Suzi McGowen said…
I live by this rule:
1. Is it kind?
2. Is it honest?
3. Is it necessary?

Suzi, I agree with you, but this reminds me of a joke.

A man ran up to Socrates and cried, “Socrates, you’ll never guess the rumor I just heard about one of your students!”

Socrates held up his hand. “Before you speak, let me ask you three questions. Is what you want to say kind?”

“Er.” The student blushed. “Not really.”

“Is it true?” asked Socrates.

“Uh… I really don’t know if it’s true or not… it’s a rumor…”

“Is it necessary?” continued Socrates, lifting an eyebrow. “Given that it is neither kind nor even necessarily true, is it going to make the world a better place to tell me this rumor?”

The man hung his head in shame. “You’re right, Socrates. Never mind.”

This incident shows why Socrates was regarded as a wise and good man.

It’s also why he never found out that Plato was boinking his wife.

How I Structure Books

I’m strict about the structure of my books. I tend to write too much, so I limit my number of available chapters as a way to limit my word count. I cheat, at times, by sticking 7,000 words into a chapter that’s supposed to only be 5,000, but if I start to have a chapter with a 9,000 or 10,000 word count, I know something HAS to go. If I can’t cut the scenes there, I have to cut in a chapter before or after and shift scenes up or down.

That’s the bare bones of the book structure. Muscling over the bones, I also have a plot/character structure. In addition to the main plotline, which is Dindi’s, I give a different set of secondary characters their own plotline in each book. In Book 1, the secondary characters were the widow Brena, her love interest villain-hero Rthan, and her hypocondriac daughter, Gwenika.

In Book 2, the secondary characters are Kemla and Tamio, who are scheming together, à la Les Liaisons dangereuses, against Dindi, and Finnadro, who wields the Singing Bow.

Each book also has its own series of “flashbacks”; these aren’t really flashbacks, but a third major plotline told out of chronological order to the rest of the story. In Book 1, that plotline followed something that happened twenty years ago to a mysterious girl called the Corn Maiden, which Dindi discovers through ongoing Visions throughout the story. Of course, the events of the past turn out to be critical to her story as well.

In Book 2, a major villain is introduced, and he searches out Visions that will ultimately lead him to kidnap Dindi.

Draft of Book 2

I’ve been working on Dindi Book 2, operating on the idea this will be a Quartet.

First off, I dragged every scene I’d ever written into one file. That gave me about 80,000 words right there, but the order was haphazard, some whole chapters were duplicates, there were the wrong number of chapters overall — in short, a pretty mess.

Using my post-it note outline method, I culled through the draft chapter by chapter. I removed duplicate scenes. Each book in the Dindi series is to have three sections of seven chapters each, for a total of twenty-one scenes.

Altogether I have a minimum of fourteen new scenes to write. Since one of those is a newly beefed-up battle, and another an all new climax sequence for the book, it will probably be more like twenty to twenty-five new scenes. Not to mention every other scene in the book has to be re-written. I need only change a few details and polish the style in some cases, but many other chapters require substantial re-writes. I’ve left them in now as place holders, because the new versions will probably have a similar word count.

Altogether, I have to write about 30,000 words worth of new material, and re-vamp another 40,000, then go back and comb the tangles out of the whole thing.

Art vs Capitalism

In the comments of my last post, “You’re going to be eaten by hyenas,” my friend Ban remarked, “When someone rejects something you’ve created it’s in essence a rejection of one’s inner self. You are that book – you are those characters – they live in your head. When someone says they don’t like – they ARE in fact saying they don’t like a part of you – however small or big that part my be.”

Allow me to repsond.

No. They aren’t. It just feels as though they are. Which was my point.

Seriously, my fellow writers, think about it.

I sent out a query letter. It was 179 words. Hey, sure, I put a lot of thought into those 179 words. An amazing amount of thought. I did research on query letters, read other query letters, read agent blogs, even parted with cold, hard cash to learn to polish those 179 words. And yes, it sucked rocks that those 179 words were still not good enough to entice even a request for a partial. It means I have more work to do. Damn.

But do those 179 words in any way summarize the contents and value of my inner soul?

Uh, let’s hope not. It would be one sorry-ass inner soul that could be shoved into 179 words of what is, in essence, an advertisement. That’s all a query letter is really, a specific kind of ad.

We live in a global, industrial, capitalist society, where art is a commodity. You aren’t sharing your deepest self with another human being when you send you mss into an agent or an editor, you’re peddling a commodity to a middle-man, who has to sell it in turn to someone else. THIS FACT MAKES THE BRAINS OF ARTISTS IMPLODE.

It’s wrong. It’s evil. It’s a betrayal of everything art has meant to our species for the past ten thousand years.

I believe we did evolve the arts as part of our unique human way of sharing our inner sense of self. A species could have sociality without art. Termites manage it. (See my post on why ants don’t have art.) Termites don’t have selfhood, either, so although they have sociality — eusociality, in fact, which may arguably be superior– they don’t have community. To have a community, you need to have individuality first, because community is what binds individuals together. I don’t think you can be human without art.

If we evolved art to bind us into small, hunter-gather communities, then everything about how art works today in a capitalist society necessarily feels wrong. That’s why there’s a disconnect between the artist and the society in which we are now making art. Rejected query letters are just the start of an artist’s agony. What about the Beta readers who say they just don’t “connect” with your characters? What about the publishers who turn down your agent? What about the reviewers? Oh, god, the reviewers. A reviewer wrote, about the first book I ever published, that it made her LAUGH… not because it was that good but because it was that BAD. OH GOD PEOPLE ARE LAUGHING AT ME IN PUBLIC. Let me die now, please. Please?

