Camp NaNoWriMo 2017

I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo for the first time this past April. Sorry it's taken me so long to write about it, but I've been somewhat busy lately. More on that some other time, though.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Camp NaNoWriMo is a more laid-back summertime version of National Novel Writing Month where you set your own writing goal, get grouped into virtual cabins with other writers, and track your writing progress on a particular project over the course of a single month.

The Plan

I intended to use Camp NaNoWriMo as an excuse to finish my NaNoWriMo 2016 novel, because although I actually met my goal for that event, it turned out that my novel was destined to be more than 50,000 words long. Because the 50k word goal is a bit of a strenuous commitment; I decided to set myself a more reasonable goal of 25 hours of writing for camp.

Unfortunately, the website only allows a minimum of 30 hours, so I had to pick that as my goal instead. Still, that seemed doable, and more importantly I figured it was more than enough time needed to spend on my novel in order to finally finish it - it specifically being a second draft that I intend to shop around for publishers upon completion and before torturing myself over any more rewrites.

The Results

It turned out that setting an hour goal instead of a word count goal allowed me to shift my writing priorities in a way that, while helpful, was not conducive to my goal of finishing the actual novel. You see, despite feeling initially confident in the outline I'd laid out for the story when beginning NaNoWriMo 2016, while writing I found myself incredibly dissatisfied with the subplot of the main character's roommate, as well as the roommate herself as a character. Therefor, I ended up using much of Camp NaNoWriMo rewriting that character and her scenes to better fit the story I was trying to tell.  I did get around to writing some new scenes, resulting in a more complete book than I had to begin, but I ended the month with almost the entire final third of the story still unwritten.

What's more is that, as time has gone on, I've found myself increasingly disinterested in the novel as my growing interests pull me toward science fiction stories instead. I still intend to finish it, but the simple fact is that my heart isn't in it like it used to be. Additionally, as I've been developing new stories in my head, I've realized that I've been building this story on a somewhat poor foundation of planning and outlining - by which I mean I wasn't as knowledgeable about conceptualizing what makes a good story when I initially planned it, so it's as if I'm now trying to stack heavy bricks onto various fallen branches that I once found and stuck standing up in the sand. (For those wondering themselves about story structure, I highly suggest reading Dan Harmon's Story Structure as a starting point - a short guide that is available totally free online if you just search for it!)

Ugh, I know, I'm being so angsty and not cool. What can I say? I'm a writer.

Anyway, Camp NaNoWriMo was fun and helpful and I would definitely suggest it to other writers, but it was ultimately not the success I hoped it would be for me, personally. Also, I really wish it was a real thing. Like, I wish there was a month-long writer's summer camp for young adults to go to complete with cabins, bonfires, nature, and writer-based activities guided by published authors.

If any such place or event does exists, please point me in the direction of where I can sign up.

Read some of my short stories based on writing prompts at https://www.reddit.com/r/Yackemflaber/

My Never-Ending Journey to Figure Out Who I Am As A Writer

I feel like this is a redundant statement on my blog at this point, but I've had a bit of an epiphany in my writing recently.

Perhaps that's what the story of a young writer is meant to be; a series of epiphanies that eventually lead to some profound work of art. If so, then my brilliant work of art is just around the corner, because I've been having an epiphany just about every month lately. Sorry I haven't taken the time to tell you about all of them. At this point I couldn't even tell you off the top of my head what they are, I'm just so epiphanous.

But enough tooting my own horn.

This Novel I've Been Writing For Three Years Doesn't Represent The Type Of Novels I'd Like To Write

Oh boy. I really shot myself in the foot three years ago and I didn't even notice the gaping hole until a month ago.

You see, although I started writing my current work-in-progress novel out of genuine interest and excitement, in retrospect I think I took my peers’ praise of the original short story a bit too literally. Rather than interpreting their praise and desire for more as “this was good, I want more of this story,” I wish I had heard it more like “you’ve got talent, keep it up.”

