Behind the Curtain

Before I was a sociologist--and maybe even before I was a writer--I was a theater kid.

I loved watching performances--music, dance, theater. I still do. But when I was about eight, I decided that I wanted to do more than watch performances. I wanted to be part of them.

Insert The Little Mermaid reference here.

 

So I took acting classes and did theater camps. I helped local community theaters on their work days, and I started following actors, composers, and playwrights. Where before I had only seen the finished product--the play unfolding on stage--I started to see all of the bits and pieces that go in to creating the spectacle in front of me.

 

It's hard to explain to someone who's never been back stage at a performance the (sometimes barely)  controlled chaos that's required to keep a show moving. It's a little like watching a duck swim from underneath. It slides smoothly across the surface, but below is a bunch of unattractive though necessary flailing. Now and then, though, there's the opportunity for people outside the theater community to get a glimpse at what it's like.

 

The Tony's are always great for this. Last year, especially.

 

 This opportunity to look behind the curtain has changed the way that I look at performances--which is a good thing and a bad one, depending on the day. I'm able to appreciate a well crafted illusion. I'm also more likely to notice when things go wrong or don't work. Someone who's not familiar with how a particular change is supposed to go won't notice if, for instance, a piece of costume is missing or a prop doesn't make it to where its supposed to be or if the people responsible for the effect don't know how to accomplish it properly.

 

I am occasionally (often) a pain to watch plays, television, and movies with precisely because I notice the little hiccups. The kind of stuff that folks generally are able to overlook. I'll be the one to point out that a change in the lighting was off or that someone wasn't where they were supposed to be. And comments like these are almost always met with the suggestion that I just ignore the flaws and try to enjoy whatever I'm watching.

 

But that's not easy. It's hard to ignore the strings once you've seen them.  

 

I've learned over the time I've spent trying to figure out how to be a better writer, that this applies just as much to my experience of reading as it did to my experience of performance. 

 

I don't just read things anymore. There's an ongoing critique that runs under everything that I read now. Most of it isn't a planned thing--I don't set out to read a book with the intention of picking it apart or trying to figure out the author's exact intent and the type of tools they had at their disposal (though sometimes I do, like when I read Kieron Gillen's writing notes for The Wicked + The Divine). But I inevitably end up doing the same thing I've done with performance for years.

 

And I tend to get the same response-- "Just try to enjoy it."

 

 

The thing is, I don't think being critical of the bits and pieces of a thing and enjoying that thing are mutually exclusive. I read the writer notes, which frequently point out flaws and lumps that I didn't notice on my read, for each issue of The Wicked + The Divine, and it's still my favorite comic series. I'm able to reread the Harry Potter books--which were pretty formative for me--and track the ways the writing changed and improved over the course of the series. It gives me a little thrill to realize at what point Rowling learned a new tool or what Gillen thinks he should have done differently with a character's dialogue.

 

It humanizes the people I look up to. It tells me that it's not going to hurt me or my work to acknowledge when I don't do things as well as I'd like or as well as I could. It suggests things that I need to think about in improving my own work. 

 

It makes me better.

 

So I'm going to continue to look behind the curtain, to try to see the work and the pieces that go into the things that I watch and read. 

 

My apologies to the people that wish I'd just sit back and enjoy.

 

 

 

 

Finished (sort of)

I finished the first draft of Project 2016 Thursday night.

It was a huge relief. This process for this one has been rocky—in no small part because my expectations frequently outstrip my talent—but there has been something incredibly satisfying about finishing a whole draft over the course of months rather than years.

Which is not to say that the project is done. The plan now is to let it sit a while, to let my writing group partner read through the draft, and then to dive back in to clean it up and smooth out the lumps.

Even so, the end of a first draft is a good point to look back on the work so far and figure out what worked and what didn’t. I’m not starting another novel-length project just yet, but Project 2016 certainly won’t be the last one I write. Reflecting on how this draft went might help me figure out what tricks to keep in my catalogue for next time.

So, what did I learn from draft one of Project 2016?

·         Daily writing makes it SO MUCH EASIER to remember where I was going with a particular plot thread.

