Making for a blurry line.

What a busy day!

I made my totally fantastic chocolate chip pancakes this morning.  It's a good way to start a weekend.  My youngest daughter Bear got skates and a helmet, and my oldest daughter Monster had a hockey game in a tournament 40 minutes away from home.  In amongst that I managed to fit in making dinner, getting groceries, and writing.

On the writing front I touched up a few things in my last chapter, and then set in to fleshing out that Outline.  While my word count here on the site may have only gone up 200 or so words, my word count on the Outline went up almost 3000 (2966)!

My Outline seems to have two distinct formats to it, the single sentence to describe an entire chapter, and the incredibly detailed "you can almost copy and paste this in and just flesh it out" bits that I am beginning to build for Act 3 that blur the line between Outline and Draft.  It's making for a pretty solid foundation to get this revision/draft done.

I still have a lot to do on the Outline and the Book, but I have to cut tonight short since there's another hockey game tomorrow morning at 8:30am, again 40 minutes away.  Add on that we have to be there an hour ahead of time, at 7:30am, and it's a 40 minute drive, that means we have to leave the house at 6:50am.

Considering I have to motivate not only Bear (3 years old) and Monster (13 years old), but also my wonderful other half (xx years old) and I think I should get to bed.

G'Night!

- Grimm

Coming along nicely, nicely, nicely, whoops!

I've wrapped up a few chapters in the last two nights.  As I closed off this last one I realized that my outline from here on isn't anywhere near as detailed as it was leading up to this point until I get to the finale.  The balance of time between the viewpoint characters is terribly lopsided, and I have a LOT (and I really mean a LOT) of the Third Act to flesh out.

About that.  The Three Act Structure, it's a common theme used in movies and books, and generally iterates between separate levels of story.  In a trilogy, that pinnacle of modern story-telling you end up with a Twelve Act Structure.  Look, it works, follow me on the math here:

Book 1 = 3 Acts.  Book 2 = 3 Acts.  Book 3 = 3 Acts.  Therefore Book 1 + Book 2 + Book 3 = 9 Acts correct?

Now consider that there's a larger structure.  Book 1 = Act 1, Book 2 = Act 2, Book 3 = Act 3.  Those Three Acts added onto the previous Nine gives you a Twelve Act structure.

Alright, now that I'm done boosting word count on my blog with pointless mathematics, here's my take on the Three Act Structure.

Act 1:  The Setup (A New Hope).  This is where you set the overall stage.  You can build characters backgrounds and competence and set the overall story up.  They may even try to resolve the main problem, but they will fail, which leads into...

Act 2: Where Everything Goes to 11 (Empire Strikes Back).  This is where you ramp up the tension and start picking up steam.  Your characters start learning some lessons, picking themselves up off the floor a bit and making some progress only to have it all come crashing down at the end and driving straight into...

Act 3: The Ceiling Comes In (Return of the Jedi).  This is the final Act, the crescendo if you will.  This is where everything goes catastrophically wrong and forces the characters to take the initiative and go beyond.  If your characters have been passive up until this point, this is where the rubber meets the road, and just about any other metaphor you can throw out there for that ultimate last push that wins the day.

To summarize, I think Howard Taylor said it best on Writing Excuses:
Act 1: Chase the heroes up the tree.
Act 2: Throw stones at them.
Act 3: Cut down the tree.

So, I need to flesh out my outline for the Third Act as it was the part most devastated by this revision.  I spent about an hour getting started on that this evening.  My mindmap has enough cross-node links on it at this point that it's starting to resemble a fractal.  I can only hope I'm not tearing any new holes in my plot that I'll have to clean up in the next pass.  I'm sure I'll let you know!

Alpha Readers:  I don't have anything too new for you just yet.  I want to finish this run on the main viewpoint character then I'll make some selections for you all to go over that won't give too much away just yet.  I have a choice scene in mind right now that I think you'll either enjoy or roll your eyes at.

- Grimm

About that Character Building

Yeah, so normally if a scene doesn't have action or something "cool" going on, I find it feels a lot like work to get it done.  That scene I've been working on, the Character scene, would generally fit that bill perfectly.

Somehow it didn't, and I got seriously carried away.  So carried away in fact that it ended up doing TOO much all at once and moved certain relationships further along at far too early a point in the plot.  Not to mention that it ended up six times the average length of a chapter so far O.o

It's supposed to be taboo to edit before you're done writing, but anyone who's followed or read back in this blog will know that I do so regularly (though admittedly far less now than I used to).  Despite that, I got the scissors out and excised some of the character building chapter for re-use later and cleaned up a bit more of it, ensuring that one of the characters would act more in line with where their arc would be at that point.  This writing thing can be hard when you get carried away.