You (also) see, I distinctly remember going to my then-fiancée now-wife with this praise and struggling to make use of it. "They want more of this story," I said (verbatim - because nobody can prove otherwise). "The thing is that I don't know if I have any more to tell. Then again, I'd like to try writing a novel, so why not start with one that people already want to read?"

Yes, dear readers, I chose to write a story about a neurotic college girl in a casual sexual relationship with a married man as she begins to fall in love with his wife because I desperately wanted to be read, not because I felt the magnetic pull to get this story out of my head and onto the page. For this I am somewhat ashamed to admit, except not, because I'm an egotistical narcissist. Anyway, eventually I thought of more story to tell, so I set forth starting to write it despite it not exactly being in my wheelhouse.

The thing is that just about all of my short stories before that one were much darker in tone. They often featured emotionally-detached nihilists who were faced with an extreme and emotional situation, such as:

• An emotionally detached nihilist gets caught cheating on his fiancée with someone else's wife by that woman's husband, who's drunk and happens to be carrying a gun because he's a cop. People die.
• An emotionally detached nihilistic writer and his emotionally detached nihilistic female independent editor/publisher get locked in a hotel room by some supernatural force, are mildly tortured by the same unseen force, grow closer together, but then she finds evidence that he might be behind it all in some creepy effort to seduce her. She wakes up and it might have just been a nightmare, except it also might not have been.
• An emotionally detached nihilist gets a visit from the grim reaper who tells her she's got one week to live. She becomes depressed, angry, stops caring for herself, and at the last minute manages to trick the grim reaper into taking her innocent sister's life instead of hers. That bitch.
• An emotionally detached nihilist living in a safe zone in the post-zombie-apocalypse gets infected but retains most of her humanity. She eats a lot of people. This one's actually pretty funny.

And those are just a few of the ones I actually completed writing. I've got a huge document full of other ideas I never got around to. Can you believe none of those have been accepted into a literary magazine? Conspiracy!

Anyway, I think that darkness is a mood that I really thrive in either despite or because of my lighthearted carefree exterior. As a coworker recently told me, "sometimes you just have to have an outlet for darkness in your life."

So much darkness! He could explode at any minute!

Anyway, although the main character in Nothing But The Boots is still kind of an emotionally detached nihilist, she's pretty upbeat about it and nothing dark really happens.

What's more is that I've recently become obsessed with space. No, not the dimensions of height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move, but outer space. More specifically, I'm drawn to what I've recently learned is termed "hard science fiction," or science fiction stories that focus on scientifically plausible concepts, physics, and possibilities. This fascination started growing on me around the time that I realized that Interstellar may be one of my favorite movies of all time, and it led to me reading more science fiction and overall just being fascinated with the stuff.

The problem here is that Nothing But The Boots is an incomplete work that I've put years of work into and is not set in space. I really, really want to write something set in space. I've got about three relevant novel ideas already queued up and one of them has potential to be a series. Seriously guys, this might be my true calling.

Side-note; I used to think sci-fi was only a stupid genre for uber dorks who liked reading about green women with three boobs fighting space worms. Why didn't anybody tell me there was another way, or just sit me down and force me to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey?! I could have avoided years of self-discovery and aimless wandering!

So here's the plan. I’m still going to finish this draft of my novel, because it’s been three years and I need to prove that I can write a novel that makes sense and deliver on my promises to so many people. Then I'm going to send it out to as many publishers and agents as possible, get it published under a totally different name so as to not get anyone's hopes up when my next novel is about a group of people getting stranded on a derelict space ship and killing each other off instead of a whimsical sequel to Nothing But The Boots in which the main character finds herself in yet another wacky sexual conundrum.

Then again, this could all change in an instant, right? I'm having epiphanies on the regular now. Maybe tomorrow I'll realize that I prefer writing about emotionally-distant nihilistic sexually adventurous green women who get stranded on derelict space ships and are forced to literally eat their own parents, but until that day comes, that idea is free to anyone who wants it.

