Nanowrimo Break: Inception and All Your Settings

It may not be a surprise to regular readers that I sort of have a thing for Inception. I have a shout out tag for Inception and this blog is not about a.) film making b.) suits or c.) Tom Hardy. I also occasionally mention my Inception view count, which has now gotten a little confusing as I own it on dvd, digital copy on my computer and my phone. Some people take a one minute break by viewing photos of loved ones, I like to watch a little Inception. Make of that what you will.

Anyway, this is not about my undying love for Joseph Gordon-Levitt in zero gravity or Leonardo DiCaprio's strut, but rather a study in setting. No, not the awesome hotel decor or the matchy-matchy bad guys wearing white in the snow level. This is about using all the bits of your setting to create a world that works for you while you entice the reader to continue reading your work.

We first see setting the second the movie opens, but seriously, the first time we truly interact with setting is when Mal mentions "Postwar British painters". She refers to the artwork in the dream hotel and hey! It's by Francis Bacon. That's not the cool part. That is an easy way to engage setting - and by engage I mean draw the audience's eye toward it. Now for people who hear Postwar and British and Painter, it's a detail. It's dialogue that says she knows what she's talking about. To people who hear that and see the painting and think Francis Bacon, that's a little reach out and say hello to the audience members in the know. We like to feel smart. Some of us may use Google to get there, but we become members of a special club when we figure it out.

That throwaway line, by the way, tells us a lot about Mal. She can spot a postwar British painter for one thing. Now - SPOILER - for the 0.01% of you who haven't seen or possibly heard of Inception, Mal is a figment in Cobb's head. What does that tell us about what Cobb knows?

Anyway, the point of being in people's heads is that we aren't supposed to be there and so the projections in other peoples' heads try to uncover you and then remove you from the landscape, by tearing you limb from limb if they have to. Knowing this, watch the scene where Cobb begins to convince Fisher that something is wrong while he sits at the bar surrounded by rich older people. At one point there is a sound so out of tune with the ambience of the bar that everyone pays attention. Can you imagine that older woman with the shawl and the white hair with blood staining her mouth, fingers curled into claws?

You can now.

********************************And NOW****************************************

So.

I wrote the above about halfway through November and then remembered that I was writing a novel. I was also municipal liaising my region, with roughly 400 people (on paper) and got a little caught up in my newfound productive writing life.

Here we are in the year the world ends (see previously 2000, 1999, and 1997 according to the World Weekly News) and I am a novel richer and half a blog post poorer.

It happens sometimes that you come back to something you were writing in a different head space, physical space, you-space and you realize - hey! This was pretty good! I wonder what happens next. And then you totally blank.

I have no idea where the rest of the post was going. I do, however, know what I would like to say now, 55,000 words later, about scenery and setting and how different and necessary the two are to everything in your story and how your audience perceives your world.

I've been using setting and scenery interchangeably in my previous posts (and if I haven't, I've been doing it in my head) but they really are quite different. Scenery is a necessary part of setting but setting encompasses scenery. Scenery is the vase on the mantelpiece and the stone setting in the hearth and the rich yet threadbare rug under your feet. Setting is the opulent sitting room gone slightly to seed in a story about an old rich family that has possessed wealth so long they have forgotten they have it. You know the type, the ones who wear t-shirts and drive beamers and buy tens of thousands of dollars of diamonds just to say it's Tuesday, I love you.

Take away some of those details and they become nouveau riche, conscientious of what they have and how much they have to show it to the world. Take away other details and they become misers. Suddenly your story is about something else entirely.

The settings may be the easiest to describe later when you're talking about that book you just read, but it's the scenery that makes it so memorable. Scenery, the bangles, the gun, the hidden corpse, the missing figurine on the bookshelf, the details give your story a why without you having to come right out and beat your reader over the head with what you're trying to say.

Getting back to my minor obsession with Inception, let's look at Arthur. He's gorgeous. And now, analytically, let's look at what says competent. It's the slicked back hair, the suits, the fashion forward little touches, the flashy fighting style, and the way he remains calm under any kind of pressure, with or without gravity.

Ariadne, on the other hand, screams college student. If we hadn't met her first in a college, we would quickly place her there in the Inception special anniversary edition paper doll playbook (I would totally buy that, wouldn't you?). There's the brash manner of speaking, the curiosity with none of the temperance borne of what some might call maturity but what we can also call the knowledge of consequence from touching a hot stove. She hasn't had that curiosity slapped down yet. She wears those scarves and coats with rolled up sleeves, stands slightly to the side and watches and learns while the others move.

