Nick Bryan

writing about writing

My Writing Process meme – The truth behind Hobson & Choi

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So, for the first time ever on this blog (WOO), I have done one of those answer-some-questions-then-nominate-people memes. Because, y’know, why not? Lets me talk a bit about Hobson & Choi, which I always enjoy doing. For anyone who ever wanted a straight-forward pitch for the whole story, here it is.

Thanks to Lisa Goll of London Writer’s Cafe for nominating me, you can see her pass at the same questions over at her blog.

But now, on with the ME.

1. When and where is the story set?

Hobson & Choi is set in London, in The Now of the early 2010s. To be precise, it’s set in a criminal undercurrent that seems to exist just below the surface of almost everything. Seems to be nothing in London I can’t point to and say “Ah, but what if it was evil?”

2. What can you say about the main characters?

The main characters are John Hobson, middle-aged private eye with dark past, and Angelia Choi, slightly withdrawn but well-meaning teenage girl with… well, a past of some kind. They come together after she asks for a work experience placement at his agency, and end up using his expertise in turning over scumbags to investigate more modern crimes than he was bothering to find.

Although John Hobson, the world-weary old bastard, finds all these newfangled dirty-dealings rather fey and annoying. There’s a lot of bickering at first, but no doubt they’ll eventually discover they have more in common than they first thought.

3. What is the main conflict?

H&C has been one of those stories that has revealed its true self slowly as it went along. The main conflict seems to be between the slick new world and the rather grimy old one it’s built on top of, as helpfully embodied by Hobson and Choi themselves.

And more directly, the series of crimes the heroes are presented with provides a helpful immediate conflict. Can they solve the murder/find the kidnap victim/uncover the conspiracy? All the while dealing with their personal issues and secrets mounting in the background?

And if all that has enticed you to give Hobson & Choi a go, you can wait a bit longer for the upcoming definitive self-published edition of Case One.

The Infectious Phase

The lucky people nominated by me to carry this on…

  1. Frances Pauli, fellow JukePop author of The Earth Tigers.
  2. Alastair JR Ball, author of the non-JukePop webserial The First 500.
  3. Julianne Benford, book blogger and aspiring YA writer.

Why can’t I work at home? – A video study in writing and procrastination

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So, for a while now, I’ve found myself unable to get much work done in my home. I’m not sure why, my procrastination levels just spiked, but I’ve spent ages going to a local cafe as a result. Loads of time, loads of money, but I’ve also achieved a fuckton of writing, so maybe it’ll just have to be fair enough.

Anyway, long story short, I fancied doing another video blog after last month’s moderately fun experiment, so I have created the below. A short piece exploring that very question: why can’t I work at home?

And for anyone interested: yes, that is my workspace. Judge away. (Watch it on YouTube here.)

So, can you no longer work in your house? Is it for the same reasons as me? Feel free to form a sufferer support group in the comments, I’ll break up any fights.

I AM NOT A NUMBER (but my novel editing progress is and I can’t stop looking at it)

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This week, threatened as recently as last week, I launched into the third draft of my constantly-in-progress novel. This is the phase where I trawl through the entire text of the book, picking at individual words and trying to get it to the stage where I’m willing to share it with my elite team of beta readers.

ASIDE: If you want to join said elite team, email me and volunteer, or contact me using any other method available to you. All viable humans considered, especially those able to read a book in 1-2 months and provide feedback more detailed than “Yeah, it was okay.” Beta reading likely to commence in early-to-mid June.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I launched into the editing process, and quickly settled on a method. For more details on said method and its implications for my location, read on…

Editalactus – Mincer Of Words

In a bid to give the words a thorough beating, my “third pass” will actually consist of three passes – one in the cafe with music on, picking at the language and doing any final bits of continuity straightening necessary. After that, I read the whole thing out – yes, with my voice at full volume – which usually serves to find clunky phrasings and stupid repeated words.

Last of all, I run this version through the Hemingway web app, which I think I’ve mentioned here before. This provides one last suggestion of overlong clunky sentences, letting me snip a few more chunks away.

