Nick Bryan

writing about writing

All NaNo’s Eve – Belated NaNoWriMo Prep 2012

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I’ve been slack on blogging of late, due to moving house and devoting my typing time to working on the actual stories, rather than masturbatory writing about writing. (Also, September/October means a lot more TV reviews.) See the picture to the right for an illustration of my housemove, doubling as a metaphor for writer’s block.

But it’s nearly November, which means NaNoWriMo, and writing bloggers across the world breathe a sigh of glorious relief. Because, hey, no need to think of a topic for the next few weeks. Just start with NaNo and go from there!

And I’m not one to turn down easy inspiration, especially because it’s the 31st October (Happy Halloween!) and I haven’t done a shred of planning yet. Or even decided my exact approach. So, let’s talk about that. (This blog post totally isn’t an excuse to put off planning. Shut up.)

Length Vs Garbage

Last November, I decided to work on 50k worth of short stories, rather than add to my pile of unfinished novel drafts. It felt good at the time, although I haven’t yet finalised or sold any. Mostly because I’ve spent the bulk of this year finalising my novel from NaNo 2010.

So, this year, back to basics. After months punching and hacking at the same wall, I desperately want to feel the warm, damp flow of actual creativity again, so time for a new book. To be precise, a massive expansion of a story I wrote last November. See how everything’s connected?

Not for the first time, I’m aiming to focus on quality over quantity this year, and settle for less than the regulation 50k, if it means I produce better work. I’m pretty sure I’m a better writer thanks to the MA, so want to create something that doesn’t require rewriting from scratch later.

Of course, I may still get swept up in the competitive rush, produce 50k anyway, then delete the last fifth for being garbage. Again.

Planning Vs Pantsing

There’s been discussion in the NaNo community about planing lately, as you’d expect. In particular, planning vs “pantsing” – the art of making it up as you go along. (For more about pantsing, see this blog post on the NaNo London site. Contains no actual pants.)

There’s a lot of pantsing in NaNo, and I don’t just mean systematic American-style bullying. You’re writing at speed, the word quotas are terrifying, stopping for an evening to re-assess your plan means over 3,000 words tomorrow, so tempting to just power through.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen what happens when I power through. It leads to rambled, clunky sentences, endless funny-but-needless dialogue and characters enacting convoluted schemes instead of the obvious simple solution, which I was too hurried to realise. In short, all the things I’m trying to avoid. Pantsing may work for some, but I need a plan. It’s nearly midday on the last day of October and I don’t have one.

Gosh, I wonder what I’ll be doing this afternoon. Blogs will hopefully happen sporadically during the month, depending on level of panic, etc. London people, I will be attending at least some of the meets organised by the nice NaNo London folk (especially the All-Nighter, because it’s fun). Non-Londoners, I imagine it will be mentioned on my Twitter. And, y’know, those of you doing NaNo… how’s the planning going? Anyone else doing it in a rush this afternoon?

My Influences – Quantum & Woody by Christopher Priest & Mark Bright

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I imagine few have heard of Quantum & Woody, a comic book published in the 1990s (not a time known for great comics, I grant you) by Acclaim Comics. Q&W was pretty obscure even when coming out, and so it remains. It barely even exists on UK Amazon.

Nonetheless, that damn comic has been a huge influence on my stuff, in terms of both character and story structure. (In terms of actual prose, yes, I had to read some books.) So I’m going to talk about it a little.

Brief intro to concept (Quancept?)

Eric Henderson and Woodrew Van Chelton were childhood friends who drifted apart. They’re reunited when their fathers, who were working on a Mysterious Comic Book Science project together, die suddenly. Eric is now a serious man with a serious life, whereas Woody is a slacker whose band is going nowhere, but they try to investigate nonetheless, squabbling all the way. Inevitably, they are caught in a Mysterious Comic Book Science accident.

Thereafter, they have to meet up and touch wristbands every 24 hours, otherwise they both die, but in return, they get superpowers. Eric fancies himself as a proper superhero, and has the money to go through with it. Stuck near Eric thanks to the wristband dependency, Woody joins in to annoy him.

Buddy Superhero Goat Toilet Action

If this sounds like a mismatched buddy cop movie, only with superheroes… well, you’re not wrong. But it’s also a surprisingly subtle story about a long-standing friendship, the misdirected resentment between the two of them, along with the genuine affection beneath it. Oh, and the humour is mostly funny, in a broad sitcom kinda way.

The storyline where they switch bodies and have to face the prospect of peeing using each other’s genitalia is a watershed moment. It helps that Mark Bright, like all great comic artists, can do emotion and comic timing as well as people punching each other.