I spent a fair bit of my writing time this evening cleaning up and closing gaps in the outline, fleshing out some of the side story and side characters so they wouldn't feel too flat.  I think that part of it is coming along nicely.  However, I'm trying to keep the number of main viewpoint characters to 3 (because I am most definitely NOT George R. R. Martin) and parts of my outline weren't reflecting that very clearly.  That's been tidied up and will no longer be a problem.

The Word Counter is being kept up to date even on days where I don't update my blog.  I'm still trying to write every day, even if it's just touching up the Outline or squeezing in a few paragraphs or minor thought tangents between meetings at work.

While I'm currently not banging out 2K words a day, I am forever creeping forward.

- Grimm

Dredd

Saw Dredd tonight, so I haven't gotten a whole lot of writing done.  Still working on that character building scene.  I'm trying to make sure it stays clean and fluid while still doing it's job, it may take a few good hard edits to make it right, but it's getting written.

As for Dredd.  Now this is the Judge Dredd movie I've been waiting for!  Not that I was explicitly waiting for a Judge Dredd movie after the Stallone mess, after that I would have been happy if Hollywood never touched the property again.  This Judge Dredd movie?  I'll take a few more thanks!

Karl Urban knows Judge Dredd, you can tell by his delivery of the character and the insistance that he keeps the helmet on throughout.  He plays on Dredd's one note, black and white moral code perfectly.  There is no middle ground, there is no room for negotiations, or plea bargains, or mercy.  There is right, and wrong, and if you're in the wrong, you get served justice.  It was perfectly in line with what the comic book Dredd was when he was at his best.

The movie is gritty, gory, a little melodramatic, and has just the right amount of good cheese (and not of the "groan" Rob Schneider variety either).  No one phoned in a performance, and no one overacted, which was a HUGE problem with the Stallone version.

Best of all, they did what so many said they couldn't: They pulled off the sheer scale of Mega City One.  Every exterior shot brought the point home that this was a sprawling hot mess of an ultra-megalopolis (take that Sim City!).

I would happily pay to see a sequel.

Anyway, tomorrow should be a good writing night.  I've updated my word count with what I did tonight (about 800 words give or take).

- Grimm

Progress Report

This is just a super-quick blog update (I hope).

I'm writing another "Character Building" scene, which are generally very tough for me as they don't tend to feel as "active" as other scenes.  This one however is coming along quite well, so far I'm pretty happy with it.

I've had a few people ask for an actual progress report, or to put up a percentage meter on the site so they'd know how far along I am in this endeavour.  Well, simply put, I can't as  I really don't know how far along I am in the overall scheme of things.

Here's what I can tell you:

I'm on my second revision, which is largely a rewrite to fix some major plot and character issues.  I'm doing it a viewpoint character at a time, of which there are three.  I'm about halfway through the first character.  So, you could say I'm about 1/6th of the way through this revision.  I'm also 100 pages in, you could say it that way too.

What I can put up is a word count bar, and I have, it'll only be representative of the current revision.  I'll try to keep it updated.

That will have to do for now since I can't tell you how many revisions it will take.  Once I've gone through this process and have a better idea of what my process is and how many revisions I take, I'll be able to switch over to the much less informative, but more comforting percentage model.

 - Grimm

Character Building and Real Life

I'm writing in the Third Person Limited format, which means my writing viewpoint is limited to a single person at a time and has selective access to their thoughts and feelings (meaning I can intentionally not reveal certain thoughts, allowing for surprises from viewpoint characters).  One thing I shouldn't leave out is how they feel and react to things, that's one of the strengths of the medium over film, getting inside a character's head.

I draw a lot of my characters actions and reactions from real life, drawing on my own experiences and those of my children, wife, and friends.

For years I've watched people (not peeping, just watching, in public, it's not creepy damn you!).  I like to see how they react to certain things.  It probably explains my off-kilter sense of humour, I get just as much enjoyment out of a person groaning or looking oddly bewildered as I do from a deep belly-laugh.

I think the creative process for characters and their reactions has to go beyond that though, well into the realm of imagination.  I can't have one of my friends or family commit crimes, or kill someone to get a better understanding of my villains (or protagonist, could be the protagonist).  I can't do it myself either, though there are times where I'm sure prison would provide enough of a quiet writing environment that I might actually finish this book.