So yeah, I'm pretty much living in constant mental agony of being torn between what I feel obligated to write and what I know in my heart I need to write. It's fun.

Read some of my short stories based on writing prompts at https://www.reddit.com/r/Yackemflaber/

From 2016 to 2017 - Keeping the Momentum Going

Do you like this new graphic? I made it myself with a photo I took of my beautiful wife.

I felt like I should do some end-of-the-year blogging to get some closure on 2016 and publicly express my goals for 2017, especially after writing a lengthy post/essay titled "Spider-Man or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Reboot" that I then decided not to publish because it was basically just me telling the entire story of my love for Spider-Man and expressing my opinions (that nobody asked for) about the upcoming reboot film.

Concerning My 2016 Resolution

I don't actually remember my primary resolution for 2016, and looking back on last year's review, I didn't really state anything specific. Therefore I'm just going to assume my resolution was to complete the second draft of my novel, which I came very close but ultimately failed to do. I do remember, however, resolving to learn to meditate in 2016, which I did a little bit of throughout the year but not as much as I wanted to.

So what did I actually do this year, then? I read a lot more books (the entire Hitchiker's Guide series, several books in the Detective Bosch series, four books in the Series of Unfortunate Events, The Martian, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Childhood's End), watched a bunch of good movies for the first time (La La Land, Sunshine, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Good Will Hunting, The Revenant, the "Before" trilogy, Spirited Away, High Rise, Begin Again, Deadpool, Ghost in the Shell, There Will Be Blood, Victoria, Carol, Room, Sixteen Candles, Straight Outta Compton, Steve Jobs, Brick, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Memento, Sicario, A Scanner Darkly, Snowpiercer, and more), watched some good TV shows (Westworld, Stranger Things, Black Mirror, Game of Thrones, Better Call Saul, Parks and Recreation, etc), discovered some new music and played the occasional video game (mostly on Android).

I also lost my job, found a better one, got a new phone that lets me play Xcom anywhere, put up a fence in my back yard for my dog, started using Instagram, redesigned the blog to actually look like a writer's blog, started writing short stories based on writing prompts (one of which has gained enough attention for two individuals to ask me if they could adapt it into a short film), made new friends, reconnected with old friends, did a lot of hiking, tried out a few different haircuts, and lost 10 lbs.

2017 Resolutions

First and foremost, I really want to get the second draft of my novel finished and start sending it out to publishers. I'm really close thanks to NaNoWriMo, and I really only need to write the ending, rewrite a secondary character's arc, and punch up the humor and charisma in some parts.

Secondly, I just want to keep writing more, especially those writing prompts, and eventually put a few up on the website for public consumption.

Thirdly, ever since experimenting with mixing music again a few weeks ago and seeing the amazing film La La Land in theaters a few days ago with my wife, it's starting to look like I might finally be learning to play an instrument or two. You see, she grew up playing the violin and guitar, but after seeing Ryan Gosling in La La Land and learning that he trained himself in only three months she's been wanting to learn piano (and her parents have a beautiful one in their home that rarely gets used), and I grew up owning a guitar but not knowing how to play it and always wanted to learn to play the keyboard so I could make some music on the computer without relying entirely on pre-recorded loops. So I'll say my tertiary big goal of 2017 is to learn to play piano and/or guitar, but this just came up recently so we'll see if it really sticks.

Fourthly, I should probably continue to lose weight and get in shape. I did some pilates this year, which proved to be quite enjoyable and challenging, tried to get into a routine of exercising (beyond taking my daily walks) at least once a week, and made an effort to eat healthier or smaller portions, so more of that would be good. Now that the wedding has long passed, my biggest motivation to be healthy and in shape is that I want to be able to keep up and play with my future kids as much as possible.

