Writing A Novel - Day 5
It’s Saturday, which is traditionally a day in which I don’t work. When I went full time as a writer I told myself that if I was going to work for myself I should be a better boss than the other people I’d worked for. I try to only work four days a week, with Wednesday given over to playing some games and generally relaxing, and I aggressively protect evenings and weekends.
This weekend has to be different. I have deadlines that have been pushed back due to me being hospitalised a couple of weeks ago, and they’ve caught up to me. It turns out you can’t get much done when you’re on large amounts of opiates for a week, so I’m giving up my weekend to get these written so I can go into March with a clean slate. (Well, mostly clean. I’m launching Blood In The Margins on the 13th and I still have a lot of work to do towards that, but that’s why I wanted everything else polished off by now.)
But this whole writing a novel thing isn’t something that I’m letting myself take days off from. Today feels like the first day in a new routine of sitting my ass down to write on a Saturday morning. I’ll allow myself to be more relaxed about it once the work actually starts - maybe just one block of Pomodoros, an hour of my time, to make sure I at least touch the book - but we’ll see.
Yesterday I read James Scott Bell’s Write Your Novel From The Middle and found it to be a little lacking. Part of that is because I’d already read Super Structure, a later book which repeats much of the material from Write Your Novel…
It wasn’t completely without merit, though. He introduces something which he calls the “Golden Triangle”, with his mirror moment at the top and the lead’s moment of transformation (normally the final chapter of the novel, according to his model) at the bottom right. The bottom left is filled by the lead’s “pre-story psychology” - effectively backstory that we develop about the character to sow the seeds for the mirror moment.
As well as never having been much of an outliner in the past, I’ve also never been the type of writer who develops characters before they hit the page. In the same way that I play RPGs that don’t demand large backstories and allow characters to develop during play, I like to discover who my characters are as I write them. But something that Bell has mentioned a couple of times - and that’s repeated by Jim Driver in another book I’ll talk about in a moment - is that this ‘pantsing’ approach to writing a novel and developing characters is still outlining, it’s just outling that takes a lot longer. When you don’t plan the book ahead of time you end up rewriting lots of it as discoveries later in the text contradict things earlier in the text. The first draft becomes a very detailed outline.
This makes sense to me, and I want to see what I can achieve when I go into the writing process with a firm idea of who I’m writing about and where I’m going.
Maybe it’s because I’m autistic, but I often get stuck on doing new things because I don’t know exactly what I’m meant to be doing. I’ve been sitting here asking myself, “how exactly do I start outlining a novel?” I almost want to be handed a step-by-step procedure that I can read about and internalise. Knowing me I’d immediately start to change it to suit me, throwing bits out that I don’t like even though I’ve never actually tried to use them, but I need some sort of raw material to get started with. I’ve always been like this.
I was hoping that Write Your Novel From The Middle would provide me with this step-by-step procedure, but it didn’t. So I turned to another book. I don’t remember how I discovered this one or who recommended it, if I’m being honest, but I picked it up when I picked up the other books I’ve been referring to. That book is Jim Driver’s Outline Your Books Or Die!, and this one did give me a step by step procedure to follow. And, in a moment of downtime yesterday afternoon, I started working on it.
Which means I’ve started outlining the book, at least a little bit. I know who my main character is, and who the other characters surrounding him are. I know what drives him, and roughly what his mirror moment is going to be. I have a rough three paragraph overview of the novel. I even have a motivation and mirror moment for the antagonist of the book. Here’s the rough premise as it currently stands. Names of characters and places will absolutely change until I’m happy with them.
A new dungeon has opened up in the hills outside a small town called Appleby. Before the Crypt Breakers of the Imperial Treasury can arrive to contain the site, a group of local children go missing. It’s believed that they went into the dungeon.
The team of Crypt Breakers assigned to ‘contain and exploit’ this dungeon is led by Crew Commander Darlyn Roux, recently promoted and keen to prove himself. Unknown to his colleagues is the fact that his husband and child died in a dungeon years ago and he was unable to save them. This is the event that propelled him into joining the military arm of the Treasury to begin with. He has spent years blaming himself for the loss of his family.
Darlyn’s boss is Brigade Commander Nell Kalba, a jaded veteran who has worked her way up from the bottom. She is unsentimental about the fate of the missing children. Her job is to extract as much wealth from the dungeon as possible before securing it and moving on to the next job. But as she learns the truth of the missing children and external forces begin to demand results, her fate becomes increasingly linked to the fate of the Crypt Breakers inside the dungeon.
While all this is happening, the mage on Darlin’s team has plans to extract something of his own from the depths of the earth - something that will require a huge blood sacrifice for him to obtain. And down in the dungeon, far from the prying eyes of those on the surface, he might just get what he wants.
Obviously there’s no real plot here, just a bunch of characters who want different things who are thrown into a pressure cooker situation. The plot will come tomorrow when I sit down with a bunch of index cards and start brainstorming scenes and trying to put them into some semblance of an order.
My plan is to begin with the mirror moment, then figure out the moment of transformation for Darlyn. Because this is grimdark fantasy, I’m drawn to the idea that he’s offered the chance to transform and refuses it. It means that I’m effectively writing a tragedy. He’s going to change, but a large portion of that change is going to be in the stripping away of the ideas about who he thinks he can become and leaving him to come to terms with who he actually is. His failure in the past wasn’t actually a failure, because he never could have done anything different. It’s his nature, and he needs to embrace that.
Once I have those moments in place I’ll sit down with some index cards and hammer out a load of scenes that could possibly happen in the novel. Then, with the assistance of James Scott Bell’s list of 14 beats, I’ll start trying to arrange them into some sort of outline. At that point the next step will be to write a short paragraph about what actually happens in each of those scenes and how they drive everything forward, and that’s effectively the start of writing the novel.
I’m feeling good about this, and I also think I’m on track to actually start writing properly on Monday. Let’s see how tomorrow goes.