Simonson » Blog Archive » Read about my writing process on Tim
Hallinan’s website Says:
[...] Tim Hallinan asked me to write a guest blog for his series on creative writing
process. Tim maintains a website full of useful advice for [...]
Next Up: Leighton Gage
March 3rd, 2010
Brazil, coming up. Leighton Gage is the massively talented author of the Chief Inspector Mario Silva
mysteries, the most recent of which, DYING GASP, was just praised by Hallie Ephron in the Boston
Globe as “. . . compelling writing” rich in “characters that seethe on the page.” I’ve read the first two,
BURIED STRANGERS and BLOOD OF THE WICKED, and I more than concur — Leighton is a
writer’s writer.
He’s also my colleague at a terrific site, murderiseverywhere.com, where six far-flung crime writers
(Brazil, England, Iceland, France, South Africa, and Thailand) post whatever is on their minds. Leight
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One Response to “Next Up: Leighton Gage”
1. karenfrommentor Says:
March 3rd, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Off to visit murderiseverywhere.com. Thanks for the heads up!
Plotting vs. Pantsing 7: Leighton Gage
March 3rd, 2010
Leighton Gage lives in Brazil and writes crime novels set in that country. That’s all he put in his bio,
but I’ll go all editorial here and tell you he’s really good and that his books feature an absolutely great
Inspector named Mario Silva and they’re published by Soho Press, which is itself a kind of
endorsement. Go to Amazon and check out Blood of the Wicked, Buried Strangers, and Dying Gasp.
You can get more information about Leighton and his books at http://www.leightongage.com
Q, The world is divided (roughly) between pantsers, who make it up as they go along, and plotters,
who plot, or even outline, in advance. Where do you fall on that spectrum?
A: I fall all over it. It’s a consequence of stumbling. And what I generally stumble over is first drafts.
My first novel (deservedly unpublished) was created without forethought to plot and without any kind
of an outline. That was back in my who needs a freakin’ outline stage.
Uh, maybe I did. The only good thing about that book was the title. (Amazon Snow. Catchy, huh?)
Well, hell, I thought it was catchy.
The second book ultimately became Blood of the Wicked. Why “ultimately”? Because, again, I didn’t
do any plotting, I didn’t outline, and the first draft wound-up being one long outline. As an outline, it
was pretty good. As a book, it sucked.
Check out this speech from Churchill, the one he gave on the occasion of his very first entrance into the
House of Commons as Britain’s new Prime Minister on May 13, 1940.
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/churchill.htm
“Blood, toil, tears and sweat,” the man said. What an inspiration! I already had the blood. It was in the
title, and there were gallons more between the pages. All I had to do, I figured, was to add the toil, tears
and sweat. So I toiled. And toiled. And used up lots of handkerchiefs and cans of deodorant spray.
Revision followed revision, rewrite followed rewrite. At last it was good enough to publish, was
published and, mirabile dictu, got a favorable mention in the New York Times.
The experience taught me two things, one of them about publicity, the other about writing:
1.Not plotting, or outlining, can snag you a mention in the New York Times.
2.Not plotting or outlining, can waste you a hell of a lot of time.
Confusing, huh? Well, crap, it was for me too.
Confession time: I am, by nature, lazy and loath to put any more effort into anything than I absolutely
have to.
Fact: I am a perfectionist; averse to turning in any manuscript that isn’t as good as I can get it.
Mutually exclusive? Um, not really. But confusing for some, my wife for starters.
I am reminded of a cartoon I once saw in The New Yorker:
A sculptor is up on a ladder, hammer and chisel in hand. The huge statue in front of him is split right
down the middle. His wife is looking up at him. Her line: “You never learn, do you, Pierre? You and
your ‘one more tap’.”
Can you “improve” a book to death? Some people think so. My wife sure as hell thinks so. I don’t.
But maybe, just maybe, (Thought I to myself upon concluding book #1) there’s a way to maintain
quality and save myself some work.
Enter the outline. I decided to give it a try. And it works for me.
Q Why does it work for you?
Because I have learned, the hard way, not to show my outlines to anyone. Maybe you, dear fellow
writers, have a different experience. But mine has been that people, certain people, certain importantin-the-process people (not just wives) often start putting in their two cents on the outline. Yeah, on the
outline; saves them the trouble of having to wait and read the book.
Does me no good to explain that I never follow an outline exactly, that I keep changing the story as I go
along. They’re going to put in their two cents anyway.
Advice to newbies: outline, but tell people you don’t.
Q. How do you actually approach it?
Unlike the venerable, very professional, illustrious and highly-experienced owner of this blog (grovel,
grovel, pulling of forelock, rending of garments) I’m still a newbie myself, still developing my
technique.
One thing that seems to be working at the moment, at least it has with my last two books, is to begin
with the end and outline backward. Does that make sense to you?
If it doesn’t, I’m not gonna bother to explain it. Reading my explanation would be a waste of your time
because, if you don’t get it straightaway, you’re not likely to even after I’ve thrown a lot of words at it.
Q. Where do you think your stories come from?
I’m fortunate to be living in a country where a lot of weird stuff happens. My first book, for example,
deals with liberation theology and land reform. You got liberation and land reform at work in your
country?
Ha! I didn’t think so.
Here’s how the story came about: One starry Brazilian night, I was sharing some wine with a friend of
mine, a defrocked priest, also a committed liberation theologian. As the evening progressed, and a long
evening it was, he told me many stories of his experiences during Brazil’s most recent dictatorship.
Hey, I thought, those stories would make a great book. About a week after that, a relative of my wife’s,
and I, were splitting a few bottles of Argentinean red while he told me how his ranch was invaded by a
group of landless workers. Hey, I thought, that story make another great book. Still another week went
by. My wife went out with a few girlfriends and left me alone with a book about Bishop Oscar Romero
and a full magnum of Chilean cabernet. I finished the book, made good progress on the wine, and, for
some inexplicable reason, found that all the stories were getting mixed up in my head.
That’s when the epiphany occurred: Why bother to try to sort the freakin’ things out. Everything
together is gonna make a great book.
Three weeks, two conversations, one book, a half-dozen bottles of wine. It was as simple as that. But I
should have outlined.
My second opus, Buried Strangers, had its origins in a conversation I had in the kitchen of our home. I
heard this story about organ theft from Geralda, one of our maids. As I recall, she was washing dishes
and I…hey, that’s right, I was drinking a caipirinha.
Maybe it isn’t outlining that’s the writer’s best friend.
Maybe it’s booze.
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13 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 7: Leighton Gage”
1. Sylvia Says:
March 4th, 2010 at 6:53 am
I fall all over it. It’s a consequence of stumbling. And what I generally stumble
over is first drafts.
I want this as a plaque on my wall.
There’s a nice Tempranillo for sale at our local shop at the moment, I shall try that
theory first.
2. Dana King Says:
Thanks for the lazy/perfectionist comment; my wife can sympathize/empathize
with yours.
That’s exactly why I outline. I’m too lazy to go back and fix all the stuff I’d foul
up if I made it all up as I go along, but I still want it to be as perfect as I can make
it.
So I plan it out first. The finished product looks little like the original outline, but
it got me where I needed to go.
3. Beth, MA Says:
The connection to Oscar Romero occurred to me the first time I read BLOOD OF
THE WICKED. Romero was appointed archbishop of San Salvador as a harmless
place keeper until a better(Vatican supporter) candidate came along. That was the
same thinking that got John XXIII elected; the Vatican apparently didn’t learn
anything from that experience.
It is unfortunate that the liberation theology movement was labeled as Marxist.
Marxism equals communism. A pope who spent his life in a country first occupied
by the Nazis and then under a Soviet-controlled communist government was not a
man to see beyond the Marxist label. The church should be deeply ashamed of its
support of governments that deny the poor, the landless, basic human dignity.
BURIED STRANGERS speaks to the very real fear of people being hurried to
premature deaths so that organs can be supplied to the highest bidder. I have an
organ donor sticker on my driver’s license but I wonder what I would decide if I
had to make a decision about life support for my children?
My middle child lost a kidney after a skiing accident. The oldest maintains that
she ruined the plan. The two younger were supposed to keep themselves healthy
so they could pass on organs to her. It is ok to be facetious as long as a decision
about organ donation isn’t required in the now.
4. Chester Campbell Says:
I’m a confirmed pantser. Always have been. Sometimes when I get into the story,
I think ahead a chapter or so to where it’s going, but I don’t write anything down.
With my current book, I’m like Rebecca Cantrell, who said she writes too little
and has to add scenes. I’ve reached the end of the book and am about 15,000
words short. So I’m back to beefing up scenes and looking for spots to add new
plot quirks.
This is a great series, Tim. I wasn’t aware of it until this morning and spent the
last few hours reading all the posts and comments. Hopefully, it will help chart my
way to finishing this fifth Greg McKenzie tale. One of my problems is I’ve never
been able to sit down and pound out an uninterrupted first draft. I’m a constant
edit/revise freak. When I’m through with it, I’ll let some colleagues read it and
head back for one last rewrite.
Well, I envy both Leighton, who knows how to outline, and Chester, whose books
(like Rebecca’s) come in short. I can’t outline to save my soul and my basic
method is to paint the basic idea on a wall and throw absolutely everything at it
until it’s done. Which is why my last one, the as-yet-untitled one, came in at
155,000 words. So I cut 35,000 of the worst words and turned it in.
Reading Leighton’s work, it seems extremely spontaneous, which is a compliment
and which (I think) makes it even more clear that you can’t tell which approach a
good writer takes, although you can usually make an educated guess with a bad
writer.
And Leighton’s whole thing about pulling his forelock and how cool I am is
poppycock. He hasn’t got a forelock.
6. Leighton Gage Says:
I do. I do have a forelock.
It’s just very small.
I tug it with tweezers.
Enjoyed the post, and it almost makes me want to learn how to do an outline. But
it’s probably too late to change now.
I used to have a forelock, but something happened to it.
I loved the description of mentally mashing unrelated stories together and
receiving an epiphany.
And I haven’t heard the term “liberation theology” since my college days in the
late 80s. I’m a former Army intelligence analyst who sat through a sociology class
on Nicaragua. Ooooh the debates that sparked in that class! I have to admit I’ve
complete changed my opinion of the American government’s policies pertaining
to South America as I’ve grown older.
Thanks for sharing. I look forward to reading your work.
captcha: sincerer agreement (I wonder if this applies to my change of opinion
regarding SA politics?)
I’m fortunate enough to have forelocks, sidelocks and backlocks. It’s the locks
coming out of my ears that disturb me.
Great post, Leighton. Are you from Brazil? Did you grow up there? If not, how
did you come to be there? I think it’s fascinating to have such vibrant experiences
surrounding you – dictatorships, land reform, organ-stealing…all we have in the
U.S. is milktoast sex scandals.
Interesting comment about “improving a book to death”. Makes me think of Jack
Kerouac’s comment, “First thought best thought.” The Beat writers generally
published their first drafts, or so the mythology goes. I tend to agree with you –
I’ll futz with a story until the day the copyeditor says “fuck off already.”
10.Leighton Gage Says:
Thank you, Sylvia, Dana, Beth, Chester, Bill, Cynthia and Stephen for taking the
time to comment. It’s nice to know that I’m not just talking to myself.
Thank you, Tim, for providing me with a soapbox. And for hosting the other
people who have made such interesting and readable contributions to this series.
I have delighted in their posts, every one of them.
Lastly, thank you, Stephen, for your questions.
Nope, I’m not from Brazil, nor did I grow up there. I first visited the country in
1973, having been transferred to São Paulo by the multinational company I’d been
working for in Europe.
I met a Brazilian girl, fell in love with her and the place, and have been living
there happily, on and off, ever since.
My wife, Eide, and I have now been married for thirty-three years and she I and
our offspring have become not quite Brazilian, not quite Europeans not quite
Americans. But we usually manage to fake it when we’re in any one of those three
environments.
The language of our nuclear household is Portuguese. I speak Dutch to my
grandchildren. These days, I try to spend at least four of five months a year in
Paris – because that’s where the little ones are.
My kids all have at least two passports. One daughter, and my three (soon to be
four) grandchildren have three.
But, if there’s any place that I truly feel at home it’s Brazil. I never fell out of love
with the girl or the place.
You might get a different impression from my books, but, heck, I write crime
novels.
For a more positive take on the country and it’s people, please check out some of
the posts I’ve done on the blog that I do with Tim and four other writers who set
their books outside the United States.
That blog is my home in cyberspace.
And I’m in such good company.
You can find it here:
http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/
Cheers All,
Vot a bunch — I like everybody.
I’ve been thinking for months (ever since I first read Leighton’s post) about
starting with the ending and outlining backwards. It makes perfect sense to me on
one level but on another I know I could never do it. I’ll confess, though, that as I
blunder, um pants, my way through a story, a future scene sometimes comes to me
that’s too good to forget, and I’ll figure out how to get there from here, so to
speak. So that’s sort of the same thing.
By the way, I shortchanged Chester in not mentioning that he writes terrific
mysteries and that I’m hoping he’ll be one of the writers in the next thread of
guest posts, THE BOOK THAT ALMOST KILLED ME, in which writers will
describe the worst trouble they ever got into on a book, how they got there, and
how they worked their way out of it.
Should be interesting.
Clearly I am not drinking enough. I bet my first drafts would come in longer if I
just had more wine. And more tipsy people in my kitchen too.
Thanks, Leighton, for another brilliant take on plotting vs. pantsing, and thanks,
Tim, for giving us all a forum to discuss it!
(my captcha is: their emergining which seems like a captcha for a panster)
More wine, yes. Ice wine. The ambrosia of the gods. I wonder if I can write it off
on my taxes.
And I do have a forelock; my mother used to quote that nursery rhyme about the
“little girl who had the little curl” all the time.
I love your line about stumbling over first drafts. I’m primarily an outliner, but I
do my share of stumbling too.
Next up: Jamie Freveletti
March 15th, 2010
Coming on Wednesday is Jamie Freveletti, the author of Running from the Devil, the mega-thriller
about which Oline Cogdill of the Florida Sun-Sentinel said,”Ten pages in, my heart was pounding-and
the tension only grew from there. This is a breathless, hair-raising read, one of the most gripping
thrillers I’ve read in a long, long time.” Jamie’s piece is called “What Happens Next,” and to find out
what it is, you’ll have to drop by — but I promise that you’ll enjoy the hell out of it.
And I’m happy to say that Rebecca Cantrell, who guested here a few weeks back, just won the Bruce
Alexander Memorial Historical Mystery Award for Tree of Smoke. Congratulations, Rebecca.
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Plotting vs. Pantsing 8: Jamie Freveletti
March 18th, 2010
Jamie Freveletti is a trial attorney, martial artist, and runner. She has crewed for an elite ultra-marathon
runner at 100 mile and twenty-four hour races across the country, and holds a black belt in Aikido, a
Japanese martial art. After law school she lived in Geneva, Switzerland while obtaining a diploma in
International Studies. Back in Chicago, she represented clients in areas ranging from class actions for
mass salmonella poisoning to securities fraud. Her debut thriller, Running from the Devil, was released
in May, 2009, and her second, Running Dark, will be released in June, 2010. She lives in Chicago.
That’s a question I ask myself just about every day. I write without
benefit of an outline, a full understanding of the plot, or even a list of
characters. What I do have is a premise. It’s the premise that excites
me, and the rest starts from there.
When you’re a “pantser,” the idea is everything. It needs to excite you
enough to sustain you through the long slog of creating that lies ahead.
The premise is also the key to getting published in today’s market. If
you have a premise that takes an idea and gives it a unique twist, it will
propel you over the many hurdles that your manuscript will need to
jump to become a book. I suspect that most published writers start out
as pantsers, whether they still are or not, because it’s the concept that
sells the book initially, not the writing. Which is not to say that the
writing doesn’t count; it does, but but there are a lot of good writers
creating interesting stories that aren’t getting the attention they merit.
Often, it’s the premise that kicks open the doors.
Where do I find the premise? In the world. I read the papers, surf the
Internet, and watch television news programs, documentaries, and informational shows. I keep active.
I have a file of newspaper and magazine clippings. Whenever I see something that ignites my interest,
I clip it out and shove it into the stack.
The premise for my first novel, Running from the Devil, came from an incident in my life. I was
crewing for an elite ultra-marathoner at an event called “The Centurion.” In this event, one must
racewalk 100 miles in twenty-four hours. The event started at one o’clock on a rainy September day in
Golden, Colorado, and within eight hours the temperature plunged and the rain became driving snow.
One of the walkers, an excellent athlete, passed out on the side of the trail. By the time the organizers
got to him he was suffering from hypothermia and disoriented. As I sat with him in the ER later, I got
the idea for my novel. Emma Caldridge is an ultra runner, and when her plane is downed in the
Colombian jungle she’s thrown free, and watches as the guerillas that downed the plane take the other
passengers hostage. Without a compass and in an area littered with land mines, she decides to track the
guerillas through the jungle to disrupt their plans.
The idea for my second, due to launch on June 29th and titled Running Dark, came from a newspaper
story that I’d read back in 2005. A group of Somali pirates fired on a cruise liner in an attempt to
hijack it. At the time, such an attack was so rare as to be an anomaly, but it fascinated me and I clipped
the story. I pulled the clipping out in 2008 and began writing my second. When I pitched the premise
to HarperCollins they responded with a bemused, “Pirates? Like Jack Sparrow?” but gave me free rein
to write what I wanted. Fast forward one and one half years later, the second is written, and I no longer
have to explain the concept of Somali pirates.
Once I get the premise I launch into the story. I have a slight idea for the story arc: for my first I knew
I needed to get my ultra runner into an area where if she ended up disoriented on a trail she would not
find help easily. I started writing the hijacking. Once that was done I had her land in the jungle. As
each chapter unfolded, I embellished my protagonist, the guerillas, and what type of dangers my
character would encounter in an area as dangerous as Colombia.
For the second, my prescient idea came back to bite me. All the while I was writing, the pirates were
escalating their attacks. Suddenly, the people who had scoffed at the idea of a cruise ship being taken
(mostly those I’d contacted in the cruise ship industry) were clamming up. I couldn’t get anyone to
talk to me, and, even worse, the maritime rules for the Gulf of Aden region were in a state of flux as the
United Nations scrambled to create new ones. By last August, I found myself in Italy on a family
vacation, scrambling myself to remove the reference to the old laws and the commercial flights that no
longer existed, and writing like mad to make Emma’s run, this time toward trouble, work.
But the joy of being a pantser is that such an event only gives you greater freedom, and since I don’t
outline, I didn’t lose valuable time creating a new one. I found another, unique way to get Emma to
Somalia, and the new laws created even more obstacles for the characters. In one month, I deleted
3,000 words, added 10,000 new ones, and created a new character that my agent loved. My editor
called back to rave about the rewrite. We stayed on schedule.
The only real issue I’ve encountered as a pantser involves writing the synopsis required for a book
proposal. I’m now on my third, and this time I’ve been asked to create four chapters and a synopsis.
The synopsis required that I tell the entire story before it’s written. Talk about an anxiety-producing
event! For a pantser, the idea of telling a story before it’s written takes a bit of the magic out of it.
I already had the premise, this time derived from my research into failing nations, and creating the first
four chapters was a breeze. I hit the wall on the synopsis. Instead of having a general idea of the
story’s arc, this time I buckled down and forced myself to follow Emma to the end. I wrote a two-page
synopsis that hit the high points and hinted at the ending. And you know what? I really liked doing it.
It feels a bit like an outline to me, or at least as much of one a pantser like me will ever hope to create,
and the hint of an ending leaves me free to continue forward without knowing what happens next.
Exactly the way I like it.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 12:13 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
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10 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 8: Jamie Freveletti”
Oooh….I got so breathless just reading this post that I can hardly wait to read
your books. And with Tim’s description of all your activities, I can’t believe you
have any time to write. Thanks for sharing your description of the hazards of
writing a novel while the events are unfolding on the evening news (and the
international laws are a half step behind you).
captcha: exchange serbian
April 6th, 2010 at 11:40 am
Hi Jamie,
Great to see you out here at Tim’s blog. Loved the piece. I relate to what you said
about how it’s uncomfortable to be a pantser asked to turn in a synopsis for the
next project. Same problem here. I’d rather just be writing, already!
