Report to the Commissioner No. 29

Finished eight more chapters of the Fourth Draft.

Thirteen chapters into the Fourth Draft. Word Count: 11,298.

Using Time like Occam’s Razor to reorganize the plot has been a revelation. Changes the sequence and pacing. Remains to be seen how it will work overall, but so far it’s creating a clear sequence.

Daniel Mason said of his recent novel: “It had become this huge appendage that I was constantly trying to beat into shape.” I could relate.

Report to the Commissioner No. 28

“Things are as I think they are and say they are on the blue guitar.” (Wallace Stevens)

When there is rise and fall, Chao Wen plays the lute. (I Ching)

 

This week I finished Chapter 47 and then found a new kink in the timeline, went back to beat sheet and even post-its all over the desk top, found and fought chaos, and ended up re-doing the whole plot sequence and completing a third draft of 60,943 words.

Hope to find about another 10,000 words in the fourth draft.

Started over on Chapter One and things went well up to Chapter Four, where the wheels came off for the first time and I decided to start phoning it in for the sake of moving forward. Fixed that and completed five chapters.

Five chapters into the fourth draft. Word count: 5,953.

Five chapters in, I expect the ride ahead to be uneven at best, baffling at worst. I keep losing my grip on the plot, going back to the beat sheet. The constant challenge is to see the story unfold in real time simultaneously on the west coast and the east coast, from four different POV characters, with this fiendish technical plot, a main character with external and internal conflicts, a ticking time bomb, and a set of craft instructions two pages long. I like a challenge.

One thing that has helped is to put in the tick-tock, ask myself at the beginning of each scene, what time is it? Since the plot unfolds in time, this helps inform the sequence of things. The I Ching told me: “A flight of headless dragons. For the Holy Man, the meaning of time is that in it the stages of growth can unfold in a clear sequence.” Seems to nail my plot problems.

I note a tendency to jump ahead and give you the action in a flashback, and alternatively to have the characters plan ahead before I give you the action. I find this fracturing of the timeline distancing. It produces a lot of summarizing, and it doesn’t make things more interesting. I don’t know why I do it. Is it just a habit I need to break? Or could it be an effort to reflect reality, since we all live in the present moment with constant harmonics of past and future on either side of the moment? That would be elevating it to a literary device that doesn’t go far enough. Mainly, it just doesn’t work. I’ve decided to fight this tendency and try to stay in the now. Putting the time on both coasts at the beginning of each scene has helped for the first five chapters. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

And the band played on.

 

Report to the Commissioner No. 27

Accomplishments

Another week of staring into the hua t’ou. Finally able to get started on constructing Chapter 47. Started calling myself “doofus” in my editing notes throughout the third draft. And what a mess it is. Got through another iteration of the beat sheet, and I can only hope it unkinks some of the worst knots. Hard to believe I wrote my first book in five weeks.

How can I make things worse? This may be the magic key to unlock all plots. I see it at work constantly in all the various dramas I watch on TV to avoid confronting the conundrum that is The Achilles Factor.

Objective

Finish Chapter Forty-Seven.

Comment

Ha! Sad.

Word count: 40,391