I finished the first draft of my next novel a few minutes ago. Everything is nicely in place, and I feel as if I’m getting something done.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s The Hookie-Pookie Man. His mother was an Earth woman, and his father was from another planet. And he, Dwight wanders the country in search of the Hookie-Pookie Woman (who has similar origins), knowing she’s his soul mate. It’s a story of love, hope and outsider-ness.
I’m on a Vonnegut spree. I’ve lined up all his novels, and I’m reading them in the order they were written. I’ve read them all before, each one at least three times and some as many as a dozen. But it’s particularly interesting to go through them this way, one right after another, because of all the connections between them and the characters who reappear. The problem is that I haven’t had much reading time in the last couple weeks, so I’ve been on page four of Breakfast of Champions for the last two weeks. It’s okay, though. There’s no hurry.
After neglecting this thing for… however many months it’s been, I think it’s time to come back and writing something here.
So I have new novel out, Open Stage. I’ve approved it for publication at CreateSpace, but it’s not yet shown up on Amazon. It should soon.
It’s an old-ish story. I wrote a screenplay called Blind Faith years ago, intending to recruit actors and shoot it on video. It was to be a sequel to a feature-length video I had made previously called Crosswalk, a story about a character named Gilbert Ragwater. Well, for better or worse, Blind Faith never got off the ground, and the screenplay sat in a file cabinet drawer.
I’m inclined to think it was for the better. For the novel, I reworked a number of things and added some material that (in my opinion) makes Ragwater’s world more vivid. Although it’s now bulkier, the overall effect is that it’s more streamlined and elegant. It’s meatier. It makes a stronger, more well-focused statement about love and fidelity. Well, okay, not a statement. It challenges the reader to think about what he/she expects of relationships.
Anyway, the novel is a far better presentation of the story. A novel can dig deeper into a character’s head than a movie can, and that’s where this story needs to be. Open Stage takes full advantage of the opportunity. Blind Faith was like a skinny little kid, awkward and unsure of himself. Open Stage (while I would never claim it to be flawless) is that kid after he’s grown up, filled out physically, gained some “life experience,” developed some self-confidence and decided what he wants to do with his life.
Well, it’s done.
I finished my final pass at copy editing Goliath yesterday, got all the elements of the cover art in place, and now the files are at CreateSpace waiting for approval. Being the obscure author that I am, I don’t imagine the world was breathlessly waiting for this announcement. I’m just sayin’. Okay, well, I’m going to say that maybe there’s a tiny bit of interest. Anyway…
The point is, I have to figure out what to do now. The sensible thing is to get some promotional ideas in place for the novel (and to get more promotional ideas in place for my previous novel, The Hermit.) My problem is that I don’t have the temperament to do that kind of thing. I want to move onto the next book and let the previous ones sell themselves. Yes, I know know it doesn’t work that way.
That’s why I have this blog. I don’t mind writing it, and I can feel I’m doing something positive to get the word out. (Yet it just moves the problem one step farther back. Now I have to promote the blog if it’s to do me any good!)
There’s a saying among painters that you never finish a picture. You just stop working on it.
The same is true of any creative work. I’ve been copy editing my upcoming novel Goliath for several weeks. I’ve taken pass after pass on it; the first couple times included some fairly drastic changes involving moving scenes around to improve the flow of the story. I’ve rewritten a lot of sentences, deleted paragraphs, and added a few things here and there to improve clarity and the overall flow of the story.
Now, I’m down to nitpicking over words, or, as I think of it, “taking sandpaper to the novel.” I’m smoothing it out. Yesterday I searched for the word “just” and deleted, I’m guessing, something on the order of thirty to forty instances of the word. It had struck me that it was in the novel too many times. I simply deleted many of them without any problem at all. In every instance, the deletion improved the sentence. In a few instances, I had to rewrite the sentence. I think I still have more “just”s than you’re likely to find in a randomly chosen novel, but at least now it’s within acceptable tolerances.
I have lots of ideas for novels. Ideas are cheap.
Going into the final copy-editing and book design stages of my second CreateSpace novel, Goliath, I’ve been spending some time scoping out ideas for the next one. The thing is, judging how viable an idea is can be difficult. In some cases, it’s apparent that an idea sucks after about thirty seconds of thought. In other cases, I might write ten to twenty pages and not like what I have. When that happens, I’ll usually plow ahead and see if I can get it to morph into something I like. That’s how Goliath got started — I threw out the original first two chapters long ago. Where it begins now, in the final version, was actually chapter three in the first draft.
