For those who have followed me for a while, yes, I’m still on the low energy phase with the WIP. And as the title indicates, this is a post where I will talk about my strategies for carrying on.
But before I delve into my own specifics, I think the most useful thing for managing this (or procrastination which is not quite the same thing) that I had ever come across personally was what one of the UBC novel writing courses instructor Annabel said, “How you deal with this is either be kind or be strict to yourself.” That might not be everyone’s cup of tea but I’m a practical person and that’s exactly how I see it in a broad sense.
Moving onto my specifics, I had two issues: the first was that I tend to have the most clear idea of the scenes at the start of the book compared to later sections. I might have talked about this before but the difference is as big as I can convert a certain number of scenes straight from outline into scenes by just expressing my outline as prose in one swoop whereas it feels like there is an entire black hole between the outline and the write up of the scene. And basically I’ve moved on from the easy scenes, all the scenes that I have yet to write for the WIP are black holes. The second is monetary or security inspired and driven by the recurring argument that Mum and I have over the large block of my time not used towards making money (my main job is a casual research assistant, I used to be working at least part time but then in light of current economic conditions post-COVID, my job has become almost on-demand now). For at least 3 or 4 years now, I have been resisting the idea of looking for another career to supplement my income (I was warned against competition ambitions in the course of novel writing during the online novel writing course and I have been eyeing another income supplement warily ever since). But I’m starting to think about getting educated to become a certified translator/interpreter. My initial idea was to become an editor but then I’m not sure how much job I would get as a native Chinese speaking freelance editor and I’m definitely trying to breach into this second source of income as a freelancer (I like my boss and she likes me and I know she’s trying really hard to keep me as her RA and plus I tend to like the job okay).
Now I actually have written a prior post on some of the mechanic or structural ways to break into a scene. But I think the predominant approach I have been using is to just keep on going without measuring myself if I need to. And I have definitely fallen back in pace, from 200 or 300 words per day 6 days a week to basically 100 words per day 5 times a week. What I tell myself is that it’s not the speed that is important but the quality. So it doesn’t matter in the long haul.
Lately, one approach I’ve been using with scene writing specifically is to take it to the point of creative exhaustion. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s basically the point where I’m just done with the scene and can’t work on it anymore or where the thought “You’ve been mired in this scene for x days now, how about moving on?” just arises by itself.
That’s it for today. Let me know if you want to discuss specific parts of this post further.
Day 3, we made our way to Termini from Ottaviano for our journey to Florence and gosh it was dangerous to go on escalators with two checked in luggages plus one hand carry (we did not know that we had to have the luggage besides us on the same step, we were both putting the big luggages in front of us so it was always falling down in front of us at the threshold between escalator and landing). Also, when Mum got off the metro at Termini, the big luggage tripped her up or something so she ended up with a full leg stuck in the gap between the metro train and the platform. Luckily, the male passenger who got off before her saw that and pulled her straight up else she would have a forceful amputation of the leg! Thank you so much for the fast reaction and also thanks goes to the kind man who carried down the big luggages for us at one escalator/set of stairs at Termini. After that misadventure, I had a croissant for breakfast and Mum had nothing. As per usual, we arrived early and which platform our train arrived at appeared on the dot on the big departure screen 20 minutes earlier. I thought all the gates to platforms would open so moved leisurely down to the corresponding gate. Except that it never opened and our train had already left by the time I realised that. At the Italo ticket booth, I was forced to upgrade from Smart to Prime Business and forked out 70 Euro for 2 tickets from Rome to Florence. And how I rushed to the second train, not wanting to fork out another 70 Euro for a third one! I literally rushed from cabin 11 to cabin 3 along the platform and the attempt to port one checked in luggage up 3 steps was also an absolute killer. I didn’t even know how I managed and how Mum managed but we did! But Rome is definitely on my blacklist purely because I never wanted to experience the hassle of train travel from Termini ever again!
All the mishaps aside, we arrived safely at our Florence hotel at around 12pm and luckily, our room was already ready! We spent the rest of the day exploring Florence but only managed to find the Duomo, Baptistery of St. John and the Uffizi Gallery (we did walk past the cathedral near Santa Maria Novella but skipped it because it was just an old grey dilapidated building). To be honest, I followed a pointer to Ponte Vecchio but only managed to find the Uffizi Gallery. We had lunch at a place called Ristorante Bar at a square where Mum had tiramisu (which turned out to be in liquid form rather than cake form as we expected) and ice-cream (she did not feel like eating) and I forgot what I had, some light food. Then we had gelato at Vecchio Cioccolato e Gelato and there was a French young couple who lined up behind us who very kindly pointed us back towards the Duomo because we were thoroughly lost by then! In fact, the guy actually confirmed the route in Google maps by walking around himself. I think we were still muddled with the instructions after a while (we always do, after a while, it’s always did the person say left or right?) but we miraculously made it back. Dinner was at Pantarei Osteria Pizza & Grill which I had reserved. Mum had the squid ink noodles with shrimp and candied lemon peel which she was curious about and I probably had some salmon dish- fish was my go-to dish for Western cuisine. The noodles were okay but Mum said she was so-so about it too just like the carbonara.
