WIP Wednesday: Beat Draft

It’s the first Wednesday of November and I have, on my hard drive, a wonderful, terrible thing. It’s wonderful, because it’s a new novel, full of characters I’ve just met and situations whose implications I’ve only begun to grasp. It’s terrible because… it’s terrible. Just horrid. In between all those fantastic, meaningful situations, my characters ask themselves endless streams of rhetorical questions. They prattle on about their histories as if they’re being interviewed for a Lifetime biopic. They have great difficulty moving from one place to another. Extreme difficulty. It often takes them pages to take three steps across the kitchen.

It’s okay.

This year, I’m finally calling my NaNoWriMo novel what it is. It’s a discovery draft. I’m spending a month to write 50,000 words so I can see what happens. I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m okay with it even if I get to the end of the month and decide the story isn’t viable. It’s only a month and, chances are, at least some of the material I generate writing 2000 words a day will be useful somewhere. If not, well, I’m trying some new draft techniques and the month will have been worth it as a writing experiment.

One technique I've started experimenting with over the past couple of days is similar to what author Lazette Gifford calls a “phase draft.” I call it a “beat draft” after Sandra Scofield’s brilliant description of scene structure in her The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer. This isn’t quite the same as a screenwriter’s beat sheet. (At least, I don’t think so. I’m not a screenwriter, so I guess I don’t know for sure.) This is smaller. My beat draft drives the pulse of a scene by spelling out each action the characters will take. For example, for an upcoming scene, I wrote:

• Turtle tackles Kyle
• Tells him about Ev’s disappearance
• Kyle drops suitcase in hall
• Kisses Cindy
• Asks after Ev
• Squeezes Cindy’s hand
• Pulls Turtle off leg
• Picks up suitcase
• Goes upstairs
• Cindy closes door

This list, of course, contains none of the real emotional resonance of the scene and certainly none of the sensory detail. It’s just what happens. Gifford’s phase draft is more detailed, but it does something similar in that it lays a gridwork for each scene, a frame on which to hang the real writing.

I’m amazed at how much more easily the words have come since I began writing my scenes this way. Now, whether the scenes are any better than they’ve been in previous years remains to be seen. I won’t be revising this novel for quite a while, but I’m sure when (and if) I do, I’ll find myself, once again, amazed by how wonderful and terrible it all is. For now, it’s about the process more than the product and, I’m happy to say, this is a process that seems to work.

Them Goals, Them Goals

It’s that time again. What… NaNoWriMo? No… well… yes, but there’s plenty of time to talk about that. I am seizing the day, instead, for some backwards-thinking retrospective. Remember those October goals?

Reasonably Low Goal: Submit four pieces to market, including two new pieces for the Nanoism contest.
Success! 4/4 pieces submitted (3 new).

Reasonably Low Goal: Send next 50 pages of Things Between to beta readers.
Progress: 31/50 pages sent.

Reasonably Low Goal: Do four writing group exercises to generate new material.
Progress: 2/4 completed.

Reasonably Low Goal: Prepare a rough synopsis and scene list for new novel.
Unreasonably High Goal: Outline the entire new novel using the first eight steps of the Snowflake Method.
Progress: Synopsis and character perspective completed (first three steps of Snowflake Method)

My “reasonably low” goals would have been perfectly reasonable, had the month gone as expected, but the reality turned out quite different. My son was out of school for almost a week with the H1N1 flu, the same virus (I think) took me out of commission for several days, and to top it off, I ended the month by being diagnosed with pneumonia, just in time to start NaNoWriMo. Luckily, it’s a mild case and we started pummeling it with antibiotics right at the onset of symptoms, so I’m confident I’ll be up for the challenges of the month ahead. As it is, I’m reasonably happy with the way the month went. At the very least, I didn’t give up.

Wee WIP

I took a short break from contemplating the novels (I say “contemplating” because I’ve gotten precious little real writing done since the flu hit last week) to write something new and small. As I mentioned earlier, Nanoism is running another contest this month, this time for five-tweet serials that tell a life story. These suckers are not easy, but once I had my concepts in place, they turned out to be pretty fun to write.