Lastly, I really just want to keep trying new things in my area. For years, I was stuck in a rut of eating at chain restaurants, shopping at chain stores, and going to the same places to do the same old things, but this year my wife and I made a solid attempt of eating and shopping more locally, as well as visiting parks we'd never been to before and just overall trying to attend more community events like concerts, movies in the park, and beer gardens. More of that is always good fun.

And I still want to do more Tactical Laser Tag. Seriously, I only went once this year.

-Ryan

NaNoWriMo 2016 Update: Over Halfway There!

Do you like this new graphic? I made it myself with a photo I took of one of my typewriters.

November 15th marked the halfway point for National Novel Writing Month, and so far I haven't been behind on my word count for a single day, and have in fact been ahead for most of the month. That alone is an improvement over last year's attempt, in which I was occasionally a few hundred words behind on the day's goal.

I like to try something new with everything I write, whether that means putting a greater effort into a particular aspect of the craft that I feel I need practice on or stepping out of my comfort zone to do something totally different. Last year's experiment was simply to see if I could actually churn out a 50,000 word story in a single month, which I'm glad to say was a success.

This novel's experiment (or to be more accurate, this draft's experiment) is to try writing a long-form story out of sequential order for the first time. You see, when I initially got into writing, I wrote nothing but short stories of which I either knew the entire plot from beginning to end or felt like I had a good enough grasp of the concept to just start writing from the beginning and see where it took me. I carried that method with me when I later decided to try my hand at writing novels, and so my first handful of attempts were all written as they were to be read, from beginning to end.

I rationalized this by saying that, like with short stories, the novel's second half was heavily reliant on what came out of actually sitting down and writing the first. If I had a good idea while writing that would affect the later parts of the story, I didn't want to feel confined by having already written the later section of the story. Sure, I had heard from most of my writer friends and strangers online that they always wrote out of order and couldn't fathom having to write anything sequentially, but I took pride in the feeling that I was unique and found something special that worked for me.

However, it turns out that writing in order makes the whole process incredibly difficult and often turns the hobby I love into a mind-splitting chore. The thing is that I didn't realize this before, after, or even as I was writing sequentially - it wasn't until someone online explained why they preferred writing out of order that I saw how difficult my way of writing had been.

The Advantage of Writing Out Of Order

So for NaNoWriMo this year, I decided to give out-of-order writing a shot, and so far it's been going wonderfully! The biggest advantage that I was initially looking forward to was the ability to write whatever scene I was most interested in rather than having to trudge through some earlier scenes I'm not as enthused about in order to eventually get to the more interesting stuff. Not only would this allow me to follow my muse wherever it took me and deal with the connecting or missing transitional scenes later, but it would prevent me from worrying about forgetting some cool idea I had before I had time to write it down.

However, what has so far turned out to be the actual biggest advantage of writing out of order isn't actually writing the big scenes, but the small ones. You see, when writing the first draft of my novel, I had to repeatedly go back to figure out what exactly it was "that one secondary character" said the last time we saw them because it had been so long since I actually wrote the damn scene and I totally forgot where that subplot was going. Writing out of order has allowed me to treat those subplots almost as if they're stories in and of themselves, meaning that I can spend a few days in a row only writing the scenes in which "secondary character X" shows up, getting their entire story/character arc out of the way while it's all fresh in my mind.

Overall, this method of writing has been like a breath of fresh air, and I think I will continue to write novels in this manner in the future.

As for how the novel itself is coming along? Pretty good, I'd say. I think it will easily go above 50,000 words when all is said and done, and I feel a lot more confident about the overall quality of this draft as compared to the first. My only real concern at this moment (aside from a few scenes I'm avoiding writing until the end because I'm not really sure how they should go) is that I may need to do some revisions for tone, as I've always wanted Nothing But The Boots to be a dramatic story with lighthearted narration, and so far it feels like it's been mostly a dramatic story with dramatic narration. It needs more levity. Otherwise, everything is going splendid!

