Nick Bryan

Writing About Writing

Novel Editing – Snake eats itself, then spits self back out and says “Yick!” (WriteBlog #19)

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I started these WriteBlogs back in October, mostly as a way of creating imagined mass peer-pressure and encouraging me to finish my damn novel edits. Since then, they’ve gone through a range of topics, including thoughts on comics writing and moaning about my near-misses with writer’s block.

Well, this week we came full circle, as I got back into the novel edits hard, and ended up working on the very chapters I was blogging about when I first started the whole cycle. And then… well, I deleted a lot of them. This writing shit is brutal.

To be fair, a lot of this mass word genocide was in line with what I said I’d do – my new Chapter 12 is my previous Chapter 10, and as a result, a huge amount of it needed to be deleted to get it to fit its new place in sequence. I just hadn’t quite anticipated how much purging there would need to be – all of the twelfth chapter is more or less gone.

I managed to bring forward a couple of scenes from Chapter 15 (the rest of which no longer exists) to ease my burden, but the rest I wrote from scratch. And yes, this does make Chapters 13-14 a little awkward.

It’s not all grim news though – the new Chapter 10 I wrote during that last round of shuffling was excellent. Liked that a lot. Also, one particular scene in Chapter 11 might be one of my favourite things I’ve ever written in terms of comedy. I laughed until people in the cafe glared.

Yes, laughing at your own jokes is a bit lame, but they were lines I wrote five or six months ago, so basically completely new.Anyway, the point being: the editing is back on, and it’s proving brutal (more than I expected), but it is happening, which is good. I’ve had serious trouble identifying and making big changes in the past, so it’s a massive relief to see it start coming naturally.

Ow My Face

After writing from about 10AM-6PM for two days running (with a break for lunch), I was feeling pretty smug about my achievements, but also mentally dead inside. I spent the whole of Tuesday night playing this Doctor Who 2048 game – not only is it a complete waste of time, I didn’t even get beyond the Ninth Doctor.(I just played another twenty minutes after opening it up to paste the link in here, and only got to the Eighth Doctor. Dear God, I’m receding.)

Then on Wednesday, I went to writing group and lost the will to think fairly early on. Too much caffeine, then some alcohol, then a trance. There’s some adage about candles burning at both ends or snakes eating their own tail here, isn’t there?

Still: on Thursday night, I write this blog post which is clearly amazing, so there’s still hope.

Truth be told, part of me is tempted to say Fuck it! and continue just because I’m getting so much work done, but that would probably be stupid. Eventually the candle flames out or the snake finds itself eating its own teeth, and then you’re screwed.

Plus: it is my thirtieth birthday next Tuesday, and real-life people may expect me not to spend it ignoring them and typing. But I imagine you’ll hear about that on here/Twitter in the next few days, so I’ll spare you for now.

Bursting The Pipes – Man Writes Story (WriteBlog #18)

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Two weeks ago, I spent the best part of seven days bashing my head against the same short story brief, before concluding that I simply didn’t have the right idea. So, last week, I went off to write other things, only to be distracted by the plumbing in our house going wrong.

This week, at last, I got my shit together. A nice man came over and rearranged our pipework (only sounds dirty) so we can have both hot water and heating at the same time. Meanwhile, I went to multiple cafes, battered the keys of my poor netbook within an inch of their lives and seem to have produced, at long last… stuff.

Splash Bang Wallop

I’d love to take sole credit for my recent breakthrough on the stuck short story, but the kick was actually provided by Alastair JR Ball, good friend and fellow writing chap. Once he made a handy suggestion about setting, the rest of it dropped into place like Tetris blocks.

And so I took myself to various cafes for the best part of 1.5 days, drank enough tea to keep five regular English people going and hammered out the first six thousand words of the probably-about-eight-thousand-word piece. If you’re curious exactly what it is, there are more hinty-details on tomorrow’s Hobson & Choi Podcast.

Suffice to say, you’ll hopefully get the chance to read it in the near future, but it is pretty cool. And funny. And sweary. And maybe at times a bit harsh, but aren’t all the good things? Just me?

