The Craft of Writing, Part Seven – Productivity

Good day, my fellow readers! I hope this leap day is treating you well. For me, it’s just another day, but I’ll persevere. Anyway, today I’d like to begin with a story. More specifically, it’s the story of me as a writer.

I mentioned back in the beginning of this series that I started writing my first book in the seventh grade, but I didn’t make it very far because I didn’t have a storyboard. Well, not long after I gave up, I thought up the storyline for a new novel, a fantasy which I initially called “A Knight’s Journey,” and later changed to simply “War.” I wrote this novel on-and-off for the next five or six years, completing a chapter or two, then taking a six month break, then writing furiously, then taking a year off, and on it went. I would write, then take a long sabbatical. When the anxiety, pressure and guilt finally got to me, I’d drag out my computer and write more, as much as I could before I lost interest and put it away for another long break. Then I hit my senior year and I decided that I just had to get that book done. So, almost exactly a week before graduation, I finally typed the last words of the epilogue and boom! My first novel, Torjen, was complete (minus the revising, which came later).

But in that time, over the course of those five or so years of writing one book, I’d compiled ideas, characters, plotlines and connections to over thirty-five other books that I decided to write in my life. There was only one problem: if I took as long to write each of them as I did to write Torjen, then I would die of old age before I made it even halfway down the list. That was when I committed to my book-in-a-year plan. Thereafter, once I began a book, I would plan everything in such a way that I would complete it in a year or less. As such, during my five years in college, I completed (year-by-year and in this order) Torjen II: The Search for Andross, Reality, The Hybrid, Torjen III: Diablo and finally the science fiction novel, Infrared. Most of these have yet to be published, but I promise they will be released from their digital prison cells someday. From college, I dove into my studies in seminary and, graduate studies being what they are, I was forced to suspend my novel-writing until I completed my studies. Finally, in the first year of marriage, I was able to dive back in with my newest creation, The Choice of Anonymity, only to take yet another year off afterward so I could make strides into the realm of publication. But regardless of whether or not I get published by this fall, I will definitely begin work on the sequel, tentatively called The Struggle With Conformity.

Now why am I telling you all of this? Because I believe one of the chief qualities of a writer can’t simply be good ideas, skills and talents. It can’t just be good planning, groundwork and carefully crafted worlds and characters. The quality which differentiates between the one-hit-wonder and the legitimate writer is productivity. A good career writer doesn’t write one novel and then live off of that for the rest of his life; if he does, he’s just a fluke, not a true writer. No, a writer writes, and he writes, and he writes because that’s what he does. He writes his stories because he must get them out, or because the need to write, to share his thoughts is driving him mad. Or perhaps he’s in a deep (non-romantic) love affair with the craft itself. He doesn’t just think about writing; he writes!

But too often, I myself have struggled with long periods of inactivity. After all, it took me five years to write my first book! So what’s the solution? For me, what makes the one-year rule successful is a concept that probably brings a nauseating sensation to many stomachs and a woozy disgust to many minds: deadlines. Yes, that terrible beast which plagued each of us in school is what I have to enforce upon myself: deadlines. Check out the 2014-2015 schedule I crafted for The Choice of Anonymity below.

After completing my storyboard of the plot, I looked at how much was to compose each chapter and I gave myself the necessary time to complete it. Notice, for instance, that chapters ten, twelve and fourteen each took nearly a month to complete, while most of the others took about two weeks. That’s because those chapters were whoppers. On the other end of the spectrum, the prologue and epilogue each took about a week because those were miniscule. And chapter nine took another month because, in all honesty, I took two weeks off for the holidays. It wasn’t my most megalithic chapter.

By sticking to these deadlines, I made the writing of my book into a much less daunting task, and I ensured that less than a year after selecting the first few words of the story, I was writing the last few lines. This is the tactic that works for me, the strategy which keeps me productive and ensures that I will not die of old age before I make it halfway through my list of future books (which still rests at around thirty-five to forty, although I now have other follow-up ideas if my memory isn’t shot by then).

If the system of deadlines doesn’t work for you, then I encourage you to find something that will. But remember, you absolutely must find something that works. If you don’t, your productivity will be very low – if alive at all – and a writer you will cease to be. Stay the course, my friends. Be committed to seeing your works through.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for next week’s finale to our eight-part series on the craft of writing, in which I’ll discuss the nature of beauty versus exploitation in storytelling!

The Craft of Writing, Part Five: Information

Hello, hello, hello, hello! I hope your Valentine’s Day went well. Whether with a romantic partner-in-crime or alone with God, I’ve recently heard a number of my wise friends say that what matters most is that you foster the prime relationships you have – both with God and your fellow man. I have to wholeheartedly agree.

Today we’re crossing into the second half of our series about the craft of writing. So far we’ve covered plot, character development, setting and pacing. Now, continuing on the notion of pacing is a factor to which it is intimately tied: the dissemination of information. What do I mean by this? By “dissemination of information,” I mean the revealing of mysteries, the answering of questions or the introduction of something new to the story. Essentially, it’s adding a bit of novelty.