I'll update you again once December rolls around!

Announcing My Novel for NaNoWriMo 2016

So there's this novel that I've been blogging about writing since literally June 2013 - over three freaking years ago. In fact, as of right now, I have blogged about it exactly 16 times, including for the first time I participated in NaNoWriMo.

Pictured: too many rewrites.

Yet, in all of those posts, I only mention the title three times (most recently in January 2014), and that's not even the title I've been working with for the past couple years. Additionally, if you searched through all of my blog posts talking about the novel, or even read its synopsis in my 2013 NaNoWriMo, you'd have trouble articulating exactly what it's about. Sure, I revealed a few details here and there, but those were back before the massive amount of rewrites I did. Even then, all the details I had released online amounted to nothing more than "some college girl sleeps with a married man and then something complicated happens."

Well, a lot has happened since I last posted about that novel, and as a result, I'm willing to reveal its title and synopsis.

Here's exactly what happened:

The Long, Painful Journey of Realizing I'm Doing It Wrong

Sometime early this year, after three years of planning, writing, and rewriting, I finished the first draft of that novel. Just a month later, I took to rewriting it almost completely from scratch, but as the year wore on I began to lose faith in the story as a whole, going so far as to almost completely throw it out and move on to some other project.

I admit now that I was going about the rewrite all wrong by starting from scratch without even going back to look at the first draft; I was so hard on myself for what I perceived as the shortcomings that they clouded my vision and I failed to see any of the genuinely good-quality writing that was hidden within the original draft. I was so clouded, in fact, that I was determined to remove what I would later realize were key, quality, entertaining scenes.

As should be expected, it was someone else who set me straight.

I was having lunch one day with my talented poet friend, Kathrine Yets, whose delightful works have been featured in the likes of Straylight, Woodland Pattern Book Center, River & South Review, and Blue Heron Review, when we inevitably got around to talking about my novel. You see, Kathrine and I have been friends since college, where we bonded in large part due to our mutual interest in raw, unfiltered, honest writing. Because of this and the fact that we're always genuinely eager and interested in each other's work, Kathrine has been my go-to person whenever I need advice, critique, or someone to brag to about an accomplishment or new idea in my writing. While she doesn't know absolutely everything about my novel, she's read the original short story, seen the first outline, and read and helped me to shape large portions of the first draft (and I can't thank her enough for all of that).

So we were sitting there, eating our overstuffed pita pockets while talking about my novel. I told her that I was incredibly dissatisfied with how the second draft was going, that I hated the first draft, and that I wanted to change this character and that scene.

"You're getting rid of that?" she asked, eyes wide with disbelief. "I loved that part!"

I was immediately caught off-guard. The only person I'd been consulting on the quality of my own writing for several months had been myself, and I was not a fan. However, hearing someone else be honestly upset at my artistic decision was only the beginning of her slapping some sense into me, because shortly afterwards she dropped this wisdom bomb on me:

"Never listen to your inner critic; that’s what other people are for."

-Kathrine Yets

This phrase stuck with me more than similar sentiments from dozens of other people had, because not only was it the solid advice I'd heard before but never really believed ("you're too hard on yourself") but because that part was immediately accompanied by the comforting notion that this is not solely my burden to bear. The immediate sensation upon hearing these words (after a moment of dumbfounded silence) was that of the cliché elephant being lifted off my shoulders.

Shortly after this meeting, I was able to look back at my first draft (a feat in and of itself) in a whole new light, unburdened by my inner critic. I was able to see the moments of real quality writing, and more importantly I was able to shrug off the muddy bits that had been obscuring my vision for almost an entire year.

As November approached, I realized what I had to do:

NaNoWriMo 2016

working cover designed by myself for NaNoWriMo

This year for National Novel Writing Month, I am pleased to announce that I will be completing the second draft of my novel, titled Nothing But The Boots.