The settings of Inception and the personal scenery of each of the characters (including where they stand in relation to one another...I guess I have another rewatching to do) require all those little details and more - leave nothing to chance. Your dialogue, character descriptions, workspaces and living spaces advance the reader's understanding of what you are trying to say in your story. Are you talking about money? Love? Evil and our interactions when faced with such a thing?

Now you (and I) get to shave away every detail that doesn't have to do with cementing your answer to the question you are discussing in your work, right down to how your character eats lunch and where and why.

Yay, scenery!

Nanowrimo Break: Sleepless and Bitty Details

Sleepless by Charlie Huston is one of those near future science fiction things you hear about but never realized exists until you hold it in your hands. It's detailed.

Most of the time when someone says 'detailed' he means 'they talked about a space ship a lot and maybe there was a character and stuff happened.' Or maybe the author dedicated forty pages on fashion styles to explain why the protagonist took that parasol with those boots.

Sleepless is detailed in that every part of the world - the WOW game stand-in, the human bombs, the devastating disease - are effortlessly referenced in sentences and phrases before Huston dedicates entire scenes to explaining just what the hell is going on. The background details are such a part of the world that his characters live these pieces of science fiction and the reader can breathe it all in without pausing to admire the damn spaceship for pages on end. Think of the last time you had a fight with a friend on a message board and tried to explain to someone (to whom message boards did not exist) how you had trouble communicating in real time. The important part of the story you are telling this person is not that you have to wait minutes, hours, or days to get the last-last word in, but that you are having an argument with a friend and the bastard won't lay down and accept defeat in light of your brilliance. In between recounting witty repartee, you still have to explain message boards. That's the importance of detail.

As I Nano (only four thousand words behind, it's okay, that's a weekend marathoner, no problem) I have to keep detail in mind because while it's tempting to boost a word count with nonsense like two thousand words of what color sneakers my character has on, the bits I get to keep later while Nanoedmo'ing (National Novel Editing Month) are the pieces that advance the story while maintaining a careful snare around the reader's attention.

If you have a minute in between typing madly and procrastinating just as madly, give Sleepless a try. It's science fiction without the spaceships and it's a brilliant apocalypse that will make you wonder about the tiny things in life. And if near future science fiction can't make you doubt every minuscule interaction in your life with a tiny shake of fear, it's obviously not trying hard enough.

Another detailed series I've always enjoyed are the Company novels by Kage Baker. She takes history and future with the same finesse, and while she shines with historical detail I'll admit my favorite of the series is Graveyard Games where she really starts telling us about her world's terrifying future.

Nanowrimo Break: Handwavium and Transitions

John Connolly's Every Dead Thing is a little rough, and one of the most delightfully gory mysteries I've torn through in a long while. For someone who usually devours horror movies and peppers her sci-fi diet with The Cat Who... Every Dead Thing was a welcome respite. Though it suffers from the tragic past hero, it has an intriguing (and conveniently helpful) secondary cast of an assassin and master thief, Every Dead Thing moves quickly through sometimes not quite explained transitions. We are at point A, now we are at Point B, now we see my old friend. Now my old friend is dead, look at my dead old friend, meticulously dissected atop his equally dead wife in a creepy yet totally memorable scene.

Anyway, this is one of those books (and series) I return to when I want some handwavium. My transitions usually suffer from real-worldism, where we actually have to walk out to the car, and open the door, and fiddle with our keys. In book world, we are simply driving. Last page we were in San Francisco, and now we are in Las Vegas! Did we mean to be in Las Vegas? Who knows? Who cares! Look at the pretty lights!

Writing 50,000 words in 30 days means taking some big leaps of faith in terms of travel, changing groups of people, and on occasion, surprise action scenes. Writing at any point can use a little handwavium, so long as your reader can handle a little handwavium. Remember suspension of disbelief, and the value of your reader coming back for the sequel.

Something I find helps is sitting for a few minutes and asking myself what is absolutely necessary to get this message across? Do I need to show us on the road? Do I need to explain the ninja? Can we just have the evil guy over here, suddenly? Would that be really cool? When I strip the scenes down to the absolutes, it makes the writing go faster, the reading, and at times, the head scratching. Anyway, if "The Most Terrifying Thriller Since Silence Of The Lambs" (see cover above) is not your slice of pie, try Jim Butcher's Dresdenfiles. For some reason, I have Small Favor listed on my outline for this post, so I suppose it must be an example of handwavium. I recommend the whole series, just so you too can spend all of White Knight with a big fan-service grin on your face.

Nanowrimo Prep: Breaking (Almost) All the Rules

There are 8 rules for writing.

There are only 7 plots in the whole wide world.

There are 36 plots.