So I dig into the realm of my imagination, and use my observations of myself and other people as a baseline to measure against.  It'll tell me whether a character feels "real" or not.

As for the creation of the characters themselves?


I create a template for a character in mind-map format.  I describe their physical appearance (male/female, young/old, athletic/...not so athletic, hair/eye colour etc.) and I throw in a paragraph about their personality.

E.g.
This character is emotionally stolid and by the books with a black and white view of right and wrong.  They wouldn't tell a lie to get their own tail out of the fire... and so on, though usually not so blah as that.

It helps to give them a flaw or two as well.  It doesn't have to be something like "colourblind" or "sucks at math" or "has a raging temper".  In the above example the "black and white view of right and wrong" can be a flaw (quite easily) when played right.

After I'm done that character introduction and getting a feel for if they work, I like to have a sense of where they're going through the story, what's their intended path of growth.  Does the character learn to be more or less flexible?  Do they learn to tolerate faults in others?  Do the learn to tolerate faults in themselves? and so on.

I've found one of the best ways to get to know a character is to whip them up, then throw them into a situation to see how they deal with it.  If it's a life or death situation and I find myself cheating so that they live I have one of three options:

1) Let them die (sometimes not preferable).

2) Don't put them in that situation (sometimes not possible).

3) Fix the character so they have a some way of getting out of it that isn't cheating (or just let them die).

Once I'm done with my experimentation, I sometimes have a character that needs a story.  Often through the writing of that story (such as BookB right now) I find the character I start with is a lot more realized and "whole" feeling by the time I finish the first draft.  Which means they may not fit the original character creation or arc, and the character I have coming out at the end of the book couldn't possibly have been the same character that I started writing the book with. 

The solution to that problem?  Revision.

Go back, re-write and revise until I have a full, cohesive character arc, that fits the story, is believable (at least on the emotional level), and that evokes genuine emotion from the reader.

I've yet to achieve a character of that level, as I'm still revising my first full length book (and it's getting longer by the day).  Hopefully when I'm done some of you will be able to hold me to this and let me know if I pulled it off.

- Grimm

Fixed(ish)!

Alright, the cliche referred to in my last blog post has been corrected.  The offending text has been surgically removed from the story and replaced with something superior that actually fulfills the role of building character considerably better.  It'll need a good bit of polish and cleaning up before I consider it "done" but it's fixed nonetheless.

Speaking of which, I went back and touched up a few spots on the Outline for BookB.  That's right, it's not a static document set it stone, along with revising the actual story text the outline is frequently revised.

I've spoken with a few other writers (and by spoken I mean in an IRC channel online) and they say they detest the entire idea of using an outline.  That it sucks the very soul out of their writing, making something organic become mechanical.

I don't know if I'm unique in my views on outlining, but I've never seen it that way.  To me the outline is simply another organic piece of the whole, a skeleton if you will, waiting for the muscle, organs, and other tissue to build up around it.  You can change that skeleton, provided you're willing to rework everything else to fit it, which to me is what revision is all about.

My outline has become vastly different and incredibly detailed as part of this writing process, which admittedly I'm figuring out as I go along.  Who knows, maybe my way is "broken", it would certainly seem so if I ever listened to my English teachers (except Mr. Oliver, he was a different cat altogether).  They seemed to think an outline was a concrete foundation upon which to build.

Well, if I have to stick to a construction metaphor to get through to them, then I'd have to point them in the direction of Howl's Moving Castle, or Hogwarts moving staircases.  Sometimes, to get where you want to go, you simply have to change the surrounding structure.

The replacement chapter written tonight actually combined a few elements I'd been trying to work in, but couldn't wrap my head around until I'd gone back to the outline.  Of course, this one structural change in the outline of the chapter means I'll have to revisit some of the earlier sections and rework them, but that's something to panic about another day.  For now, I'll just be content that this effort seems to have paid off.

- Grimm

Tropes and Cliches in (my) Writing.

Tonight was a pretty good night for writing.  I had a good two hours of dedicated writing time, headsets on, music playing.  Too bad most of it will have to be cut up and rewritten tomorrow.

You see, for the chapter I'm working on currently I only had one short sentence in my outline.  It didn't exist in the last draft, but it's very much needed in this one.  That's right, it's one of THOSE bits.  The between-the-action-character-relationship-building bits, which I apparently don't outline that well.  So rather than spend most of my limited time this evening outlining it, I figured I'd take a stab at pantsing it.

When I work from an outline I tend to do a fair bit of research and digging to make sure I'm not getting so wrapped up in layered tropes of a particular genre or stereotyping.  When I'm discovery writing I just let it flow and worry about it afterwards.  

