Writing A Novel - Day 3
I'm trying something new today. In the first blog post in this little journey towards writing a novel, I talked about the advice in Monica Leonelle’s book to dictate, and how dictation gets her up to 4,000 words an hour. I said that I tried this in the past, and I have. I find it really awkward and uncomfortable but, I thought I would try dictating this blog post instead of typing it, since I have to walk somewhere this morning.
The thing is, there's a very big difference for me between writing a blog post and writing fiction, and so far, 50 words into this blog post, what I'm realising is that this is very easy to dictate because my blog posts are very conversational and I write them in the same sort of voice that I speak. (See how long and rambling that sentence was? I'd never write that if I were typing.) That's not the same for fiction, and I know that in the past when I've tried to dictate fiction - because I've had an idea when I've been out and about and I've not had anywhere to write it down - I've stalled and I've got self-conscious about my own fictive voice.
Another problem is that I just don't think I can ever get used to talking to myself in public. I don't like being on my phone in public talking to someone else, let alone talking to myself. The third problem is that voice to text software generally is trained on American accents and I have a very strong Northern English accent which these sorts of apps really don't like. I'll be interested to see what sort of edits I need to do on this blog post before I make it legible enough to post. (It was a lot of editing.)
But anyway, to the substance of this post. Because I haven't started outlining yet, there isn't really much for me to write about today. I also haven't started reading James Bell's Write Your Novel From The Middle yet. I've read more of Donald Maass' The Emotional Craft of Fiction and I'm finding that to be a really useful book, but not so useful that I have anything new to say about it.
Having said that, the chapter I've just read has been talking about emotional plots and how they function alongside a more traditional plot of action and story beats and things happening on the page, and it has a very brief discussion of how to use them to write a novel with no plot, the sort of thing that's quite common in literary fiction. I read a lot of literary fiction and I definitely have aspired to write that sort of novel in the past. In the short fiction that I've been writing, I often find that I start by writing something very literary and mundane and then don't really know what to do with it. And so I start to introduce fantasy or horror elements and slip into something a little bit more like magic realism. I've wondered for a while how one goes about plotting a novel with no outward plot, and this chapter was really useful in helping me conceive of how to approach that.
The other use it provided was in making me start to think about what the novel I'm going to attempt to write over the next month or so is actually going to be. Like most writers who want to be novelists, I have a thousand ideas for books that I want to write. I have a thousand ideas for novels that I've started to write, and it's tempting to pick up one of those half finished manuscripts and either continue with it or start rewriting it, but I've done that a hundred times. Some of these manuscripts have been worked and reworked to death. They're all stories that one day I would like to finish telling, but I feel like picking up a book that I've already failed to write is setting myself up to fail this time and so I want to write something new
Which brings me to the question, what is the book going to be? I've mentioned before that I have ADHD and I can be quite impulsive, and so the fact that I've just read a chapter talking about plotting a plotless novel makes me want to jump in and try to plot a plotless novel. But that also sort of defeats the purpose of this exercise. Because this exercise really exists for me to try writing a novel the ‘traditional’ way, where I outline it. I want to use these techniques that the writers of LitRPG and endless serialised novels are using, and those techniques don't really apply (as far as I can see it) to literary fiction. It is a different form. It's a different genre with different genre expectations
And so that leads me to my next love, and really my first love, the book that I've been talking about writing for years. Over the years, like many readers, I think, I've become frustrated by the trend for fantasy novels to be spread over series. Whether that's a duology or a trilogy or longer, it is vanishingly rare to find a stand-alone fantasy book. And that sort of baffles me, because a lot of fantasy - especially heroic fantasy and grimdark fantasy - is built at least in part on the shoulders of games like D&D. And games like D&D have a built in one-off storytelling feature feature in the form of the dungeon crawl.
These are in the DNA of the genre. The cultural weight that the Mines of Moria hold far outstrip their actual presence on the page. The story of going into an ancient unknown and unknowable hostile place where you are tested more than you ever thought you could be tested and barely emerge from the other side. Often emerging changed is a story as old as the idea of us telling stories in the first place. It's always surprised me that we don't see more standalone dungeon crawl novels.
I've been threatening to write one for years. Common advice to writers is to identify a niche that you think hasn't been filled, and to fill it. Write the book that you want to read. This is both the book I want to read and the niche I don't think is being particularly well-served.
It's also the book I've tried to write several times, and failed. I chalk that failure up, in large part, to a failure to properly plan.
This failure of mine is, in the most literal sense of the term, ironic. I've spent the past 9 years of my career writing adventures for tabletop roleplaying games, and I've written more dungeons than you can shake a stick at. I'm good at writing dungeons. Why have I never planned the dungeon before I write the novel? It's silly that this has been my sticking point. (I actually have planned the dungeon for a novel once and started writing it, and I think it was good. The reason that one failed was because I didn't plan the actual story structure, I just threw the characters into the dungeon and hoped I'd figure everything else out as I wrote. That book in particular is at the top of the list of novels I'd like to revisit some day.)
So part of my outlining process is likely to be very similar to my writing process for games, which is - at least in part - mapping a small section of a dungeon. I won't need to create the whole thing, because our heroes aren't going to see the whole thing, but I should have an idea of what's in there and how my novel is going to move through it.
The novel I've wanted to write for a long time is one that takes dungeon exploration and looks at it through a lens of hyper capitalism. What does a world in which dungeons filled with awful monsters and endless treasures really exist actually look like? Surely these things become something akin to a natural resource, exploited by capitalists and governments at the expense of the working person. I have this vision of something that looks like a halfway point between an army encampment and a festival site, hundreds or thousands of people gathered around the entrance to a dungeon, waiting to crack it open and extract the gooey middle.
I want to follow a group of dungeon breakers as they venture in. The question “why don't we simply run away?” - a hallmark of D&D games for decades - is answered with the fact that this is their job, and their bosses are standing on the surface with a huge support team they've invested money into, demanding results.
Some time ago I spent a weekend analysing the structure of Joe Abercrombie’s novels, breaking them apart and figuring out how he manages multiple POV characters. That all lives on this spreadsheet. This novel is going to call for multiple POV characters. I think my job this weekend is going to be figuring out how to apply what I've been learning about structure to a book that jumps between characters. Do I plan individual arcs for each POV character? Should the ‘minor’ characters have arcs that somehow support the ‘main’ character’s arc? I've got the next few days to figure that out.
I'm looking forward to this. I can feel the urge to get cracking and write, that excited energy that's crucial to getting through the first 20k words or so. I can feel all the questions about the process that normally hold me back and get me stuck in pre-production and research at the expense of writing bubbling up, but knowing that there's a deadline on answering them is helping me remain focused. Writing these journals every day is helping me keep touching base with the project despite not having begun yet.
It's too early to say that this approach is working, because I haven't written anything, but I feel good about where I am with this right now.