Eclectic Magpie

Found a note from John Truby that writer’s block comes from not understanding the true structure of the story.

It will be interesting to see if my complete restructuring of the story this week gets me going again. It was amazing to see how the elements of the story fit into my new constructed plot outline so well and how the new structure changed everything about the story.

Things I thought were important faded into the background. Anna Jane came into focus in such an organic way. I never could find her before, and I always had the feeling I was making her up. By changing her initial motivation to its opposite, the whole journey fell into place.  That is probably the single most important move I made, but sending Sam Fox to the cutting room floor has to be a close second. Radical moves. We’ll see.

Created an outline of a plot structure by combining Viki King’s Inner Movie Method of 9 key plot points with the five-act structure I learned from Shonda Rhimes.

Skimmed through my folder of writing notes on how to do it.

Made key bad-guy decisions: (1) eliminated a favorite bad-guy character, Sergeant Major Sam Fox; (2) simplified the motivations of the remaining bad guys — they just want one thing instead of being at cross-purposes; (3) gave the final twist to the Uzbeks.

Re-thought Anna Jane’s motivations and completely changed her journey.

Fit the pieces of the plot into my new structure and created a beat sheet with 70 beats that should see me through.

Objective:

Read through and tweak the beat sheet into fighting shape.

Write Chapter One.

 

The book has some strengths. A good set-up for suspense, an interesting cast of characters, a lot of research on the background.

Character motivations are not clear. There are structural problems at the conceptual level. It’s too complicated. The technical details are boring and overworked. I tried too hard to keep up a fast pace, and as a result everything seems rushed. It lacks emotion.

Anna Jane and Jason make sense. The problem is intriguing and good. The stakes are high. The timeline and the technical sequences are worked out pretty well. The science team seems real.

The problem is with the bad guys. Too many villains with too many conflicting agendas.

I need to re-think the entire bad-guy element of the story.

Read through the first 22 chapters of  The Achilles Factor and skimmed through the rest of the second draft. Concluded it doesn’t work.

Don’t feel ready to give up on it, decided to think about it for a week.

Objective: Rethink the plot using How to Write a Movie in 21 Days by Viki King.  See if that works.

Hua t’ou means word-head, that which precedes word. Before a word is said, it is a hua t’ou, the moment before a thought arises. The unending void. Turning of the light inwards, instant after instant,  exclusive of all other things, is called “looking into the hua t’ou.” The moment before a thought or mental word stirs in the mind, the precious vajra king sword. Word arises from Mind and Mind is the head of word. Before a thought arises, it is a hua t’ou. To look into a hua t’ou is to look into the Mind.

The hua t’ou sometimes is compared to the Greek logos, which sometimes is said to mean word, and other times seems to mean that which gives form and meaning to the cosmos.

In the beginning was the Word.

I believe Chapter Twenty-Three currently resides in the hua t’ou, and that is where I will find it.

Accomplishments

1. Opened the Achilles Factor Beats file for the first time since February 5; moved all the instructions and admonitions on how to write the next chapter to a new file, “How To.”
2. Reviewed the work so far and realized I’ve actually completed 21 chapters and I’m stuck on Chapter Twenty-Two.
3. Completed an inventory of work on Achilles Factor and found: (1) one main computer file with 21 chapters of the second draft; (2) one computer Beats file with the rest of the first draft; (3) 45 computer files with notes for components of the book; (4) 3 computer files with notes on a previous version; (5) 3 computer files with notes on another previous version; and (6) 43 hard copy files with notes on background research and critiques.
4. Re-read “Why Do Writers Abandon Novels?” by Dan Kois and laughed out loud.

Objectives

1. Sit down and read through the 21 chapters of the second draft.
2. Make a decision on whether to continue with Achilles Factor or find something else to work on.

 

I published my first two novels in 1974 and 1976, and then a series of unfortunate incidents tanked my budding career and I did other things. A decade went by, as the decades are wont to do. I never stopped working on novels and wanting to sell another book. In the spring of 1984, a friend suggested a way forward toward my goal to sell another book. Once a week, I was to sit down and write a report on what I had accomplished that week and what I had set as objectives for the next week. It wouldn’t be enough just to write the reports. I would have to actually mail them to her. Her job was to receive them. An essential part of the strategy.

I wrote Report to the Commissioner No. 1 on Sunday, May 20, 1984. I still have all the reports in a folder. They’re on that flimsy pink paper we used for carbon copies, since I mailed the originals to my friend. (Advice to new writers — always put the carbon paper in shiny side out. More than once I ended up with a carbon copy on the back of the page.) My accomplishments that first week included things like putting a new ribbon in the typewriter and completing an inventory of works in progress to identify the most market-ready product available.  I identified a complete manuscript for “Office Romance.” I set an objective to develop a marketing strategy for it and mail it to the first market on the list.