Day 4 was supposed to be split between Pisa and Siena. Not much to be said about the trip to Pisa where we basically took pictures of the Leaning Tower and the building next to it and then caught our 11:30am train back to Florence. And here, a small hitch-up occurred: we were dropped at Firenze Ri-something, the outlying train station of Florence rather than back at Santa Maria Novella. We had lunch at a taglia pizza place (the pizza was pre-cut into rectangles and did not taste great because it was stored inside the counter for god knows how long already) before we bought a ticket back to Santa Maria Novella. That put us back at Florence at around 2pm rather than 12pm. And then when we were trying to find the bus to Siena, we ended up giving up because the bus company’s website always has bus routes where redundant stops are added (with the correct bus lines added in brackets underneath?!). Long story short, we ended up riding along the tram for the whole afternoon looking for bus stops for two separate bus lines (I had the thought of going to Piazza Michelangelo on the line 13 bus instead of Siena). I had booked dinner at Siena but obviously I had to cancel so we rode the tram to Santa Maria Novella (it had become our second homebase in Florence besides our hotel) for greater choice of dinner options. We ended up choosing a Chinese restaurant (I could see Mum was already a bit sick and tired of Italian cuisine)- not sure what its Italian name was but in Chinese its name meant the Big Capital Restaurant. We ordered two dishes- crabs and prawns, but the bill only came up to about 50 Euro. In general, I was underhitting the budget for lunch and dinner in Italy compared to my New Zealand trip. In fact, this became the theme for this entire trip except for Switzerland. But more on this later.
Day 5 was our big trip to Cinque Terre from Florence (it was 2.5 hours one way between Florence and La Spezia and then about half an hour between La Spezia and the last village of Cinque Terre, Monterosso al Mare). Now, Mum originally wanted to do it in reverse order, thinking that the majority of visitors would do the 5 fishing villages in chronological order, from the first one onwards. But I pointed out most of the hikers would start with the last village and visit them in reverse (something I found through Google search on Cinque Terre trips). So I came up with my own order which was 4, 5, then 1 and then maybe 3 if we had extra time. And doing it in that order (4,5,1) did help us to avoid the big crowds. To be honest, the fourth village was a bit too shabby for our taste and when seeing one of the pictures of a door taken there, Mum actually commented that we took a picture of a rubbish bin. Now, Monterosso al Mare, the biggest village, was a much different picture. It had a completely new look to it. We had a cheese and ham sandwich/focaccia (it was basically a sandwich with crunchy/deep fried bread) each for lunch. Then we hopped the train back to village 1 (Riomaggiore) where the road into the village was so steep that I was forced to find a different way back (we usually backtrack since I’m direction blind but am forced to be the guide due to language barriers) where the way down would not be as steep. After the 3 villages, we decided to call it a day in order to not miss our train from La Spezia back to Florence. And lucky we were not greedy because the train from village 1 back to La Spezia was delayed. For dinner I again reserved but we had no success finding the restaurant I booked because we were befuddled by a street where the numbers jumped around (at first it was going ever higher and then it jumped around to a small number!). So we went back to Santa Maria Novella and tried to find the Chinese restaurant where we had dinner yesterday. But what do you know that we could not even find the street with lots of restaurants and ended up having dinner at Burger King. And that concluded our 3 days in Florence.
To be honest, this book doesn’t really grab my attention. I started tuning out after chapter 7 or 8 and I finally decided to abandon it after chapter 16. There is nothing really wrong with the author or the narrator per se but it is just not my cup of tea. The plot is essentially too romance-centric and lacking in the type of excitement that I need to sustain interest and the bit of Scottish meta is not absorbing enough for me to really enjoy. So no point for me to just breeze through without really paying attention to it.