Rachel
I wrote a truly brilliant comment that never appeared because of the crash. Too
bad I’ve forgotten it. I think I even included the winning lottery numbers for the
week. Anyway, two pages is about enough of a synopsis for me, and I’d still count
that as pantsing. Who’s winning, by the way? Pantsers or outliners? I haven’t been
counting.
4. Sylvia Says:
Hi Jamie,
I love your descriptions of finding things from the events happening around you
and letting your imagination run away with it. You say that you start with the
premise and I’m thinking that to keep you pushing forward, it must be a fairly
detailed premise? I guess it must be coherent enough that you can see the
unexpected twist.
“Emma Caldridge is an ultra runner, and when her plane is downed in the
Colombian jungle she’s thrown free, and watches as the guerillas that downed the
plane take the other passengers hostage. Without a compass and in an area littered
with land mines, she decides to track the guerillas through the jungle to disrupt
their plans.”
How much of that was in your head when you started? Clearly you started with
the glimmer of Emma, an ultra runner ending up in trouble.
5. Jamie Freveletti Says:
April 7th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Ahh-the joys of website crashes! I am interested to see that Rachel is a pantster
and I am not sure who is winning-but I bet Tim knows.
Sylvia: the premise is never involved–I know, sounds weird doesn’t it? It’s
literally one line: “A cruise ship carrying an unknown chemical weapon is fired on
by Somali pirates set on hijacking it.”
That’s all. Then I just start. I learned a while ago that if I couldn’t describe the
premise in a one or two sentence pitch I was going to run into real trouble writing
the book.
As for the synopsis–is 2 pages double spaced–I know, weak, huh?
Thanks for the nice comment Cynthia!
Jamie Freveletti
6. Dana King Says:
not unlike Bill, I had a detailed and witty comment that was eaten, and my
memory and current supply of pharmaceuticals prohibit a accurate reproduction.
What I’m getting from the Jamie’s post and the comments is that I may be more of
a pantser than I thought. The outline for the current WIP is only a few pages of
Word table, each with a sentence or two of what happens in each chapter. How
that happens is up to me a the time. So I guess I’m a macro-plotter, and micropantser, or a strategic plotter and tactical pantser. (Yeah, “tactical pantser” sounds
a lot more manly than “micro-pantser.” I’m going with that.)
Hey, Dana — “Tactical Pantser” is Washington-worthy — as in “The
Administration had no Iraqi exit strategy because they’re tactical pantsers.”
By the way the pantsers STRONGLY outnumber the plotters, but if this were a
screenwriting site, there’d be no pantsers at all.
Thanks for a great piece, Jamie. Looking forward to the new book, RUNNING
DARK, at the end of June.
April 12th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
I had a feeling the pantsers might be running ahead of the pack. Too bad about
screenwriting. I guess I’ll never do a screenplay. No wonder I’m not rich.
9. Stevie Poskus Says:
Hi, are you having problems with your blog? I made a comment on another one of
your posts twice but your blog “ate it” and it vanished so I figured I ask on this
one in case it happened again.
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Yet another fascinating post on the creative process. Jamie, your books sound
intriguing–and your life sounds exhausting!
Tim, thank you for this series. I have learned something from every one of the
posts.
Responses Not Going Through?
March 29th, 2010
I’ve been depressed about the lack of response to Jamie Freveletti’s post and having doubts about
putting more guest pieces up because it seemed as though no one was reading them. But now I’ve had
two e-mails, from Greg Smith and Andrea Wynn, saying that their responses aren’t posting.
If you’ve responded and nothing has appeared online, PLEASE E-MAIL ME AT [email protected]
so I can have Chris Lang, the brains behind the site, take care of it. It could be a WordPress or a
Captcha problem, or something else entirely. Please let me know, and also let me know whether you
want the Pantsing vs. Plotting thread to continue.
Thanks.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 7:32 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
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One Response to “Responses Not Going Through?”
1. Beth Terrell Says:
Tim,
Yes, please do continue the pantsing versus plotting series. I don’t always get to
visit the day the posts go up, but I have found all of them very helpful and
thought-provoking.
All the best,
Beth (Terrell)
Win a Book on HuffPost
March 30th, 2010
Huffington Post has just put up a blog in which I ask for help in naming the new Poke Rafferty book.
I’ve been having animated discussions with the people at Morrow about it. Would you please drop by
and vote? Here’s the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-hallinan/name-my-book-first-50who_b_517790.html And Morrow’s giving away 50 copies of my books to people who play along.
And, on another front, we’re working on the comments problem. Sorry to all of you whose comments
never appeared. There’s a software problem either with Captcha or with WordPress. I have to accept
every comment that comes in, and I have seen NONE except for Cynthia Mueller’s in more than three
weeks. And my PROFUSR apologies to Jamie Freveletti, whose excellent Pantsing piece drew
(apparently) many unpublished comments.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 11:20 am and is filed under All Blogs. You can
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One Response to “Win a Book on HuffPost”
This is only a test/
Comments? We’re BACK!!
April 5th, 2010
I have disabled Captcha, which was responsible for deleting all comments.Having now sent comments
from two other computers, I know they’re going through. They still have to wait for me to approve
them before they go public, but they ARE making it into the comments cue.
Those of you who had something to say about Jamie Frevelleti’s terrific Pantsing post, PLEASE recomment beneath her piece so Jamie can see that she wasn’t ignored. And here’s a good reason to say
something: Jamie’s RUNNING FROM THE DEVIL was just nominated by the International Thriller
Writers as Best First Novel of 2009.
So please stop by and say something to Jamie, and next week we’ll have a new post from Jim Newport,
whose books include a vampire saga and a reminiscence of Jimi Hendrix. Oh, and who’s a top-line
movie art director and lives in Phuket.
‘s
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own site.
7 Responses to “Comments? We’re BACK!!”
Welcome back!
But I have to say, I’m going to miss the writing prompt generator (captchas).
Looking forward to Wednesday’s post.
2. Sylvia Says:
Testing – one two three – testing!
Thanks, you guys. GREAT to know we’re really back.
But I miss Captcha, too — and you should see the amount of spam I’m getting
without it.
Hoping a bunch of others come back and comment on Jamie’s post. And we have
some great ones coming.
I’m just posting because I can!
5. Larissa Says:
Yay. Glad to see things are back up and running. (c: I am thoroughly enjoying
these posts so please don’t take them away. Uhm…that’s about all I have. Just
glad to see we’re all back in touch~
Hi, everybody, and sorry for the long down time. Lots of things happening, and
we’re going to start it off on Monday with the next of the Plotters vs Pantsers
posts, of which I think three remain.
Then I’m going to hog the forum for a while, probably until late August, after the
new Poke book, THE QUEEN OF PATPONG, is released, and then we’ll start the
guest blogs in THE BOOK THAT ALMOST KILLED ME thread.
Next up, Jim Newport, author of (among other things) THE VAMPIRE OF SIAM
series.
Hi, Tim. Great to see that comments are up and running again. (Yep, I’m behind
the curve, as always.)
I look forward to reading the rest in this series and then reading about THE
BOOK THAT ALMOST KILLED ME.
From Diane von Fürstenberg!!!
April 10th, 2010
Oh, my God, I’ve had a response from Diane von Fürstenberg.
Don’t get me wrong — I prize every response I get, even from those of you who aren’t rich, famous,
blue-blooded, and married to Barry Diller. But Diane von Fürstenberg is all three of those things, and
she responded to MY WEB SITE.
It’s a little odd that she responded to a post that’s more than a year old and that describes a sort of
crucifixion festival in the Philippines (called Getting Nailed on Coke), but I guess it’s presumptuous to
think we know what will interest someone who’s famous. blue-blooded, and married to Barry Diller.
On second thought, crucifixion might be just the topic for someone who’s married to Barry Diller.
It’s also odd that WordPress flagged Diane’s (I guess I can call her Diane) message as spam, especially
considering how personal it is, how elegantly worded, and how directly responsive it is to a post about
a crucifixion festival in the Philippines.
This is what, ahem, Diane wrote: “Exactly what an outstanding job you possess done. You’ve served
lots of people by creating this publish. Caps away to a person. Thank a person and looking more like
these articles. “
Now come on. You see how blue blood reveals itself ? Class will tell, every time. The understated
eloquence of Exactly what an outstanding job you possess done. I mean, I’d like to see you do so much
in so few words. And the offhand expression of gratitude, Caps away to a person. Not just “hats off”;
no, the precision of “caps,” even if it is a bit odd for it to be pluralized like that, and the sweeping
imagery of “away.” And the final flourish — not “to you,” which is rudely direct, considering that
Diane and I haven’t been formally introduced (although I have to admit that I’ve come to feel like I
know her), but rather, “to a person.”
And who among us isn’t? A person, I mean. See? There’s no improving on it.
There is a bit of Boris-and-Natasha spin to some of the language (“creating this publish,” for example),
but please — von Fürstenberg? You don’t get handed a name like that in Moline, Illinois. An, in fact,
she was born plain old Diane Halfin in Belgium and acquired her umlaut by marrying Prince Egon von
Fürstenberg, thereby becoming Princess Diane von Fürstenberg. When she and Prince Egon (not a
name you see every day) split up, she relinquished the title but retained the umlaut.
But now, try this. Look at the photo of the elegantly attired, terminally chic woman above and imagine
her saying, “Exactly what an outstanding job you possess done. You’ve served lots of people by
creating this publish. Caps away to a person. Thank a person and looking more like these articles.”
And WordPress thinks this is spam. Peh, I laugh heavily upon a person, as Diane might say, judging
from her note.
Spam?!?! It screams her.
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7 Responses to “From Diane von Fürstenberg!!!”
You are always rubbing elbows with the rich and famous. And I’m not just
hanging noodles from your ears.
The elbow of a person in that one’s ribs are outstanding in meaningful.
Rachel Brady also replied to this post and I approved it, but then it whoosh!
vanished into the void. The person is missing it too much, as Diane would say.
3. Suzanna Says:
Approximately why are you so funny time? There’s so many youth who look to
your creating humors. Caps away to that can funny make.
Diane loves good for reason.
It is to laugh but discreet up the cloth on the arm of a person.
5. John Lindquist Says:
It is possible that your site inspired Diane von Fürstenberg to utilize the web more
to make known her personal concerns as well as her product. I just checked out
her publish at dvf.com and am really impressed. She is quite a noble example as
well as a sweetie. Caps off indeed.
WHOA!!!! DVF.com — is that aristocratic and understated or not. Also, since this
is now an old thread and I can probably say something that might get me into
trouble if it were more heavily trafficked, Diane’s site is rich in nubile young
things of the preferable sex.
And — FLASH — Diane has written me again, John. I’ll be sharing it with a
person soon.
I can’t wait for the new person’s publish. Actually, “Diane” sounds eerily like
Koko the gorilla (one of my favorite people).
Recent Reads
April 12th, 2010
Absolutely no one has asked me to revive this feature, but here it is anyway.
It’s been kind of a stretched month — had to review galleys for THE QUEEN OF PATPONG, read two
books (both killer) for blurbs, and wrote a HuffPost blog. Oh, and I did two book proposals, which is
the only part of writing I truly loathe.
But some good reading. (I know I sound really definite below, but these are my opinions only. And I
mostly don’t review books I hate.)
WHITE SHADOW, Ace Atkins – I think Atkins is one of our treasures, and in this book he slices off
a big sloppy piece of Florida history in the 1950s — Italians on the decline, crime-wise, Cubans on the
rise; Fidel Castro looming on the horizon in Cuba; and the corrupt little town of Tampa is deeply
unsettled by the brutal murder of Charlie Wall, a former bookmaker and criminal eminence grise
known as the white shadow. Who killed Charlie and what did Charlie tell whoever
it was? Those questions drive the journalists, cops, and crooks trying to figure it out. Must be 30
characters, and they all work — even Castro, who makes a late appearance to cap a wonderful subplot
about a young female Cuban revolutionary who turns the female-in-peril paradigm on its pointed head.
Great, dense, exciting as hell. Ace Atkins is the real deal.
MONEY SHOT, Christa Faust – Rules of disclosure require that I tell you I had lunch with Christa
once, but other than that I don’t know her from Eve. But I’ll read anything she writes in the future. This
is noir so dark you can barely see the white on the page, and also (not often, but often enough) very
funny. Angel Dare is a former porn star, now retired from on-camera skinwork and running an agency
for, um, talent in the adult film and strip-club industries. Called out to make one final appearance as a
favor to the director she always liked best, she’s brutalized, thrown into the trunk of a car, driven to the
ass end of nowhere, shot several times, and left for dead. But boy, is she ever not dead. The rest of the
book is a tapestry of revenge, disillusionment, and double-cross that moves at warp speed and never,
ever takes the easy way out. I know some people will hate it, but I took it like an aspirin. And Lord,
can Christa Faust write.
THE LAST CHILD, John Hart — Okay, I liked Hart’s first two books, although not as much as
many people seemed to, but this one makes me want to go back and
reread the first two to see what I missed. This is a heartbreaker of the first magnitude, the story of a kid
who is just 100 pounds of spirit and fight, who’s been dealt a hand so raw it’s enough to make you
wonder about karma. Johnny Merrimon’s twin sister was abducted a year ago, and only Johnny thinks
she’s alive. His father disappeared not long after and his mother, now pretty much a walking blotter for
booze and pills, has fallen into the hands of a charming and very rich sadist who just loves to
bounce her around. Johnny won’t accept help from anyone, not even the cop who pities him and has a
deeply hidden torch burning for Johnny’s mother. This was a two-reading book for me, and it would
have been one except that someone of my venerable years needs to close his eyes every 24 hours or so.
One of the best books I’ve read in the past year.
A DEATH IN VIENNA, Frank Tallis – I’ve been reading a lot of period mysteries about Berlin and
Vienna lately, and someone said she liked this, so I tried it. I knew immediately it wasn’t for me, for
two reasons. First, it has a Sherlock Holmes character, and I have no patience for Sherlock Holmes
characters other than Nero Wolfe. Second, it’s got real people in it (Sigmund Freud, in this case) and
I’m not usually crazy about that, either. But I gave it 50 pages. Then I gave it 100 pages. Then
I finished it and ordered the second and the third from Amazon. The wonderful thing about having
prejudices is that they give you opportunities to build
character. I recommend this to anyone who likes big, fat, well-written, highly atmospheric mysteries
set in a fascinating milieu. Oh, and Freud tells Jewish jokes, and a couple of them are hilarious.
THE DAWN PATROL, Don Winslow — Oh, just buy it. Buy all of them. Make him rich and
famous. He deserves it.
IRON RIVER, T. Jefferson Parker — Is that a great title, or what? This picks up the saga that Parker
is apparently going to write about for a while longer, the story about cop Charlie hood and the woman
he loved, a female descendant of Juaquin Murrieta whom he introduced in LA OUTLAWS and
pursued through THE RENEGADES. She’s dead now, and her son is the focus of Hood’s concern.
For good reason — the kid is running guns to Mexican drug cartels. As always, the writing is just
completely transparent, a style so accomplished and apparently effortless (despite multiple viewpoints)
that you’re never aware of it, but I kind of wish Parker would go back to standalones. I think he’s one
of the top crime novelists (as opposed to crime writers) in the world today, but this string of
books hasn’t thrilled me as much as, say. THE BLUE HOUR. Full disclosure – Parker has said, in
print, some extraordinarily nice things about my books. But that’s not why I’m saying he’s a wonderful
writer; it’s why I feel guilty for not liking this book a little more.
EXECUTION DOCK, Anne Perry — I love Anne Perry. I know some people don’t like her as much
as I do, but then some of you probably vote differently than I do, too. I think it’s easy to take for
granted the level of her craft, her skill with character, and most of all, the vividness with which she
brings Victorian London to life in all its lurid hypocrisy. I like all her books, but I liked this one more
than many. There’s no point in doing a synopsis or anything (except to point out that this one has
a particularly heinous villain and noting that this is a Monk book and that I like Monk more than I like
Thomas and Charlotte). If you like her, you’ll love this. If you haven’t read her, I think you should.
NON-CRIME
MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND, Helen Simonson — Well, I loved it. I laughed myself
silly, got embarrassingly choked up at times, feared deeply for Mrs. Ali at the hands of the village
snobs, and loathed, loathed, loathed Major P.’s son and the surviving family of his recently deceased
brother. Oprah’s magazine loved it, which means I probably wouldn’t have read it, but (disclosure)
Simonson used the FINISH YOUR NOVEL material on my website to help her through some rough
spots and we corresponded five or six times when she had questions. I’m even in the
Acknowledgments. All that notwithstanding, this is an extraordinarily accomplished first novel and
a truly delightful read.
THE HARVARD PSYCHEDELIC CLUB, Don Lattin – A cautionary tale about psychotropic drugs
and scholarly arrogance featuring Tim Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), religious historian
Huston Smith, and the serpent in the garden, Andrew Weil. A riveting read for anyone who’s
experienced psychedelics, or just has some curiosity about where the hell the Sixties came from. Weil
ratted out Leary and Alpert at Harvard — got them fired – not because of any principled moral stand
but because they wouldn’t give him any dope although they turned on his friends. He spent a lifetime
trying to apologize to Alpert, and I’m delighted to say that despite a lifetime of consciousness
expansion and spiritual growth, Alpert/Ram Dass remained ripely pissed off. My favorite line in the
book comes from Leary, who got a thousand strangers high, talked hundreds of them through bad
trips, sold his friends to the cops, and gradually developed an ego the size of the atmosphere: he said,
“You get the Tim Leary you deserve.”
INTERVIEWS WITH BUSTER KEATON, various — Not the world’s best interview subject but
certainly one of history’s greatest filmmakers, Keaton resolutely refused to get theoretical about his
approach to making such sublime movies as THE GENERAL, THE NAVIGATOR, STEAMBOAT
BILL, OUR HOSPITALITY, and SHERLOCK, JR. I bought a huge DVD set of practically all his
surviving films and read the interviews as I watched. Best time I’ve had in front of a television since
the Army-McCarthy hearings, which I did not see live. I’m not THAT old.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 9:48 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can follow
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8 Responses to “Recent Reads”
1. Sylvia Says:
I’ve been looking for some new fiction as I’m finally able to see my bedside table
which was drowning under a pile of unread books.
I think I’ll start from this list, I’ve not read anything on it!
2. Suzanna Says:
I really envy your voracity for reading! And I enjoy just reading your take on
these books.
I saw a Buster Keaton movie a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t see the beginning
titles so I don’t know the name of it. Keaton was on a sinking ship not far from
shore and “cannibals” were trying to get on board the ship to take him and his
woman ashore. With no fancy special effects, and probably no stunt people to help
him, Keaton was arguably one of the hardest working entertainers to ever live.
Reading his interviews and watching his movies does sound like fun.
Had no idea Andrew Weil was such a weasel at Harvard. He does give some
pretty sound health advice though.
3. Sphinx Ink Says:
I so enjoy your reading lists, because you do such excellent pocket reviews. You
capture the essence in no more than a neat paragraph. (It’s quite a skill, and one I
haven’t acquired.) And your reviews make me want to read the books, too.
My favorite, however, is this one: “THE DAWN PATROL, Don Winslow — Oh,
just buy it. Buy all of them. Make him rich and famous. He deserves it.”
LOL!
4. Larissa Says:
howdy. I’m glad that you’re reviving this feature. I did a bit of a book review on
Iron River is on my shelf in the TBR pile and this is the second praise I’ve heard
for Money Shot in as many days. It’s going into the TBR stack too.
6. Dana King Says:
MONEY SHOT is a hell of a book. Good story, well paced, in a style Mickey
Spillane would have liked. great cover, too.
I like these lists, and have missed them. You should keep doing them. This is the
kind of thing that keeps a Diane von Furstenberg coming back, you know.
Glad to see that you’ve breathed new life into this feature, Tim; it saves me a lot
of time and I can always count on your opinions leading to books I’ll actually
enjoy reading. Do the names Natsuo Kirino, Joe Lansdale, and Jamie Freveletti
ring any bells? There are others on my short list that I’ll read as time permits.
We’re agreed about Don Winslow; he does deserve rich and famous. Highly
recommend The Power of the Dog and The Winter of Frankie Machine in addition
to the aforementioned The Dawn Patrol.
Oh, yeah, and Christa Faust goes to the top of my short list. For some twisted
reason I find noir (the noirer the noir the better) fiction especially appealing.