Ahem. The point is, things just get worse after you are published, not better. Now you are being judged on the fruit of your soul, you feel naked in front of a million judges, and no matter how many people like your book, someone will hate it. That’s the law of large numbers.

There’s a good side to the law of large numbers. Now matter how quirky your story is, it’s possible there is an audience out there who can connect with your characters. If you were a hunter-gatherer in a tribe of a 150 people, you were pretty much stuck with whatever art forms everyone else had already agreed upon. If you didn’t like their art, or if they didn’t like yours…. see my post below about the care and feeding of hyenas.

Now even weirdo freaks such as yours truly have a shot at touching the hearts of like-minded freaks. Woohoo! Unfortunately, to find the community of brilliant souls who will at last appreciate my greatness, I have to risk repeated rejection from a lot of otherwise decent human beings who just aren’t that into me. The healthy thing would be to shrug off the people who say, “No, thanks, not my cuppa,” and just focus on the kindred souls. The healthy thing would be to view art as a business, not as an existential battle. The healthy thing would be to treat rejection as a part of the profession, and just move on without obsessing over it day and night, night and day, years on end.

And, by the way, Clueless Reviewer, of course you laughed, that scene was SUPPOSED to be funny!

You’re Going To Be Eaten By Hyenas

Over at BookEnds, LLC, a writer asked, “Does It Get Any Better?”

My dilemma is this; I seem to have lost the joy to write anything. When I was writing my novel, I was divinely engrossed in doing so. I was so eager to see what was going to happen myself that I stayed up till 4am almost every morning writing (even though I had to wake up with my 2 year old and go to work). I continuously did research on writing, querying, etc. I loved it. After I sent my queries, I was excited every time I saw the light flashing on my blackberry. Then with each passing rejection, it felt like someone was twisting a knife in my gut a little more each time. Now, I literally hate opening my e-mail. I still have several more responses I’m waiting on, and I’m dreading them. It’s like these rejections are pretty much a slap in the face.

The replies in the comment section overflowed, so I will post my own thoughts here. Many of the other writers offer good advice.

My own answer? The more rejections you accumulate, the easier it is to deal with.

Except when it’s not.

I wanted to dig deeper into this phenomena, though. Why does rejection of a personal creative work hurt so much? Logically, it really shouldn’t. It’s not like someone has taken a hacksaw, amputated your left leg and rubbed the stump in unsweetened lemonade. It’s not even like you just caught your boyfriend with his pants down in the bed of the bimbo next door. But try telling that to your brain when you see the words, “After careful evaluation, I have decided that I am not the right agent to represent your work.” Sticking your bloody stump leg in lemonade made by your cheating boyfriend is starting to look pretty good in comparison. And that’s friggin’ crazy.

I think it dates back to when we all lived in bands of hunter-gatherers on the plains of Africa. Back in those days, if you kept doing something meant to entertain and please the rest of your clan, and they replied again and again, “Get lost!” you would be in trouble. Because in those days, “get lost” meant you would literally get lost after the rest of the tribe kicked you out for repeatedly annoying them. If they rejected you, you would find yourself wandering all by your lonesome on the Serengeti. It would be only a matter of time before some Big Bad stalked you, chased you down, ripped your limbs off one by one and devoured you, perhaps while you were still alive.

So the horrible feeling where you want to crawl into a cave and hide, and perhaps throw rocks at strangers, is perfectly understandable. It’s just nature’s way of warning you social rejection means you’re going to be eaten by hyenas.

Trilogies, Quartets, Septets

I haven’t settled on how many books should be in the Dindi series yet. As I’ve said, the story arc is plotted, and much of it is written, but how much is “much”? Stories are fractal. I can always work in new complications.

When I broke the megabook into a series, for some reason, it would not work as a trilogy. I decided it had to be seven books, although I knew a septet would require quite a lot of additional writing. At that time, I was writing full time.

Now that my writing time is more constrained, I’ve considered this question again. I still can’t seem to work the story into a trilogy, unfortunately.

I wanted the number of books in the series to fit the “color magic” in the story. So the seven book series would have looked like this:

Book 1: Yellow
Book 2: Green
Book 3: Purple
Book 4: Blue
Book 5: Orange
Book 6: Red
Book 7: Black

I could, however, divide the series into only four books, highlighting the conflicts between colors:

Book 1: Yellow/Blue
Book 2: Green/Red
Book 3: Purple/Orange
Book 4: Black/White

One distinct advantage of the Quartet idea is that it means the series is automatically closer to completion. My hard limit on word count is 120,000 words (per book), but in theory I am aiming at a word count between 90,000 and 110,000. (You’ll notice I barely squeezed by on Book 1.) This means my drafts of the remaining books are substantial.

Book 1: 119,000 – Complete
Book 2: 86,000 – Needs new ending
Book 3: 68,000 – Needs new beginning
Book 4: 60,000 – Needs new middle

In the interest of completing the entire series this summer (ha), I think I might go ahead and work on the assumption this is how I’m going to go with it. I’ll drop some tangent plotlines, perhaps even a few characters I had planned on developing further. If I really feel so inspired that I can’t stop myself from writing their stories, that’s okay too. I don’t mind, in theory, going back to the seven book model. For now, though, I think this plan works.