Martin Livings

Rest in peace, novel. You were never meant to be.

Or: Don't put off until tomorrow what you can put off indefinitely...

Yesterday I described writing a novel as paleontology. Today, though, it feels less like arranging bones and more like eating an elephant. The task is so big that it's hurting my fragile little brain. And it's not that big a novel; how people write those massive fat fantasy books, I'll never know.

So, I decided to change my method. I usually write books as a single big Word document. Which is fine during the initial writing, and usually okay in the editing, as long as you get it basically right the first time. With this one, though, there's a lot of chopping and changing around, reordering chapters, inserting new chapters, all the while trying to keep it consistent. It's a frickin' nightmare.

So I bit the bullet, and decided to try something new. or, more accurately, something old, something I utilised a little many years ago when working on Carnies.

I decided to install halspacejock's yWriter.

This version's a huge improvement over the previous ones, I have to say that. Importing my work was... well, tricky, because it refused to import the first fifteen chapters, deciding instead to start at sixteen for no readily apparent reason. But I got over that and managed to get the entire manuscript imported and split into "scenes" (actually my chapters, but I knew I'd be changing it around so much that having chapter divisions at this stage would be pointless). It's a neat way of getting an overall look at the book. For example, I now know that I have too many scenes from one of the characters' point of view and not enough of the other. I can also see at a glance where I need to add more stuff. Neat.

Will it help? Who knows. But, if nothing else, it let me avoid doing any actual work on it for the entire morning...

At the moment, I'm finding the act of writing a little like field paleontology. You go out and dig somewhere you think there may be something. Sometimes there's nothing there at all. Sometimes there's junk, bits and pieces of worthless detritus. But sometimes, just sometimes, there's something good.

Short stories are like fossils for me. Generally they're complete animals, even if only skeletons and a hint of an outline. The only work to do is to fill in the gaps, flesh it out, make it come alive. That's how my story for the latest sekrit projekt came to me, and more recently (ie, last night) the story for jennifer_brozek's project, though I'm not sure if that story is any good yet, there's still a lot of dirt on it to be cleaned off. But no time for that right now, i have to make some field notes then put it aside for later inspection.

No, right now is novel time. And novels are like the bigger dinosaurs, in that they aren't discovered fully formed and clear. They come in pieces, large and small, dug up over weeks and months and, yeah, sometimes years. And sometimes you think you've assembled all the bones correctly, only to discover more bones later on and realise that you made some mistakes in your initial assembly.

That's the stage I'm at right now. I thought I had a complete skeleton, only to find more bones in the pit. So I have to add those bones to the big picture, and rearrange the ones I'd already found. Some of them may not even be the right bones at all, might come from a different animal altogether.

But in the end, I will have my dinosaur. And it will have big teeth and big claws, and yea, it will make the earth tremble beneath its mighty feet.

And yes, I am avoiding getting started on this... how could you tell???