Gosh — If I’d only known. Think of the hundreds of books that are now bobbing
unreviewed in my wake.
Seriously, glad you guys like it. Will keep it alive. Actually reading Eric Ambler
now and discovering what “old master” actually means.’
Riss — Loved the reviews. People should never allow life to interfere with
reading. The only thing that should be allowed to interfere with reading is writing.
Dana — You really think? You think she’ll come back? I was afraid the Barry
Diller/crucifixion remark might offend. But she’s almost certainly bigger than
that.
Sphinxy, I just love Don Winslow. All of him. THE DEATH AND LIFE OF
BOBBY Z is hilariously over the top, ball to the wall all the way, and
CALIFORNIA FIRE AND LIFE is a model of thriller writing. Also, THE
WINTER OF FRANKIE MACHINE just doesn’t have anything at all wrong with
it. They’ve very, very guy, though.
Suzie, that’s the end of THE NAVIGATOR, one of the best American movies ever.
Keaton bought for $25000 a decommissioned ocean liner and put his female costar and a four-man crew aboard and put to sea. When they got back they had their
movie and he sold the ship.
Rachel and Sylvia — if you aren’t necessarily looking for a thriller, Helen
Simonson’s book is just deliriously good.
Plotting vs. Pantsing 9: Jim Newport
April 14th, 2010
Jim Newport lives in Phuket, having happily deserted LA (and a stellar career as a motion picture
production designer) to check out the other side — the Thai side — of the world. And he writes about
one aspect of Thai life — the supernatural aspect — in THE VAMPIRE OF SIAM trilogy, which has
been optioned as a potential major motion picture. He’s also written two novels, CHASING JIMI, a
rock-and-roll period piece about the sudden explosion that was Jimi Hendrix, and — most recently,
TINSEL TOWN; ANOTHER ROTTEN DAY IN PARADISE, inspired by his experiences in the early
days of his film career. By the way, that career included such films as “Bangkok Dangerous” and
“Brokedown Palace,” and TV of the caliber of “Lost.”
Don’t Talk About Writing – Write
Every once in a while someone wants to talk to me about writing. What immediately goes through my
mind is what I used to say to my art directors when I was designing a film and they’d ask me: “What
color?” My reply was always: “You don’t talk about color.”
You don’t talk about writing – you write.
Every day. You plow ahead, leaving gaps and holes to be filled in later. Moving the story forward is the
key.
My mom was an inspiration to me. I recently found some of her poems and short stories and made
copies and sent them to my brothers. She also was a very good artist. She worked in water colors, a
very difficult medium. My dad played a pretty good honky-tonk piano. But they were both school
teachers and their two careers and raising 3 boys left them little time for those pursuits.
When I’m not writing – I read. Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, James Lee Burke and
the great Cormac McCarthy – those writers fill my shelves. But when I set about the serious task of
writing a new novel, I stop reading and start writing.
I have written a trilogy (THE VAMPIRE OF SIAM) and two factoids (CHASING JIMI and TINSEL
TOWN) I always have a notebook and a pen. I keep the notes in files with simple headings and then
when its time to write – I go to these and find the nucleus to begin the process.
I begin with a very loose plot. I outline just enough to get started.
The hardest part of writing a book is getting started. Like everyone, I procrastinate and do just about
everything but write, when it comes time for me to start something.
I do my best writing when I am in a stream of consciousness mode. When it flows. When I don’t know
what I will write next. When I feel (as Robert Howard said of “Conan”) – the characters are standing
over my shoulder telling me their story. I laugh out loud all the time. And I am constantly amazed at the
twists and turns the story takes.
This is what excites me about writing. It tales a while to get to this point – both in your writing as a
whole and in each individual book. But that magic moment has so far come to me very early on in each
of the half-dozen novels I’ve written so far.
There was a time when I wrote lots of songs (early 80’s.) I had a band and a regular gig. My act was
about 2 hours – 90% original material. I never consciously sat down at the piano to write a song. They
came to me. I woke up with them in my head and I would scramble to get them down (Mick Jagger
sleeps every night with a recorder next to his bed.)
Now, when I’m working on a book, I wake up & write stuff in the middle of the night. Then I go back
to bed – and read it the next day and barely remember writing it.
I write practically every day. Without a given schedule. I am semi-retired from the film game now and I
chose my ‘spot’ in the world for this part of my life very carefully. I live in Phuket, an island in the
south of Thailand.
When I first visited here 20 years ago, I had no idea that this would be a place that I would return to
time and time again for the next two decades of my life. I was most fortunate that on my first trip here,
I found the very spot that afforded me the solitude and peace to pursue my dream of being a writer. It
was just a little single room house, Baan Thukkataan, but it was where, I was convinced, that my muse
lived. I would work as a Production Designer in the Hollywood system throughout the year and then
return every winter to the little house by the sea. Words poured forth. I wrote through the long days
and into the fold of the tropical nights, listening to the lapping of the surf and the cries of the jungle
behind me. I poured my heart onto to the keys of my various laptops. I filled countless notebooks while
sitting in the islands of numerous cafes. All the while, my muse stood quietly at my shoulder –
encouraging and beckoning me forward.
Now I live right across the street in my own house. I am very comfortable and I enjoy writing here. It is
where all my books get started. But once I’ve cleared that initial ‘getting started’ phase, – I can write
anywhere – bars, restaurants, airplanes, trains.
I put the book down when it is finished and leave it for 6 months or more. Then, when I return to it, the
superfluous becomes obvious. Lastly, I have the fun of working with the editor, setting the galleys and
designing the cover art.
I’m writing a fourth VAMPIRE OF SIAM tale now, and needed to re-read the last book in the series.
There was much of it that I truly do not recall writing. It is fresh to me – and, I must admit, enjoyable. I
think that is the hallmark of a good book, when you can pick it up again and the writing still intrigues
you.
Jim Newport
January 2010
Phuket, Thailand
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 4:12 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
13 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 9: Jim Newport”
1. Larissa Says:
hmm. I’m happy that he’s found success for himself and his writing. I appreciate
the message about “don’t talk about writing. Just write.” however, I can’t entirely
discount the value of not working in a vacuum and actually talking about your
ideas and the act of writing. But I’m a very verbal person and thinker. I have often
thought that I should record myself talking about my characters instead of initially
2. Lady Glamis Says:
This was great to read and introduced me to a new writer. Thank you!
I write like Jim, outlining only enough to get started, and then I roll with it until
1/3 of the way through, then seriously sit down to plan the entire novel in depth.
Like Larissa, I can’t write in a vacuum. I must talk about writing all the time, but
lots of reading helps, too. Of course, the most important thing is writing. Constant
practice. Period.
3. Jim Newport Says:
Thanks for the comments. I don’t mean to give the impression that I write in a
vacum. I write everywhere – bars, restaurants, parks, planes, trains. I enjoy being
surronded by life when I create.
And I do talk about what I’m writing. I learned a long time ago that astory
becomes real the more times you tell it.
Jim Newport
PS All my books are available at willatpublishing.com
April 16th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Hi, all –
Riss, I agree about the vacuum, but actually Jim and I write very much the same
way — often in coffee shops or other public areas where there’s a current of
energy in the air.
And Lady Glamis, welcome. I actually spent five days at Glamis Castle on a film
shoot, and it’s a tad on the spooky side. I have to say that your returning to
outlining for the remainder of the book is a new approach to me. And it amazes
me, to be frank, that anyone can outline a book. I just finished two book
proposals, both of which required outlining, and I just gave up and wrote short
scenes, linking them together with cloudspeak — “When these two story lines
intertwine, they’ll give the book a new energy source,” etc. Drivel, in other words.
But some of what’s in each proposal is good, so we shall see what we see.
SUZANNA wrote (and WordPress swallowed):
Wondering what made you decide to go from your career in production design to
writing novels? Was telling a story/writing something that you were already pretty
good at?
6. Suzanna Says:
And WordPress also swallowed my follow up apology for the blunder I made. I
had read Jim’s post days before I wrote my question. After I wrote the question I
reread Jim’s post and realized that he had already carefully explained the
transition from his design career to writing. Congratulations for realizing your
dream, Jim! It sounds like you are having a wonderful time.
7. Jim Newport Says:
April 19th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Suzanna
Thanks for your kind words. I started writing screenplays about 20 years ago. I
had spent a good part of my production design career dissecting scripts and I
thought I knew how to write them. I pursued financing for one that I wanted to
direct through all the independent companies. I was told time & again that my
film didn’t fit their ‘genre.’ That genre was usually horror films. So I decided to
write a vampire script. As I started to write I soon realized that the amount of
color and tone that I wanted to impart would not be suited to the harsh confines of
a screenplay. The ‘Vampire Of Siam’ became a book instead. I soon found that I
preferred the freedom of the novel as a format for my words.
8. Suzanna Says:
Hi, Jim
I think it’s great that you pushed passed the limitations of the industry and found
the format that suits you.
By the way Cormac McCarthy’s books are some of my favorites too. One of the
things I like best about his writing is his wonderful ear for dialogue. His dialogue
just never seems forced.
Thanks for your post and looking forward to checking out your books.
Thank you, Jim. I agree with you 100% about the way it feels when the work is
flowing and you go back to read it later and think, “Oh my goodness. Who wrote
this? It’s…not half bad. Actually, it’s pretty darn good. Hey…was that ME?”
10.Jim Newport Says:
April 23rd, 2010 at 9:22 am
Thank you for your comments. Re: Cormac McCarthy – After seeing the movie
“No Country For Old Men,” I read both the script for and the novel. Brilliant as
the Cohen Brothers are, they hardly changed a thing from the book. That rarely
happens. I adapted my own novel (“Vampire Of Siam”) for the screen & have
now done 3 drafts. It is 180 degrees different than the original book. Better or
worse? It’s hard to be objective. It’s just different. But that’s what they (the
producers) paid me to do & it is in my best interest to do it myself.
11.Sean Bunzick Says:
Sawadee kob Jim and Tim!
I read this section and was thrilled to see you and your works here, Jim. I’m even
more excited that there’ll be a new Vampire of Siam novel coming out–I can’t
wait to get my hands on that one.
One thing that I find funny and a little ironic in a lame kind of way is that over on
my good friend Mike’s website Thailand Stories (www.thailandstories.com), a lot
of the regular e-mail writers complain that too many books are just about a
middle-aged farang “saving” an Issan bargirl and all the blah-blah-blah that goes
with it yet your novels–going down an entirely unique soi–aren’t there (I think
Mike can arrange that if you or Timothy would like to do so) but nor are there any
comments because I’m assuming that these folks haven’t bothered with your
series, Tim’s Poke Rafferty series and the first chapters of my John Harwich
Adventure series which are basically Indiana Jones Meets Rambo rarely get a
reply so it’s a tough audience to call.
I agree fully with your writing style; I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll even try to
get some writing done on my latest rough draft in Logan or LAX while I’m
waiting to catch my next set of planes back to Chiang Mai.
Anyway, Jim, I’m glad Timothy got you on his fantastic website and I hope both
of you will continue to write and put out such beautiful novels that capture the
kingdom in your own way. Choke dee to both of you from the Cape!
12.Barb Says:
May 13th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Newport, it’s been a very long time! So glad to read about your life as a published
writer. It suits you well!
I agree with you 100%–
I all too often talk (or think about) writing when I should be setting pen to paper.
It’s something I’m working on but get totally jazzed when it’s flowing and
seemingly coming out of nowhere!
Tell me, how does one go about getting a signed copy of your latest work?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
13.Jim Newport Says:
May 14th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
Barb
You need to block out time to write. I am currently hiding out from the world in
the south of France – doing just that. You could just tell everyone you’re at the
gym – whatever works for you. Just buy the time.
Signed copies of all my books are available at willatpublishing.com
Cheers
Jim
Plotting vs. Pantsing 10: Jeffrey Cohen
April 21st, 2010
Jeffrey Cohen writes two series, but the one I’m most familiar with are the
Double Feature Mysteries starring Elliot Freed, mensch, divorced man, movie theater entrepreneur and
classic movie addict. The books are expertly plotted, pin-you-to-the-wall mysteries that are also loving
homages to those glorious days of yesteryear when motion picture comedies were actually — dare I say
it? — funny. In all three of the Freed books — It Happened One Knife, Some Like It Hot Buttered, and
A Night at the Operation, Cohen works his unique alchemy, and often making me laugh out loud in the
process. Oh, and if Bruce Springsteen weren’t already the poet laureate of New Jersey, Jeff could
qualify for that, too. As if that weren’t enough, he’s also the author of the Aaron Tucker mysteries and
has worked as a freelance reporter and writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, TV
Guide, USA Weekend, Premiere, American Baby (!) and The Newark Star-Ledger, among many others.
I love to paint myself into a corner.
I don’t like to call myself a “pantser,” mostly because it brings up unpleasant memories of junior high
school, but given the choice between identifying myself that way and saying that I carefully and
meticulously outline every move I’m going to make in a new book, I have to go with the colloquial. I
“pants.”
See, every writer has a style of working. I’m not talking about the words we choose or the artistry of
our construction. I mean the thing that gets us going in the morning (or in my case, the late afternoon)
and forces us to continue through the spots when we really haven’t a clue what the next word is
supposed to be. it’s not so much the muse–I think you can write whenever you need to, and don’t
believe in “Writer’s Block”–as it is the motivator, something that keeps you going when there’s a
ballgame on TV and a bag of Cheetos in the kitchen cabinet.
For me, it wouldn’t work if I knew everything that was going to happen in my story before I wrote it.
I’d feel like that story had been told. There would be no surprises for me in the process, and no
surprises would mean no enjoyment. I might just as well be punching a time clock and working for Da
Man instead of this cushy life of skimpy advances and the constant threat of unemployment.
I came from screenwriter’s training; I started by writing a truckload of screenplays and trying for years
to sell them, with varying degrees of no success. But what I was unable to obtain in monetary
compensation I more than made up for with the storytelling technique and confidence I found in
endless rewrites and repetition. I found out about the three-act structure, what a midpoint was and why
it was important, the absolute need for character, and how to write dialogue that didn’t sound like
people making speeches and more important, didn’t always sound like me talking. I’m grateful for
everything I learned writing screenplays. Someday, I might try it again, just to see how not selling one
feels at this age.
What I found out is that there’s no right way to write. There’s no wrong way, either. There’s only your
way. I found mine by doing it–I started with a story idea, a premise, and worked from there once I got
the process going. I generally wrote in the late afternoon because when I tried to do it earlier in the day,
I’d procrastinate until the late afternoon, and then get all my work in from four to six. So now I work
on my “day job,” newspaper articles, teaching and like that, until four, and then get to writing the
novel. Because there’s no sense in wasting all that time when I could be trying to make tuition money
for my kids.
Now, I know what I need to start a story–a premise, a character I understand, and a few scenes that I
know I want to write. I have an idea where they’ll fit in the structure of the story, but not what will
connect them to each other. So when I’m writing, if a character does or says something unexpected, I
can run with it, rather than trying to cut out something that could be interesting just because it doesn’t
fit the preset outline I would have concocted before starting in to work.
For example: My second novel, the Aaron Tucker mystery A FAREWELL TO LEGS, involved our
intrepid hero, a freelance reporter and family man trying his best not to investigate crimes,
investigating a crime that took place in Washington, DC. Specifically, the murder of a sleazy lobbyist
found in his mistress’ bed with a kitchen knife sticking out of his chest. And Aaron, who lived in New
Jersey, had to go to Our Nation’s Capital to investigate. He started by contacting the local police
detective working the case, and got remarkably little information, mostly because the cop didn’t want
to tell him anything.
But Aaron had somewhat acerbic nature (imagine!) and liked to irritate people to get what he needed.
He needled the cop about a high profile case like this being too much for the police to handle, and how
he was sure they were behind the times in crime investigation. At one point, Aaron suggested the police
had not even collected any DNA samples to help identify the killer. And sure enough, the cop was
rankled enough to respond.
Now, keep in mind: I really am just looking for a plot point to end the chapter here. Something that will
keep the pages turning. And I have not planned ahead, so I don’t really know where this is going, but I
figure if I keep it going long enough, it’ll get somewhere.
The cop told Aaron that they had, too, gotten DNA samples, and one of them had paid off: A hair
belonging to a man convicted of a series of murders in Texas some years before. Terrific, Aaron said,
you’ve got your man. So go arrest him.
We can’t, the cop answered. The guy was executed by the Texas State Troopers seven years ago.
And I got finished typing that, read it, and honest to goodness, said aloud, “What?”
But here’s the thing: I decided I liked that bit. So now I had to figure out how it made sense in the
context of my story. And while I’m not going to tell you how I resolved it (go ahead and buy the damn
book; I’ve got kids to send to college), I will tell you that I’m pretty proud of how it came out.
It wouldn’t have happened if I’d outlined meticulously ahead of time and slavishly stuck to the outline.
I’m not suggesting that all those who write outlines do that; some are quite flexible, and can change the
outline when necessary. They are using one just because they like to have a road map, and I respect
that.
But for me, the thrill of the hunt isn’t as much fun if the fox and the dogs have worked out the capture
among themselves ahead of time. I thrive on the discovery process. As I write, I find out things about
my characters that can have an impact on the plot. That helps me keep the characters front and center,
and have the plot serve them, rather than the other way around.
That’s just my process. Yours is yours. You should do what works for you.
Jeffrey Cohen is the author of the Double Feature Mystery series, most recently with A NIGHT AT
THE OPERATION, and the Aaron Tucker mystery series, most recently with AS DOG IS MY
WITNESS.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 7:33 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
13 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 10: Jeffrey Cohen”
1. Loren Eaton Says:
April 22nd, 2010 at 4:49 am
I think you can write whenever you need to, and don’t believe in “Writer’s Block.”
Glad to know there’s someone else who doesn’t buy into the inspiration-doesn’tneed-to-fall-from-the-sky-like-a-lightning-bolt idea. I dumped my muse in a lake
one day and have been much happier ever since.
2. Sylvia Says:
I think this makes a lot of sense except that I am not sure how you paint yourself
out of the corner once in there. Sometimes something can come out of the blue (I
almost drowned once when I was swimming laps and realised that my main
character was going to die in chapter one but it was the right thing to happen for
the story) but sometimes, don’t you just heap on the action and end up standing on
a pile of manure?
…or is that just me?
3. Jeff Cohen Says:
Loren, I do believe in bolts of inspiration, although I think that’s just your mind
coming up with something because you’re not trying desperately to do so. I
DON’T believe there’s a special disease called Writer’s Block. If I have a
newspaper article due Thursday, and I call my editor and tell him I’m just not
feelin’ it today, he’s going to find someone who is.
Sylvia, that ties in with something you said. If you paint yourself into a corner you
can’t get out of? You delete that section and start over. The great thing about
writing on a computer is that you don’t need Wite Out, which is a bummer for
Michael Nesmith but a boon to the rest of us.
Anthony Trollope, who wrote more than 45 novels, many of them masterpieces,
said, “If our bootmakers waited for inspiration, we should all go barefoot.”
And Picasso said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”
5. Kathy Waller Says:
I’m a newbie. I’ve written over 100,000 words of a rough draft, and most of it
isn’t usable. However, I got to know my characters, watched them interact,
learned things about their relationships and backstories, and generated ideas I’d
never have had if I’d tried to plot at the outset. (Actually, I did try to outline. It
drove me up the wall.) Perhaps what surprised me will surprise my readers
(speaking optimistically here) as well.
Jeff, I’ve bought and enjoyed the Aaron Tucker books (loved ‘em, by the way),
but haven’t yet started the next series. My apologies to your kids and their college
tuition fund; I’ll remedy my omission ASAP.
I love my muse. He comes and goes as he pleases, and I write whether he’s there
or not (I’m mostly a plotter). Occasionally he comes in and gets an imaginary beer
out of the imaginary fridge and says something like, “Hey, what if that guy who
runs the martial arts school keeps venomous snakes? And what if he hid one under
the front seat of our dauntless hero’s truck?”
7. Gary Says:
Jefffrey, isn’t it great when you have all those disparate threads and crazy
happenings, and suddenly you see how to bring them all together and you say,
“Yes! That works!” Who’d be a plotter when pantsing can give you a buzz like
that?
