Nick Bryan

Writing About Writing

When the going gets tough, Nick Bryan goes on Tumblr (WriteBlog #13)

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I don’t know if I ever posted about this on here – I have a Tumblr account, it used to be my main website before I moved to this one. A couple of months ago, I chose a better theme and started using it in the same way as other Tumblrers do – mostly reblogging images and commenting below them. Feel free to follow if you like. A lot of it is comic-related, but sometimes not.

Anyway, I never started using it regularly – I had a starting spurt but died off. To be honest, Tumblr isn’t entirely my thing. I’m more a words person than a pictures one, and I don’t get emotionally attached to fictional characters in the animated-gif way. Until the last week or so, just as I reached the first genuinely hard part of my novel edits. What a remarkable coincidence.

It is not really a coincidence

After making the first three chapters worth of edits in a shade over a week, I wrote last week’s blog post, which was so positive, people have commented about it socially. Things were going well, and then I reached the fourth chapter, represented in my notes by a thick line with BIG CHANGES START HERE written along it.

What that means is: this is where I need to start heavily deviating from my original draft, rearranging plot points, writing lots of new scenes and taking stuff off in new directions. Yeah, I had a bit of a wobble. Partly laziness, partly intimidation at the scale of the task, partly fear that I wasn’t capable of it, probably some other things as well.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t leading up to And Then I Did Nothing All Week – I redid chapter four, it’s finished, but it took an eternity, I wasted probably the equivalent of a working day not just procrastinating on Twitter but turning regularly to Tumblr when I ran out of tweets to read (and that took a while).

It was just an extreme slow start, compounded by this being the week I had to draft the Hobson & Choi Extra Long 50th Chapter Extravaganza, which I’ve been looking forward to for ages and didn’t want to end up doing half-arsed. Still, in the end I rattled through two thirds of chapter four today and then worked out my revised outline for chapter five.

Things are happening, but there are even more severe edits coming, and if I’m going to get any momentum going, losing whole afternoons to social media isn’t really an option, especially when I already have to fit the editing around my day job, Hobson & Choi and having an actual life.

Basically, in short, what I’m saying is: if you see me post anything on Tumblr in the middle of a UK weekday, you’d probably be entirely justified in sending a message over telling me to get the hell back to work. Yeah.

Killing Your Darlings – They warned me it would be rough, but still… (WriteBlog #12)

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Since last I WroteBlogged, I’ve been editing my novel first draft in a few large sessions, along with keeping up my regular commitments. Long story short, I’m now three chapters into the edit and if I continue at this pace, I may even have something available to discuss at the next writing group meeting, after several quiet sessions while I waited to be happy with stuff.

So, in a bid to make this an interactive shared learning experience, here are my observations/thoughts/feelings from one whole week of hacking at the early parts of a rough early novel manuscript.

The Greatest Struggle Is Within

To be honest, I’ve been what some call a “churner” in my writing. Historically, I’ve enjoyed the thrill of pounding out a first draft far more than the harder labour of going back, taking a wider view of said scrawl and hammering it into something people besides my Mum might want to read. (No offence, Mum. Please don’t stop reading the blog, I need your pageviews.)

But, as I’ve mused before, I think the current book has genuine potential and is in a not-too-awful state, so I should do my best to push through that barrier. That’s one of the reasons I’m persisting in these regular blogs if we’re being really honest – if I just don’t bother finishing after talking about it so much, I’ll feel like an utter nob.

So, I’m trying to focus on the creative fun parts of editing rather than the line-by-line torture: writing new subplots and chapters, fiddling with stuff to make other stuff work. So far, this has been a moderate success – although during one afternoon in which I had to write a slightly-different version of an existing scene because the old one just wasn’t salvageable, I did find my brain wandering away a little.

Still, today was great, I really felt the parts sliding together and I wasn’t even working on fresh material. Hopefully I’m finally getting to grips with the necessary attitude, and if not, I invite you all to come round my house and beat me soundly with sticks of bamboo.

Though Cutting Good Stuff Is A Bugger Too

I did read some blog posts about the editing process and a lot of them talk about the need to Kill Your Darlings. That’s a big buzzphrase. And no, it doesn’t refer to aspiring writers getting so frustrated with slow line-edits, they end up indulging in a killing spree – instead, it’s the need to often remove scenes or story features you really like because they don’t fit in/are superfluous to the rest of the piece.