And there are other times when I have fifty or sixty pages, and it’s just not happening. I look at it and say, “so what?” Still, I keep the pages. I might be able to make it work some time later.
So now, looking for the next novel, I’ve resurrected a screenplay I wrote years ago, a story called Blind Faith. Things are going well. In fact, it’s going so well that the screenplay seems as if it were written for no other reason than to serve as an outline for the novel. As Jim Cramer would say, boo-yah!
Let’s talk about influences again.
Shortly after I got out of high school, some friends turned me on to Philip K. Dick. Now, I had been quite the science fiction reader as a kid, with a library boasting loads of Asimov, Bradbury, Clark, Ellison, Heinlein, Sturgeon, and so on, but this was about the time I started branching out into other forms of fiction. SF, by this time, wasn’t quite as compelling to me as it had been. (To give a reference point, I’ll mention that I finished high school in 1975.)
What set Dick apart? Why was I once again excited about a science fiction writer? Well, this was dark, disturbing stuff. Now, some of these other writers got into the dark areas when they wanted. For example, Ray Bradbury. But his darkness was the fun, Halloween-type darkness, and it was effective because he was one of the great masters of his craft, especially in the early stuff when he was at his creepiest. Harlan Ellison’s dark stuff was clearly allegorical and effective mainly because (at his best) it was written with the passion of a thousand suns. (And these two men will probably get their own posts as influences, but Dick comes first.)
At that time I didn’t know anything about Dick’s personal life. But his books were disturbing. His work up to the late 70’s had some flavor of the old-school “space opera” science fiction, but there was much more to it than that. This stuff had a clear philosophical grounding. He played with reality in interesting ways. These were nightmarish worlds he was creating, and one didn’t get the sense that he was creating them in fun. In fact, maybe he wasn’t creating worlds so much as reflecting one. If we were rooting for the protagonist to prevail, it wasn’t so much because we identified with him. It was because Dick made us feel we had something personal at stake in seeing things come out all right.
Ray’s Philip K. Dick recommendations:
All four novels contained in the volume Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
When I’m writing, i don’t like to work in a vacuum. I like to have the TV on, or some music. With the TV, I’m not picky. Just about anything will do, although I’ll generally settle into one of the cable news channels, or a ball game if it’s on. That is to say, I find some sort of programming that doesn’t require constant attention, even though I end up not paying attention to it, anyway, regardless of what might be on.
It it’s music, I usually go with long, instrumental jams. Music in a “standard song format” will too often demand my attention. If “Shattered” starts playing, I’m listening for the duration. I can’t leave it in the background. That’s not to say the music I’m about to mention in the next paragraph is good for nothing more than background music. I find it very much worthwhile to listen to it attentively at other times. It just has the extra dimension of being able to go into the background if I want it to.
So anyway, for writing, I like the Bitches Brew-era Miles and some of the other be-bop artists. Charles Mingus. Or maybe some free jazz with Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton or Last Exit. Sometimes I’ll find something with a psychedelic tint, such as Heldon some of the harder-edged Djam Karet stuff. Or maybe I’ll find a Dead show that that has a long “Dark Star” or “Playing” jam. Often I realize the music has ended and I haven’t heard the last thirty minutes. But I have to have something playing.
I was discussing the idea of “inspiration” with a couple friends earlier today. My take on it? In my experience (with writing in particular), inspiration just gets you started. Everything that follows–development, revision, polishing it up, etc.–is just work that’s not much different from digging a great big hole in your back yard.
Sometimes you just have to put your work-in-progress down and take a break. For example, I’ve lost a certain perspective on my own WIP that I think can be regained only by forgetting about it for a few weeks and coming back to it fresh.
Looking for a follow-up to my recently-released novel The Hermit, I found a years-old first draft of a novel titled Goliath. Reading it was wince-inducing in many ways, but I discovered I still liked the underlying material. It just needed some reworking. It needed a couple extra scenes for better development and a whole lotta copy editing. It also needed some of the events to be “re-sequenced” to give the whole thing a better . . . oh, let’s call it a better “time flow.”
Fortunately, this re-sequencing didn’t require any major changes in the structure of the story. All I had to do was move some blocks of text around and rewrite some of the transitions.
But now, I’m not sure how it reads. I’m pretty sure the new sequence of events makes more sense, but only because I think it should. After going through the novel beginning to end numerous times fairly quickly, it’s no longer clear to me how all the events line up in the story. Every event, every scene, every little piece of business that happens is all equally vivid in my head.
So I’ll let it sit until January rolls around. There’s no hurry.