Nothing But The Boots follows Mandy, a neurotic college girl in a casual sexual relationship with a married man, as she begins to fall in love with his wife.

The book is a continuation of a short story I wrote in college, titled "The Other Woman," which featured Mandy narrating from a closet, where she was forced to hide completely naked to avoid being discovered by her boyfriend's wife. In the novelization, free-spirited, boot-loving Mandy pursues her romantic interest in the wife of the man she's sleeping with, completely unabated by the social stigma and traditional rules of relationships. In doing so, she deals with the repercussions of going against the grain as she fights for what she believes is her right as a human; to pursue true happiness in whatever form it takes.

To prepare for this year's massive 50,000 word challenge, I've uploaded the original draft to my e-reader and have been steadily reading through it during my lunch breaks to find what worked and use that as a foundation.

Aside from the 50,000 words in a month thing, the goal is to develop a coherent second draft worthy of sending to agents and publishers.

Wish me luck!
-Ryan

Condensing and Combining Scenes

One of the biggest things I noticed about the first draft of my novel was that it was long. Really, really long. 93,000 words long.

At first, I thought this was fantastic. It meant that my initial fear of not being able to write a full-length novel was inaccurate. Unfortunately, I soon realized that the length of my first draft wasn't a result of my expert storytelling, but in fact it was evidence of quite the opposite. The length of my first draft was entirely due to my inability to plan ahead and combine multiple plot lines into single scenes. Basically, my novel was too long because it was dragging its feet the entire way to the finish line.

Luckily, in writing my second draft, I've found that the first draft is very useful as a thorough outline of what the later drafts should include, albeit in a totally different format. Each scene of the first draft typically had one objective, which was to get a single plot point from A to B. With the second draft, I'm finding it much easier to think ahead and put together the puzzle pieces to fill each scene with at least three simultaneous "objectives," AKA plot lines. Rather than just getting characters from one place to another, they're moving locations, slowly completing their arcs, and introducing mysteries into their pasts all at once. The result is scenes which feel more exciting and alive, even though they're technically another step removed from what a real-world moment in time typically includes.

It's yet another big step forward in both my novel and my abilities as a writer.
-Ryan

Tips for Revising the Second Draft of a Novel

Last year, I completed rough drafts of two separate novels, each of which I wrote in very different ways. One was loosely outlined, and then that outline was almost completely ignored in favor of making it up as I went along over the course of a few years. The other was extensively planned, outlined, and then written entirely in the span of a single month with only minor deviations from the original outline.

These are the first full-length novel drafts I've ever completed, hence the drastically different approaches to writing as I'm still kind of figuring out what works best for me. While it was incredibly relieving to finally finish not just one but two full-length drafts after so many years of work, this year I'm tasked with the equally difficult task known as the rewrite. As I've never done a full rewrite before (I refuse to count the time I did massive rewrites to the first story's first draft mid-way through writing it, or the fact that the second story is actually a rewrite in itself), I've found myself in personally uncharted territory yet again. Luckily, I feel like I'm already finding my groove, so here are a few tips for the revision process based on my own experiences thus far:

Tips for Writing Your Second Draft

Rule #1: Nothing is Sacred

The first and most important rule to any rewrite is thus; nothing is sacred. You've got to be prepared for constructive criticism to do away with your favorite scenes, characters, and plot lines if you want to write the best story possible. It doesn't matter if the subject in question is personally important to you unless you can make it just as important to the story and your readers, because in the end a fiction writer isn't some prestigious person to whom all else must obey, a writer is a servant to both the story and the readers.

More important to this rule is that you must understand exactly what is at the core of your story, because if anything is to be considered sacred, it must be that core idea which inspired your story in the first place. Understanding what that core idea is will be infinitely helpful if you hit a wall and become convinced that everything you've written is rubbish. It's in moments like these that you must be willing to toss away all the rubbish and go back to and rebuild an entirely new story from that core. This core can be anything from a setting or character that initially inspired you to write a story around it, or it might be an emotion or message that you want to convey to the reader.