So, that’s what I’m doing. I have nearly a hundred thousand words to feed through this mincer, and in the last week, I’ve managed a third of the novel. Not bad. Probably helps that I’ve spent three whole days in that time doing almost nothing else.

With this in mind, I might be on track to finish by the end of the month, then I can get some opinions and work out how much more work is needed. Must admit, I’ve already found myself eyeing up some bigger changes to the first third, but I’m tempted to let a few other people read it first. Be good to finally get a wider view on this thing rather than keep picking and picking.

Sit still, you idiot.

The down-side of the above-described editing process: I can’t do all of it in the cafe. Specifically, the part where I read out the text to myself. Doesn’t really work in public, people give you odd looks.

For a year or so now, I’ve basically done all my writing in the same Walthamstow cafe. Working at home just hasn’t been productive for me, I’m too prone to wandering off and procrastinating. But I’ve had to force myself through it this time, and although there are still a few hours that got lost in the whirl of talking to myself, the job is getting done.

Maybe one day, I’ll be able to work at home when I don’t have to. Might save me a few quid on coffee, at least.

So yeah, it’s getting done. When I laid out the target of finishing this edit by the end of May, I thought I was being self-punishingly optimistic, but perhaps not? We’ll see if this progress continues in subsequent weeks, I suppose.

WRITEBLOG EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

You may note I’ve stopped numbering my blogs about writing, as there was more or less no point. Sorry to anyone upset by this. I’m a slave to public approval, so feel free to argue the case for numbering in the comments…

Is it me or is there a COMPLETED SECOND draft in here? (WriteBlog #24)

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Unfortunately, the pun in the title doesn’t really work, as that kind of draft is spelt draught. But enough self-sabotage.

This week, on Wednesday to be precise, I completed the second draft of the novel I’ve been blogging about for ages. So yeah, hit my self-imposed deadline of the end of April by about six hours, go team. Now, this doesn’t mean it’s time to show it to publishing professionals, or indeed other humans at all, but it is a major chunk of work finished, and I’m going to number it as second draft anyway, simply because it gives me a feeling of progress.

So what exactly do I mean by second draft? And what’s next if not showing it to others? Time now for a little pause-and-take-stock in the editing process.

“It’s like running a comb through the forest.”

The second draft, as I’m defining it, involves going through the entire first draft text and trying to turn it into a coherent item, which you could conceivably go through from beginning to end and understand. I’m not saying every detail will be correct or the writing will be beautiful – in fact, that definitely isn’t true – but I have a thing that resembles a story.

More excitingly, it more or less resembles the story I wanted to tell when I started this whole process.In practise, this involved re-ordering or re-writing a lot of scenes, jamming new segments into them, not to mention the heartbreaking deletion of bits which no longer work. My deleted offcuts folder for this project is a terrifying 43,924 words – a lot of work to accept that you may never use.

(Well, there’s one whole deleted chapter which may find a home in some future related project, as I still like it, but the story has shifted and left the poor thing homeless. But aside from that, yup, it’s all being launched into the void to die.)

But at least it sounds like I’ve done something. Plenty of new writing, interesting thoughts about old work, gratifying sense of creation. The best editing experience I’ve yet had. I won’t be showing the first or second drafts to anyone, but one definitely advances the other.So, what’s next?

“It’s like fighting off an ant invasion using a sledgehammer.”

Well, the detailed editing, which I call the third draft because, again, it’s nice to feel like you’re achieving something. The bit where I go through the text in a finer fashion, potentially more than once, trying to get all the sentences to look and sound nice, spot the details which contradict each other, ruthlessly eliminate words like actually and finally which I use every five minutes and are never fucking worth it.

In short, yes, this is the fiddly part many non-writers assume I’m doing when I first start editing. If only.It also includes the always-entertaining section where I read the whole thing out loud to myself, alone in my house, hoping to spot awkward sentence construction and over-used words. The current manuscript is only 94,000 words so hopefully that won’t take too many thousands of hours.

I still live in hope this won’t be a huge chore. The last editing section was surprisingly pleasant, as it was still writing basically, but this really is word-by-word text examination. I’m going to try and push through it relatively quickly to avoid that being too much of a problem – in my dreams, I’m finished by the end of May. In reality, the end of June might be more realistic.