Which keeps bringing me back to the same old theme – repeated ad nauseum as
friends will tell you – that the story was resident in your subconscious the whole
time. And, as Tim tells us about Ingmar Bergman, you just have to carefully tease
out the threads without breaking them.
8. val dave Says:
An enchanting interview. M. Cohen
validates every writer who cannot write before four pm in the afternoon and there
are more than several of us!
9. Jeff Cohen Says:
Not to worry, Beth–there’s still time! Four more years of college tuition to pay!
Feel free to contribute!
Gary, I’m not sure the story was in my head the whole time–sounds like that
discounts the hard work that goes consciously into it while I”m writing. But I do
believe in writing every day, as long as you have something worthwhile to work
on.
Thank you, val. I don’t want to backtrack on what I said–I really do work after
four pretty much every day–BUT when I’m nearing the end and can see the light
at the end of the tunnel, I can write pretty much anytime.
Thanks to everyone for chiming in. Glad you enjoyed it!
Kathy — 100,000 words is a lot of words even if most of them are the wrong
words. I always figure I’ll write about 300,000 words to get a 120,000-word book
(I write long). Some of this is just what I call circling the drain — writing to
figure out what I’m writing about, and it all (or most of it) gets tossed when I see
where I’m actually going. Some of it is just blind alleys, plot lines that go all stale.
I figure that’s why the little scissors are up on the task bar. But you should be
terrifically proud: 100,000 words. 90% of novels go unfinished because the writer
can’t stay on task long enough to solve the problems and finish the story. That
doesn’t seem to be your problem. And remember that you can fix a bad page, but
there’s not much you can do with an empty page.
Oh, and I’m with Jeff — I can’t even find the keyboard in the morning, but when
I’m on that long downhill glide toward the ending, I’ll turn the computer on while
the coffee drips.
11.Chester Campbell Says:
April 23rd, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Good discussion. As a pantser, I agree with just about everything Jeff says (being
perverse, I don’t agree with “everything” anybody says). I find it fascinating when
a character suddenly pops in just when I need him. I never know where a story is
going, but somehow it always comes together at the end.
12.jenny milchman Says:
I agree with you and your pants, although this method (or lack thereof) has me
writing 13 + drafts of any given story. Since I find revising, um, challenging, this
can be a drag. But I just can’t give up the wholesale excitement of not knowing
what happens till I fill a page…
13.Larissa Says:
Great post and great comments. I appreciate that I can sense the relaxation coming
from this post-it’s not a long diatribe about process and it sounds like it’s coming
from someone who really enjoys writing. Good stuff. I also really appreciate the
“If I have a newspaper article due Thursday, and I call my editor and tell him I’m
just not feelin’ it today, he’s going to find someone who is.” comment. I take a lot
from that because on one hand it shows that you’re not the end-all out there and
that you write because you choose to keep doing so-not because you have to or
because you’re the only one out there who can do it. And, it says to me that while
you have to make a habit for yourself to write daily and things like that, if you
don’t or if “you’re not feelin’ it” one day, that’s ok too. It’s not the end of the
world.
Anyway-great posts and hopefully some of this will stick the next time I write
Plotting vs. Pantsing 11: Rachel Brady
April 29th, 2010
I know, I know, we haven’t had enough women, but here we have the
first of two in a row. No, no, hold the applause. You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful. What a crowd.
Okay, enough about you. Rachel Brady works as an engineer at NASA when she’s not writing
mystery and suspense fiction. Midwest Book Review called her debut novel, Final Approach, “a tense
thriller perfect for mystery libraries” and Reader Views praised its “interesting and colorful characters.”
The second in the Emily Locke mystery series, Dead Lift, is coming in December and Rachel has just
jumped into writing the third. She likes connecting with other writers at her excellent blog, Write It
Anyway, and talking with bookish types on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
In the interest of disclosure, I have an acute dislike — no, fear – of heights, and since much of Final
Approach takes place while sky divers are in free fall, it scared the hell out of me. Terrific book.
Messily in the Middle: Getting Happy in My Writing Skin
I’m delighted and excited to visit the Blog Cabin! When Tim invited me over, he asked me to answer
two questions: Where do I get my story ideas? How do I put them on the page?
Not long ago, I wrote a short piece that addresses the Where. The How is more difficult to explain so
I’ll focus on that here.
Some writers are “pantsers,” who write by the seat of their pants, laying the story down as the ideas
come. Others, the plotters and outliners, think the whole story out ahead of time. I’m a pantser with
outlining tendencies, so I fall messily in the middle.
Final Approach came to me in key scenes. Certain parts of the story played in my mind like a movie
and, since I saw them so vividly, I wrote them first. This meant I had a few important scenes from the
beginning, middle, and end of the novel, but nothing to link them. My struggle was finding the
“bridges” between these scenes. Instead of writing from A to Z, it was more like writing from D to H
and then L to Q. This strategy nearly drove me mad. I promised myself that if I ever wrote another
book, I would write it linearly, from A to Z, no messing around. I was finished with bridges. Burn the
bridges.
The random-scenes technique had two perks.
1. There was no excuse for not writing. If I didn’t know what came next, I would skip ahead, way
ahead, to something I knew would happen eventually. Sure, there would be extensive revisions later,
but in the moment, words were going on the page.
2. Each chapter existed as a separate Word document on my machine. When I was finally finished
with a rough draft, I pasted forty separate Word documents together in the right order and watched a
manuscript build before my eyes. That was enormously exciting.
While querying Final Approach, I started working on a new book, the linear A to Z one. I was a third
of the way through a first draft when Final Approach sold, and eventually my editor and I turned our
approach to Book Two. She asked for a synopsis first, an overview of the whole book, including the
ending, so she could flag any major issues before I wandered off into the weeds. This requirement
paralyzed me for a long time. How could I send a summary of the book? I had no idea how the story
would unfold. I knew how it would end, but not how to get there.
I e-mailed a good writing friend. ”Fake it,” came his reply. ”Make something up, and if it changes
when you actually wrote it, say you came up with something even better.”
Ultimately, I did fake it. But even faking a path took two weeks. I made way more revisions than a
three-page summary should require. I tried working on it narrative-style and I tried outlining it. In
fact, at the time I was determined to reform as an Outliner. But deep down I knew that if I waited for
the whole book to reveal itself to me, so that I could summarize it in outline form, I would wait a very
long time. Have you heard the advice about driving in fog? Not to overdrive your headlights? In my
writing, the headlights only stretch a few scenes ahead. That’s as far as I can outline. I can not see the
end of the road, and I’m envious of writers who can.
I wrote the second book linearly and liked that approach well enough. It was easier to keep the
chronology of the story straight, and I did less hand-waving to get characters where I needed them to
be. Events unfolded organically with this method. But there were problems.
1. When I got stuck I stopped writing. Sometimes it took weeks or months for me to figure out the
next scene.
2. The manuscript existed as a single file on my computer and I developed an annoying preoccupation
with its total word count. Now I’m a compulsive word-count checker. I wish they made a patch for
this.
A rough draft of this linear book, the next in the Emily Locke series, is with my editor now. We’ll be
revising over the next few months and it’s scheduled for release in December 2010.
Now I’m thinking about Book Three. I started exploring this idea in November as part of National
Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Participating in NaNoWriMo for the first time was my attempt
to shake up my writing routine, and boy, did it ever.
This story is my foray into multiple viewpoints. It presents new challenges, both in the story and in its
synopsis. I’m not sure how to capture parallel story lines in summary form and, as usual, I don’t know
how the story will unfold. Once again, I’m sweating down here in Synopsis Hell. I also suspect that a
linear, A to Z, approach won’t serve this story well. In some ways, writing this book is like creating
two novellas with a plan to weave their chapters together later in a way that makes sense. I’ll
experiment until I find something that works. I’ll admit it. I’m freaked.
But this time, I’m okay with that. For a long time, I would read writing books or listen to authors at
writers’ conferences and then rush to the keyboard to implement their processes. I’ve decided that this
is like trying to squeeze into someone else’s shoes. What fits another person might give me blisters.
Better to break in my own shoes, I think. My process will probably always vary by project and will
depend on what I’m prioritizing at the time.
When I was little, my grandfather brought home a necklace he’d found at a yard sale. Its gold-plated
pendant said “I’m okay” on one side and “You’re okay” on the other. If I had to summarize my
thoughts about pantsing versus outlining, I’d do it with those four words. I think that if the story is
forming, whether on the page or in our minds, and that if we’re giving it the time it deserves, then
we’re all A-OK. As with the messages on the pendant, there will be times when only one writing
approach is visible and working for us, but that doesn’t mean that both can’t co-exist within the same
writer and flip-flop, like my pendant did, throughout a project or a career.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 4:10 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
14 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 11: Rachel Brady”
1. Sylvia Says:
April 30th, 2010 at 12:40 pm
Wow! You know, I was thinking that one of the questions that I wish I’d put to
more of the authors in this series was “Do you write linearly?” The question only
occurred to me last week. A writing buddy of mine is writing from A-Z and
posting her scenes as she goes and they *make sense*.
I use yWriter (which will give you a total wordcount but does help in terms of
being able to drag and drop scenes around – and you can mark scenes as “unused”
which leaves them in place but removes them from your wordcount). I realised
last week that I can see my scene order (i.e. the actual order I created them in)
from the underlying file names.
It looks like this: 1,4, 5,6,7,16,9,10,17,11,14,18,19,13,33,25,26,34,3,24.
That’s me writing linearly. I don’t think I’m a natural.
Did Book 2 match the synopsis at all, in the end?
Will you have to submit a synopsis for Book 3? (And will it take less time, this
time?)
Final Approach is a wonderful name! I shall keep an eye out for it if it is available
in the UK.
May 2nd, 2010 at 7:49 pm
Hi Sylvia,
Sincere apologies for my late reply; I have been out of town and offline since last
week. Thanks for your wonderful comments.
It sounds like we have some things in common. The scene order you listed is
eerily similar to how Final Approach came to be.
Book 2 did match its synopsis, more or less, and yes, I do have to submit a
synopsis for Book 3 and have only recently finished that. This synopsis took less
time to write, but I “stewed” on the plot (in my head and notebooks) for much
longer. Near as I can tell, there is no way for me to rush things. Ideas either spend
time in my head and come out more quickly on the page, or I only partially think
them through and then agonize forever on a synopsis!
I hope (but doubt) that Final Approach is available through UK bookstores. In the
event that it is not, it’s listed on Amazon UK. Thanks for expressing interest.
I often catch your comments on other posts here at Tim’s blog. Best wishes with
your writing!
May 3rd, 2010 at 6:08 am
I’m definitely linear. I’ve worked with other writers on projects from time to time,
and I was surprised to discover that one of them didn’t work that way at all. He
wrote scenes, and then he decided where they’d go in the book. I’d go nuts doing
that.
May 3rd, 2010 at 9:07 am
Bill,
…As did I.
For that project, first time out of the gate, it was good for getting words down and
finding a story path. I’ll resort to it again if I get stuck, but overall I preferred a
linear approach too.
Rachel
May 3rd, 2010 at 7:40 pm
I’m so sorry there weren’t more comments, but I think the long WordPress screwup disheartened some people who never saw their comments get online.
I’m especially sorry because I think that Rachel’s was one of the best and most
informative posts in the thread thus far. When I read it, a light came on in the East
— I ALWAYS have scenes I know I’m going to write, but when I’m stuck, as I so
frequently am, it has never once occurred to me to jump ahead and write them. I
feel like the guy who busted out the back wall of his garage because it didn’t
occur to him to put his car in reverse.
And that wasn’t all I learned. So thank you, Rachel, and when we’ve built our
readership back up to the pre-screwuop throng, I hope you’ll come back and write
for us again.
May 4th, 2010 at 5:36 am
I hardly ever know what scenes I’m going to write, at least when I start.
Sometimes one will occur to me as I’m writing, but I never write it until I get to
the point in the book that I want to put it.
May 4th, 2010 at 11:15 am
Bill, you are a natural pantser! I love when you tell us how the process goes for
you. The bit you shared earlier about starting with a single sentence and having
little idea where it will lead was crazy talk to me. But look how well it works for
you.
Just goes to show… whatever works!
8. Dana King Says:
May 5th, 2010 at 9:27 am
It’s great that you’re willing to examine your practices and adjust them. Too many
writers just go along saying, “This is how I do it,” when each book presents its
own challenges. (I know; I used to be one.) A change in technique may not be
necessary, but how will you know if you haven’t examined the possibility?
You have examined the possibilities.
Sorry for the late comment; I’ve been behind on a lot of things lately. Great post.
9. Usman Says:
May 5th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
Hi Rachel, Thanks for a great post about your writing process.
Let’s say we are merrily pantsing along, plots and sub-plots are there, for good or
bad. Then we take the left turn, a great idea comes to mind, it fits the plot, so in it
goes. But then this sub-plot becomes bigger than the major plot, not in number of
pages, but in its scope, and the canvas attached to it, perhaps the new characters.
What then? Is it back to the drawing board, or sticking to the original path, the
original seed that started you off.
Tim, It’s great to be back. Work has been murder.
Usman.
May 6th, 2010 at 10:55 am
Dana and Usman, thanks for stopping by. You’ve been missed.
I agree, Dana — when something’s not working, change tracks. That’s not easy
for me, since outlining is pretty close to impossible for me, but I did it in
BREATHING WATER just to find a plausible series of scenes to get me out of a
corner. It worked, but I later went back and rewrote almost all of that material.
Usman, I’m the guy to ask. In THE QUEEN OF PATPONG, the upcoming Poke, I
decided I’d go back and tell Rose’s backstory — how she went from being a shy
village girl to the woman she was when she met Poke. Three or four chapters, I
thought, maybe 6,000-8,000 words.
45,000 words later, I’d finished that part of the story. So now I had a flashback in
the middle of a thriller. I really only had two choices, dump it or live with it. I
chose to live with it, changing the ending so it led us back into the thriller that
opened the book.
Does it work? I have no idea. But it seemed absolutely germane to the story I was
writing, and I think that’s the test when a new idea begins to lead you away from
your story: is it directly related to, or does it illuminate the main idea? If yes,
follow it. If no, then either write a book with two distinct plot threads or save the
new material for another book.
One trap to avoid is embracing the new material just because it’s new — you
haven’t been slogging away on it for months as it revealed its limitations and
problems. New ideas are always limitless and problem-free.
11.Dana King Says:
May 7th, 2010 at 6:11 am
Tim,
I finished Rose’s backstory on the train this morning; now I’m back in real time.
I’ll send you more notes when I finish the book (probably over the weekend), but
I can say for certain right now, it works.
Oh yeah, it works.
12.Rachel Brady Says:
May 7th, 2010 at 6:32 am
Thanks, Dana. Honestly, my open approach toward new techniques comes mainly
from desperation. When too much time goes by and nothing is being written, I
kind of freak out and conclude anything must be better than nothing.
Usman, I’m glad Tim got to your question before I did. I still have a phobia of
“wasting words.” Once something is on the page, I have a real hard time giving up
on it and cutting it. It’s hard to watch a word count drop from 45,000 to 8,000, to
use Tim’s example. This is something I still work on. I haven’t experienced a
runaway subplot yet. If that happened to me, I might be the type to fall into the
trap Tim described, of falling in love with the newer, more exciting idea. Only…
my fear of wasting words kind of keeps that reined in. I hope you’ll let us know
what you decide.
May 7th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Dana — THANKS with whipped cream.
Rachel, it’s terrible to lose a big chunk of writing and I hope it never happens to
you, but it’s arguably worse to put out a book that’s not optimal.
I think the big challenge is telling between new material that’s appealing primarily
because it’s new and new material that’s appealing because it’s right. Time will
tell whether I made the correct decision on THE QUEEN OF PATPONG,
although Dana seems to think I did. That noise you hear is me crossing myself,
and I’m not even Catholic.
14.Larissa Says:
May 18th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Ok, so I’m backtracking…and here I thought I’d been making progress. This is
definitely the most informative of all the postings in this series–and it’s got some
of the best comments–I am also obsessed with word count! If only because I’ve
been making myself write a certain number-ala Tim style-just to put something
down. Sometimes I think I should just copy the letter “a” and paste that 1000
And Tim-you and I both would have ended up in our living rooms from the garage
because we never thought of Reverse-I have these other scenes and I don’t write
them because they aren’t “Due” yet in the story-except the story is stuck and I’m
not writing anything…something tells me if I write them I might get the jump on
what’s actually going to happen next…ahem.
Thanks for a great post! Why did i wait this long to read it?!? Egads!
Plotting vs. Pantsing 12: Meredith Cole
May 8th, 2010
Meredith Cole started her career as a screenwriter and filmmaker. She was the winner of the St.
Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic competition, and her book Posed for Murder was published by St.
Martin’s Minotaur in 2009. She was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her second
book, Dead In the Water, is due for release on May 11, 2010. She teaches mystery writing and
screenwriting.
To Outline or Not to Outline
When I had the opportunity last fall to teach mystery writing to fledgling writers, I encouraged all of
my students to make an outline. I think it’s easy for a first-timer to get so enthusiastic that they plunge
immediately into their story, and then at the first sign of trouble they stop. And don’t start again. An
outline is a great way for them to find their way through the dark. They know where they’re headed, so
they can start figuring out how to get from here to there.
I am, without a doubt, an outliner. It very likely originates from my tendency to make lists. I like to
know where I’m going and what I need to do to get there in my day-to-day life and in my fiction. That
certainly doesn’t mean I can’t deviate a bit on my way. I’m open to bursts of creativity, brand new
ideas and exciting twists and turns. But first I like to start with a rough road map.
When I say outline, please don’t imagine some sort of list with Roman numerals. I think I had to do
outlines like that in 6th grade. My outlines are really a collection of thoughts that grow from a central
idea. I continue to expand on my outline in a Word document. I add to it as new plot points occur to
me, and write little snippets of description and dialogue when they come to me. Eventually this
collection of thoughts begins to get long enough to start to divide it into chapters. I start to see where I
need to expand my story and what pieces of the plot I need to connect. I look over the whole picture,
and fix story problems before I become attached to the carefully crafted words on the page.
Even as I start to write my book, I keep my outline at the end of the manuscript so I can consult it as
needed. This helps when I have to stop writing and then start again (interrupted by my family, galleys
for my previous book, or any number of things). I continue to add to the end of it as I go, writing short
notes for myself to look at later about inconsistencies or ideas to add in on the second draft.
I know lots of writers say they don’t outline, and some of them probably actually do write by the seat
of their pants (and consequently admit to doing a lot of revising). I admire their ability to keep a whole
novel in their head. I just can’t do it. And I’ve heard a few writers say that outlining makes writing the
book itself boring. But I keep getting surprised by my story, even when I’m revising, so I don’t get that
at all.
Interestingly enough, quite a few non-outliners I’ve spoken to admit to doing something similar to my
process. They just don’t call it outlining for some reason. Perhaps they think that outlining involves
those dreaded Roman numerals, and is less organic and creative.
I recently started a new book that borrows the basic plot line from one of my abandoned novels. I
began to write the book without outlining. I knew the story well, so at first it seemed as if it would be
no problem. But quickly I write myself into a couple of dead ends, got my timeline all messed up and
had to start tweaking at the midway point. So now I’m back to my original method. It keeps me
writing until it’s time to type “the end,” and that’s what’s most important.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 5:17 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can follow
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14 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 12: Meredith Cole”
1. Pat Brown Says:
May 9th, 2010 at 7:23 am
I have to say I vary between not outlining at all to jotting down ideas and brief
sketches like you describe. The one book, Geography of Murder, was written
entirely on the fly. I had nothing but a single scene in my head when I started it. A
man waking up beside a dead man he’s never met. I had no idea who the dead
man was, who the guy was who found him, who the cop was who arrested him. I
didn’t even know why the dead man was dead or who killed him. All of that came
as I wrote.
I can’t even say I had the whole book in my head because I didn’t. It grew as I
wrote. Which I did in almost one continuous session of just over 3 weeks. Yes
there was some rewriting, but for me there always is. Even the books that have
more of an outline, there is a lot of revision. Geography of Murder had
surprisingly little revision given how fast I wrote it.
I can’t say I recommend that method to anyone. But it was an interesting
experience.
May 9th, 2010 at 10:06 am
I’m a list user, too, which may explain my need for outlining. What gets me are
the spaces between the points on the outline, those little things I didn’t think up
beforehand.