Part of my struggle with previous work has been that I’ll leave it sitting for months on end and then run across something that I clearly meant to be the start of a subplot or a reference to something that I had planned to work in that I don’t remember. Looks like this character was supposed to be important—but hell if I know what they were supposed to do.

With daily writing, that didn’t happen. That’s not to say that everything flowed smoothly. There were still plenty of days that were more pouting at the computer screen than actually writing. The difference was that the pouting was more “what do I do next” than “what was I going for there.”

·         That said, setting a high daily wordcount goal is more hindrance than help.

I started out with a goal of 1000 words a day—not an outrageous goal, but hefty enough that I’d be making significant progress each day.

It took maybe three days before I started falling short of this goal. There were different reasons: I was traveling; I had to get things done for my real job; I had a four day long migraine and could barely see, let alone look at a computer screen.

None of these were me slacking off or being lazy—they were unavoidable interruptions that were largely out of my control (I mean, I guess I could have not gone to my best friend’s wedding, but there was no way I was gonna make that choice). And it’s not like I did no writing on those days—even on the worst days, I managed 250 words. But I felt terrible for missing my goal on those days. My disappointment in myself made the next day’s writing more of a struggle.

Next time, I’ll probably set lower daily word goals. Going over the wordcount goal doesn’t always make the next day’s work easier, but it does at least keep me from feeling like a failure before I even start.

·         When I’m struggling, sometimes writing things out on paper eases the way.

Getting stuck is part of my writing process no matter what I’m writing or how I’m going about writing it (just ask my spouse how much of the time I spent working on my thesis was me staring at my computer and swearing). Even though I was less likely to miss the connections or suggestions that I had set up each day, there were still moments where I couldn’t figure out how to go about moving things forward.

I got stuck right before I left for my friend’s wedding. On top of being stuck, I didn’t bring my computer with me on the trip. To keep up with my daily writing, I had to jot those days’ additions in my journal.

Something about that change in how I was working seemed to shake things free. Maybe having to alter the process got me to take apart scenes in a different way. Whatever the reason, the scenes where I got hung up seemed easier to write when I sat down with pen and paper.

·         I’m probably not ready to write a huge, multi-POV story.

Project 2016 is my first time experimenting with more than one point of view in a story. Two different characters tell the story alongside each other. Jumping back and forth between their perspectives was harder than I thought it would be—if for no other reason than that I had to constantly remind myself “no, this is the one who wouldn’t even blink at that” or “no this is the one that would start a fight.” I think I was (mostly) able to manage these two perspectives without getting them too confused, but I don’t think I’m ready to negotiate multiple points of view.

It’s difficult enough to keep up with two distinct voices. I want a little more practice before I try to wrap in multiple characters’ viewpoints.

·         Sometimes you just have to get it on the page.

In my head, I know that first drafts are always terrible—especially first drafts of something as big as a novel. The process is a little like herding cats, so something(s) is bound to get away from you or to come across as awkward or clumsy. First drafts are not meant to be the finished product. I know that.

But I still want my first draft to be perfect.

What held me back more than anything with this draft was trying to tinker with the things I’d already gotten down rather than forging ahead. I’d open the document and think, “You know, I’m just gonna go back and smooth out this bit of dialogue before I get to the new stuff” or “I should really plant the seed for this reveal a few chapters earlier.”

All of these are things that I’ll have to go back and adjust eventually, but the point of the first draft is to get the bare bones of the story on paper. At this point, I don’t even know that the bits of dialogue that I’m worried about will be in the next draft. Going back and trying to perfect all of the little bits and pieces right now is, really, a waste of time. I’d be better served by just getting the story out and going back and fixing it later.

I’ve put in a lot of work on Project 2016 at this point. The work’s not done by any stretch, but I’m pretty proud of hitting this milestone. I’m not sure where this project will end up going from here, but I’m pretty excited about the progress that I’ve made.

Process/Panic

I'm at the point in my writing where I can comfortably say that I'm good but still no where near as good as I think I ought to be (I imagine if you ask other writers that almost all of them will say there in a similar space). In trying to get my skills to where I want them to be--where I need them to be for the work that I'm trying to do--I've been taking a closer look at the process.

"Process" is one of those art words that has a vacillating meaning. What "the process" is can vary drastically from one artist to the next.

For me, the process is largely panic.

