My Brain Isn’t Linear

One of the things that always annoyed me in school was that we had to turn in portions of our books as we wrote them. In grad school we checked in every week. So that meant we were supposed to write chronologically from beginning to end and then also get critiqued on something that wasn’t finished yet and wasn’t even necessarily presentable.

That might work for some people, but not for me. I don’t think of scenes in the write order, and more importantly, I don’t necessarily feel like writing them in the right order. So maybe there’s a transition that I know has to come between two scenes, but I don’t want to tackle it right now. In school, I’d feel like I had to tackle it then because it was NEXT, and that was important, and if I didn’t write it, then the professor would knock me for not having a transition there–score one for her. So I’d end up sitting there staring at my screen, pulling my hair out trying to write a scene that, no matter how I wrote it, wasn’t going to make me happy because I just wasn’t feeling it. And more likely than not, I’d get stuck, frustrated, and have an unproductive writing session.

Now, fortunately, I don’t have to deal with that BS, which is great. I’ve decided that the order doesn’t matter, because this is a first draft. So I’m not going back to read anything I’ve already written. I’m not doing any editing. Not going to agonize over phrasing and word choice. Not going to look for typos. I’m not even going to worry about the ordewr of plot events–and let me assure you, things are not even CLOSE to the right order at the moment.

And aside from opening up my productivity and lessening the pressure, it’s also giving me more freedom to let my characters do what they want inside the scenes.

Before, I’d try to keep hold of where each character stood in the timeline, how they were experiencing things, and try to make sure all those rollercoasters synced up. And based on all of that, I’d try to make sure all the characters were acting appropriately for that point in the story. Sounds hard, right? It was. And it was stupid.

It makes a lot more sense to have a good feeling of who the characters are, and then turn them loose in these situations. I worry about whether or not they’re acting naturally according to who they are and that’s it. Later if a scene feels out of place because of their reactions, I’ll readjust so it makes better sense with the plot points. There will be a lot of editing to do, sure. But there has to be a full draft before there can be editing.

Right now, I’ve got something like 12,000 words written, and I can’t believe how much easier they came than the first time around with this book. Writing it is an entirely different experience. And true, ten years later I should be a much better writer. But to be honest, I haven’t written much in that time period at all. I’ve done editing, I’ve written some for work. But I haven’t actually made significant progress on any projects (old or new) since finishing grad school. I don’t want anyone to think I didn’t learn from the experience or that I regret grad school. That’s not the case. But I got that degree specifically because I wanted to write novels. And I wrote a novel, and the experience was absolutely terrible. Is it any wonder I didn’t want to do it after that?

The most frustrating part is that it didn’t HAVE to be that way. Nobody’s a great writer starting out. It takes practice and effort. No one should be ashamed of an awful first draft, because that’s a great accomplishment. But as a teacher, you aren’t supposed to stomp on your students for not being perfect on the first go round. You should find the potential. Listen to them. Ask why they wrote the story that they did, and why they made those choices. Figure out what kind of story they wanted to tell, and push them towards that. Help them discover better ways to accomplish their goal, how to add depth, use their words more effectively. That’s what a good teacher should do. And I’m fortunate to have had a few really excellent teachers who did exactly that. (Andrew Davis, Andy Horton, Mel Odom, Lou Berney) It’s just a shame that one misguided, unhelpful voice was the loudest one in the room for a while.

Back into the groove…

I’ve started working on my novel again. The novel that I first wrote ten years ago as my graduate thesis. Here’s the thing… I spent a year writing the thing, trying to please my professor, trying to get my degree. I did some good writing. I did some terrible writing. I learned a lot in the process. But what I wound up with was a pretty bad novel that was pretty far from what I originally set out to write. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked a lot of what I wrote. But as a whole, it wasn’t at all what I wanted to write, and it definitely wasn’t something I wanted to publish.

Now that I’ve got some distance, a lot more life experience, and no one to answer to, I’ve basically scrapped what I had before and I’ve started over, and I’m going to try to blog (semi-regularly) about the process.

The original idea kernel was my grandpa. I grew up in Wichita, and my dad’s parents lived in New Jersey, something like 1500 miles away. I feel like I had a really close bond with my grandparents, despite the difference, but the miles definitely had an impact on our relationship. It’s not like we just popped by for dinner every weekend. So there was less time together, but it also meant that we really made time together count.

When I was in high school, though, my grandpa got a brain tumor. He passed away just after I graduated. Between the time he got sick and when he passed away, I did get to visit one more time. I think it was Thanksgiving break. But for the most part, I heard updates about Grandpa from mom, who heard from dad, who heard from his mom and brother. It wasn’t ever the whole picture, and it was always indirect. I used a lot of humor to process what was going on–I think we all did.

So that was kind of the starting point–not the sad story about Grandpa being sick, necessarily, but the way that different people can have a totally different experience of the same shared event. Also, how an illness like that changes personalities, changes family dynamics, and the ways that people attack the problem and cope.

The story started there. A grandkid living far away from the grandparents, the granddad getting sick, and the family moving in with him to help him out. I thought as a tribute to Grandpa, I’d include his love of gems and minerals. Grandma and Grandpa were rockhounds. They collected specimens, made cabochons, faceted gems, and they kind of passed the hobby on to me. So I decided the characters in my story would be rockhounds too. And what if the grandkid decided that the rocks were magic? I wanted to add a touch of fantasy to the story.

Well, that’s where the original version of the novel went astray. My grad professor didn’t deal with subtlety or grey area well. So, at her insistence, that touch of fantasy became a full-blown cookie-cutter fantasy novel with world building and rules of magic and elemental tribes and shit.

I’m not trying to knock traditional fantasy novels. It’s just, that wasn’t what I wanted to write at all.

Anyway, that’s the journey I’m on now. I’m 11,000 words in, and I’m eager to see where the adventure heads this time.