Well, after an hour and a half I took a quick break, then came back and re-read what I'd written.  The voice is fantastic, there's a bit of humour in there that clicks with the character.  However, it follows a fairly typical trope and has strong potential to run itself in a direction destined for a good deal more.

Tropes are not bad per-se, some are quite enjoyable, but as a new and aspiring writer I'm trying desperately to avoid them.  Otherwise I'll use them as crutches to cheat my way to the end of my book, which would somewhat defeat the purpose since this first book is meant primarily to be a learning experience.  (That's not to say that if I'm happy with it I won't try to solicit it to agents etc.)

So tomorrow it gets surgery.  I'm going to hammer out an outline for the chapter that's more detailed than the one line I've got.  Hopefully I can preserve some of the tone and lose some of the "we've been here before and this should happen next" essence.  That's not to say that more experienced and better hands at writing can't pull off exactly that sort of trope and get away with it, making it feel fresh and funny and new.  I just don't think I'm anywhere near there yet.

That said, I think I'll snip it out and put it in a side document to look over later, to analyze how I got there and why the funny worked.  

Every word I write and every word I delete should teach me something.

- Grimm

Settling In.

Ah... That feels good.  Just under 1000 words tonight, not the greatest pace, but better than nothing, and I'm not falling asleep at the keys.  Things have been absolutely crazy here since the last blog update.  

I've been writing, but nowhere near as much as I'd like, and as I hinted above, by the time I was done anything even remotely close to meaningful on a particular night, I just wanted to go to sleep, so the blog wasn't getting done.

This revision is progressing, wrapped up another chapter tonight, which of course will need some major rewrites, mostly in dialogue.  The point is to keep getting in there and write, whether I get 2500 words in a day, or a mere 200, it's more than I had yesterday.

I'm actually sticking fairly close to the outline on this revision, I think that's a sign that I either did a much better job fixing the previous draft (in the outline), or I'm getting more comfortable with my own outlines and learning to trust myself a bit more.  Sure, some things are changing here and there, which will require more revision, but I'm hoping every change is for the better.

Work has been incredibly busy, but some of my projects are really taking off, which is a good feeling.  Previously, I'd never had a project make it from concept to market before, they all got killed as soon as "costs" were determined, now I've got one on the market (with a reasonable amount of uptake), another that Product wants out by the end of the year (which simply won't happen with as many moving pieces as they want), and two more that should be at least in pre-production trials by mid next year.

I have people coming to me for advice and guidance, which is both incredibly satisfying, and nerve wracking.  I'll manage.

On the more personal side of things, I'm itchy, oh so terribly itchy!

You see, I'm covered in hives.  I've taken gluten out of my diet for a two week span (I'm on day 10) to determine if I'm gluten intolerant.  For some reason the inconvenience and "bubble-boy" factor that brings into my life and the lives of those around me simply isn't enough.  Somehow, some way I'm not 100% sure about, it's brought about a wonderful case of hives.  

I've had explanations from the doctor at my workplace, the one who pointed me in the direction of testing for gluten intolerance, telling me that it's a normal case of my body purging the gluten from itself, to my brother, who's gluten intolerant ("sensitive") himself, telling me it's the result of my body chemistry changing.

To be honest, I don't give a tinker's damn why, as long as it stops!  Doctor, and everyone else, says it should last around 10 days from when it started, which was on day 3 of going gluten free.  Well, unless it's a food allergy to something new that I'm eating (I can't think of anything new).

Monster's hockey season has started, first exhibition game was tonight, and she played quite well if I do say so myself (and I just did!), I brought Bear with me to give my Wife some peace and quiet to get some things done that needed doing.  Bear and I had fun goofing off and playing together in the seats while watching the game.

When last I posted, I was heartbroken over being unable to adopt the dog we were fostering.  Well, he's been moved to a long term rehabilitation facility where he's getting the care and guidance he needs in a safe environment.  I think it's for the best (still care for him though and still feel a little bit of hurt that he couldn't stay here).

My loving wife got sick of me (and herself) moping around and found a litter of puppies that was in a rescue organization.  Needless to say, she adopted a new puppy (with the help of my daughters and myself), who is coming along nicely.

He's part of why I don't seem to have as much time to write as I'd like, mostly because he's still house training which requires "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" but he's most definitely worth it. His name is Apollo, and he's integrating with our other dog Sadie, and the two cats, Mal and Silver, quite well.

That reminds me, going to take him for a quick walk before bed.

Night!

- Grimm