Lilith Saintcrow

Crossposted to Deadline Dames. So you want to know how the Dames got started? Stay tuned…

Someone once said, “You don’t know how to write novels. You only know how to write the novel you’re writing NOW.”

Wise words.

Writers fall on a continuum. You have your pantsers, who tend to store things in their head and blithely run through a novel; then you have your plotters, who have a variety of strategies for deciding on what happens in a novel before they write it. (Strategies like outlining, 3X5 cards, mapping a novel on butcher or kraft paper, Post-Its, you name it.) Anywhere you land in that process is fine as long as you come up with a workable product at the end.

I’ve been an inveterate pantser for most of my writing life. I generally work hot and fast after a protracted period of getting the book clear inside my skull, led on from point to point by the Muse, halting only for those places where I have to feel out what happens next like a woman with a plug in one hand searching for a socket in a dark room. (While artillery goes off all around and rats are trying to eat me…) Sometimes (as we discussed last night on Twitter) I stick inessential or don’t-have-it parts in [square brackets] and flail onward while the momentum is hot. Things like [big fight goes here, yadda yadda, get gun kicked away in struggle and wound to hip]. You get the idea.

Then there comes a book to change all that.

I’ve actually outlined the rest of the book I’m working on, in square bracket chunks.

This upsets me a little. I tend not to “plot” so much because the few times I’ve tried it, I’ve ended up feeling confined by the strictures and throwing them out anyway. It’s like someone peering over my shoulder as I write, which is the kiss of death for any kind of peace of mind for me.

Part of having a sustainable writing career is learning to take these sorts of changes with a minimum of flailing. Or, at least, scheduling in the flailing so you can meet your deadline.

So now I’m forced to take a deep breath and repeat to myself, Be mellow. It’s another way of doing the book. As long as the book gets done, we’re OK with however we get there. Just do what the novel needs now, and don’t worry so much about it. You’ve done this thirty-odd times, and each time it’s been different. You finished the other books, you can do this one, outline or not.

So my message for this Friday? Relax. Each book, short story, poem, what-have-you, is unique. Some won’t get finished. Others need different preparations along the plotter-pantser continuum to come to fruition. If this was easy, or if one size fit every novel, well, this would be a lot easier.

But it isn’t. Just ride the pony you’ve got for now.

Now, when I start losing my mind in another twenty thousand words, can someone point me back at this and thwap me on the head until I chill out?

Thanks.

I am doing #Askawriter tonight at 6:30PM PST. For 20-25 minutes I will answer questions on Twitter about writing and publishing.

I climbed on the treadmill yesterday. A half-mile later, the simple answer to my dilemma hit me right between the eyes. Security cameras. That’s how that character knows what he knows. Duh! So then I had 2.25 miles to think about it and the implications.

That’s the big secondary reason why I exercise. Physical movement often shakes the creative nuts and bolts enough to jam things into place. I’ve always been good at thinking on my feet.

So today is for seeing just where that revelation will end us up in terms of Dru 4, and also for reading Public Enemies. (Yes, the movie was based on it. But it’s about So Much More than the movie. Did you know Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker Gang, Bonnie & Clyde, and John Dillinger were active at the same time?) It’s a fascinating book, and Burrough obviously loves his material. He’s not half bad as a writer, either.

So, um, you guys can stop sending bonbons now. The Muse was deluged. I’m sure she’s throwing stuff at me now in self-defense. I have not-very-nice thoughts of letting her eat her way out of the pile of beribboned boxes…but then I decided to lend a hand.

She is my Muse, after all.

Over and out.

The Muse, again. Taking the story through a bootlegger’s turn, and now she’s sitting on her red velvet fainting-couch, selecting bonbons from a beribboned cardboard box, and thinking through how she’s going to tell me to fix this thing. I can’t go any further until I figure out how Character A has received the information he’s going to impart to Girl Friday. I know there’s a solution, it’s on the tip of my brain. The goddamn Muse is sitting on it.

Some days she’s like that.

I am just going to keep throwing bonbons at her until she takes pity on me or until the solution wriggles out from under her and into my head. In the meantime, I’ll be working on another project to make this one jealous. Making books jealous of each other is a good way to jolt them free. If I’m not working on one thing I’m working on another, and that’s what’s saving my sanity.

Such as it is.

So. I’ll be shoveling bonbons and working on the homicidal-fae book today if anyone needs me. If you see the Muse, throw some choco at her or kick her pretty little derriere, willya?

Thanks. You’re a pal. I couldn’t do this without you.

*exits stage right, hands fisted in hair, muttering*

The morning is nice and gray and soft-edged outside my windows. Not foggy, but not with the glare of spring sunshine and a blue lidless sky either. I’m glad–you live in the Pacific NW for long enough, you start getting nervous when it’s not cloudy or raining. No doubt the rain will start later today, but for now it’s just…cloudy. And I like it. The synchronicity engine is still turning over and echoing under the surface of Real Life.

Yesterday I was fighting tooth and nail with the latest book, and I figured out the point where things had gone wrong was…whoops, 10K words ago. After much thought and cutting and pasting, I only lost about 8K of those words. *headdesk* There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Not to mention cursing, bitching, and wandering around the house muttering and glaring balefully at things. I hadn’t precisely gone wrong, I’d just…well, had a major plot thing happen too soon, and it removed a lot of the necessary tension for the book to go forward. Plus I can always keep that 8K chunk for if I need it later. It will go in the graveyard like every other wrong turn.

If there’s one thing that’s changed about me writing, it’s that I only feel a twinge and not a huge soul-devouring terror when I slice out a huge chunk of text.

So now I have to figure out how to proceed from five steps back.

Those are the days when writing is intensely frustrating and nothing seems to go right. They hit just often enough to remind me that the usual state of affairs is a gift.

I have great hopes for today.

The engine of synchronicity runs under the surface of my days. In order to feel the engine and see the connections, I have to be in a certain frame of mind. I can generally tell how OK I am by how well I can sense the engine running. Whether it only runs when I’m happy or I just don’t see it when I’m in the undertow is largely academic as far as I’m concerned.

So. I am reading Murakami. There’s a passage in Dance Dance Dance–Chapter 17, to be precise–where he talks about the phone, about connections, about the imperfection of communication. It resonated so strongly I set the book aside and sat thinking for a while, feeling the engine thrum under the surface of daily life.

I started reading Murakami because of a tragedy, and the first novel I picked–The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles–still resonates. I was climbing out of a well of my own when I read it; the tragedy was in a well of its own. For various reasons, it was gruesomely ironic that I started reading him at about that time. I can’t blame the author, but I think that has something to do with my liking the books.

The tragedy wasn’t mine, but it tore at me. My links under the surface of the world mean very little to anyone but me, but seeing them, the wheels and cogs sliding gently into place, meshing with the terrible convenience of coincidence–well, it’s important. Maybe I only see it when I’m happy because otherwise I couldn’t bear the tangled knots weaving everything and everyone I know together. I couldn’t bear to see the machinery going along with its own chaotic, fractal regularity and logic.

In any case, the world is sparkling with golden dust and thrumming with the knots and threads all bound together and pulling in their different directions. It’s marvelous to think that everyone I see is a node with their own net of knots and threads that sometimes touch mine briefly. Each touch is a fresh knot. If it’s a net, it’s one that keeps us from falling too far.

It’s good not to feel alone. The magic has come back. The tightrope act goes on.