3. Meredith Cole Says:
May 9th, 2010 at 10:47 am
PatIt sounds like you alternate being a pantser and plotter. I fantasize occasionally
about sitting down and writing a whole book out of my head, but so far it hasn’t
happened yet. As long as the outlining experience is a creative one for me, I don’t
mind my process at all.
4. Grace Topping Says:
May 9th, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Hi, Meredith–
Probably because of my years as a technical writer, I am an outliner as well. One
of the classes I took talked about the nine checkpoints of a mystery.
These checkpoints help me outline–sort of like a prompt or a roadmap if I get
stuck and don’t know where to go next. Others may find them helpful.
Hook
Backstory
Trigger
Crisis
Struggle
Epiphany
Plan
Climax
Ending
May 9th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
This is a great piece, Meredith. I know it’s going to provoke a lot of interest.
My experience of pantsing is like Pat’s — at no point was I aware of carrying the
whole book in my head. Rather, it was like a journey of discovery, writing to the
limits of my foreknowledge and then suddenly seeing where it went on from
there, even if only for a few scenes.
The kind of rewriting I do (other than to improve the quality of the prose, and my
guess is that everyone does that) consists of going back once I’m finished and (a)
pruning the material, so promising at the time, that ended up going nowhere, and
(b) planting seeds in the early parts of the story for the stuff that manifested itself
later.
It’s not all that onerous a task.
By the way, I love the idea of putting new ideas at the end of the manuscript so
you can glance down at them from time to time. I keep a second document open at
all times and throw everything into that, but I think your approach might be better.
6. Polly Iyer Says:
May 9th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
I am a pure pantster. I have written all my books without an outline, but I have a
vague idea where I’m going. I do write scenes out of sequence when I see them
clearly and know where they’re going. Just today, I came up with a terrific plot
twist that I don’t think I would have thought of if I’d outlined. But then again, I’m
not published, so maybe that says something. By the way, I do make lists if I have
more than three things to do or buy. I’ve decided I have a split personality.
May 9th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
Thanks for that list Grace! I may have to steal, er borrow, it for my class.
The end of the manuscript list is a great dumping place, Tim. When I put
something in another document, I always seem to lose it.
May 9th, 2010 at 5:55 pm
PollyIf you’ve got a system that works for you, then don’t change! I think the most
important thing when you’re writing is to be flexible, so that you’re open to new
ideas and inspiration.
It’s funny that you write lists, though. There’s that great Frog and Toad story
where he loses his list of things to do and becomes unable to do anything. But I
think once I write a list I somehow etch it into my brain, and it’s probably the
same process with the outline for me.
9. Dana King Says:
May 10th, 2010 at 7:01 am
Meredith,
I do it almost exactly the way you do, and I agree, I’m often surprised where
things take me, even though the general direction of the story has already been
defined.
It also proves the process is less important than the talent of the author.
10.Meredith Cole Says:
May 10th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Great point, Dana! I like to think of my outlining process as a gathering of ideas
that might be useful. But in the end, the book is only going to work if I am a good
writer. You can certainly spend way too much time outlining and never get the
book written at all.
May 12th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
This has been a great discussion, and I hope anyone who drops by in the next few
days will leave a comment. On Friday we’ll pass the baton to Brett Battles, one of
the today’s hottest thriller writers.
May 14th, 2010 at 9:09 am
SYLVIA WROTE (and WordPress ate) the following:
I’m obsessive about lists; I never thought of the two as being connected before.
My current work, I wrote 5k of “notes” which probably is outlining but it’s not in
a coherent order and there’s huge chunks missing. I’m halfway through now and
although I know where I’m heading, I’m not quite sure of the steps from here to
the climax (and am in fact fairly convinced that the climax is not how I originally
envisioned it).
Grace’s list looks great, I’m just sitting down to see how the pieces I have fit the
categories.
May 14th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Grace: Thanks for this plan or whatever you call it, I think I’m going to find it
useful – I’ll paste it here again in case anyone else wants to see:
Hook
Backstory
Trigger
Crisis
Struggle
Epiphany
Plan
Climax
Ending
May 15th, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Great thread, all — I learn every time one of these pieces goes up.
Plotting vs Pantsing 13: Brett Battles
May 15th, 2010
Who’s a sturdy enough talent to go 13th in this thread? Brett Battles,
whose Jonathan Quinn “Cleaner” series is among my favorite of recent years. Brett’s books — THE
CLEANER, THE DECEIVED, and SHADOW OF BETRAYAL, the last of which will be reincarnated
in a paperback edition on May 25 — are models of the form. The form, in this case, is the breakneck,
intercontinental thriller with solid, emotionally affecting characters, a plot twist every time the reader
gets comfortable, and a resolution that’s always unexpected and, in retrospect, inevitable. If I sound
like a fan, I am. After I read THE CLEANER, I used it as a sort of primer for pacing (this will be news
to Brett) and I think my books are the better for it. So here’s where those amazing plots come from.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had or overheard conversations about this topic. I guess that’s
probably because it’s a core, nuts-and-bolts part of the writing process.
It’s funny. Writers can be pretty vehement about their particular position. ”Writing a detailed outline is
the only way to go.” ”Outline? No way. I just write and let the story tell itself to me.”
If you’d asked me a few years ago where I fell, I would have said without hesitation that I was a
pantser. In fact, I was probably sitting on the Pantser’s Board of Directors. I was the one saying, “I let
the story tell itself to me.” It worked for me, but that’s because I had all the time in the world to write a
book.
But then I got my first contract.
Per that contract I had to provide a synopsis of whatever book I planned on writing to my editor.
Obviously I didn’t have to do this for my first book as it had been written prior to getting a deal. But
for the second book? Absolutely.
Still, I considered myself a full-fledged, card-carrying pantser. So when I wrote my proposal for Book
2 I made my synopsis as short and as vague as possible. (Note: I also included the first two or three
chapters.) Fine for me, I thought. Lots of room to move around. Thankfully, my editor went for it.
But that’s where the problems started. I had a year to write that second book. It sounded like a lot of
time, but at that point, in addition to being a novelist, I still had a full-time day job, so as I progressed, I
realized that a year wasn’t long at all.
The problem with writing without a clear idea of where you’re going is that you can write yourself into
a corner. And that’s pretty much what I ended up doing. The draft that I delivered by my deadline still
needed some serious work, and it took another four months before I got the book into shape.
You would have thought I would have learned my lesson from that. But no, I still considered myself a
pantser. After all, Book 2 turned out pretty well.So once agai, I delivered a two-page synopsis and
some sample chapters, and, once again, my editor said, “Go for it.”
I’m sure you can guess the result. Once more the process of writing the book (still with the day job)
took far too much time. And, like before, the draft I delivered still needed some serious work.
(Thankfully, though, not as much as had been required for Book 2.)
So when I set out to write Book 4 of my series, I vowed that I would do things differently. This would
be the first one I would write as a full-time novelist, so I wanted to off right. But wanting and doing, as
we all know, can be two different things. The proposal I gave my editor: 2-page synopsis and sample
chaps. The same old song.
This book, though, did go faster. But that was a product of two things. The first, and probably the
most influential, was, as I mentioned, that I had no day job interfering with my writing schedule. But
the second was that, when I hit around pag2 250, I stopped and took a full week to map the book
out . . . where I was, where I should be going . . . from each of my characters’ points of view.
(Not really relevant, but here’s what I did: I went down to Office Depot and bought those gigantic
post-it notes. Seriously gigantic. We’re talking something like three feet by four feet. Each central
character got a note, and then, below their name, I listed out, in point form, the story from their POV. I
think I ended up having something like eight or nine of these post-its hanging on my walls. Doing this
enabled me to get a handle on where my story was going. When I turned the book in, it was much
more finished than my previous books had been. Not perfect, but definitely closer to the finish line.)
I knew that for my next book, I was going to have to do something different. This time I wrote a fivepage synopsis along with chapters. That might not seem like a big leap, but it was for me.
Then a funny thing happened. My publisher asked if my fifth book, instead of being another in my
Jonathan Quinn series, could be a standalone. This prospect was exciting to me as I was feeling the
itch to write a standalone. It wasn’t that I was tired of my series, far from it. I just wanted to branch
out a little.
When I sat down to figure out the proposal for the standalone, I knew that I was going to have to be
more detailed than I’d been in the past. My problem this time was that I had more than one idea, and
couldn’t figure out which one to present. So I decided, what the hell, let my publisher choose. I wrote
a synopsis for each idea, each of them between 10 and 15 pages in length. These were much more
detailed maps than I’d ever produced before. Oh, and I also did sample chapters for all three stories. (I
know, I know. Overkill.)
Bantam chose one of the stories, and, in a little over two weeks, I wrote the first 150 pages of the new
book. Yes, blazing fast. I’d never written anything so fast. But there was no question but that this was
a direct result of those more detailed plans.
(Okay, just to make the story accurate and more complete — though, again, not necessarily relevant —
at that 150-page mark, I hit a hiccup. I happened to read a novel by a person I respect who had set her
story in the same location as I was setting mine. Turns out that plot and the one I was working on were
pretty damn close. Too close for me to continue. So what did I do? I wrote another 12-page synopsis,
keeping a few of the elements from the story I’d been working on, but really creating something
completely new. I started at page zero again on November 4th of last year and had a rough draft just
over one month later, on the 7th of December. A month after that, I had a polished draft that was
tighter and more complete than any other manuscript I’d ever turned in.)
I was a pantser, but I am no more. That’s not to say that I’m all all-out, detail-oriented outline, either.
I’m a kind of a blend, a hybrid if you will.My optimum working process seems to be first creating a 10
to 15-page story map with room to expand and change, and then putting my butt in a chair and writing.
the map/outline/synopsis gives me the confidence to plow forward. In fact, I don’t think I looked back
at my synopsis once when I was writing that last book. But I knew in my mind that I’d figured it all
out, so I knew how far I could stray.
The bottom line is that each writer has a different way of writing. But what I think we need to do is
periodically evaluate whether those methods are helping us be our best. This is not some static, forever
kind of thing. For a long time writing by the seat of my pants worked well for me. It was really the
only way I could do it. But then things changed, so I changed.
And who knows, in the future I may change again.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 15th, 2010 at 6:02 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can follow
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7 Responses to “Plotting vs Pantsing 13: Brett Battles”
1. Sylvia Says:
May 16th, 2010 at 3:00 am
That’s fascinating. I love the idea of the giant post-it notes.
Do you have any idea of the time spent doing the detailed story maps? Clearly a
detailed synopsis is allowing you to get through your rough draft much much
faster but I’m curious about total time.
This sounds a bit odder but do you write the synop in order on the first go? Or do
you put down planned scenes and then rearrange them to best fit?
It would be fascinating to read the original synop along side the book and see how
things had emerged.
May 16th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Thanks for walking us through the evolution, Brett. I agree with you that it’s
helpful to accept that each project may be different from the last. Having written
novels with both methods also gives you a unique toolbox, I imagine: the ability
to draw on either skill when you need or want to.
3. Brett Battles Says:
May 16th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Hi Sylvia,
Usually takes me less than a week to figure out the synopsis, so total time is still
WAY down. And when I write them, I tend to write in order. But just like with the
full book, the synopsis will go through drafts.
Interesting thought about comparing the synopsis to the final. I should probably
May 16th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Thanks, Rachel. It is nice to have the experience of both so I don’t get locked into
only doing things one way. Just about to start a new book tomorrow (a new series
actually) so will be feeling out which method works best over the next couple of
days.
5. Dana King Says:
May 17th, 2010 at 6:46 am
It’s good to see successful writers evolve from one process to another, and
possibly back. Rachel wrote of re-examining her technique last week, and your
journey has been similar, though not identical. I tend to change it up a little for
each project, and always worried that was because I just didn’t know what the hell
I was doing. Now, not so much.
May 18th, 2010 at 6:26 am
I think changing things up, even if it’s just a little bit, also serves to keep the
writing fresh. I’m constantly worried about writing the same book over and over,
so perhaps by mixing it up it helps me to avoid this. (At least that’s what I’m
going to tell myself!)
May 27th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
I have actually changed my writing habits (or at least my attitude toward them)
because of this post. I read it in the middle of a three-book-proposal marathon,
something I have loathed my entire writing life because it forces me to outline. I
read Brett’s piece, and it all made sense to me, and I thought, “If Brett can be that
flexible, so can I,” and I went back to work with a new attitude and found that I
can — gasp – outline, at least as long as I begin to write every scene so I can get a
sense of where the characters are heading.
So my proposals are 1 and 2-page scenes, complete with dialogue, that turn from
writing into condensation and then a new scene followed by more condensation,
and when I have a pretty good idea of how the book might come out, I do some
cloud-language so I’m not actually committed to anything.
And they’re terrific proposals, if I do say so myself, and I didn’t hate every
minute of it. So a big “thanks,” Brett.
Plotting vs. Pantsing 14: Michael Stanley
May 23rd, 2010
Michael Stanley is the writing name of two long-time friends, Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. Both
were born in Johannesburg, but their paths diverged during the apartheid era. Stanley went to
university in the United States, Michael in Australia. The friendship developed in Minneapolis in the
early eighties. Both have worked in academia and business. Michael is a mathematician, specializing
in remote sensing; Stanley is an educational psychologist, specializing in the application of computers
to teaching and learning.
They have enjoyed many trips in southern Africa together, with Botswana a favourite destination. The
idea of completely destroying a murdered body by setting it out for hyenas came on one of these. But
the intriguing thing about a perfect murder is that it never is perfect, and the intricate plotting of murder
mysteries seduced them both, leading to their debut novel A Carrion Death which was published in
2008. Their second novel A Deadly Trade (titled The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu in the US) will
be available in paperback on May 27th. Both feature their detective, whose nickname Kubu means
hippopotamus in Setswana.
Plot or Pants? Plot and Pants.
When Stanley and I started our first book — A Carrion Death — we didn’t have much idea about
anything . We had written lots of nonfiction — several books in Stanley’s case and multiple
mathematics papers in mine — but we’d never tried out hands at fiction. The premise had come to us
in the Botswana bush after watching hyenas devour a young wildebeest. They ate everything except
the horns and hooves. We speculated on what they would do to a human corpse. Nothing would be
left. Nothing at all. What a wonderful way to get rid of a body, we thought! Especially if you had a
particular reason that the body should not under any circumstances be recognized.
I wrote the first chapter and sent it to Stanley. He was as intrigued and puzzled by the half-eaten corpse
as were the ranger and scientist who found it. What happens next, he asked. I didn’t have the faintest
idea . . . .
When Detective Kubu went out to the area to investigate, we still didn’t know. We had lots of ideas,
but we were coming to grips with all the issues around writing fiction. Who was it that said that fiction
has to be believable but biography doesn’t suffer from that disadvantage? How right he (or she)
was . . . . We had been told to write about what we knew, so our plan was to have the scientist as hero;
fortunately, Kubu ignored us and took over, shouldered the academic and not too smart game ranger out
of the limelight, and started investigating. He made one discovery after another leaving a trail of dead
plots in his wake. Somewhere a nasty family of rich and greedy people started to be the focus of his
investigation. Somehow they started to fit the bill.
I can’t imagine a more seat-of-the-pants approach than this. Kubu pulled us up by his bootstraps. Or is
that our bootstraps? It was great fun! Maybe there was a freshness and excitement that came from the
plot twisting and turning around us as it coalesced. When the dust had settled, a couple of reviewers
commented that there was “too much plot” and they were probably right. Good thing they hadn’t seen
all the plots we rejected along the way! In the end we were left with a plot with which we were
comfortable, but also with a strong feeling that this was a very inefficient way to write a book.
When we started the second book, we were convinced that all this chaos was a spinoff of the fact that
we knew nothing about writing fiction. It was only much later that we discovered that many mystery
writers do it that way, enjoying the discovery of what’s going on as much as the reader. By the second
book we were experts. We knew better. We spent a lot of time plotting and arguing, rejecting ideas,
following twists, taking turns. We had mind maps that couldn’t fit on the dining room table. And
eventually we had a plot that we felt held up and that would lead to none of the dead ends that had cost
us thousands of discarded words in the first book. We sent our publisher an outline of The Second
Death of Goodluck Tinubu and while a few extra embellishments occurred during writing as the
characters developed and insisted on doing things their way, if you read that synopsis now, you would
see that the final manuscript followed it very closely. The book came out last June in North America
and received enthusiastic reviews. The paperback will be released in the UK and the rest of the world
as A Deadly Trade on the 27th of this month. We felt we had cracked it! We knew how to write
mystery novels. This must be how all the professionals do it!
Then came the third book. We addressed it almost casually. We knew what to do. It was just a matter
of enough work. For the first time, however, we found ourselves in heated arguments. Our ideas were
quite different, and yet very much the same. This plot had no natural birth; like MacDuff, it was
“ripped untimely from its mother’s womb.” It wasn’t for lack of effort. We actually spent more time
on it than on the plot of the second book. Just as in A Carrion Death the plot has suffered (rejoiced in?)
major changes as we painted ourselves into corners or found our characters forced out of character. As
we traveled around the world hawking A Carrion Death, we argued about the plot of The Death of the
Mantis. And we still do — with 95% of the book finished!
I suppose our third book is a compromise between the two approaches. Our first book was chaos,
enjoyable chaos, and ultimately successful chaos — a true example of writing by the seat of your pants.
Our second was planned and manicured. Successful, too, we hope. An example of planning and
careful execution. Our third is somewhere in between, and it may be our best book yet.
And how will we approach the fourth book? Your guess is as good as ours. Maybe better.
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10 Responses to “Plotting vs. Pantsing 14: Michael Stanley”
1. Sylvia Says:
May 24th, 2010 at 9:09 am
How fascinating! I must read all three books now to see the difference.
Would you say you approached the first one linearly (diversions into dead-ends
notwithstanding)? Or did you add new details into the beginning as you made
sense of the end?
I love the idea of “too much plot” !
Was the second the fastest of the three to write? Was the synopsis very detailed or
sketchy?
I wonder if your discussions and arguments about book three during your book
tours work similarly to the “large body of work” that Jeremy Duns said he builds
up before beginning (Plotting vs. Pantsing 4).
2. Suzanna Says:
May 24th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
I know that there are sometimes many co-authors in non-fiction but I think your
co-authorship is the first that I’ve heard about for a fictional work, which is
probably due to the fact that for the most part I read non-fiction.
A strong longstanding friendship, great writing skills probably help sustain your
writing partnership, I imagine.
Is there anything else that you feel has added significantly to the success of your
co-authorship?
3. Michael Stanley Says:
May 25th, 2010 at 1:16 am
Dear Sylvia
Thanks for your comments and questions.
We think that A Carrion Death had a clear starting point, but then it was more like
a shrub – a rather untidy shrub – with lots of branches that developed but had to
be trimmed back. So the thrust was linear, but there were lots of side lines.
Yes, you correctly deduce that the second book was the fastest to write, and we
did have a quite detailed outline. It was in various forms – mindmaps, synopsis,
character descriptions and so on. The synopsis was fairly accurate, too, although
there were some ideas that didn’t work out and changed as we went along. Not
that many though.
I think there are similarities with what jeremy Dunns said. I suppose the main
difference is that we have to both be comfortable with what we are doing all the
time. When one of us gets uncomfortable, that leads to a LOT of discussion!
Hope you enjoy the books!
Best wishes
Michael.
May 25th, 2010 at 1:21 am
Dear Suzanna,
Thanks for this input. There are a number of contemporary writing partnerships
that have been successful in fiction -Nicky French (husband and wife) and Charles
Todd (mother and son). We were recently on a panel with Caroline Todd and she
says that her collaboration with her son works pretty much the same as ours.
Probably the main issues are general compatibility, similar writing styles, and a
willingness to set aside ego and listen carefully to the other partner!
Most of all we have a lot of fun!
Best wishes
Michael.
5. Dana King Says:
May 25th, 2010 at 11:32 am
Congratulations on the success of your collaborations. I can’t imagine writing in
conjunction with someone else, though much of it does sound like fun.
I’m starting to see a common thread running through many of these posts: don;t
get locked in. You’re a perfect example of writing each book as it needs to be
written, without being too rigid about “this is how I/we do it.” When successful–
as you clearly are–it must have the side effect of keeping the series from
becoming formulaic.