In retrospect, this series influenced me more than I even knew. My stories love thick-and-thin friendships, straight man/funny guy duos, out of sequence storytelling (seriously, “linear plot” is a dirty word in Q&W, especially early on), inane farm animal mascots (they had a goat, see image) and wry smartarse humour. Especially wry smartarse toilet humour.

Alas, the comic has been so lost in time that the odds of you reading it are quite small. If you know me in real life and are intrigued, I can dig out the four collected editions reprinting issues #1-16. For anyone else trying to track it down (good luck!) – get #1-16 and you’ll have a beginning, middle and end. Subsequent issues are also good, but the series was cancelled mid-storyline with #21, so you may experience frustration.

Speaking of Frustration

Writer Christopher Priest talks a little about Quantum & Woody here. He’s a very talented guy who’s worked on other good comics too (although Q&W will always be first in my heart), so it’s sad that he isn’t active in the field nowadays. A new company, Valiant, took possession of all character rights after Acclaim went bust, so maybe they could relaunch Q&W – if Priest is there, so am I. If he isn’t, I kinda feel the point is gone. And if they can get Bright back on art, even better.

This is the problem with following US comics not published by the big two, Marvel and DC. Even when they have superheroic elements in them. It’s a constant struggle for survival and they keep disappearing. But Quantum & Woody, even if it never returns or gets reprinted again, was a clever, warm, funny work, and I thought it deserved a note here. It was one of the first things I really took on board, and yes, I may view it with somewhat rosetinted glasses, but it’s still worthy of at least a look. Did anyone else read this? Just me?

Writing About Writing About Writing

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Currently, I am sweating over my Creative Writing MA portfolio. This has meant scaling back the blogging, or at least, only doing stuff that repeats every week. As I’ve said before, the writing is easy, having ideas is hard.So, for this week’s blog post about writing: the painful art of commentating on your own work.

You might think blog posts about writing might prepare me for the 2,500 words commentary I have to produce about my 16,000 word portfolio. I hoped so too, but it turns out I never talk in detail about my own work, only that of other people, mostly in broad strokes. Nonetheless, here is what I have found so far whilst commentating my own material.

“I am awesome, yet modest.”

A lot of writers and creative people look at their work and see only flaws. But, not just for critical commentaries but life in general, you have to see the up-side. I want my MA tutors to give me good marks, and further down the line, I may want publishers to pay me money for my stuff.

And if that’s going to happen, I need to be able to point out its good points with conviction, without sounding deluded. I am aware my work has weaknesses, but am definitely bringing them up after the positive stuff. And possibly in fewer words.

“Truthfully, readers, I dare not contemplate the majesty.”

I need to sound more pretentious than I do, really. My tone in the commentaries, although not quite as conversational as these blogs, isn’t that much more serious and heavy. And, when trying to push yourself as a proper thoughtful creative, should I be able to talk about “themes” and “motivations” in a way that would make many people (including me) want to mock me? Perhaps.

“The process matters more than the outcome.”

Yes, I quoted The West Wing. Anyway, I’m not sure that’s strictly true, but creative process is interesting for some, and it’s good to be willing to talk about yours, both to seem accessible and build interest (someone out there might read your process and then check out the story) and because, you know, it’s useful to write this stuff down as a thinking exercise. So be honest and try to think about exactly what you did. If nothing else, it fills up the word count.

Anyway, I hope that’s useful to anyone else who finds themselves having to do one of these commentaries, or even just discuss their own work in general. If you’ve had to write a commentary for any reason, feel free to share any advice in the comments, I still have 60% of the thing left to do.

Pirates, Zombies and Monkeys – Oh Christ!

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For every craft, there is an easy shortcut. In cooking, you can just add salt. In fashion, just wear black. In warfare, just launch a nuclear weapon.

And also in storytelling, you can just throw in vampires, zombies, pirates, monkeys, cowboys, aliens, wizards or one of the other big tropes. I’m not saying these things always suck (vampire joke), but I am weary of them being used as a substitute for new ideas.

And, quite possibly, so are other people, as I haven’t noticed as many new books in which the entire premise appears to be “Established plot with added vampires/cowboys/zombies” (“Pride and Prejudice… With Leopards!”). Not to mention the movie “Cowboys Vs Aliens”, wherein the entire film was right there in the title to imagine.

I can’t directly criticise that movie, as I haven’t seen it, but that’s because I read the title and thought “Well, I know what that’ll be like,” saw a trailer which echoed those feelings, and then ignored it happily. A rush of positive reviews might have changed my mind, but they never came.

The problem with these genres mashes, or pointlessly bashing big genre concepts into your story, is dilution. It automatically cheapens whatever your point was, and it’s probably won’t be a masterful take on cowboys/monkeys/whatever either.