Hemingway, Man

One last point, as just talking about myself typing isn’t amazing blog-fodder: I’ve been using the web-app Hemingway to edit some of my old work, during breaks from tapping out the new story. It suggests various ways to smooth out and improve text phrasing, attempts to spotlight long sentences and adverbs, etc.

Now, it isn’t flawless and I’m by no means advocating blindly implementing every change it suggests. Sometimes long sentences are long for a reason, and it also has a fun habit of marking any word ending in -ly as an adverb for destruction.

Still, Hemingway proves a useful broad tool for finding spaces where I can use a stronger, less rambling phrasing, so I’m recommending it anyway. Worth a look.

And now, I’ve got another few bits of work to run through that site, and then the remainder of this story to tap out. Fare ye well.

Not Drowning But Typing (WriteBlog #17)

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Last week, I discussed how my writing wasn’t entirely flowing, words refusing to come out no matter how long I stared at the page. In a typical ironic-sadistic finger-of-fate fashion, this week I had a much easier time getting the material down when I was at the keyboard, but… was frustratingly not finding much opportunity.

No sooner had I lined up a few clear days of work, the pipework in our house experienced severe explosive turbulence, all over our bathroom floor, leaving me waiting in for a lot of plumbers. Don’t worry, this won’t be a whole blog about plumbing. I’ve spent so much time lately failing to get our house watertight again, most of my available computer time has gone to working on my writing, rather than blog posts about it.

Nonetheless, it’s been a good week for the art, so I wanted to get a post done in the name of confidence-building self-affirmation. Here is some stuff that’s happened, in quick-and-dirty bullet point form.

  • Had an agent one-to-one with Bryony Woods of DKW Literary Agency as part of an event at the Big Green Bookshop – didn’t get taken on right there and then, but very positive stuff said about my writing, and from someone who does this stuff for a living too. A lot of others from my writing group took part, and the air of support and positivity around the event was genuinely inspiring stuff. Hooray.
  • Also, got comments back on the second of my two GreyHaven Comics scripts from the editor, and feedback so positive that I don’t even need to do a second draft. Sweet. If you fancy submitting to them yourself, by the way, they’re accepting more story pitches on a range of themes for another two weeks.
  • As I already said elsewhere, Hobson & Choi was second in the Jukepop charts for February, which is pretty damn good. Even if it does make it harder and harder to keep topping ourselves.
  • Returned to editing the novel, did a whole chapter, felt great to be back on it. Happy times.

It’s not all sunshine – for example, the project I mentioned being stuck on last week… yeah, still no ideas and do need to get it done in next couple of months. But all this upbeat stuff made it much easier to cope with the puddle spreading across the bathroom and ruining my socks whenever I went to pee.

Hammer & Claw – Adventures resembling Writer’s Block (WriteBlog #16)

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I believe these WriteBlogs were meant to be weekly, but obviously that hasn’t happened. Upsetting, because it means I hit that old blog cliche – a post opening with an apology for not blogging recently.

Shame I picked this time to drop off the WriteBlog schedule, as I was chuffed with the last one about comic scripting – nice balance between self-indulgent me-talk and links to worthwhile resources. Anyway, let’s move on. What’s been going down? Well, there was the Hobson & Choi birthday…

Double Trouble

As I’m sure you all know, due to being avid H&C fans, I did two chapters of the serial last week to mark our first birthday on the 17th of February. This was a very apt idea, but the execution of it utterly killed me. I really thought it wouldn’t be too hard – writing a chapter usually only takes a day or so, I had the necessary extra day spare – but then two things hit me:

ONE – real-life interruptions happened – occasions to be planned, other work to be done, pints of beer that wouldn’t drink themselves, that sort of thing. Frustrating, but survivable if not for…

TWO – I got stuck on the first of these chapters. H&C #54 just killed me, the bastard. I have an entire draft worth of material that I threw away. And even worse, it isn’t even material I can use later – all scrap. I’d “budgeted” two days to write both chapters, and ended up taking most of three days on just the first one.