About a month ago, I finished the latest draft of what I hope will be my first novel. I got about 80,000 words done in roughly a month and a half. Pretty great, yeah?

Yeah, until you realize that doing that meant spending literally every waking moment that I wasn't at work sitting with the laptop frantically stitching words together.

I had made a deadline. My writing group friend and I had decided that we would both finish our current drafts by the end of May. A reasonable person would have set daily word goals--1,000 to 2,000 words a day would have finished the draft in plenty of time.

I didn't see the day-to-day. I saw a giant, looming deadline and twenty-plus chapters that needed extensive rewrites.

I panicked.

This is a pattern in my life that is by no means limited to my writing. And it's served me reasonably well: it's how I managed to get a teaching job at the end of June and have two courses prepped through October by mid-July and how I went from a proposal to a successfully completed and defended thesis in a month and a half of work.

The thing with panic is that, while it might help me get done what I need to get done, it does so at the cost of my equilibrium. After a certain point, a sort of writing delirium sets in. I've focused on one thing too long, and I can't shift my brain to anything else. I forget directions. I stare blankly at the microwave trying to remember how to get it to open (this one was particularly embarrassing--my microwave door just has a handle).

And this hyper-focus doesn't make my work any better. I pounded out draft after draft of my thesis, and got a long list of revisions for each one. The novel draft I finished last month is with my writing group friend, and I'm sure she'll have a set of things for me to double check or revise.

I get things done, but it doesn't actually save any steps. It doesn't necessarily speed things up.

I'm gearing up to dive into a new project. I don't have a hard deadline for it set--right now the goal is just to complete a draft by sometime next March. I want to try something different. I want to be more consistent. I want to take more time with my process.

In trying to "refine my process" (which sounds nothing at all like the sitting-in-my-pjs-and-munching-on-chips-while-I-scroll-through-blogs-and-listen-to-podcasts-while-occasionally-getting-distracted-by-twitter situation that it actually is), I've started looking at other writers' thought processes.

I'm of the opinion that there is no one correct "process"; that everyone sort of has to work out how to do this thing for themselves. But that doesn't mean that you can't Frankenstein what other people are doing and come up with something that suits.

I started with trying to get into the heads of writers whose work I love. A couple of them have made this super-easy. Kieron Gillen, writer for my current favorite comic book series, The Wicked + the Divine, posts issue-by-issue writer's notes in which he gives a glimpse into not just his part of the creation process, but also the work that his collaborators do for some of his works on his Tumblr. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the man behind the Pulitzer-winning musical Hamilton, published a book that uses anecdotes to guide the reader through the show's journey to Broadway and contains a libretto complete with Miranda's annotations that detail some of the thought behind the lyrical, musical, and story choices made for the show. Seeing the complicated decision-making (and dashes of panic) that go into some of my favorite works has made me regard my personal process with a little more warmth.

Feeling better about what I do is just part of the puzzle (though seeing some of my doubts echoed by creators that I respect does help ease my imposter syndrome worries a little). There's also the issue of learning the craft. If my experience grading papers has taught me anything, it's that everyone thinks that they can write without help, and pretty much everyone is wrong. I'm a reasonably competent writer, but there are things about the craft that I don't know because I lack a certain level of experience.

One of the things that's great about the communication technology that exists today is that people that have the same sets of questions and concerns can reach out, directly or indirectly, to the people that have the answers and vice versa. If I want to have a group of successful authors in my living room, telling me about strategies to aid a writer in my position, I can do that.

Podcasts, man. Podcasts are excellent.

There are a boatload of writing podcasts out there--way more than I've had the time to check out. Do a quick Google search of "writing podcasts" and you'll see a dozen lists of "Best Podcasts for Writers." One cast that's on most of these lists--the one that I've been binge listening to--is Writing Excuses, jointly hosted by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells. They look at everything from character creation, story structure, and setting to publishing, dealing with life as a public figure, and deadline pressure.

These resources haven't removed the panic from my process entirely. I don't imagine I'll ever write in a way that's totally panic-free. But they have changed how I'm approaching my new project. I find myself taking more time to lay out plans, spending more time in the world I'm making, getting to know my characters better. It's too soon to say if this process will be more effective, but it certainly feels better.

And, for now, that's victory enough.