Suppose, for example, you’re writing a story in which your protagonist unveils and ultimately foils a grand conspiracy. You can’t simply reveal the whole conspiracy in your first chapter, or else you’d have nothing left to reveal in the rest of the tale. But if you wait until the second-to-last chapter to reveal all that information, then with what have you filled up all of the previous chapters? What you need to do is space the information out, spreading it like butter over the toast of your novel. This is most preferable for two complementary reasons:

1. By spacing out the information, you’re contributing to the proper pacing that you worked hard to establish according to last week’s post. If you go too long without revealing information, your story may soon grow boring. And if you give away everything at the start, then you have nothing left to reveal and the rest of your book (until the climax) will be similarly boring. What works best is establishing a steady rate of revelation: a little bit here, a little bit there, some more here, some new facts there. And eventually, these little bits of information will begin to form something new underlying your story, something rich and developed. Your readers will feel like detectives, better able to identify with your protagonist as they put the information together along with him (or her).
2. But you also want to add breaks. If every chapter reveals truckloads of new information, then your reader can quickly become overwhelmed and lost in all of the novelty. My recommendation is similar to that of the pacing: after every high-speed place, after every information dump, take a break and allow the reader to catch their breath. Let them process the information for a bit before you throw something new into the mix. You don’t want to pull a Matrix Reloaded and wait until one of the last parts of the tale to unload everything, or it will be too much for the audience to take in at a time (I still have no idea what The Architect was saying in that scene). Let the audience take the information in little spurts, or at a slow and steady rate, but not too slow, or you’ll lose their interest.

Now you may, unfortunately, run into a pinched point where you have no choice but to reveal a large amount of information in a short amount of time. It’s understandable, it happens to me from time to time. If you have exhausted all other options and find yourself facing this conundrum, my advice is to try and be as careful and clever as possible. While writing Torjen II: The Search for Andross, I arrived at a chapter where I was forced to introduce over a dozen new characters who were to have an intense discussion. The best I could do in that scenario was to make each as unique as possible so that the reader could keep them separate, then focus predominantly on only a few of them. I had a similar issue in my most recent work, The Choice of Anonymity, in which the ultimate explanation was revealed in one chapter. To balance this, I added foreshadowing in order to set this up, and then I still held a few key bits of information on reserve so as to keep the reader engaged. The foreshadowing worked like a charm, allowing for the revealed information to read more like a linking of facts than a wholesale revelation of them.

So the basic rule of thumb is to tie in the revealing of new information with the pacing you’ve already constructed. That adds some consistency to your book, as well as depth. But as a final note, let me point out that in the end of your work, all of the most important information must be explained. That’s my personal pet peeve in writing, when mysteries are established and then left unsolved. I mean, sure, you don’t have to explain whether or not one character followed through on their resolution to quit smoking or if another character ultimately conquered her fear of flying. But the big, crucial information that forms the core plot of your work must be answered.

However, it doesn’t necessarily have to be answered in this book. Suppose you’re writing a trilogy, or a series, or a grouping of works that interrelate but don’t form a linear series. If, over the course of your stories or books (notice the plurality there), those things will eventually be answered, then you may withhold key pieces of information to be made clear later. Again returning to The Choice of Anonymity, I leave the ultimate fate of all but my protagonist unknown, but the reason for this is that there will be two follow-up novels in this trilogy, and their fates will be made known there.

So if you’re going to establish a mystery, or some unresolved question, please ignore the tendency of the highly-talented and fascinating writer/director J.J. Abrams, who chooses to leave his mysteries unresolved. Let it be known, my friends. Let it be known.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll discuss the deeper relationship between the protagonist and antagonist!

A History of Zombiism, Part Two

Good day, good year and welcome to the year 2015! Can you believe it’s been over two years since everyone thought the world was going to end? I have to say, I’m glad those people were wrong, although I did enjoy the 2009 film it inspired. Now about a month ago, I began a series exploring the origins of the zombie myth. In part one, I laid out the Haitian Voodoo origins of the “zombie” term. Essentially, a zombie is a person who is poisoned into a near-death state by a bokor (Voodoo witch doctor) and then revived, then kept under the influence of cognitive-inhibiting drugs in order to be retained as a slave. Now the question becomes: how did we go from a poisoned-revived-drugged slave of a Voodoo bokor to the flesh- or brain-eating reanimated dead that fill our silver screens today (sometimes done well, sometimes done very poorly)?

On the surface, the “reanimating of the dead” is a clue as to the connection. After all, a bokor who is reviving a person would appear to be “raising the dead.” And furthermore, a victim kept drugged and enslaved certainly tends to possess the diminished mental prowess that we see in the zombies in film. But then there’s the big kicker: the cannibalism. Where did that part of the myth come from?

One of the earliest original precursors to today’s zombies appears in Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend. Although the creatures in his novel are referred to as vampires and bear many similar characteristics to vampires (aversion to light and holy objects, as well as the protagonist’s choice to kill them with stakes through the heart), the behavior of Matheson’s vampires are closer to the rabid zombies that showed up in fiction later on. But the more far-reaching effect of I Am Legend was its influence upon the father of the zombie genre: George A. Romero.

Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, can truly be considered the film that transformed the zombie myth into what it is today. In this movie, the dead are brought back to life presumably as a result of a space probe exploding in the atmosphere, dispersing a strange type of radiation that it picked up from Venus (that came from the movie, so don’t get mad at me for the scientific issues there). These reanimated dead – referred to in the movie simply as ghouls – are cannibalistic in nature, appear in swarms and spread their infection through biting.

It took another 17 years before Dan O’Bannon’s 1985 film, Return of the Dead, switched up the mythos, with the zombies specifically interested in brains, as opposed to simply flesh. While the brain-eating function of zombies (as well as government experimentation being the origin of the zombiism) are staples of the zombie genre, those two points appear to be dying out in recent years, with many good and terrible zombie films following more in line with the Romero conception.

So George A. Romero – under the influence of Richard Matheson’s novel – seems to have bridged the gap between the Voodoo bokor zombies and the flesh-eating living dead in film and television today. But interestingly enough, in his original 1968 film, Romero never actually used the word “zombie”; that name was applied by the fans afterward, and it stuck. Romero has since come to be identified as the “Godfather of the Zombie Genre,” though the contributions of Matheson and O’Bannon should not be overlooked.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll explore some of the deeper, cultural impacts of zombie films!