Mustn’t get too doomy, I made it – thanks to the paranoid amount of padding I add into my schedule, I was able to have those problems but still get the chapters up. And then I tried to move onto another project and ran into a dead stop of uninspiration. Basically, my entire writing productivity for most of February is the previously-mentioned short comic script and meeting my self-imposed H&C deadlines. This, by my usual standards for a non-Christmas month, isn’t amazing. So, could this mean…

WRITER’S BLOCK – THE SCOURGE OF THE MIND

Hmm.

I’ve never got as far as saying Writer’s Block Doesn’t Exist, but I’ve never accepted that it’s a condition all on its own. Yes, there are times in life when I’ve struggled to write due to external circumstances or the story just not working – or, as per ONE and TWO above, both of them at once when really damn lucky. Might as well call that writer’s block, it certainly blocks your writing.

So, not much to do beyond try to work around it – throwing my hands up and acting as if I’m cursed would just annoy me. Case in point – today, I fucked off the project I was stuck on (after emailing a couple of friends for help) and went to do something else. Not really a long-term solution, gotta go back to it eventually, but I got a decent amount done at a good speed today for once, and feel much better as a result. One reason why I’m back here doing this, I suspect.

Admittedly, I was going to write more tonight, but got distracted screwing around on Twitter. A major street in south-west London was flooded with sewage, you see, and there’s no way you can’t want to make puerile jokes about that burst of turd. It’s funny because it’s poo, after all. (Kudos to whoever on Twitter coined the term poonami.)

So I churned out a few quips, one of them got a few retweets and again, I feel better. And when I’m feeling beaten down and anxious about the state of things, I’ll take any good cheer I can get. Even if it is slightly embarrassing that my most “viral” Twitter effort in a few months is a joke about shite and undigested sweetcorn…

Comic Scripting – Useful links, tools and thought balloons (WriteBlog #15)

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First and foremost, before I get into this week’s actual topic: the Seventh Star Press anthologies containing my two new stories are available for e-readers now! Click this link here to see purchase links from various online places. Not to influence your decision, but they’re good fun. The Unseelie Court piece, in particular, is one of my favourite short works.

But that isn’t what I’m here to blog about. After a short break to get the novel editing underway, I returned to comic scripting in the last few days, as I still owe a script to GreyHaven Comics. My last effort was chronicled here, and that got through editorial with only minor changes, so how’d it go this time?

Let’s Research Comics!

In a bid to get more under the skin of this process, I’ve read a lot of comics lately, plus listened to a few episodes of Word Balloon and Let’s Talk Comics – in-depth interview podcasts with comic creators. (If you want a recommendation, episode #6 of Let’s Talk Comics with Brian Michael Bendis was both fun and inspirational, although quite long.)

Also, for anyone looking to read about comic-stuff, a lot of creators are very active on Tumblr, answering questions, posting thoughts and suchlike. If you’re starting an account and following people, some of the better ones I’ve found for writing process talk are:

For some of those, it probably helps if you’re familiar with their actual works to get the most out of it. Kieron Gillen’s podcast Decompressed also has a lot of interesting comics-thoughts from various creators. Also, I was at the recording of the Brubaker-Phillips episode and I’m sure I heard myself chuckle at least a couple of times. So yes, those were my methods of inspiration.

Good job I was feeling upbeat, as I’d set myself a difficult task in terms of actual scripting – the narrative ran along two parallel tracks, connected by a slideshow, with only four pages to fit it all. I hope you get to read it one day, it’ll be cool if I pull it off. Or if I’ve made a total mess of everything, hopefully you never see it and I’ll throw all the copies down a well.

After all the materials I’ve looked at, I think I’ve hit a scripting tone I’m happy with, in terms of describing what has to be conveyed without being too commanding about how exactly the artist should do their job – although we won’t find out how well I did until all’s said and done. But as I say, the editor seemed happy with my last one. This latest script should go off for editorial perusal in the next week or so, after I’ve had time to do another read-through.

Don’wanna leave Scrivener…

In terms of tools, I wrote the last script in Word, and although that went fine, I wanted something that looked cleaner and more readable – in short, more like the comic scripts I’d seen in books. Not to mention: after doing all my substantial writing in Scrivener for ages, going back to Word felt downright odd.

Luckily I stumbled across the comic script template for Scrivener by Antony Johnston – it actually comes included with the Scrivener software, but Johnston’s article linked just then provides useful guidelines about how to use it. So now I can produce scripty-looking scripts and never leave Scrivener again. A dream fulfilled!