I’ve had to do this a couple of times now, and let me tell you, the fact you may not get to read the scene where one of my characters sets their entire body on fire upsets me in a primal, spiritual way. There are other parts too, which had to die due to being pointless tangents.

I live in the quiet, perhaps desperate hope that I can fit some of the excised material into future work, but a lot of it is probably good for nothing else. Which is a shame as I loved writing a lot of it, I still remember the thrill of it first coming into existence. But I also know that the resultant story reads less like an unfocused “Yeah, let’s chuck that in” ramble now, which is kinda satisfying.

All of which is to say: those bloggers may have been right. Shame, I always hoped I was the special flower the common advice didn’t apply to. Bugger.Now, I’ve got 45 minutes spare so am going to start the edits on chapter four. I’m actually excited to do it too, which is nice. Maybe I’m getting somewhere with my internal struggle after all.

2014 Novel Edits – if only there were as few as that… (WriteBlog #11)

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Tomorrow is my first full day of writing time since the Great Christmas Pause a few weeks ago. I have a quiet spell ahead, so I’m hoping to get a little start on my 2014 work. I figured this was probably a good time to get back into these writing blogs.

So, what does that mean? After months of musing, contemplating and general hoping for the best, time to finally start editing that novel I finished at the end of November. Shit.

Basically, aside from keeping up on my Hobson & Choi deadlines, my only hard goal for 2014, fiction-wise, is thus: get the modern-Faustian novel first draft up to a decent standard. I will settle for achieving this by the end of the year, but if I’m being honest, I’d quite like to manage it before that. How long is a reasonable amount of time to edit a 90,000ish word first draft into decent shape? I honestly don’t know, but a whole year seems like it should be enough, especially considering I don’t currently work full-time.

Keep in mind, I don’t intend to even send it out to beta readers until I’ve done one very full edit. I haven’t sat down and worked out the main changes yet, but I know it’ll involve shifting parts around and writing several whole new chapters. So there’s the first big rewrite, the pause while beta readers judge it, then the subsequent rewrites. Having typed that out, maybe I should prepare myself for it taking the whole year.

So, now that I’ve thought about what I’ll be doing in December 2014, let’s move back down to tomorrow. Keep it manageable, focus on goals you can really enact.

Tomorrow, once I’ve done enough H&C work to keep on target, I need a plan. If I’m going to get this done with any order and efficiency, I need to look over what I’ve got and try to create some kind of overview of what I’m trying to create, preferably accompanied by a list of what I need to do to achieve this. Part of me feels this is getting quite far off the Dream Creative Process but fuck that. Making it up as I go along has never led to my best work (and has also directly caused some of the problem in this very manuscript), so I’m going to avoid it.

I hope this slightly terrified download from my brain has struck a chord somewhere. I don’t pretend to be giving advice here, if anything I’m actively reaching out for it. If your own editing adventures have given you any insight into how I should go about this, share them in the comments (or use whichever of the contact methods listed here you like best) for god’s sake.

Oh, and readers of my unadvertised Christmas Day blog message may remember I mentioned ideas for the Next Novel. Those have been noted, and will now go totally ignored until I’ve got some kind of rhythm going on this editing.

Anthologies, both JukePop and Comic Book (WriteBlog #10)

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Me and my thumb in the Jukepop anthology!

Those of you who see my updates on any form of social media are probably familiar with the photograph on the right of me (and my thumb) in the Jukepop Serials anthology, as I posted it more or less everywhere on Tuesday night.

Now, for anyone who fancies some context, here it is: Jukepop Serials, the publishers of Hobson & Choi, have produced a print collection of their ten “best” serials.

I have no idea what magical algorithms were used to reach this list, but nonetheless, I was on it, and the first five chapters of Hobson & Choi can now be found on pages 43-68 of the book. I stress, these are not improved or “director’s cut” versions, so if you’re not a H&C completist (do we have those yet?), you don’t have to rush out and buy it, but if you want a Christmas present for someone who enjoys serialised genre fiction, this could work.

Whatever the algorithm, they’ve ended up choosing some good stories. No, this isn’t a published novel, but at this early point in my writing career, part of my brain still spikes with joy whenever I see my own name in print, so good fun nonetheless.

Elsewhere in Nick In Anthologies news, the comic script I was working on last week had its first encounter with a genuine editor, and happily all went well. Got interesting notes, no spelling mistakes found. In short, I didn’t get an email back saying “What in the good fuck is this, have you even read a comic?”, so good result. Next, this afternoon in fact, I shall go sit in my cafe and attempt to enact said notes.