Recently, Twilight (love it or hate it) has been successful in the vampire gothic romance area, while Walking Dead has raked in the zombie money. What do those two have in common, beyond  attractive British leading men in screen adaptations? They’re both pretty straight approaches to their chosen area. No genre-bendng or random insertion of aliens.

As ever, I’m doing heavy generalising here. Obviously, sometimes genre-mashing has produced interesting, clever works. I enjoyed Sean of the Dead just as much as you did, but that was deceptively carefully done and affectionate. If you’re going to randomly deploy a huge monkey into your novel, beware the risk of laziness. The fact you’re using a pre-made concept doesn’t mean you don’t have to consider the meaning and motivation of the gorilla and give it a firm reason to exist beyond “monkeys are cool”.

My Writing Environment And Me

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That’s where the magic happens. My base station, where I sit for hours to bring you this red-hot stream of content. As you can see, it is untidy. But aren’t “creatives” honourbound to be a disorganised mess? So is this an optimum writing environment, or should I get my shit together and purge my desk with a match?

Sometimes in these blog posts, I leap onto my high horse, but this one will be more tentative, because finding a writing environment in which I can reliably do some damn work has always eluded me.

One possible conclusion: environment is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether I’m huddled in my pit or a nice clean branch of Pret, I will work if I’m in the mood. Because, yes, I enjoy sitting in a coffee shop impersonating a pretentious nob, but I don’t always get a huge amount done.

Still, there are a couple of environmental factors which matter.

Distractions (okay, the internet)

Sometimes, I am on form and can brilliantly forge ahead with work, whilst keeping up an IM conversation, tweeting intermittently and checking my email whenever it pings. But I will admit those days are rare.

More often, the productivity comes when I step away from the internet, either genuinely bored of it or thinking “Look, fuck this, I have to do something today”. So, yes, if I want to sort my environment out, getting rid of the internet is a big step.

And that’s one reason why going to a cafe with my terrible netbook sometimes works. It can’t connect to the internet, as this burns the battery in minutes.

Peer Pressure

I started going to NaNoWriMo writing groups in 2010. Long before that, myself and my friend Paul used to spur each other on through NaNo with competitive word count battles, complete with embarrassingly geeky trash talk on Messenger.

And I’m forced to admit, more even than turning off the internet, bouncing off other writers does help me get stuff done. Even in smaller groups (right now, I’m in a sandwich shop with five others), it kickstarts my childhood Catholic-rooted guilt brilliantly.

In the future, if the writing ever brings the money in, I might hire an assistant. Aside from the usual boring tasks like accounts and making the tea, their main tasks will be to turn off my internet whenever I need to work, and then stare at me judgmentally until I get on with it. Whether I’ll be happy is debatable, but maybe productive at least.

If anyone wants to do this for free, applications welcome in the comments section. Or, you know, share any tips you’ve picked up about making the writing environment work.

I Am Not A Travel Writer

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As Twitter followers may know, I am currently on holiday in Austria. However, we are currently having an internet break, so I am going to try and honour my blogging commitment by posting about writing.

(It is currently Monday rather than Tuesday, and I`m sorry if this confuses anyone. I decided the wrong day is better than nothing.)

It may not be as long as usual, I can only apologise, but it is going to tackle a writing impulse I get whenever I go away: the urge to try and be a travel writer.

Because, y`know, I write, I think I`m decent at it, and when I go on holiday, I`m seized by the need to chronicle my holiday in a poetic or emotive fashion. After all, for a writer all life is research (unfortunate for anyone trying to date us, but there it is), and holidays cost money, so why shouldn`t I try and get material out of it?

Well, firstly because I don`t exactly have a soaring, poetic style. But more fundamentally, and this is a problem I found when I used to write blog posts about my so-called “real life”, the proper human world is annoyingly reluctant to follow a standard narrative structure. Hence why I now restrict my real world observations to Twitter, where they get all the length and depth they deserve.

And that`s okay. I mean, if people are interested in my holiday, they can ask me (Feel free to do so in the comments!), but I don`t think the world needs an epic work about it. Luckily, this has come to me quickly whenever I`ve sat down to try and write such a thing and just found that… yeah, this is just a list, isn`t it?

I mean, good fun for me at the time, but I`m a fiction writer with a TV-blogging sideline, not a diarist or Bill Bryson. Even The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin who I admire greatly, suffers from a lack of real climax, no matter how much Sorkin tries to play up the events towards the end. And we let him off maybe, because he was adapting someone else`s book about events beyond his control, so he did the best he can. Still, I see no reason to knowingly dive into this problem.

Don`t get me wrong, I`m not saying this is impossible. There`s a lot of great work out there about holidays and travel and so on, the afore-mentioned Bryson for one, I`m not saying no-one is a travel writer. I`m just saying… pretty sure I`m not.