I picked a good time to make that change, as I think the more spaced-out scripting format might make the complex structure of this story come through better. I ended up including a brief note to the artist at the end to make sure all was clear, but at least I didn’t need to supply a diagram. Which, at times, I really thought I might.

So, first draft now done. It was a long job, and a lot might be changed or refined once I read it through in one clear sitting, as it was very bitty and might not yet flow well. Still, as with most writing, especially shorter pieces of work, having a draft to play with is half the battle. One more long afternoon of revisions and I think we’ll be there. Cool.

And if anyone else has any comics-process inspiration sources I should look at before tackling scripts again, do let me know in the comments. Enjoying this stuff a lot.

Man Vs Synopsis (WriteBlog #14)

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In the near future, I am going to an event where I will be presenting a synopsis and a short sample of my novel to Important People. This, logically, means I will need to write a synopsis, which is what I’ve been doing for the last week. I have now completed a version I can read without wincing, so it’s time for the inevitable blog-hashing of what I feel I’ve learnt from this.

And for anyone who is actually worried, my synopsis itself does not feature in this post, so there will not be any spoilers for my half-edited unpublished novel about Satan. Furthermore, if you have a scary dream which you think would serve as a good ending, absolutely post details in the comments – there is still time for me to use it. Thanks.

A synopsis, for anyone who hasn’t run painfully into them, is a description of a novel from start to finish, trying to convey the beginning, middle and end of the story and make it sound amazing and be concise. Yes, it’s difficult.

It should not be confused with a “blurb” – that’s the text on the back of published books trying to persuade you to buy them. Blurbs (ideally) do not give away the ending. The aim with a synopsis is not yet to persuade a reader to buy my book, but to convince an agent/editor/publisher I know what I’m doing in terms of constructing a whole story.

So, that’s what they are and I’ve now written mine. Here, in no order, are the thoughts I had whilst doing so.

“…but seriously, it’s way better in the book!”

With a limited amount of space (many synopses only get a page to wow the reader), it’s pressuring to fit in a full, meaningful explanation of the depth and scope of your story. Even if your prose is beautifully written, trying to cram everything into a synopsis often leads to a childish odyssey of “…and then… and then… and then…”.

And this, sadly, can be especially true in sci-fi/fantasy, my chosen genre, where the need to explain how your “universe” works might crowd out the character stuff which is just as much (if not more) of a selling point than the amazing new type of orc/alien/boy wizard/vampire/detective you’ve made up.

Which led me to hours of thinking on how much exposition was necessary and trying to make myself keep a reasonable percentage of the character-important rambling, even though it was tempting to see that as filler and keep the worldbuilding. To be honest, a lot of the refining here will come when I show repeated versions to beta readers and ask them whether they understand it.

“…and then, in a brief subplot, Bob has colonic irrigation, and then…”

For those of us who write novels containing a wide range of characters and events, you gotta find yourself asking – how much of this must I cram into my one-pager? Does every subplot need at least a brief mention? Can I drop a few? If I can coherently describe the plot without mentioning Bob’s bum-washing storyline, is it possible it doesn’t really need to be there?

Yes, I had these thoughts. But if you think that’s bad, imagine the one-page synopsis of the longer George R.R. Martin novels, they must be nothing but brief words for a few main characters. Or perhaps they’re in 1-point font size, that wouldn’t entirely surprise me either.

Point being – yes, if you can effectively summarise your book without mentioning a subplot, it’s probably worth having the “Do we really need this?” chat with yourself, but don’t necessarily assume it means instant death. Like all good blog posts, I’m proposing we have a rule, but sensibly so.

“So the printer can print how close to the edge of the page, exactly?”

If nothing else, you can fit more words on the page by widening the margins. I wouldn’t usually propose such cheap tricks, but let’s be honest, this is summarising a single novel in one sheet, every pixel counts.

And that, folks, is everything that came to mind whilst writing my synopsis. If nothing else, it gave me an interesting high aerial view of my story and did lead me to solve a few problems along the way, so was a worthwhile exercise. Now, back to the actual editing.