May 26th, 2010 at 2:59 am
Hi Dana
Yes, I think you hit the nail on the head. Sometimes you think you have a really
good plan but it just doesn’t work. Of course you twist and turn for a while but in
the end you have to accept that. I’m sure many writers have that sort of
experience.
Matt Lynn who writes mercenary thrillers told me he writes very detailed outlines
– about 20% of the book – and sticks to it. But then, of course, he’s really doing
the pantsing in his outline…
Michael.
7. Dana King Says:
May 26th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Michael,
That’s a great point. Everyone pantses at some point. I tend to do it while putting
together the outline; I need some structure to allow myself to be creative in the
expression of what happens, and how. (My outlines aren’t nearly as detailed as
Matt’s.) Most who consider themselves true pantsers are fixing things in their
rewrites I thought about in the outline. I often wonder if the amount of time spent
actually writing as opposed to thinking about what happens next is different
between the two schools; we just do them at different stages of the process.
8. Greg Smith Says:
May 26th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
About the detailed outlining that Matt Lynn does, you said, “but then, he’s really
doing the pantsing in his outline.” It’s beginning to look like everybody employs
both approaches to writing one way or the other; even for the died in the wool
plotters, pantsing has to come into it at some point.
Thanks for sharing your process and the fact that all of us might benefit by mixing
it up with approaches from time to time.
May 27th, 2010 at 8:28 am
Yes, I think that’s right, Greg. Stan and I are wondering about how we’ll approach
our fourth book. But I guess we’ll just start plotting and see where it goes…
Michael.
May 31st, 2010 at 8:32 pm
Thanks to Stanley and Michael, and thanks to all who chimed in on this post and
those that preceded it. I think this was an especially apt one, since these guys have
pretty much lived the entire spectrum, and also wrote one sentence I’m going
paste over my keyboard: “Just as in A Carrion Death the plot has suffered
(rejoiced in?) major changes as we painted ourselves into corners or found our
characters forced out of character.”
Just a great post and a great ending to this enterprise.
I think the next thread, maybe in September, will be THE BOOK THAT
ALMOST KILLED ME. More about that later.
Thanks again to everyone.
No Smirkus from Kirkus
June 7th, 2010
Kirkus Reviews is the trade publication known for being somewhat sparing with praise and,
occasionally, for running reviews that are absolutely scathing. So it’s with a light heart and a certain
amount of relief that I announce that the Kirkus review of THE QUEEN OF PATPONG is an out-andout RAVE, complete with star.A star, in addition to being a token of enthusiasm for the book, also
means that the reviewer gets more space for his/her review, and this one is a beauty. He/she even liked
the stuff about Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” which I really put in for myself.
THE QUEEN OF PATPONG
Author: Hallinan, Timothy
Review Date: June 15, 2010
Publisher:Morrow/HarperCollins
Pages: 320
Price ( Hardback ): $24.99
Publication Date: August 17, 2010
ISBN ( Hardback ): 978-0-06-167226-2
Category: Fiction
Classification: Suspense/Thriller
A
star is assigned to books of unusual merit, determined by the editors of Kirkus Reviews.
Hallinan (Breathing Water, 2009, etc.) takes his Poke Rafferty series to the next level with this taut,
offbeat and fast-moving thriller that focuses on Bangkok’s red-light district and sex trade.
Travel writer Poke has finally persuaded his live-in love Rose, a statuesque former bar girl in
Bangkok’s Patpong district, to marry him. The couple and their adopted daughter Miaow are happy.
Miaow, a former street urchin, is doing well in school and preparing for her part in an upcoming
version of The Tempest; Rose’s cleaning service, which hires former bar workers, is successful; and
Poke’s latest book is doing well. But as anyone familiar with Hallinan’s previous entries in this series
knows, that much serendipity means Poke’s trouble meter is running. This time the trouble centers
around Rose, who finds her past flooding back to haunt her in the worst possible form—a man she
thought was dead pops up with the clear intention of not only disrupting her life, but taking it, along
with the lives of the other people who matter to her. Poke is well aware of Rose’s past—he met her in a
bar—but he had no clue as to what she endured at the hands of this man, or the detailed story of her
journey from village girl to prostitute. In the second part of the novel, Rose poignantly tells her story,
and this is where Hallinan’s writing really shines: Readers can feel the grime and poverty of village
life, smell the streets of Bangkok, taste the fear when Rose—previously known as “Kwan”—fights for
her life in her own, private version of The Tempest. Stalked by a resourceful killer dedicated to wiping
out his family, Poke and his loyal and incorruptible friend, police officer Arthit, still mourning the loss
of his wife, put together a plan to bring the hunter into the kill zone, hoping they can end the nightmare
that began years ago in a Bangkok club.
Hallinan’s unlikely hero shines in this sometimes funny, always engrossing and undeniably authentic
story that explores a dark and fascinating side of Thailand.
In all, a really excellent way to start the week.
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12 Responses to “No Smirkus from Kirkus”
1. Glenn W. Says:
June 7th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Tim,
I’m delighted for you that your newest Poke novel has wound its way out of the
labyrinthine maze of your own hard work, through the editorial, and publication
processes into the light of day. Bravo and hearty kudos to you!!
I’ve deeply appreciated the last several months of “Pantser vs. Ploder” series.
Helpful, instructive, encouraging, fun; by far, mile better than any three day
$1000.00 writer’s conference. You’ve done us all a great service.
Cheers!!
June 8th, 2010 at 9:34 am
Adding it to the reading list …
3. Suzanna Says:
June 8th, 2010 at 9:46 am
Thrilled for you Tim. You deserve every accolade this review has bestowed on
you: BIG GIANT RED STAR, and all the magnificent praise that is sure to follow
this wonderful review. Congratulations!
4. Usman Says:
June 8th, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Hope, it becomes a bestseller, and then I can buy it in Pakistan.
June 9th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Congrats! I’m reading A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART at the moment.
June 9th, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Him everybody, and thanks for all the niceness.
GLENN — Happy you enjoyed the “Plotting VS Pantsing” thread — me, too.
And BILL proved himself the most unregenerate pantser of them all.
LOREN — QUEEN will come out on August 17 although it’s up on Amazon right
now. Hope you like it.
SUZANNA — Stars are hard to get from the trades and in the end they don’t
really mean much for sales, but it’s tremendously rewarding to get them,
especially when you have doubts about a book, as I did with this one.
USMAN — You and me both. Maybe I could come to Pakistan and you could
take me into a bookstore and show it to me. I’ll never forget how juked I was the
first time I saw one of my books for sale in Thailand.
BILL — If you like it, please e-mail me to tell me so. If you hate it, well, silence
is golden.
June 10th, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Congratulations Tim on the great review. It’s interesting that the reviewer was so
taken with the section in which Rose starred alone. She and Peachy always
intrigued me.
8. Paul D. Brazill Says:
June 14th, 2010 at 10:27 am
Congratulations.
That’s a tasty review!
9. Annelie Says:
June 17th, 2010 at 4:31 am
Congratulations! on receiving such a brilliant review.
June 17th, 2010 at 8:59 am
Thanks again — to Philip, who’s writing a novel about Cambodia, to Paul, who
writes terrific dark short stories, and to Annelie, who leaves a very sweet note.
11.J. Edward Tremlett Says:
June 19th, 2010 at 8:16 pm
*thumbs up* well done, my friend. congratulations on a well-deserved ovation
from a tough room.
July 17th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
Thanks, Jim –
Your review is pretty high up on the list of “bests” for QUEEN.
One Mo Stah
June 22nd, 2010
It’s BOOKLIST!!!
The second of the four publishing trades has just run its review, and this one is also accompanied by a
star. Two for two, so far.
Also, I have to tell you that this review knocks me out. The guy who wrote it likes the same things I
do.
You have to imagine a big red star because I can’t figure out how to put it there.
The Queen of Patpong
Hallinan, Timothy (Author)
Sep 2010. 320 p. Morrow, hardcover, $24.99. (9780061672262).
Life in Bangkok is good for writer Poke Rafferty and his unlikely family. Poke’s new book is selling
well, and he’s happily in love with wife Rose, once a Patpong bar girl. Daughter Miaow, just a few
years removed from living on the streets, is enrolled in a good private school and becoming a
feisty preadolescent. But their contentment is upended by Howard Horner, a dangerous man from
Rose’s past. Hallinan’s previous Poke thrillers have been reliably entertaining, featuring a fascinating
and exotic locale and exceptionally malevolent bad guys (Breathing Water, 2009), but this one is a
breakthrough. The backstory concerning Rose’s impoverished life in a squalid Isaan village, her
father’s plan to sell her into prostitution, and her escape to Bangkok and life in the sex trade is riveting,
genuinely moving, and entirely plausible. Miaow’s entry into a stormy adolescence, and her parents’
efforts to deal with it, are knowingly written. Even Bangkok seems more richly detailed than in past
adventures, and Poke’s effort to condense “The Tempest” for Miaow’s school’s production (Miaow
plays Ariel) is thoroughly charming. The Queen of Patpong is a terrific page-turner, and the surprising
denouement will thrill readers who want the good guys—or girls—to win in the end.
— Thomas Gaughan
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3 Responses to “One Mo Stah”
1. Glenn W. Says:
June 22nd, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Holy Crap!!!
The mother load, my friend, the mother load. Obviously Mr. Gaugham has
impeccable insight and taste in good literature. Mostly, I delight in the fact that all
the years of hard work at your craft is being recognized and applauded.
Congratulations, good buddy. Keep up the good work. You give all of us hope.
Cheers!!
2. Helen Simonson Says:
July 24th, 2010 at 1:11 pm
Tim, I have a good feeling this is indeed the breakthrough! The combination of
thrilling mystery and the deeper story of Rose’s background sounds like a winner
to me. And when this book is a big hit, everyone who is not already a huge fan
will have to go back and read the others. Poke and Rose (especially Rose this
time) are going to knock it out of the park! I can’t wait to read it.
July 27th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Thank you, Glenn, and thank you, Helen. Sorry to gave taken so long to respond.
The new book is eating me alive. (You know about that, Helen.)
Someone once asked Elmore Leonard if it didn’t get easier after 75 (!) novels and
he said, no, because “You get harder to please.”
From your lips to God’s ear, Helen.
“QUEEN” ON VIDEO
July 8th, 2010
Premiere! Premiere!Thanks to the inexhaustible creativity of my maybe best friend in the whole world,
Shadoe Stevens, we’ve got a KILLER video on THE QUEEN OF PATPONG.
As much as I’d like to put the screen up right here on this site, I don’t know how to do that and I am
unwilling to learn how to do that because I know it’ll take hours and I’ll get all pissed off and my wife
will get mad at me and I’ll have to sleep in my car, which is way too small since it’s an, ahem, sports
car. So here’s the link.
Take a look and leave a comment if you like it. If you don’t like it — well, how could you not like it?
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4 Responses to ““QUEEN” ON VIDEO”
1. Dana King Says:
July 13th, 2010 at 7:05 am
I don’t generally care for book trailers, but this one’s good. It creates the proper
mood and establishes the setting of a noir thriller right from the start. Well done.
July 13th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
Thanks, Dana — I appreciate it. Don’t know whether these do any good but the
publisher likes them. Shadoe gets the lion’s share of the credit.
July 17th, 2010 at 10:17 am
So, I clicked on the link and . . . imagine my disappointment when I didn’t find
the keys to your Infinity. But, hey, the video was good; give Shadoe a “high 5″ for
that one.
July 17th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
You didn’t seen the keys, Phil? Wow, because I accidentally left them there. But
you can watch as many times as you like because I’ve got them now.
Me and Stephen King
July 15th, 2010
Stephen King and I have something in common. Neither of us writes for
money.
Of course we have different reasons for not writing for money. Stephen King doesn’t write for money
because he doesn’t need any. He’s already made approximately 23% of all the money in the world. I
don’t write for money because I don’t earn any.
It’s a funny thing. If I earned a little money from writing, I’d probably be writing to make more. I’d be
writing for money. But I’m what’s sometimes called a “cult favorite,” meaning that I get great reviews
and have crap sales. So I take the advances, when I can get them, and then don’t think about money
again.
And when I don’t have an advance, I write anyway, and I write the book I want to write. The lack of
concern for financial gain frees both Stephen and me up. If Stephen, 37 years (!) and God knows how
many best-sellers after Carrie, decides he wants to write a 1,088-page whopper about a small Maine
town trapped beneath a force-field shaped like one of those glass domes they put over your food in
pretentious restaurants, what’s to stop him? It’s the book he wants to write. He doesn’t have to sit
down and knock out Children of the Corn 12, because he doesn’t care about the money.
I’m writing three books right now. None of them has a publisher. They may never have a publisher.
But I’ll write all three of them anyway, and then maybe I’ll put them up on Amazon for the Kindle and
sell 312 copies and sit back and bask in the adulation of my fans.
The question, of course, is why write? Why write if you’re like Stephen, to whom more money is just
added weight? Why write if you’re like me, and money seems to avoid the sections of the shelves on
which your books sit?
I think he and I write for the same two reasons. First, because we can’t not write. It’s what we do.
And second, because we both want to get better. I think both Stephen King (whom I’ve never met)
and I write to get better. I think, really, that’s why most writers write. They know the only way to get
better is to write.
Stephen King, over the course of a long and wildly successful career, has gotten a hell of a lot better.
And me? Well, I’m not the one to judge, but I know that I’ll now attempt things I never in my wildest
dreams would have dared twenty years ago. That satisfies something inside me that really wants to be
satisfied.
Don’t misunderstand me, though. I mean, if someone forced a lot of money on me . . .
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10 Responses to “Me and Stephen King”
1. eclixpe Says:
July 17th, 2010 at 7:30 am
Test
July 17th, 2010 at 10:05 am
If I had money to force, Tim, you’d be one of the immediate beneficiaries.
Humble but highly talented writers such as yourself earn–and deserve–all the
support they can get.
The obligation readers owe to writers goes beyond the price of a book. Writers
often put their best thoughts in print. Just as often, those very thoughts become the
seeds of someone else’s new ideas.
You write because you enjoy writing, and that’s all good. Personally, I hate to
write; I struggle for every word, and it soon becomes too much like real work. I’d
rather be driving truck.
I write precisely because I enjoy having written; I enjoy blogging, I enjoy writing
very short-short stories (800 words or fewer), and I enjoy posting comments to
your blog, among others. Money is not a motive. (And for damned sure, no one in
his right mind is gonna pay me to write this crap.)
But I just don’t think I have it in me to write a full-length novel, not even a short
one.
However, there is a novel inside me that’s struggling to get out; it’s been
struggling for more than 15 years. I expect it to struggle for another fifteen, but
who knows? I’m not of an age where I should be predicting that far ahead.
Looking on the cheery side, if I make as much progress on it over the next 15
years as I made during the previous fifteen, I’ll be ready to start Chapter 3.
Regarding Stephen King, have you read his The Dark Tower series? Best rompin’
adventure since Lord of the Rings.
3. Suzanna Says:
July 17th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Tim,
I really admire you for your determination to continue doing what you love doing
and what you are so good at despite all the nonsense that goes
along with authorship in the midst of today’s crazy, fast and furious world of
competing media sources.
I’m thrilled and inspired by the fact that you remain committed to your amazing
talent to tell a story.
No matter what form your creativity takes now and in the future I will always
look forward to what you have to say, just as I always have.
Quite possibly your number one fan,
Suzanna
4. Beth Says:
July 18th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Tim, you have written about your characters having a life of their own, that they
compel you to tell their stories. Would you want to be inhabited, or even a
neighbor, of Jack from THE SHINING? Where inside of himself does Stephen
King have to go to bring his characters to life?
King writes about places that aren’t real, I hope, and invites people in to share the
scare. Poke, Rose, and Simeon are real people; readers can recognize themselves
in your characters, if not fully, at least in part. There is no question that King is
talented; there is no question that you are talented as well but differently so.
King’s books sell because they allow readers to confront fear without actually
having to be in fear. Vicarious danger appeals to many people, ergo, the volume of
sales he enjoys. But I think people eventually
grow out of that stage. They’ve had to deal with enough fearful situations in their
lives to want to move on to something that strikes a different chord.
Mid-list writers are in need of their own publicity machine and it has to be driven
by their fans. Publishing houses aren’t willing to put their money into anything
but a sure thing, but the definition they use to determine what that is seems to be
very short-sighted. Just as fast as this vampire craze appeared, it will disappear.
Fads have a very short life. Fans of writers like you and your blog mates on
Murder Is Everywhere need to make noise, to bring attention to your books. Word
of mouth is powerful.
Libraries are magical places. The economy has led to cuts in services everywhere.
Budgets are slashed so librarians have a more difficult time making decisions
about books to purchase. Much weight is given to circulation figures. My library,
like most in the country, belongs to a network. When a book I want is sent from
one library to mine, the book is checked out from its home library and it is
checked out again from mine when I pick it up. That’s two points in favor of that
book in the circulation statistics. Authors can be helped by library patrons.
Because I am obsessively concerned about running out of something to read,
every week I check out more books than I can possibly get to. I return what is due
and then a few weeks later I check it out again. That’s more points for the book.
Putting a hold on a book helps, too, because the libraries can see easily what
books are generating a lot of interest.
Three weeks ago I started a blog so I could post reviews of authors who are
undervalued, getting the names of the authors I respect and enjoy out somewhere
on the web where maybe it will be found and a new fan created. If we want to
keep reading Tim, we need to keep talking about Tim and the other authors we
don’t want to lose.
Tim, if you want to bump into Stephen King go to Fenway Park. King is an avid
Red Sox fan and is at most home games.
Beth
http://www.murderbytype.wordpress.com
July 18th, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Nice of you to put it all out there, Tim. I have no plans to quit my day job, which I
like as much as writing–only for different reasons. When I talk to other writers, I
often find I’m alone here. Isn’t the Mac Daddy dream to write full time?
Nah. Not for me. Writing was fun before I was published. It’s still fun. Life is
good.
If I depended on it to pay the bills, that would take some shine off the apple.
July 18th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Hi, everyone and thanks for taking advantage of the newly resuscitated Comments
feature (yay, Chris Lang!) and responding to Me and Stephen. People like you
really make my life a lot better.
Phil, if you ever do have money to force, I’ll even come up there to get it. In the
meantime, I’ll just have to write for pleasure (it’s not always fun — there are
times when it’s grim as hell, but then someone will come through, some character
shouldering the load and taking me elsewhere and, if I’m lucky, making me laugh.
I hope you do write your book, but you know? Some people live full and
delightful lives without doing anything of the kind. No, I’ve never read THE
DARK TOWER, even though I’ve got two volumes somewhere. In the future,
perhaps.
Suzanna, you knock me out. That’s the sweetest note I ever got, even on
Valentine’s Day, even in elementary school, when I got more than my share of
steamy (by 5th-grade standards) valentines. I just with there were a million
readers like you, people I know will read me the way I want to be read. Great
quote from David Sedaris: “Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you
realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.”
One really hopes, especially when working with delicate material (QUEEN OF
PATPONG, for example) that you’ve made it difficult for readers to bring certain
kinds of stuff into it. But once it’s out, it belongs to the reader.
Beth, thanks for the kind comparison with King — I’m more than happy to be
considered with him in any sentence that doesn’t make me look like a dwarf, No
living writer has turned out so much material that hit so many people so hard.
He’s as much an alchemist as he is a writer: he can blend his talent and our fears
and hopes, and come up with something that millions and millions of people love.
We who are firmly (and apparently permanently) placed in the midlist can only
wonder what it must be like to know that small continents were stripped of trees
to print your new one, but I doubt very much that he enjoys the act of writing, or
of reading the bits where I actually got it right, any more than I do. In the end, we
have a lot in common: we both sit down and make something that simply didn’t
exist before; and it’s a great privilege, even if there are beasts and monsters in it.
(I continually get praised for writing “ferocious” villains.)
Rachel, thank you for writing, and I think it’s terrific that you love your day job. If
I were given a month’s head start I probably wouldn’t be able to follow what you
do in any random ten minutes at work. But I’ll tell you and anyone who’s listening
that your next book, DEAD LIFT, is absolutely tremendous. Make a note,
everybody. I want to hear those pencils scratching.
7. Jean Henry Mead Says:
July 19th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
Someday you’ll be outselling Stephen King, Tim. Everyone I know who’s read
your books say you’re one of their favorite novelists. I guess it just takes time to
build a readership.
