Nick Bryan

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Man Vs Synopsis (WriteBlog #14)

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In the near future, I am going to an event where I will be presenting a synopsis and a short sample of my novel to Important People. This, logically, means I will need to write a synopsis, which is what I’ve been doing for the last week. I have now completed a version I can read without wincing, so it’s time for the inevitable blog-hashing of what I feel I’ve learnt from this.

And for anyone who is actually worried, my synopsis itself does not feature in this post, so there will not be any spoilers for my half-edited unpublished novel about Satan. Furthermore, if you have a scary dream which you think would serve as a good ending, absolutely post details in the comments – there is still time for me to use it. Thanks.

A synopsis, for anyone who hasn’t run painfully into them, is a description of a novel from start to finish, trying to convey the beginning, middle and end of the story and make it sound amazing and be concise. Yes, it’s difficult.

It should not be confused with a “blurb” – that’s the text on the back of published books trying to persuade you to buy them. Blurbs (ideally) do not give away the ending. The aim with a synopsis is not yet to persuade a reader to buy my book, but to convince an agent/editor/publisher I know what I’m doing in terms of constructing a whole story.

So, that’s what they are and I’ve now written mine. Here, in no order, are the thoughts I had whilst doing so.

“…but seriously, it’s way better in the book!”

With a limited amount of space (many synopses only get a page to wow the reader), it’s pressuring to fit in a full, meaningful explanation of the depth and scope of your story. Even if your prose is beautifully written, trying to cram everything into a synopsis often leads to a childish odyssey of “…and then… and then… and then…”.

And this, sadly, can be especially true in sci-fi/fantasy, my chosen genre, where the need to explain how your “universe” works might crowd out the character stuff which is just as much (if not more) of a selling point than the amazing new type of orc/alien/boy wizard/vampire/detective you’ve made up.

Which led me to hours of thinking on how much exposition was necessary and trying to make myself keep a reasonable percentage of the character-important rambling, even though it was tempting to see that as filler and keep the worldbuilding. To be honest, a lot of the refining here will come when I show repeated versions to beta readers and ask them whether they understand it.

“…and then, in a brief subplot, Bob has colonic irrigation, and then…”

For those of us who write novels containing a wide range of characters and events, you gotta find yourself asking – how much of this must I cram into my one-pager? Does every subplot need at least a brief mention? Can I drop a few? If I can coherently describe the plot without mentioning Bob’s bum-washing storyline, is it possible it doesn’t really need to be there?

Yes, I had these thoughts. But if you think that’s bad, imagine the one-page synopsis of the longer George R.R. Martin novels, they must be nothing but brief words for a few main characters. Or perhaps they’re in 1-point font size, that wouldn’t entirely surprise me either.

Point being – yes, if you can effectively summarise your book without mentioning a subplot, it’s probably worth having the “Do we really need this?” chat with yourself, but don’t necessarily assume it means instant death. Like all good blog posts, I’m proposing we have a rule, but sensibly so.

“So the printer can print how close to the edge of the page, exactly?”

If nothing else, you can fit more words on the page by widening the margins. I wouldn’t usually propose such cheap tricks, but let’s be honest, this is summarising a single novel in one sheet, every pixel counts.

And that, folks, is everything that came to mind whilst writing my synopsis. If nothing else, it gave me an interesting high aerial view of my story and did lead me to solve a few problems along the way, so was a worthwhile exercise. Now, back to the actual editing.

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.

Merry Christmas!

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It’s nearly 11:30PM on Christmas Eve and I’ve not got any presents to wrap, which may explain why I’ve ended up writing this instead. I should be doing something, dammit. (Considering I have to leave the house for my annual church visit at 7:50AM, you could argue that I should be asleep, but shut up.)

So, my overarching message here has to be Merry Christmas. To anyone reading this especially, as I’m not planning on plugging it on Twitter or anywhere much, so if you found this, you must’ve made some effort to engage. Or stumbled across it on a fluke. Either way, may your day be merry and not shite.

My Christmases recently have become increasingly quiet, as friends from back home in Essex have ended up scattered around, due to family relocation, marriage, deployment to Afghanistan, etc. My own family is pretty small, so this leaves us with a fairly contained affair. Lots of time to think.

Long story short, I’ve ended up planning a lot of the broad aesthetic decisions for the possible Next Novel. This is potentially unwise, as I really need to make myself do the editing on the one I finished in November, rather than casting it aside for the newer, shinier thing.

Anyway. Even though I am thinking about my writing a lot, dwelling at length on future goals probably isn’t the right material for a Christmas post, it’s more New Year fodder. For now, despite my endlessly grinding, introspective brain, I’m hoping to manage a hazy sense of warm Christmas enjoyment. We’ll see.

Merry December 25th to all, hope you get whatever you’re after out of it – in terms of fun, presents, decent Doctor Who specials, anything. Back here soon enough with a Hobson & Choi chapter, potentially some kind of Who review as well.

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.