One Hundred years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marqez (audiobook)
Again, I did not finish this audiobook because the long Spanish names are getting too confusing and I am mostly tuning out of this story, being absorbed in online jigsaw puzzles that I do concurrently to listening (else I will literally fall asleep). I think when I chose this book it was marketed as magic realism but in practice this just read to me as if it’s a Spanish family historical saga (the magic realism was at the earlier chapters but did not actually feature largely in the story, at least not in 7 chapters)
The character based approach to story is basically the idea that the character is your story so all you have to do is basically really really inhabit your main character and you are done (if you are writing third person limited or first person. Arguably, it’s useful in omniscient too but there you have to inhabit the however many POVs that you switch between and a switch in POV is not a switch in camera angle [quote from one of my UBC instructors] but an entire lens to process the events in the story). A simple and powerful idea.
So what’s my take on this? Well, when I first came across this idea in full, it was through Robert McKee’s Story, specifically chapter 7 which he titled the Substance of Story and I bought the idea right off the bat. But in practice, it works quite differently for me. Firstly, I always conceptualise a story through events and each scene for me pivots around what happens rather than how a particular character experiences the events. Secondly, because I outline in omniscient (or at least a kind of birds’ eye view because it is really hard to say that I outline in a particular voice given that my outline is basically a jumble of notes to self and whatever I know about a particular scene) that means that I have to get into character for a third person limited narration that is my norm for writing. And I have to admit I am not quite adept at this and I can’t say that I am really in character for most of the scenes I have drafted. I am not sure that I can claim a particular scene that I am really ‘in character’ all the way through, snippets certainly but never a full scene. Instead, what I was able to import from McKee was his conceptualisation of beats as a coupled action/reaction between characters (I might have mentioned it before but I never really got what a beat was when I first learnt it through the UBC novel writing course until I read McKee) and his framework of how a story can be conceptualised as a continuous cycle of where the protagonist is trying to bridge the gap between his/her expectations from their actions and results as experienced by them. In fact, both frameworks are occasionally used by me to try to break into a particular scene (I wrote about that topic before).
So in light of all this, despite my initial enthusiasm for the idea, I have come to embrace the idea instead that there are different approaches into story and it is not necessary to always enter it through character in the first draft. The idea is that the story will eventually come to embrace character, plot and theme in its final form and of course I’m now still far from that point.
That’s it for today. Feel free to let me know your own take on this.
I have now switched over to my female protagonist and I’m somewhere in Act 2 for her (her act 1 is pretty much done, unlike my male protagonist).
Now, how am I measuring up against set goals? The honest truth is I don’t know. I am now fully in the tunnel and have absolutely no idea how long before I am about to exit it. So the broad goal of getting up to decimal draft 0.84? No idea, wait and see is my approach.
I also had the mini goal of getting clarity up to the mid-point for both my protagonists which again I have no idea whether I am going to reach or not by the end of this year. I left my male protagonist in a state of “Nope, I don’t know enough about this chapter, come back to it next time” etc. but obviously that is all the way in Act 3 because I always go through the whole story linearly and never stop in middles or jump around much when I write scenes (well, I do jump in a sense because with my iteration approach I often wrote on a piece of scrap paper which chapters I feel I am capable of working on for the current round of drafting for each of my protagonists. That has been the approach for the latest two or three rounds. But I don’t hopscotch all over the story in terms of scenes right off the bat). So to be honest, my male protagonist currently doesn’t even exist for me, that’s the type of myopia I am operating under when I am drafting. I am not quite up to the middle point yet for my female protagonist.
I feel like a structural analysis of the whole novel is coming up for the mini goal. I have said that I try to avoid it because it led to procrastination. But the honest truth is that I have no other method to delve into the story to see clarity otherwise.
This is the state I am at with the WIP. Tune in for the September update.
As the title tells it all, I’m going to crown The Lost Choice: a Legend of Personal Discovery by Andy Andrews with this. At the time of writing I still have not finished this novel yet. But the meaning of Lost Choice does resonate with me.
I don’t think this will be spoiler alert because I am just talking about the theme but what is meant by lost choice is basically the idea that not choosing to act is a choice but it is a lost choice because by choosing to act you can potentially make a difference in the world by impacting others. That’s it, a simple concept.
How this touches me is in two ways. Firstly, I am somewhat of a passive person and there are lots of times when I do not act on my thoughts and intentions. I do not consider them lost choices normally because technically lots are just random thoughts and sure I might be able to make a difference in the world if I act on them but the counterargument is why me in particular to make that difference, why not someone with better skills, better time, better passion etc.? Secondly, co-existing with what I said above, I also personally believe in making differences in a small way. In fact, I tend to stay away from large scope stuff and just focus on small steps. That is how I operate. So technically I do make differences but I tend to focus on the small.
And this is all I have to say for now. You are welcome to add your thoughts in comments.
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