It's Never Too Late to Outline

After finishing the draft of my heavily-outlined novel and then ignoring it for two months, I came back to what appeared to be a horrible mess of a story written by a madman with no sense of pacing, excitement, or tone. Seeing as that draft was the result of me having already discovered the core of an earlier unfinished story and crafting an entirely new plot around it, I was confident that the general outline of my story wasn't the problem, it was the supporting details. The problem was that I couldn't put my finger on exactly what the story was missing.

This is where I turned back to outlines. For days, I did nothing but research plot structures for books, plays, and movies. I refreshed my memory on Freytag's Pyramid and the Three Act Structure, then discovered the Five Act Structure and the Eight Sequences of Film. Having found the Eight Sequences the most personally helpful structure, I poured over definitions for terms like "Inciting Incident" and "First Culmination," then, to the best of my ability, I wrote out what each of the eight sequences were of that first draft. Trying to fit my novel into this structure forced me to not only see that my story wasn't as bad as I feared it was, but helped me understand my own story so much better, which in turn allowed me to see what it was missing. Suddenly, I had a clear understanding for what my main subplot was, why it felt so natural to resolve it when I had, and how to make it even stronger in the next draft.

I'm a firm believer that, while we may have a feel for how to pace a story as we're writing it, it is incredibly helpful to break it down mathematically to understand why exactly it feels good to write it that way. For example, look at the the very middle of your story and see how it relates to the ending. According to traditional structure, if your story ends on a high note there should also be a high note in at the midpoint. If the tone of your middle is a teaser for the ending, you've now got insight into why it works, and if your middle differs from your ending, then maybe that's what's been bothering you the whole time! If traditional structures don't work for your novel, it's still helpful to break down your story to its basics to understand how it moves and what isn't working.

Just Write!

Even after all the brainstorming and outlining, some of my best ideas for revisions came when I actually sat down and started rewriting. I looked at my first paragraph, hated it, tried to think of something more catchy that better prepares the reader for the type of story they're getting into, and came up with an idea that killed two birds with one stone; not only did the new idea check off all the boxes for a great introduction to the story and characters, but out of it came a new subplot that fits perfectly into the story, will help me to tie up many loose threads, and drastically improve the pacing of the exposition.

So when all else fails, just write. Try new things. If you get stuck, take the scene or character that you hate, figure out why you hate it, draw inspiration from popular scenes and characters that you love, figure out why they're awesome, and see if you can apply the essence of that same greatness to yours. Get those creative juices flowing and let them do the heavy lifting.

Listen to the Professionals

Listen, I'm no authority on this sort of thing. Not yet, anyway. But these are the things that work for me, and hopefully I've written something here that will work for you. Otherwise go ahead and research more credible writers, I promise I won't mind.

Oh, and try not to get too stressed about all of it.

-Ryan

I Figured Out How To End My Novel As I Wrote This Blog Post

I'm literally about a chapter away from ending my novel, and yet I can't decide how to end it.

Hello, and welcome to Ryan's Blog, where I rant on about my struggles to write a novel that you know nearly nothing about. Yes, this is going to be one of those posts.

Endings are tough. You have to basically wrap up all the loose strings from your novel into a really neat-looking bow. It's hard enough to wrap up the end of two ribbons into an actual bow, so this is just insane.

Actually, the ending was kind of easy for the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo; the type of plot I was writing basically allowed for only one of two possibilities, and I just had to pick the best of those two and try my best to carry it out. This, however, is a completely different monster.