I’d love to hire your web designing team. What a great job they’ve done,
and your video really hits a home run!
8. Dana King Says:
July 20th, 2010 at 8:36 am
Look on the bright side. Assuming your original thesis is correct, and neither you
or Stephen King writes for money, then you’re much more successful at it.
July 20th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Hi, Jean — Just posted about your wonderful book on Maverick Writers — great
stuff. And let’s hope you have the power to predict the future, because it would be
interesting not to write for money (for a while, anyway) because I have too much
already.
Dana — You’re absolutely right, and you made me laugh out loud. I’m winning in
a walk. Stephen hasn’t got a chance.
10.Larissa Says:
August 8th, 2010 at 9:54 am
….long time no comment from this side of things…I wish that I could say that I
don’t do some of the things that I do for money…but it’s not true. When I sit
down to refill the jewelry table it’s because I know that some well dressed woman
is going to come by and go “oh my gosh, I just love those earrings. They would
look great with that new purse I just bought..” and while I sort of have to vomit, I
take her money. Not that I make my living doing that but still…I’m glad that you
don’t write for the money. It’s usually painfully obvious when people do what
they do only because it pays them in cold hard cash.
So-well done and keep enjoying what you do. You’re a step ahead of most people
out there. (c:
Happy Trails
July 20th, 2010
One of the things I like to do with this blog is pass along the kind of inspiration that writers can get
only from other writers. Often, this material has the added benefit of offering insight into the creative
process.
I’ve been reading a wonderful book edited by S. Jean Mead, Maverick Writers: Candid
Comments by 52 of the Best Western Authors. If you write or engage in any other
creative enterprise, you need this book. Whether you read Western novels or not (I haven’t
read many), the men and women women who talk about their work in this book are the kind
of artists I like best, people who write hard enough to get calluses on their hands. This is
inspiration and general guidance on steroids.
One interview after another made me re-examine my own work ethic and my commitment to
my writing. Janet Dailey, for example, who began in romances and went to Westerns and
mainstream novels, writes “fifteen pages a day . . . no matter how long it takes. ’. . . it’s usually
a six-day process,’ Dailey says, ‘fifteen pages a day. . . . if I have a good day, maybe I’m only
working eight hours, Then, if it’s a bad day, I might work sixteen.’” Sixteen? Sixteen hours a
day? ”Only” eight is a good day? Janet Dailey is one of my new heroes.
While I rarely confuse the authors of private-eye novels with actual private eyes, an awful lot
of these people sound like they could rope a calf and write a paragraph at the same time, and
without popping a sweat. And, in fact, many of them have horses looming in the background.
To Elmer Kelton’s father, ” . . . work was something to be done on horseback or with a pick
and shovel, not behind a desk.” When Kelton finally worked up the courage to tell his father
he was considering a career in journalism, “. . . he gave me a cotton-killing stare and declared,
‘That’s the way it is with you kids nowadays: you want to make a living without having to work
for it.’”
When Elmore Leonard started writing, while still working as a copywriter at a Detroit ad
agency, he got “out of bed each morning at five o’clock, [writing] two pages of fiction before
going to work, ‘with the rule that I wouldn’t put the water on for coffee until I’d started
writing.’” Kelton tells would-be writers, “You have to make time. You have to want it so badly
that nothing will deter you from writing . . . in the long run, the only person who can teach you
how to write is yourself, and the only way you learn is by doing it over and over and over and
over again until it becomes second nature.”
Whew. And you want to hear a great title? It’s the first book sold (in 1976) by Jeanne
Williams, A Lady Bought with Rifles. Got a better one? Show it to me, I dare you.
And underlying all these marvelous pieces is the sense that the writers were working in a
dying form, literary versions of the cowboys they wrote about, riding the vanishing range. The
magazines died first, and then the flood of paperback originals dried up. These men and
women, however, are not people you can feel sorry for. What an amazing bunch.
Just a couple of representative quotes:
A.B. Guthrie, Jr.” “I think these are our moralities: entertainment and illumination enforced by
our determination to write to the best of our abilities.”
Will Henry: “Why I really write, you see, is to get better. One day to become even better.”
Tremendous book, and all credit to Ms. Mead, who also writes, and very well, as Jean Henry
Mead. The book, as is the case with many an excellent title in this Age of Injustice, was
remaindered by its publishers, and she bought up the unsold copies, demonstrating the kind
of courage of convictions that so many of these writers represent. If you’d like a copy of
Maverick Writers, e-mail her at [email protected] and tell her so. She’ll ask you for
$7.50 and a mailing address and send you the book by return mail. It would be a deal at three
times that. By the way, she’s also written Mysterious Writers, a similar book about mystery
and thriller writers, and you can get it as an e-book from the book’s website.
You might also win Maverick Writers from me. Janet Dailey says she wanted to write like a
combination of Edna Ferber and James Michener. Give me the combination of writers you’d
like to write like, and I’ll pick two completely subjectively with no argument allowed and mail
out a book to each of the inspired combiners.
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8 Responses to “Happy Trails”
1. Jean Henry Mead Says:
July 20th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Thanks, Tim, for a terrific review!!!
2. Sylvia Says:
July 20th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
My combination:
Would it be possible to combine Margaret Atwood with Kurt Vonnegut? I suspect
the result would be unintelligeable. Sylvia Plath with Gene Roddenberry then.
Emotion, Pathos, Sex and Tribbles. What could possibly be better?
3. Suzanna Says:
July 20th, 2010 at 7:24 pm
Can we pick you? You and Robert B. Parker?
Alright I guess that will definitely be perceived as trying to curry the judge’s favor
so I’ll propose another two who don’t write mysteries. If I could magically
acquire their talent I’d, number one, be amazed and confused, and number two,
have a seriously messy house, an overgrown garden, and be blissfully hard at
work on a fantastic novel. They are: Jhumpa Lahiri and Jeffrey Eugenides.
Thanks for indulging my writer fantasy for the afternoon. I had fun.
4. fairyhedgehog Says:
July 20th, 2010 at 11:50 pm
Sylvia got there first! I was going to say Arthur C. Clarke and Margaret Atwood –
so that Atwood could finally come out of the closet about writing science fiction!
I like Sylvia’s suggestion of Plath and Roddenberry too.
July 21st, 2010 at 5:45 am
Alice Sebold and Dennis Lehane. Both can manipulate my mood with their
unique, well-placed images and phrases.
6. Usman Says:
July 23rd, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Thanks for this piece Tim.
How about Garcia Marquez and Steinbeck for literary novels.
Or
John Le Carre coupled with Elmore Leonard/Raymond Chandler. This combo
could be fireworks for me. The grit of Leonard and the subtlety of Le Carre…
hmmm.
Interesting captcha: sierra reasoning
July 23rd, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Hi, everyone — Sorry, sorry — CRAZY getting ready for QUEEN publication —
the PowerPoint presentation for bookstores alone has already taken about 60
hours, and it still stinks.
Will name winners within 49 hours.
8. galen tarman Says:
August 17th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
My all time western writer by the way is Max Brand…combine him with
Raymond Chandler and you might have a no nonsense Bogart character who
chases cowboys instead of dames..
WE GOT WINNERS!!!
July 27th, 2010
The copies of MAVERICK WRITERS have been awarded, and also two, um, booby prizes.
Okay, three, count ‘em, three winners.
Sylvia for the Plath/Roddenberry mind-meld, which made me laugh out loud;
Suzanna for Lahiri and Eugenidesm who I actually think would kill each other;
and fairyhedgehog for the tag team of Clarke and Atwood.
Usman and Rachel, you each get a signed copy of THE QUEEN OF PATPONG.
I NEED MAILING ADDRESSES FROM ALL OF YOU. (Am I shouting?) Even if you think I have
it, even if you KNOW you sent it to me earlier, I need them.
Please send them to [email protected]
And congratulations to all our fine contestants. Let’s give ‘em a hand, shall we? (Applause.)
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8 Responses to “WE GOT WINNERS!!!”
July 27th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Yes, yes, YES! Thanks, Tim. I can’t wait to read this story.
July 28th, 2010 at 12:28 am
Thank you so much!
3. Sylvia Says:
July 28th, 2010 at 12:50 am
Hurray! I liked all the combinations, actually. I’d like to read those books!
(my word verification is “choppiest friend” which is somewhat disconcerting)
July 28th, 2010 at 4:44 am
And congrats to all the winners!
5. Suzanna Says:
July 28th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Thanks for the book!
6. Usman Says:
July 30th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
What, I won a book, and that too yours. WOW. I’ve been dying to read your
books Tim. And please sign it.
Thanks a lot.
And Tim I am restarting my blog. Just getting myself into shape and retuning the
blog.
Congrats to all the winners.
July 31st, 2010 at 8:36 am
It’s not a booby prize, Usman, it’s a bonus prize for the specially gifted. Rachel is
a rising mystery novelist and you soon will be.
(Now I don’t want to get a bunch of passive-aggressive resentment from the rest
of you who won the original prize. That’s a great book.)
8. Usman Says:
August 1st, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Thanks Tim. You’re my biggest fan have always encouraged me the most. It
means a lot.
Quoting Myself
July 31st, 2010
Jean Henry Mead, who under the name S. Jean Mead is responsible for the wonderful Maverick
Writers, is running an interview with me right now at her very good site, Mysterious People. It’s
actually a re-posting of an earlier interview, with some new introductory material about THE QUEEN
OF PATPONG, but further down, in the older material, I found something I’d forgotten I wrote.
Jean asked me for my advice to beginning writers, and for once I boiled it down into something shorter
than the U.S. Constitution. I’ll quote it here:
Write the book you’d most like to read. Some writers waste years trying to create a Great Novel
they wouldn’t read if it appeared one morning under their pillow.
Honor your writing by giving it an immovable place in your daily schedule and sticking to it.
If you can’t get it right, get it wrong, but don’t stop — the enemy, as someone once said, isn’t the
bad page, it’s the empty page. You can always go back and make it better.
Give your characters their freedom and remember that plot is what characters do, not a box to put
them in.
Finish your first novel even if it goes completely, spectacularly wrong; you’ll learn more from the
first one than from the next three combined, and you can’t very well start your second novel until
you’ve finished your first.
When you’re not writing, read.
I know, I know, everyone writes differently, but I think there’s worse advice for most writers who are
still struggling to get to “The End” for the first time.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2010 at 9:57 am and is filed under All Blogs. You can follow
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9 Responses to “Quoting Myself”
July 31st, 2010 at 10:30 am
I always find your advice immensely helpful, and this is no exception.
2. Jeff B Says:
July 31st, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Nice interview even if some of it is a repost. Forgive my thick-headedness, but
what are you saying when you mention the girl’s back is curved as a C. That she is
timid or beaten-down or unattractive?
Anyway, I eagerly look forward to reading the book.
July 31st, 2010 at 2:03 pm
I wish I could show you the picture, although that’s not much of a substitute for
good writing. Timid and beat-down will both do. The sense I got from the photo is
that the weight on her shoulders as she hears that she’s about to be sold is too
great to allow her to straighten up. So in that sense, “beat-down” is pretty precise.
And thanks, FHH.
4. John R. Lindermuth Says:
August 1st, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Just read, and enjoyed, Jean’s interview with you. I’m also currently reading an
advance copy of The Queen of Patpong and enjoying it immensely.
I lived in Korea for several years back in the ’60s and–though the cultures are
vastly different–there are elements which bring back memories of that time.
5. Glenn w. Says:
August 2nd, 2010 at 4:23 pm
I was successful in tracking down a copy of MAVERICK WRITERS. Good stuff.
Thanks, once again, for steering your following in a helpful direction. I was raised
on westerns and the book is altogether so much fun.
Your interview, once again, keeps me on track and hopeful and less self-critical.
Your counsel is priceless.
Thanks!
August 3rd, 2010 at 6:06 pm
Another good way to help finish your first novel: tell all your family and friends
that you’re doing it. That way it’s too embarrassing to back out.
Oh, another one: disconnect the Internet.
Hi all — This is an insanely busy month and I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get
back to you all.
John — Glad you’re liking QUEEN — please drop back by and tell us how you
feel when you’ve finished it. I’ve spent some time in Korea, too, although much
more recently, and I really like it.
Glenn — Thanks for the kind words, and MAVERICK WRITERS is an amazing
book. I’m going to do something more with it in the next few months but don’t
know what yet. And I’m glad you liked the interview, too.
Philip — Whatever works, works. Disconnecting the Internet is a great idea
although it’s puzzling how left this response if . . . ummm . . . if . . .
Anyway, just keep writing. There’s no way to write the 2nd until you’ve finished
the first and no way to write the 3rd until etc.
9. Usman Says:
Comment got lost. So, great post as always.
SQUEAL on Kindle
August 4th, 2010
Okay, this is a shameless plug.
All of you who have written to me over the years, demanding to know what happened to poor old
Simeon Grist (and there have been literally hundreds of you) can now re-read him for PRACTICALLY
NOTHING — I MEAN, WE’RE ALMOST GIVING THEM AWAY – on Amazon’s tidy little forestsaving Kindle. Think of it — you can preserve millions of acres of virgin forest AND read the hardlydated-at-all exploits of the hero of what one critic called “One of the great lost series of the 1990s.”
You’ll be sparing butterfly breeding grounds and limpid, gurgling springs, ensuring a lifetime supply of
tasty nuts for furry-tailed rodents (the great naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch pointed out that we loathe
rodents with naked tails — rats, anyone? — but love those with furry ones – Chip ‘n Dale, anyone?) –
umm . . . this sentence has gone seriously astray.
Anyway, those of you who are Moving On from what digital-book freaks refer to as DTBs (Dead Tree
Books) can now read THE FOUR LAST THINGS and EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL on the
kindle for the practically nonexistent price of $2.99 each. And if you buy them both, you get a special
bulk price of $5.98 for both of them.
And they’ve got these cool covers designed at enormous cost by a teenage prodigy named Allen Chiu,
although, guess what? When you download them to the Kindle, you don’t get the cover. They’re just
eye candy designed to make you feel like you’re getting a DTB.
These ibooks were produced by the redoubtable Kimberly Hitchens, who has talent and energy to spare
and enough lip for a dozen private-eye novels. My role was restricted to paying for absolutely
everything and proofreading both books in their converted status, and I have to say they read pretty
well considering that the guy who wrote them was still trying to figure out what a paragraph was. I
even got a chance to trim some of the more painful excesses.
And if you don’t have a Kindle, you can download Kindle for PC free from Amazon and read them on
your PC or Mac. Come on, buy them and keep me in, oh, I don’t know, chewing gum.
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6 Responses to “SQUEAL on Kindle”
1. Hitch Says:
Tim:
Kimberly Hitchens, aka Hitch
[email protected]
Hitch — It’s only because I’m afraid of you that I didn’t exercise the webmaster’s
prerogative and delete your comment. But since I am, I’m putting it up.
The story was better the way I told it. Pout.
3. Larissa Says:
Wow. That was a completely frenetic and amusing post. I can’t quite bring myself
to read a not DTB. Hehe. I do work at a college bookstore though so I’m
surrounded by them and their sneaky, tricksy little digital book counterparts. I
know, I know, I call myself a hippie but I still like things made from paper (c:
4. Sharai Says:
You sold me, I loved THE FOUR LAST THINGS, and can’t think of a good
reason not to download EVERYTHING BUT THE SEQUEL other than not being
able to snuggle up to my lap top while I read, even though I know Susana does it.
Besides, I know you need chewing gum to keep you smoke free!
Did I hear you tell a guy in Houston last year that this was your best book before
the Poke series? I need to go back and read your older stuff.
I can’t believe how long it’s been since I responded to you guys. Between that and
the fact I never post, it’s probably not surprising that my traffic has fallen off a
cliff.
Riss, I’d had a LOT of coffee. I don’t have an e-book reader, either, but I bow to
the inevitability of getting one eventually, especially since I’ll have about eight
books up within a few months.
By the way, the Simeons are selling at a very surprising pace — good surprising, I
mean. Actual money is flowing into my bank account.
Sharai, hope you read it and that id didn’t/doesn’t horrify you. It’s on the dark
side. But it’s got its funny moments, too.
Rachel, I had to re-read these to put them up, as I noted in the post, and I was
surprised at how much I enjoyed them, but for some really extravagant patches of
overwriting. Hope you like it.
En Espanol, No Less
August 11th, 2010
Whoa — I speak Spanish!
This is EL CUARTO OBSERVADOR, the Spanish edition of THE FOUR LAST THINGS, a really
beautiful edition by the Barcelona publisher ViaMagna.
My favorite line is the one I first opened to, “El helado de Miaow se esta derritiendo,” or as I more
prosaically put it, “Miaow’s ice cream is melting.” Really loses something when it’s translated back
into English.
I LOVE having this artifact. It’s a beautiful object, and it just kills me that someone (Luis Arcadio
Galindo Lopez, as it turns out) spent months translating something I just sat down and made up and
then all these terrific Spaniards designed, printed, and are distributing this book.
A copy of this edition, inscribed by me in Spanish (!!) will be one of the many prizes in my FIRST
LINES/LAST WORDS contest, which I’ll be talking about in a couple of days. Lots of nice things will
be given away to the sharp-eyed who can identify the books from which some first lines were taken and
the writers whose final words I’ll be quoting. Stay tuned, amigos.
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9 Responses to “En Espanol, No Less”
1. Usman Says:
Great Cover, Amigo.
Love the orange and yellow hues, and the silhouette.
Don’t know Spanish. Vamos, coz Nadal is my favorite tennis player these days.
2. Sylvia Says:
Ooooh, now that’s another tempting prize. It’s gorgeous!
3. Jeff B Says:
Hmmm…I would have guessed the cover was for the Spanish language edition of
The Fourth Wacther.
Hi, all — Thanks for taking the time to drop by and say nice things. Jeff, who’s
too smart for his own good, spotted my whoppola of a mistake — this is indeed
the Spanish translation of THE FOURTH WATCHER rather than the Simeon
Grist novel THE FOUR LAST THINGS.
Maybe I’m doing too many things at the same time.
THE FOUR LAST THINGS, in the meantime is selling quite merrily as a Kindle
book, much to my surprise. Between that and EVERYTHING BUT THE
SQUEAL, we’re in double-digit daily sales and climbing. For those who have a
Kindle or Kindle for PC (or Mac) those titles are $2.99 each. Such a deal.
5. glenn w Says:
It’s all way too cool!
What a great time in your life.
Congratulations!
But in all yourcom spare time, better start freshening up on your Spanish.
20 a day for 300 days at $3 each is $18,000. Times, is 6? titles in the series? How
much of that does the author get to keep?
Now awaiting the Japanese, Finnish and Hindi translations – I think you’ve
cracked it! (Where can I get in on this?)
7. Larissa Says:
September 1st, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Well done! I’ll be keeping an eye peeled for the contest. (c:
8. Vena Says:
September 12th, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Must confess to being a recent purchaser of EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL
on Kindle (today) and THE FOUR LAST THINGS (like, three or four days ago).
Happy to have contributed to the uptick of sales, Mr Hallinan.
THANK YOU (or, muchas gracias to keep with the Spanish theme) for writing
both the Poke Rafferty and Simeon Grist novels. They’ve kept me company on
those wonderfully quiet moments while my one year old naps. Am looking
forward to reading the rest of the Grist series on Kindle when (if?) they’re
published.
Congratulations on the translation!
September 14th, 2010 at 11:27 am
Vena — You’re my hero — thanks so much for downloading and then writing me.
If I could presume upon you further, would you review one or both of the
Simeons? For some reason, e-book readers don’t review, and those pages look
really empty to me. You don’t have to write good reviews if you didn’t like one
(or both) of the books, but it would be great to have some more reader opinions up
there.
And if you do that and then send me the link to the review when it appears, I’ll
send you a free kindle file of the next one to go up, THE MAN WITH NO TIME.
(It’ll be about two weeks before it’s ready.)
In the meantime, SKIN DEEP is also up. Simeon number one in writing order, but
published third.
OFF THE MAP
August 14th, 2010
Announcing The Very Short Tour . .
