Archives: Writing

The Perfect Pocket Writing Notebook, Part 1: Purpose

Writers write; they don’t just compose when it’s convenient for them, when the stars are in alignment, or when they happen to be sitting in front of their computers.  Snatches of dialogue, scenes, or entire outlines can be lost because the muses don’t wait to inspire you until you’re in just the right place with just the right tools.

I don’t mean to suggest that we’re powerless before the goddesses of inspiration, nor do I mean to belittle the ability to simply sit down and focus and make writing happen even when you’re having a slow day. Writers have to be able to make writing happen, not to wait for it to happen.

Rabbit Holes and Writing Notebooks

Most of us can be defined in part by our obsessions, those things we’ve spent immense amounts of our lives practicing or researching or observing or collecting. The older we get, the more interests we’ve accumulated, or practiced and discarded. Some obsessions we continue to explore, others go by the way side, and some linger on the back burner to be occasionally re-ignited, as my own interest in The Beatles was when  I finally read The Beatles Anthology this winter.

I really threw myself down that particular rabbit hole. I already knew a LOT about The Beatles, but when I climbed back out and wiped the dirt off I knew so much I was a little dismayed. And yet there are people who know EVEN MORE.

Take any given topic you love and the odds are that there’s someone out there who knows more about it, probably to a frightening degree. The Internet makes it very easy to search out and discover everything you want to know (probably beyond that) about any subject. And if you’re not careful, you might find you’ve fallen into someone else’s rabbit hole.

Return to The Desert of Souls

Every once in a while nice surprises float up from the ‘net. I just read an enthusiastic new review of The Desert of Souls from a mystery review site, and there’s discussion in the comments page wondering if there are to be more stories about Dabir and Asim.

Well… Sooner or later there probably will be. Certainly my wife would love me to write more, because she likes Dabir and Asim more than any other characters I’ve ever used, even the ones I’m writing about now. At the least, I’ll one day write a third novel and resolve what happens between Dabir and the love of his life, from whom he was separated at the end of the first book. Maybe I’ll launch it as a Kickstarter or something.

Sword & Sorcery Musings

It seems that all I do with my writing anymore these days is revise. Back when I was writing in my teens and twenties I used to just keep picking away at the first three or four chapters of a work and never advance. Recently it seems like I get the first three or four chapters working pretty well but then take too long getting to the good stuff. No more. Just as I prefer streamlined role-playing game systems I’ve decided to strip away any sense of the padding I hate and get to the good bits right up front.

On Conan and Writing

Following on a great post by Fletcher Vredenburgh about Karl Edward Wagner’s Bran Mak Morn novel (over at Black Gate), I decided to update my own post on Conan pastiche. I’ve read, or tried to read, a lot more imitation Conan since I wrote the document and thought it high time to update the thing.

My own writing proceeds apace. Onward and upward. It looks like final changes are finished on my next Pathfinder novel, coming this fall (through Tor!).

I’m not sure when For the Killing of Kings will be released through Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s, but it’s looking more and more like it will be this coming winter. First, though, I have to finish this revision. I’m shooting to have that draft complete by the end of April. On a long trip recently I started reworking the outline for the second book and am so excited with it I’m having to restrain myself from jumping into work on it right now.

Writing Updates

I’m still learning, and that’s good. It means I’m not dead.

Yes, my new outlining method has really helped speed my writing process along, but I’ve still ended up with sections I didn’t need after having fleshed them out from the outline phase. I have to update my list of writing mistakes.

I’ll be adding several things.

Parallel Stories

I first experimented with parallel story structure when I wrote Plague of Shadows for Paizo’s Pathfinder series. In that book, I’d occasionally flash back in time fifteen years for vignettes that slowly revealed background relationships illuminating why the characters acted toward each other the way they did in the present.

It wasn’t a NEW technique, for I’ve seen it done elsewhere, and you probably have as well (especially in Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard books). But it was new to me.

In my new series I’m attempting to use it in a far more complex manner, for approximately half of each book (thought not all in one chunk). Characters who are dead or missing in the present are point of view characters in the past, and they are searching for explanation of mysteries that we see characters in the present discovering (all while dealing with the aftermath of actions taken by both themselves and these other POV characters long ago).

Re-Learning Mistakes

So far I think I’m doing a great job with my New Year’s resolutions, but I’ve let one of my habits slip, which is to review my Writing Mistakes every day before I write. And you know the mistake I’ve found myself making over and over on this new one? NOT knowing what my characters want before I start writing the scene. Even if it says what they’re going to do in the outline, I have to be the director and tell those people what they want!

Prep time does not begin and end with the outline, Howard!

On the other hand, I finally have a good openings sentence to the book, so that’s pretty nice. A lot of times I don’t have the opening sentence until much later in my outline.

So, what do I have to do that involves writing this year?

Writing Well

I’m starting to think that writing is easy and that it’s writing well that’s the hard part.

My new outlining method has worked wonderfully for me all year. I remain excited by it. It is not, however, the complete solution to all my writing problems.

It ensures that all the bones are in place and that everything makes sense plot wise so that I don’t write dead-end scenes that end up having to be cut. But, because I start with a very rough framework, it can take longer than I might like to whip the prose itself into shape. On the plus side, it means that my writing process HAS gotten much faster. But it’s still not as fast as I would like. I can complete a rough draft in three months, but it might take another month or two to punch it into proper shape. Now that’s not a bad thing, certainly, especially when some of my first books took more than a year to write. But in an industry that doesn’t pay particularly well 4-5 months isn’t a useful tempo. I’m not sure what to do about that except keep fingers crossed that the next books sell even better so that 4-5 months profits me more.

Process wise, though, I keep coming back to some essential truths.

Catching Up

At some point in the near future I hope to post that I’ve finished the outline of my new book and then share some lessons I’ve learned from it. Right now, though, it’s still somewhere between halfway and two-thirds complete.

There are secrets and counterplots and manipulations going on within this one, and knowing when to reveal what and through whom is really the tricky thing. I ALWAYS appreciated Zelazny’s original Chronicles of Amber but as I try to replicate some of the feel of revealing layer upon layer of how the world works and who’s behind sinister plots I have more of an appreciation for what he himself pulled off. It’s not easy.