On October 8, 1984, in Report to the Commissioner No. 19, I reported that I heard from an agent who thought she could sell a mystery-romance I had sent her. I had to cut the book from 90,000 words to about 65,000 words, and she was coming to L.A. on October 21, so I needed to get the cuts to her by October 12 so she could read it before we met. The meeting was fun. In Report to the Commissioner No. 28 on December 9, 1984, I reported that Avon had bought the book.

I kept up the Reports to the Commissioner. At one point my typewriter broke, so some of them are written by hand. The last one, Report to the Commissioner No. 61, was dated September 9, 1985. My last objective was: “Make a decision about whether to keep writing or get a second part-time job.”

I did keep writing and sold two more books, but then it crashed again. I never stopped working on novels and wanting to sell another book. A couple of years ago I weeded out piles and piles and piles of unsold manuscripts. (“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.” — Anonymous) I pulled out The Achilles Factor and I’ve been working on it ever since. I completed a first draft and got about twenty chapters into the second draft, and then a series of unfortunate incidents took away my will to work on it, and my forward progress came to a screeching halt on February 5.

Now it’s March 17 (thank you, St. Patrick). I’m going to start up the Reports to the Commissioner again. It worked like magic once before. Tomorrow will be the start of a new series, and you, my dear, dear imaginary reader, will be the Commissioner this time. See you tomorrow.

A recent episode revolved around a murdered novelist. She had just resolved a five-year writer’s block when a fan bashed her head in with her own vintage typewriter.  I could relate.

Put me in mind of my own first typewriter, a beautiful white portable Olympia in a silver clamshell case. I worked as a gasket-picker the whole summer I was sixteen to get the money to buy it. A guy stood at a drill press and punched gaskets out of big sheets of fibrous material and threw them to the floor where I sat cross-legged on the concrete. My job was to punch out the gaskets, punch out all the little holes in the gaskets, pile up the gaskets into bunches, put rubber bands around the bunches, and throw them into a bin. My first job. My first typewriter. My origin story.

 

 

 

Mercedes R. Lackey says there’s no such thing as writer’s block. It’s just your subconscious telling you that what you’re about to write is old, stale, and boring, or else you’re about to force your characters to do something that doesn’t make sense. Well, okay, Mercedes is a #1 NY Times bestseller, has published 131 books, and is beloved by legions of mesmerized fans. She is a supernatural phenomenon, or else she’s made a deal with a Crossroads Demon. I am not, and haven’t, and don’t have, and can’t find one, although I do plan to plant yarrow in my yard come real spring in New Mexico. Until then, I can confirm she hit the nail on the head except for the fact that there’s nothing subconscious about it.

I know Chapter Twenty is boring and stupid. That’s the problem. I even know why. It suffers from info dump. It lies there inert on the page. It reads like a term paper. I need a cure for info dump. Okay, what is it?

I like Helen Mirren’s advice to find my secret message inside the story. My secret story within the story. Hope springs eternal. I believe this is going to work out.

“Now to see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang, the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified.  The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him in these conditions the greatest the case permits of.” — Henry James

Been reading the Prefaces of  Henry James and finding deep inspiration in his struggles with locating the commanding centers of his novels, stubbornly refusing to locate themselves in the middle, sometimes showing up around the knees:

“. . . again and again, perversely, incurably, the centre of my structure would insist on placing itself not, so to speak, in the middle . . . the terminational terror was none the less certain to break in and my work threaten to masquerade for me as an active figure condemned to the disgrace of legs too short, ever so much too short, for its body. I urge myself to the candid confession that in very few of my productions to my eye, has the organic centre succeeded in getting into proper position. . . . The first half of a fiction insists ever on figuring to me as the stage or theatre for the second half, and I have in general given so much space to making the theatre propitious that my halves have too often proved strangely unequal.”

I am both charmed and encouraged by this. Returning again and again to the conundrum of Chapter Twenty, I believe the universe has dropped these clues in my lap. Up the ante on the danger Anna Jane must brave. Make it a deeper danger. And I love the idea of the first half as the stage for the second half. Get her up a tree, throw rocks at her, get her down again, dead or alive.

Now, if only I could locate the commanding center in the Jamesian sense of it. All I can say on my own behalf is that I am not giving up. Should have called this post the terminational terror.