And then. Well, then we really are ready for other people to read the thing. And I’m sure I’ll talk about that when the time comes.

Tune in next week to find out how much/little of a boring task this third drafting really is. And then come back the week after that to see me change my mind.

Fighting The Skeleton Army – Fleshing out NaNoWriMo writing (WriteBlog #23)

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This week, I came within 1.5 chapters of finishing the second draft of the novel! But this isn’t quite the victory lap blog post yet, I’ll get to that next week. This week, after editing 5.5 chapters worth of NaNoWriMo work (I wrote the last seven chapters during NaNo 2013), I finally worked out the real difference between this and better, more carefully written first draft material.

No, it wasn’t the terrible spelling and barely comprehensible sentences, those would’ve happened anyway.

“An interest work, yes, but I can’t help but feel it may have been written by a burning cat.”

As documented in past WriteBlogs (and even a video that one time), I was concerned that the stuff I wrote in NaNoWriMo would be wretched godawful swill, a confusion of mess that looked like a cat had leapt onto my keyboard, then been set on fire.

But I worked myself into such a mess of pessimism that it was never going to be as bad as I expected. Yes, I stumbled upon a few bits which just didn’t make sense – after a few re-readings, I was forced to jettison entire sentences because no amount of re-reading could let me in on what my past self had been thinking.

Still, that was rare. Mostly, the plot was there, even if it still needed tweaking, and there were moments of great dialogue where I found myself thinking: “You know what, Past Nick, even though you were clearly hammered when you wrote that other bit, this is masterful.”

The one recurring problem I have found: most of it it just a bit thin. Not very fleshed out.

Zombies can’t eat the flesh if it wasn’t there in the first place

This could be a common enough issue with everyone’s first draft, but even compared to my other early work, this lacked in shading. Quite a lot of scenes boiling down to “Man and woman were in the room, it was green, one said blah, another said blah blah,” and so on unto infinity.

Not that the dialogue was bad, in fact some of it was very good, but compared to other, better bits of first draft, it did read a little like I was hurrying to the finish. So, in short, my experience of editing NaNoWriMo writing: putting some meat onto the blasted white bones of description-free scenes.

This grew a repetitive when blasting through scene after scene doing the same thing every time, but it could be worse. At least I didn’t have to delete and rewrite everything. And hopefully next week, we move on to the next big step: finishing the second draft.So that’ll be exciting.

The Trouble With All That (WriteBlog #22)

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Since last week’s London Book Fair adventures, I’ve returned to my normal life and tried to live the lessons, y’know? I’ve emailed a couple of people, spoken about things, set wheels in motion, and then… well, at some point I had to sit down and do some writing again.

And honestly, it almost felt a bit dull compared to all the faffing around checking my book options and seeing pretty colours. Not to mention, there are so many things to be done on the vague self-pub checklist, there’s always some other task I could/should be doing.

In fairness, I’m pretty sure I’m not the first person to feel this way. In fact, the self-published authors who spoke last week often touched on the difficulties involved in both achieving the ten million sundry publishing tasks and getting the work done. Oh, and continuing a regular human life outside both those areas, if possible.I think there’s a lot of novelty value here too.

I’ve been writing in some form since I was about 18 and I’ve pushed a hard cranking schedule in the last year or so especially. At this point, I know pretty well what it feels like to sit at a desk and type. But all this cover-selecting strategy stuff, that’s new and interesting.

Still, I’ve done some research and at some point soon enough, I’m going to have to process my Scrivener files into a correctly formatted ebook. I don’t see any way that won’t be an enormous ballache, so I imagine that’s about the time I’ll fall back in love with writing.

So for now, things keep going as they have been. A few slow, steady moves towards that self-publishing thing, another 1.5 chapters edited in my novel. Imagine I’ll have settled happily back into my routine soon enough.

And happy Easter to anyone reading this. Hope you’re having a good one and not yet suffering from diabetes. A more substantial entry next week, perhaps. For now, stuff is happening, work continues.