Unlike last year, when I plowed a 9200-mile furrow through the highways of this great nation, this year
I’m doing a dinky little loop of maybe 3500 miles. And I’m hoping against hope that some people will
actually brave the elements to come see me. I’ve put together a Power Point presentation, and although
I know that sounds like a bad episode of “The Office,” it really works — or, at least, I think it will
when I finish it. What more could you want? Me, some pictures, a story or two, and lots of
complicated technology all hooked up in a haphazard fashion, any component of which could opt out at
any moment, leaving me gasping like a fish as I try to ad-lib.
Okay, enough verbiage.
Thursday, August 19, 7PM — Book Launch, the Mystery Bookstore, in Westwood, 1036-C
Broxton Avenue or Boulevard or Lane or whatever it is.
Sunday, August 22, 2 PM — The Poisoned Pen, Phoenix/Scottdale, 4014 W. Goldwater Boulevard,
Scottsdale, AZ
Wednesday, August 25, 5:30 PM –Murder By the Book, Denver, 1574 So. Pearl St., Denver, CO
Sunday, August 29, 2 PM – M is for Mystery, San Mateo (with the wonderful Wendy Hornsby),
86 E. 3rd Avenue, San Mateo
Saturday, Sept. 4, 2PM, San Diego — Mysterious Galaxy Books, 7051 Clairemont Mesa Boulevard,
San Diego
Saturday, Sept. 11, 12 Noon, Thousand Oaks, CA — Mysteries to Die For, 2940 Thousand Oaks
Boulevard
And a splendid time will be had by all.
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 14th, 2010 at 4:51 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
10 Responses to “OFF THE MAP”
1. Sylvia Says:
Spain next, right?
2. Larissa Says:
Say hi to Denver for me. (c: And more specifically, say hi to the mountains and go
drink some good New Belgium beer from somewhere in the vicinity. It’s made in
Ft. Collins and is therefore a required have when you’re in Colorado. (c:
Hi, Sylvia, Larissa — How I wish I were going to stores in both Spain and
Kansas, but this one isn’t as crazy as last year’s. Although who knows, Sylvia?
Mayb El Cuarto Observador will be a hit there and they’ll ask me to come.
Riss — How you doing? Writing any?
4. Larissa Says:
Tim,
Been doin’ pretty good. I was immensely busy with this year’s KC Fringe Fest…
so I was mostly painting and organizing artists..(read: herding cats.) *but* I did
start noodling around with a few of my WIPs. Mainly went back to the characters
to get reacquainted while trying to tackle some of the questions I’ve been
avoiding answering with them. Or that their not telling me yet? Whichever way.
(c: It’s hard to switch gears from trying to convey things visually to textually.
Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how to use that part of my brain.
Be that as it may-I think I had a mini revelation the other night about one of my
characters-now I just need to apply butt to chair.
It looks like things with you have been going awesome! I can’t wait to see what
you come up with next! (c:
I’m heading off to Germany for 12 days in September so I’m hoping to get some
writing done there since that’s where it all started.
Riss — I wish we could sit down and get caffeinated.
Visually to textually: think camera. How do you want to reveal the scene? You can
start with any detail — a cigarette, a bowl of flowers, the curve of a woman’s
fingers, blinding light through a window (look — not to be immodest, at the first
couple of graphs of Ch 1 of BREATHING WATER, which is all about a man who
frames himself in bright window light as a way of putting his visitors at a
disadvantage) and then direct the reader’s eye from then? When do we see the
room? How much of it do we see? Why those parts? What frames the characters
when they move? Where does the light come from? On and on and on. Break your
scene down visually and COMPLETELY LEAVE OUT FEELINGS — let the
visuals, dialog, and action tell us everything we need to know about the
characters.
You have amazing energy and it’s pretty much all positive. You need to find the
entry point (or points) into the text that works best for you.
Thanks for a great presentation. I’m loving the book! It was great to see you, and
see you doing so well!
7. Larissa Says:
I do too Tim. That’d be fun. (c: Ok-so I feel like the beginning of the story starts
off with that “pan back the camera” effect. I feel like I could go on forever
describing every little detail about the environment and the smell and the
temperature of the glass on the subway and all these things…and on and on and
on until I have 50 pages of “pretty” but not so much in the way of content.
I know from your blog and books that content comes from characters with the
occassional nudge in a certain direction from the writer. But man I have a hard
time trusting that they’re going to say anything at all. I feel like I keep trying on
scenes for size to see if they fit and then throwing them to the wayside. I’m sure
this is supposed to be a good thing but really it’s just maddening at this point.
hehe.
Finally, and then I’ll stop I promise, I really need to start carrying a tape recorder
around with me. I had this minor epiphany the other day and now I can’t seem to
get it back…maybe this is a sign that it wasn’t that great of an idea or maybe it’s
just that i’m too busy. but if I could talk myself through some of the tough spots
and then listen to it, I think it might help. I’m a verbal thinker in that way…
Ok..so I said that was it, but really this is it…I feel like I’m moving really fast in
some ways. Or rather, like a bunch of energy is being expended but there’s not
much payoff. It’s like I can’t wait to get to the part where something happens heh.
I need to slow the pace down but I don’t want to bog it down. I want all that nice,
important, space between the big events that all good books have. The ones where
you read 50 or 60 pages and things are just getting started.
And thank you for the compliment. I’ll figure out how to channel all this energy
someday. hehe. Right now, I just run around a lot. ;0)
Cindy I’m the one who owes you thanks for coming. Way, way beyond the call of duty.
And I’m so glad you’re liking the book.
Riss, I need a little time before I reply. Just drove 500 miles to get nowhere (Rock
Springs, Wyoming) and am now in a very peculiar motel so tired I can still feel
the car moving beneath me, and starving to death. Will answer in the next couple
of days — still got almost 900 miles to cover to get to San Francisco.
9. Larissa Says:
(c: You’re awesome. Get some sleep! And I’m sure Rock Springs, WY isn’t
entirely nowhere…might be a distant cousin…
10.Hitch Says:
Simeon Redux — and an Offer
September 14th, 2010
Here it is, in digital form: Simeon Grist’s third adventure, set this time in the secretive world of
network TV and the seamy world of strip bars.
To set the record straight, this is actually the first Simeon I wrote. It got sold as part of a three-book
contract and I was so, um, exuberant that I immediately wrote The Four Last Things. The publishers
decided to put Four Last out first, and in the meantime I wrote Everything But the Squeal, which the
publishers decided to put out second. So this, the first written, was the third released.
Because it was the first, I looked into it with a certain amount of dread when I had to proof it after
conversion. It turned out to be not as bad as I’d feared in the not-so-good bits and a hell of a lot better
than I’d hoped in the good bits. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever written a much more nail-biting
ending, and nobody seems to have guessed who the killer was, which was undoubtedly because I had
no idea myself until he or she was in the room with a gun in his or her hand.
It’s pretty good overall, with one of the best opening paragraphs I ever wrote:
By seven-thirty a crowd had jammed itself noisily into McGinty’s of Malibu, which, all gussied up for
the Fourth of July, was even more of a slag heap than usual. Red, white, and blue crepe paper sagged
despondently from the rafters. Red, white, and blue beach balls had been tossed into the ropy fishnet
that hung from the ceiling. They nestled among seashells, starfish, old glass floats, and other nautical
bric-a-brac to create a landscape that looked like the place where drowned children went to play.
That’s not bad, is it? And all that — plus much, MUCH more is yours for the bargain basement price
of $2.99. $2.99, do you hear? No, your eyes are not deceiving you. $2.99.
And here’s a deal. Buy it and read it and review it (or review The Four Last Things or Everything But
the Squeal) on Amazon and send the first five words to me at [email protected] with the topic
heading AMAZON REVIEW, and when your review appears I’ll send you a FREE (not even $2.99)
Kindle copy of The Man With No Time, Simeon’s fourth book, which will be ready to go in a couple of
weeks. It DOES NOT HAVE TO BE A POSITIVE REVIEW. Just tell people what you think. For
some reason, e-book readers don’t post reviews the way the readers of print&paper books do.
This offer is good until October 31. Come on, what’s to lose? One book for $2.99, one book free. I
cannot believe I’m hondling you like this. I’m sensitive. I’m an artist. I want you to buy this book.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 14th, 2010 at 5:13 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
6 Responses to “Simeon Redux — and an Offer”
1. Cliff Stanford Says:
OK, I’ll bite. I’ve just finished The Queen of Patpong so I need something else to
read.
Cliff.
Thanks, Cliff, and please review it on Amazon whether you like it or not.
Can’t believe you’re reading these on your iPhone. This is the kind of thing that
would have driven my mother crazy. “You’ll ruin your eyes, you’ll ruin your
eyes.”
3. Kyle Davis Says:
October 2nd, 2010 at 9:46 am
Ok. I’ll bite, too. Just finished 3 (the last one “The Queen of Patpong”) and loved
all 3. Great characters that I feel close to. Just bought “Skin Deep” last night so
October 2nd, 2010 at 11:16 am
Don’t forget to review, Kyle, whether you like it or not, and send me the link, and
I’ll send you the Kindle file of either THE FOUR LAST THINGS, ANYTHING
BUT THE SQUEAL, or the upcoming THE MAN WITH NO TIME.
But make sure to send me the link at [email protected], because I don’t check
the Amazon pages much.
And I’m really happy you liked QUEEN.
5. Cliff Stanford Says:
October 7th, 2010 at 8:47 am
Right, read it on the iPhone and very much enjoyed it. I have also reviewed it on
Amazon.
Cliff.
October 7th, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Cliff, thanks so much for the review — will send you the Kindle version of THE
MAN WITH NO TIME, but PLEASE send me a ne-mail reminding me that
you’re owed the file because I’m keeping all of them in a single folder.
It was full of nude dancers, wasn’t it? Hmmmm. Kind of a theme in my work.
Important: How to Recognize Spam
Spam, the bane of the Internet. But millions of dollars are being spent on new and sophisticated
techniques to slip spam messages past us. Here are indispensable identifiers to help you spot it and
grind it underfoot. ALL EXAMPLES ARE GENUINE AND WERE RECEIVED ON THIS SITE.
It starts off on-topic and quickly veers astray, often into surrealism.
Example: Fascinating post. Will have to add my own skills as i’m very well generally known as a
fantastic kisser. You might adore kissing? Kissing can be something that we desire to do and speak
about about regularly without having to get bored. Almost nothing is better a great sensual kiss.
Nothing definitely makes the birds appear to play louder, the lawn might seem greener than a good
kiss. Kissing indicates interest. It’s possible erotic or just love, however it will do it the same. She’ll be
thrilled to experience the lips on hers. Make sure, you’re never going to receive a lot of kisses in your
life long. Analysis: “Nothing definitely makes the birds appear to play (play?) louder, the lawn might
seem greener than a good kiss.” This is not on-topic. It’s not even in English. The sober attempt at a
return to sanity, “Kissing indicates interest,” doesn’t go far enough. I’m not certain there is a far
enough.
It starts off badly and goes downhill from there.
Example: Good morning Each. Same days ago I found great site (www.xxxxx) with articles for
snurkeling and diving. This is kind of portal, i don’t know. Enybody uses this site? I’m planing to write
to them but don’t know polish. Do you be acquainted with how write in polish the words diving and
snurkeling? Analysis: “Good morning Each,” while cheerful, is not widely used, at least not in my
circle. And the Polish word for “snurkeling” is “snurkeling.”
It attempts to pass as folk wisdom.
Examples: Three “everyday expressions” from the past week. These may be said all the time
somewhere, but I don’t want to visit. (1) With wealth one wins a woman. Uganda. (2) Who goes to
Rome a beast returns a beast. And my favorite, (3) Much cry and little wool. Analysis: If these are
viral attempts to start new catch-phrases, they don’t seem to apply to many everyday experiences in my
frame of reference. Although I’m hanging onto “Much cry and little wool.”
It makes your teeth itch when you try to figure out what it means.
Example: You may from not intended to do so, but I over you suffer with managed to express the
voice of mind that a tons of people are in. The common sense of inadequate to expropriate, but
not crafty how or where, is something a lot of us are going through. Analysis: Actually, on this one
I give up.
It makes you want to answer it out loud the first time you read it.
Example: Lets say my real name is Lola Sparkle-Gem (Okay, Let’s) And my username was
cheespuffgirl [email protected] (That’s not what it is! That was random!) (Is it ever.) And then instead
of saying my real name, (Uh-huh.) it says my username… (Ummmm.) How can i make it not say that
and change to my real name!?! P.S. It started out as my real name then i changed it for some reason
(For some reason?) and i want i to change back… (Honey, it actually doesn’t make any difference at all
what you’re called.)
It sounds like it came from Dianne von Fursternburg.
Example: Admiring the actual time and effort you place into your own blog and in depth information a
person offer! I will search for your blog and have my personal children check up here often. Thumbs
up! Analysis: This is unimprovable. I can only accept your” thumbs up” with humility and hope you
can keep track of your “personal children.” It would be terrible to confuse them with all those other
children
There! That was easy, wasn’t it? Go forth and battle the forces of spam wherever it may be found.
Excelsior!
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 18th, 2010 at 9:30 pm and is filed under All Blogs. You can
your own site.
8 Responses to “Important: How to Recognize Spam”
You get much more interesting blog spam than I do! I mostly get a string of
Chinese characters (which may not even be spam if I could read them but I bet it
is) or someone telling me in general terms that they like my blog or post and come
visit their blog.
My rule of thumb is that if it’s the first time someone comments and they leave a
link – it’s spam.
2. Hitch Says:
OMG, that was hilarious. Man, I gotta get your spammers. Mine just suck, and
certainly aren’t auditioning for Saturday Night Live. It figures, Hallinan, that
YOU would hog all the funny ones to yourself, you selfish prig.
With much honor wondrousness, I expropriate,
Hitch
3. Colleen Says:
Your spamalogue certainly opened a can of spam — perhaps forespamming a
spamathon? All this spam-speak begs us to explore the joys of spam in a Spam-ARama, culminating in a cyber Spam-Off, which could in turn spawn The Best of
Spam, and ultimately The Spam Bible, all promoted by a Miss Spam World
contest — or would it be Spamiverse? In spam I am…
4. Beth Says:
Tim – My daughter wanted to know what was wrong. She’s forgotten that some
things are so funny the laughing turns to wheezing.
At first I thought that it was just that I was on the list of people who get boring
spam and I should try to get on your list. Then I realized it is the analysis that
kicks it up more than a few notches.
Beth
5. Emily Bronstein Says:
You’ve actually received this type of spam?? These days it’s been My Life, the
G.I. Bill and Dupuy Hip replacement lawsuits (you did realize that every joint of
my body was redone with one of these medical devices).
em
Ahh, thank you, but I can claim credit for very little of this. The real jewels come
from the anonymous minions in Russia and Uzbekistan and, oh, I don’t know,
Upper Romania if there is one, who so painstakingly crafted these.
Emily, FHH, and Hitch — I have to confess that I saved these up for a few weeks
and that my spam, as a whole, is distressingly long on erectile dysfunction and
human growth hormone. But when these arrive I seize them with both hands.
Beth — Glad it made you laugh. Someone else wrote to say I’d made her wake
her husband up, and he wasn’t even on the same floor. Another friend suggested
an acronym NSFSR, Not Safe for Silent Reading because she had to cover her
mouth to keep from awakening the husband sleeping beside her.
Hmm. Maybe I wouldn’t get all this erectile dysfunction spam if the spammers
knew how many women read me while their husbands are asleep. And correct me
if I’m wrong, but didn’t erectile dysfunction used to be, like, personal? Remember
personal?
Colleen, spam is the only luncheon meat that gets bigger, like a snowball, as it
rolls downhill. Many scientists have risked their personal children in experiments
to understand the phenomenon and so far the score is Spam 12, personal children
0.
By the way, many of these BEG to be read in a faux-Russian Boris-and-Natasha
accent. Try to read the kissing one out loud in that accent. If you can do it without
laughing, you need a humor transfusion.
By the way a guy named Steven Thomas sent me a great line from Richard Adams
in response to my September newsletter: “They hung in the air exactly the way
gold bricks don’t.”
Nobody in the world but Douglas Adams could have written that line.
Uber-odd short-fiction podcast The Drabblecast did something brilliant recently:
They ran a short-fiction contest where you had to write your own Nigerian spamscam email. The winner (here) not only won cash money, he also had his entry
spammed to everyone on the show’s mailing list. Pure brilliance!
8. Larissa Says:
Wow. Positively absurd. I think I may have caused serious brain damage I was
laughing so hard on a few of those…and I”m drinking hot coffee! You should
warn people first! (c:
With Mozzarella
In the language of Dante, no less.
THE FOURTH WATCHER, already available in Spanish, has sailed the Mediterranean down to Italy.
And I’m being interviewed by Italian journalists, which is kind of cool.
If I get extra copies of this, I’ll inscribe them in Italian and give a few away.
But I think this, the promo copy, says it all: “Poke Rafferty è convinto di avercela fatta. Buoni
guadagni con libri di viaggi, una fidanzta e una figlia adottiva che lo amano, una vita senza scosse
nella Bangkok residenziale. Nessun problema giusto? Sbagliato. Perché il passato ritorna. Nella forma
di Frank Rafferty, spregiudicato padre di Poke, insieme alla peggiore delle compagnie, Richard Elson,
agente della CIA. Il quale accusa la fidanzata di Poke di essere coinvolta in un grosso traffico di
banconote false. Ed è solo l’inizio dell’incubo. Pezzo per pezzo, infamia per infamia, Poke è
inesorabilmente trascinato in un abisso di intrigo e cospirazione in grado di inghiottire tutto. E tutti.”
E tutti, indeed.
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 25th, 2010 at 11:34 am and is filed under All Blogs. You can
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8 Responses to “With Mozzarella”
Due caffè per favore isn’t quite enough for me here. There doesn’t seem to be
anything about ice cream, either.
It’s great you’re getting into so many languages.
“Bon giorno” and “Ferrari” are the extent of my knowledge about the Italian
language, but I’m guessing your title translates to “The Fourth Watcher.” Way
cool, Tim.
3. RJ Baliza Says:
congratulations are in order, then.
tellyou what. we’re due for an Italian vacation in the next coupla weeks, and i’d
keep an eye out for anyone reading your book in public then snap their picture and
send it to you.
4. Suzanna Says:
Happy that your book is getting yet another foreign language edition.
I hope you don’t mind but I was curious enough to find out what the Italian promo
copy said so I put the copy into an online translator and the following is the
confusing mess it came up with. These translation tools usually make a mess of
things and this was no different. Funny stuff.
“Poke Rafferty is convinced to have to us made it. Good gain with books of
travels, fidanzta and an adoptive daughter loves who it, a life without jolt in the
residential Bangkok. No problem just? Mistaken. Because the past returns. In the
form of Frank Rafferty, spregiudicato father of Poke, with to the worse one of the
companies, Richard Elson, agent of the CIA. Which accusation the fianc2ee of
Poke of being been involved in a large traffic of counterfeit banknotes. And it is
only the beginning of the incubus. Piece for piece, infamy for infamy, Poke
inexorably is dragged in an abyss of intrigue and conspiracy in a position to
swallowing all. And all.”
Now I just need to find out what fidanzta and spregiudicato mean.
My God, Suzanna — the Italian ad copy was written by Diane von Furstenburg.
The woman is everywhere. The “fidanzta” is a masterstroke — such an underused
word. And my new book is going to be called “The Beginning of the Incubus.”
RJ — If you see one, buy it. Buy three. I’ll (secretly) pay you back later. I’ve got
to do SOMETHING to drive sales, even if it’s in Italy.
Phil, you should learn the phrase in Fairyhedgehog’s note. Then you can have two
coffees all for yourself, every time you order in Italy (or at Pizza Hut. Well,
maybe not.)
Haven’t got the book yet. Can’t wait to see what they did to the sentence that
begins “El helado de Miaow” in the Spanish edition.
Thanks, all.
6. RJ Baliza Says:
Italy is going to be a family vacation, and we’re a party of 12, so sales in Italy that
But seriously, it’s just a matter of time before Italy discovers you.
7. Larissa Says:
w00t!
October 3rd, 2010 at 11:23 am
RJ — Hope you find it and buy out the entire press run. It would be nice to be big
in one country, at least.
Riss — w00t back atcha. That’s my Sarah Palin imitation, btw.

Tim`s Blog Jan-Sep 2010 ( document)

Transcription

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15 Responses to “The Stupid 365 Project, Day 1”