There is only 1 rule for writing.^

You have to write fast. You have to write slow. You have to plot first. You have burn on pure creativity. You must structure your story. You must begin at the beginning.

After a few years of attending talks and workshops and listening to people who also wrote but did not write like me, I realized everyone follows their rules. They just forget to tell you that everyone has their own set of rules that they have cobbled together from their trusted mentors and peers and sources which are totally different from yours.

Once you look at all these different rule sets a pattern emerges where you see this person's set of rules is that person's wriggle room, and that person's set of rules leaves little spaces for this person's rules to fit between. Together they make a series of contradictions that function smoothly with only a few conjunctions to smooth the way.

You have to write fast and (some days) you have to write slow.

You have to plot first or you have to burn on pure creativity.

You must structure your story but you must begin at the beginning. So what if your structure doesn't begin with the beginning?

Nanowrimo has one rule: Don't look back!

Like speed limits, it's a guideline, and like the rules above, it works best in conjunction with your pre-existing personal writing rules.

Let's talk about speed limits for a minute. There are some speed limits you obey without questions because of the unstated "or else". I always obey the speed limit that says "25 mph on this twisty mountain road...or else you might die" and "30mph in this residential area...or else you might kill someone". That sentence started with "I" for a reason, because you might trust yourself on mountain roads or trust your breaks or distrust driving through gorges...

My writing rules were pretty set before I did Nanowrimo the first time. And they were pretty set right after that first hellish month of approximately 12,000 grueling words that had been over-plotted and under-developed. I planned the life right out of my characters and spent my first word war paralyzed with writer's block.

My writing output before and after Nano was about the same, which is to say, slim to none.

The second time I tried Nanowrimo, I decided to follow the 1 rule and throw everything else out the window. I didn't look back. Some days I wrote in complete silence, some days I created careful playlists to evoke moods and characters. Some days I looked at my outline and some days I said to hell with it and plowed onward. Some weeks I went to the write-ins and sat with fellow writers and some weeks I spent wrapped up in my cocoon of a bedroom as a solitary serious artist.

I like to celebrate Nanowrimo as a time to explore new rituals in being a writer. This upcoming month I have plotted my novel as three separate storylines in very sketchy details. My characters are defined in single phrases and as comparisons to existing celebrities, TV characters in certain episodes or arcs, or even as a time of day.

Rather than plotting every single scene on index cards* I have decided to plot tomorrow's writing at the end of today's writing. I am going to break the only rule of Nanowrimo that exists to save accelerating writers from their own inability to stay off the delete key. I will read my writing of that day once I've finished it in order to write down certain details to aid with plotting - namely where I've left threads and throwaway details that may enhance tomorrow and even next week's writing.

I'm a little worried. This is the one concrete rule I've held for three successful Nanos. It won't break any of my other rules (be true to my characters, don't talk down to the reader, at some point I have to actually like the person through which I am viewing this world, among others), but it may throw off my routine. It may cause doubt. Doubt brings with it the paralyzing uncertainty 2 minutes into a 15 minute word war that can last another precious 7 minutes, losing hundreds of words in the process. I will, in effect, pants my novel.

>.<

Wish me luck!

^If you follow this link, only one rule applies to writing. :)

*Done it. Even drunk plotted before. All I have to say about that is, I guess I get philosophical when under the influence of a good white wine. Philosophy, unfortunately, does not do a whole lot for an action packed climax, especially when I've just compared an emotional arc? The path out of hell? The antagonist's long lost daughter and/or mistress? to winter's light. Oh, maudlin, oh, hangover. Nothing says bad idea like the morning after, trying to decipher both my handwriting and genius.

Nano Prep: A Little Panic on Plot and Word Counts

If you Nano on a regular basis, you know the spiel. 50,000 words is Of Mice and Men, a quick action-oriented novella by today's standards, or one of thousands of sci-fi books your parents collected in the 70's and 80's.

Today's word counts have an interesting history based partially on being paid by the word and partially driven by consumer expectation. There's obviously many other factors behind the word count evolution, and all it means is that two out of the last three books I bought can be considered concealed weapons if they could actually fit under my coat.

A little bit of word count

Conventional wisdom and other writing articles give rough estimates of word counts thusly:

<100-100 words = drabble
100-500 words = flash fiction
100-750 words = short short fiction
<25,000 words = short story
25,000 - 40,000 words = novella
40,000-60,000 words = short novel
70,000 words = basically a normal novel
>100,000 words = burglar stunner, also called an epic (or "bargain" in terms of entertainment hours)

So that 50,000 word draft you're about to lovingly pound out in a matter of days filled with caffeine abuse, familial neglect, and passionate bouts of insomnia, is a fantastic entry to the world of long form written art.