In short, it’s been a good few days on the writing, so you’re spared the stream of introspection that sometimes emerges in these posts. There may or may not be another WriteBlog next week, because my schedule of festive prep/booze is starting to squeeze the writing time. In fact, we’re reaching the calendar point where bloggers everywhere pad out their schedule with Best of [YEAR] lists, so might do that instead. Regardless, hope your own Christmas shopping and/or drinking is going well.

Comic scripting – Invisible words? Too many words? Words? (WriteBlog #9)

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And now, a change of pace: a blog not about NaNoWriMo. About six blogs ago, I wrote about a bunch of short pitches I was putting together for some comic stories. Well, while I busied myself with bashing out a novel-third in Nov, I also heard that two of those had been accepted. So, yes, if all goes well, two shorts by me will appear in GreyHaven anthologies in the future. Good times.

Now, since I only had to write paragraph-long summaries originally, this news also means I must now write the scripts for both these stories. So, that’s been my project since NaNo finished. How’s that gone?

I haven’t written any comic script since my failed Script Frenzy effort of 2012 (Remember Script Frenzy? Remember the awful portmanteau “screnzy” which used to send a shiver up my spine?) so these muscles have needed to creak back into life. I’ve read a lot of comics lately at least, so remember how the storytelling works, but describing stuff? In detail? To an actual collaborator? New territory.

Lots of words no-one will ever get to read. Lots of trying to get across what needs to be there without imposing too hard on the artist’s freedom to do something interesting with the page. Lots of reading comic scripts and script notes by comics writers online to see if it helps. I don’t yet know who the artists will be, so I’m trying to make the script as everyone-friendly as possible.

Trying to also avoid the rookie comics writer’s mistake of overloading panels with text, because even if it seems like nothing to me on the script, count up the words and compare them to an existing comics panel and I suddenly realise that, yeah, put those bad boys down in word balloons and the art may as well be a blank space. Which, at least, saves a lot of work by the artist.

So, hard work, new skills. Nonetheless, I still love comics as an art form and the idea of seeing my stories in arted and printed form makes it all seem worthwhile. So I’ve gotta finish the first one, start the second one… maybe buy some Christmas presents or something too? It’s strange new territory, but after burning the candle at both ends prose-wise during NaNo, it’s kinda nice to be working in this different structure for a while.

Thirty Nine Thousand, Six Hundred And Thirty Four Words – NaNoWriMo Ends Here! (WriteBlog #8)

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Calendar fans will note that National Novel Writing Month runs another few days, until this Saturday, but for me, it is all over. Because, well, I finished my novel, and as discussed in these WriteBlogs at some length, that was the job.

I could probably find a few thousand words to put me over fifty thousand, maybe a between-chapters diversion where my characters embark on a lengthy game of Scrabble. But I don’t really care. I have finished my novel.

Well, the first draft, anyway. As blogs are currently lining up to tell us, finishing your NaNo draft of a novel is not the same as having a complete book, and it’s probably best to at least read over it a few times before sending it out to everyone. Chuck Wendig did a better blog about this than I ever will.

But as discussed here last week, I’m well aware that my book is not ready for primetime, both due to prose clunkiness and the jarring “How much did I just drink?” plot revisions between each chapter. So, yup, got the need for editing, thanks. What other notable feelings can I record on finishing the NaNo novel?

Well, fear mostly. I’ve managed to finish a book without hating it, which is a big step, but I’m also aware of the sheer scale of the rewriting required. I’m not necessarily exaggerating when I say at least a third of it needs to be redone. The level of change involved might be too massive to really qualify as “editing”, but I’m going to call it that anyway to keep calm.

I was coping with this better when I hadn’t finished the draft, to be honest. Now I’m faced with the need to set about doing it, I’m starting to panic properly. Fortunately, writing convention dictates I put the book in a drawer for at least a short time to get some distance from the story (and the terror) – not to mention, Christmas is coming which is always a helpful excuse to avoid work.

So I’m shoving the book away until January, when my fear will hopefully transform into a newfound commitment to high-speed editing/rewriting/whatever I’m calling it. Regardless of my nerves, I’m pretty chuffed to have finished well inside my self-imposed deadline, anyway. A 100K first draft novel in seven months is pretty good for me.

And don’t worry, WriteBlog fans, I never actually stop working – not only will Hobson & Choi continue, I have an entirely different writing project to type now. More on that next week, probably.

HINT: it involves something I’ve mentioned here before.