I think nanofiction is a great exercise for the revision brain. The thing about these stories is they’re so short, almost the second you get the idea down on paper, you’re already revising. I know, I know. I hate revising. But this revision is different. It’s contained. Nanofiction calls for laser-focused revision. It’s not the big, messy revision that greets a newly-minted novelist. This is precise stuff. A phrase here, a comma there, the constant tradeoff between the word you want and the limited space available for it. Revising a piece of nanofiction seems to use the same part of the brain as solving a crossword puzzle or playing Scrabble and it’s just as enjoyable. It’s utterly engaging. It’s a game.

I wonder if there’s a way to translate the fun I have revising small things onto the larger canvas of a novel. Perhaps I’ll get there when my large strokes are all in place, when the scenes are all in order, the plot arcs smoothly, and even the paragraphs flow without without logjams. Then, I can get out my detail brush and my magnifying lens and tweak each sentence. I’m looking forward to that.

WIP... Thursday?

So, when I said I was working on a novel, “novel H1N1 flu” was not my intent. However, I’ve had a child home sick for three days with a fever, body aches, and respiratory symptoms, so it seems that’s exactly the “novel” occupying my attention this week. I’m not nearly as sick as he was, but I am a bit under the weather and I’m trying to avoid making it any worse. The two of us have spent a lot of time curled up on the couch watching DVDs and playing Plants vs. Zombies.

Yesterday, we watched both Toy Story and Toy Story 2. There’s a scene near the beginning of Toy Story 2 where Woody, the cowboy doll, dives out the bedroom window in an effort to rescue another toy from the dreaded yard sale. It’s a pivotal sequence that sets Woody up to be discovered and stolen by a toy collector, which is the main plot of the film.

Amongst the outtakes for TS2, Pixar included an alternate version of this moment. In that version, Woody is tossed out the window quite accidentally during a raucus game with the other toys. This cut scene was storyboarded and rough-animated. Some of it was even fully-rendered. It was an entertaining scene. You could even say it was a good scene. A lot of work went into this scene. And they cut it. The writers said it was too coincidental, that they needed a stronger reason for Woody to land outside. They were right, too. The rewrite made it better.

I guess the lesson for a novelist is obvious. Sometimes, you’re pretty far along before the need to fix something becomes obvious. It’s okay. It can still be fixed. Whole scenes can be removed or reworked. Characters can be deleted and rewritten. The fictional world is malleable. And if all the minds that collaborate to create the storyboard for a Pixar film still find mistakes that deep into the process, how can a lone novelist expect perfection the first time out?

I have a chapter of Things Between I’ve been procrastinating sending to beta readers because I’m starting to doubt the whole first section of my book. It’s okay, though. That’s what they’re there for, right? Writing is fixable and fiction was made to be molded.

WIP Wednesday: Two Novels

The school bus came about twenty minutes ago. I left my writing cocoon and walked through the pouring rain to meet it. That was the only time I left my desk all day (except for food, drink, and bathroom breaks). I feel amazingly like a working writer today and it will only continue. My son has his weekly kendo class this evening, which means my husband and I will find a quiet corner to tap away on our laptops, free from the distractions of housework and television.

I’d say I’m about shin-deep in novel revisions now. If this draft were bound up in paperback form, it would be a slim 25 pages, but it’s growing every day, as I sort through the great pile of text that is my first draft. I’m deleting a lot of scenes and writing a lot of new ones, but there were gems in that first draft. It’s exciting to find them and put them in their rightful places.

Besides Things Between, there’s another project starting to niggle at my consciousness. November is less than a month away, which means another frantic month of writing another novel. There’s not much to this new novel yet, not even a rough outline. I am starting to get to know the characters, though, and I have the first scene in my head. That’s enough to start. That, and a title. It’s called The Replacement Wife.

And that’s all I’m going to tell you right now.