What about panic?

The first time I participated in Nanowrimo, I had never written anything longer than a short story or a long essay. I had some idea about how to plot an entire novel because as it turns out, pre-writing and procrastination are pretty darn close. Pre-writing gets you a neat little outline, maybe a massive wall of stickies, and carefully crafted character arcs with every gel pen color you can get your hands on.

What it doesn't do is sit your butt down and get you to write.

Around day four, I learned it was all fine and well to move character B across setting C to have conflict with characters E and I, but (aside from a hard lesson in ridiculously large casts) when the words won't come, all the stickies in the world can't get you across the 50,000 word finish line.

After a precious 3000 word dry spell (approximately 2 days of not writing) I started getting that itchy feeling of staring at a great big F for failure. It's not like Nanowrimo costs you anything, but losing usually karate chops my dignity something fierce, even if we're talking about losing Stupid Ninja seven times in a row. Nanowrimo says, in many sayings stemming from founder Chris Baty and from hundreds of thousands of participants: just write.

Desperate to not lose a contest in which I held no actual personal stake and won no riches beyond a little pixel icon, I broke my story down into mini stories, or what normal writers will probably recognize as "scenes", wherein each day of typing encompassed a beginning, middle, and end, with action and reflection and more than just a little word salad. Hey, it's 50,000 words, and one of the strategies repeat winners recommend include losing your em-dash between paired words and make at least one character a stutterer.

This year I'm going to stretch my ability to focus by breaking my overall plot into chunks. A few thousand words go into the premise [from my story sentence(s)] and a few thousand words go into the opposition and how he's going to stop the protagonist. A couple dozen grand go into the main journey part of the plot and perhaps a few thousand go into the emotional connections between the protagonist and her citizens. Before you know it, I will have ripped out 50,000 words of mayhem and occasional sentences that actually make sense in English.

My strategy will look like this:

40,000 words = main plot (includes premise, protagonist and antagonist, and just a few allies and enemies along the way)
10,000 words = secondary plot takes the main stage to take me through the muddy middle
20,000 words = main emotional past issue arc (also called "How did we get here?")

If you do math moreso than me (not hard), you'll notice that adds up to more than fifty thousand. It's about 70,000, or roughly a marketable length for a real live novel. This will be my fifth year doing Nanowrimo and I thought it was time for a little extra challenge. I'm breaking out in hives even thinking about it because I have been one of those 11:59 pm word count validaters on November 30th, but if we reach for the moon, we land among the stars. Or at least, somewhere beyond where I have gone before, and that's what Nanowrimo is all about.

So to all you plotters out there, are you stickies fanatics or do you prefer twenty packs of multi-colored gel pens?

And to all you pantsers, what kind of inspiration and caffeine are you stocking up on in preparation?

Nano Prep: One Sentence Wonders

That feeling of waiting just another second...

That picture sums up two feelings for me: October 31st, and the feeling that you really can twiddle your life away in a car.

Let's focus on October 31. Midnight. The opening nanoseconds of November 1, heralding the opening writer's block of Nanowrimo. It doesn't have to be that way, tightening your teeth and spreading your lips in a death-like grimace of agony as you realize inspiration is running circles around your ability to actually communicate in a meaningful fashion.

What does that have to do with the fact that I've put way too much mileage on my car? It's a magic number. 100,000 miles on my car is the moment I exhale and really rip loose. It means I no longer have to treat it like new, I no longer have an excuse to ignore my responsibility to change the oil, and kicking the tires means checking the air pressure with a device that gives you an actual number.

November first (or 11/1) gives me a magic number as a writer. It means I don't need to listen to that internal editor, I no longer have an excuse to procrastinate adding to a novel, and checking a word count means not closing the document until I've added more than double (or even triple) digits.

To avoid my traditional writer rictus, I like to start a story notebook before I get to the actual writing part. I'm a plotter; I plot. If you're a p-p-pantser, start with inspiration, but pick out a pretty and handy notebook for the middle. Trust me.

For those of us who are diving into the arena of idea hunting, I would say grab your butterfly nets but we are a deadly kind of lepidoptorist. We are hunting our dream moths with daggers made of pens that, rather than stab these ghostly creatures, will instead draw details on their delicate half-formed wings to weigh them down with words. What I need to do today is pin down the bare skeleton of what I think my novel may or may not be about.

I turn to Jim Butcher in many things, mostly those matters to do with solving common household issues involving vampire courts and the occasional neighborly fae, but in this post I turn to his (abandoned?) writer blog for the one sentence story skeleton.

*WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENS*, *YOUR PROTAGONIST* *PURSUES A GOAL*. But will he succeed when *ANTAGONIST PROVIDES OPPOSITION*?

Now all I need is something to happen, a protagonist, a goal, and an antagonist with his own opposition providing ability. Easy!

Something happening is the perfect beginning. You know that disappointed feeling when you read those books where the protagonist wakes up and there isn't anyone waving a gun in his face? I get that feeling too when I wake up on my more boring mornings. Waking up is the start of my day, but it isn't the start of my story. Some days my story doesn't start when we smell smoke, but only when we realize we're smelling smoke. Yes, I can set the scene by showing you my office and my ability to stare at a single sheet of paper for roughly five minutes before blinking back to reality and signing it, but the story isn't rolling until the fire shows up. For the purposes of Nano which can stand for either "forward momentum" or "don't look back", depending on your school of training (it's okay, I'll get to that later), the more exciting part of the story you jump into, the easier it will be to keep on plowing through that word count.

My story for Nano, I have decided, doesn't start until someone gets out of jail. Lots of cool stories start this way, like Blues Brothers, Lady Vengeance, and at least one of Donald Westlake's Dortmunder novels.

So someone gets out of jail, and my protagonist - we'll call her a fourteen year old girl for now, because I have a terrible soft spot for young adult fiction - has to pursue a goal.

Pursuing a goal is much easier to do when I know who the antagonist is. Let's say he's an elderly gentleman, gaunt, skin stretched so thin you can see the blood vessels moving in his veins, the kind of man for whom the word gaunt is a compliment. He's rich, too, and eccentric, because eccentric excuses so much. If we still used words like eccentric, we could excuse the whole cast of Jersey Shore. Or, not really, but you know what I mean.

Rich and eccentric people tend to collect things, or people tend to collect things, rich people tend to collect extravagant things, and rich and eccentric people tend to collect weird extravagant things.

He's a book collector. Nothing against book collectors, but if you're lining your library shelves with books made of human flesh, there is a small chance your invitation to my next party will get lost in the mail. He has lent out some of these books to protect them from someone who was trying to break into his library and wishes to recall them. Unfortunately, most of these people aren't willing to give up the books - how about these books, with their strange incantations, can make you a god by a certain full moon - and will instead attempt their own ceremony. The book collector wants these books back. Oh, and the books were tied to bloodlines. To return a book is to kill its former owner. There's the stake!

So what does my 14yo have to do with this? How about her older brother, hard up for cash and needing to leave the city, packs up his siblings and takes the job to retrieve the books? He has to leave the city because someone got out of jail. My something happens is now the big brother taking the job. The WHY of his job-acceptance is someone getting out of jail.

Her goal in all of this? One of the books found its way to her little brother. Now her goal is to ensure her big brother fails in his job in order for her to save her little brother's life...

This is kind of a mess of a story so far, but that's why I'm think about it in October. My sentence is several paragraphs long, but it boils down to this:

When her big brother takes a mysterious job to collect specific old volumes of a cursed book set, (my protagonist) must ensure these books stay with their current owners to save her little brother's life. But will she succeed when (creepy rich collector), mystical beings called Collectors, and her own father stand in her way?

It's still a tangled ball of noodles, but it's getting there.

What's your story skeleton?

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

I had a five part series on setting all planned out when I suddenly realized that in less than 20 days I will have to write a novel. This will be a 30 day writing extravaganza, snatching vignettes like cigarette breaks, sleeping on dictionaries, living with dialogue that will invade my every waking moment. This would be great - especially for a writer - except that I don't have a novel to write yet.

Oops.

I'm going to go ahead and show you how I plan my novel and I encourage you to play along. You can join the fun at nanowrimo.org. This site will connect you with nearly 200,000 other crazy writers who have all promised to attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

That's only 1667 words per day!

If you write like me (occasionally forgetting that you've promised to write a novel in November) that's 8,000 words per weekend!

Remember the word attempt?

It's insane and grueling, but best of all, you have a ready made insane posse rooting for you by your side. Nanowrimo.org will also connect you with your home region so you can find groups near you to write in person (called write-ins) once or twice per week, with kick-off parties and Thank Goodness It's Over parties.

At the end, you have a pretty bad novel. It's basically word salad in some places, as your brain moves faster than your fingers and your ability to comprehend your native tongue. The brilliance of bad novels is that they give you so much to work with as we march forward to Nanoedmo (National Novel Editing Month) in March. Ahaha.

Even if you decide not to rescue your novel after November, you will have spent 30 days learning whether you work better alone or in a crowd, in silence or noise, in short sharp bursts or long marathon sessions spaced apart, with planning or with diving in head first.

Join me. It's great fun!