And what a monster it is. As it's the first novel I've attempted to write proper (that is to say, not counting the "long story" I wrote as my first attempt at a novel - that one didn't even make it to twenty thousand words in length), it's been a very, very rough process. The overall idea stayed the same, but the details, both large and small, changed dramatically over the course of writing to the point that I felt the overwhelming need to publicly blog my promise to stop going back and changing so much. What I'm left with is a very Frankensteinian (a word I've just now coined to mean "liking to Frankenstein's monster in that it's made up of many non-matching parts to create a whole that resembles a cohesive final product, though the seams used to connect the non-matching parts are very much visible, as is the fact that those parts do not match") rough draft.

One character was shy and kept to herself, and suddenly she's bluntly honest and forward. One character was a potential love interest, and then he was a bit of a stalker, and suddenly he's just some random mutual friend. Didn't this person say they were an only child? Where did this brother come from?! That sort of thing.

But you get what kind of monster it is - I need to get back on track. The ending.

The ending, in this case, can be narrowed down by determining just what exactly the novel is about and what lessons it aims to teach both the reader and the main character. The problem is that I've spent so much time on this novel and changed it so dramatically over the years that I can't really tell for sure what it's about anymore.

I got so stressed about this three weeks ago that I attempted to write a synopsis of the novel's plot from beginning to end in hopes that simplifying it would give me clarity into what it's about and how it should end. The results of this experiment? I drafted up an ending that made about as much sense as I could figure out at the time, but, unlike the moment I thought of the novel's clever title, I just didn't feel 100% confident and certain about it.

And now, as I've just finished writing another scene, yet another ending has presented itself to me - one that I had been specifically trying to avoid for quite some time. You see, without giving anything away, I'd been working under the idea that I wanted to write a story about a girl stumbling into some very implausible situations, trying to make them work for her life, and then having a reality-check in the form of everything coming crashing down along with the realization that life just doesn't work like that; not everybody gets a happy ending because we're all just background characters in someone else's life. Jeez, that sounds like someone learned how to fly so I threw them into a pit of fire.

The thing is that the short story this novel is based on had a totally different spirit to that proposed ending. The short story was lighthearted and fun. While I tried to retain this same spirit in the novel, over time it eroded away and became more of a serious drama with only slight glimmers of the story it started as. The ending, then, became a bleak reality-check - though with a positive lesson for the main character at the end. While I still believe it's important to increase the drama as the novel goes on, I'm beginning to realize (literally, as I write this blog post) that I lost sight of what I wanted to write in the first place. I wanted to humanize an overused archetype. I wanted to make you like her.

There it is. Just as I wrote the last sentence of that paragraph, everything clicked into place. I know now how it has to end. I need the reader to be on her side. I need her to be the lovable archetype. I need to remove the story from reality and keep its feet planted firmly in the fantasy.

Wow. I'm so glad I decided to write this blog. I had no idea it would end with me knowing confidently what I want to do with the novel.

Knowing my history, I'll write another in a month or two about how the ending changed again.
-Ryan

From 2015 into 2016

Firstly, concerning my 2015 resolution

So there's this novel I've been working on since my last semester of college when a bunch of girls in my writing workshop class told me that they loved one of my short stories and wanted more. At the end of last year, I made the resolution to finally finish the first draft of that novel in 2015.

Today is the last day of 2015, and while I did finish the first draft of a novel this year (for the first time), it was for a completely unrelated story that I started and finished during the month of November for NaNoWriMo.

While I admit it's a huge bummer to not have a draft done of that college story yet, I'm proud of what I have accomplished in writing this year. I've written a 50,000 word novel from beginning to end, gotten a freelance job writing for a video game that I truly believe in, and am so incredibly close to finishing that college story that I can taste it!

And now, everything else 2015

This year, I've also been making more friends of coworkers than I thought I would, purchased a house along with my lovely wife, adopted the most adorable and fun dog on the planet, and continued to try eating more vegetables.

As far as my hobbies go, I've read several books (The Girl on the Train, Orange is the New Black, The Black Echo, The Girl with All The Gifts, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Survivor, etc.), seen countless movies (Mad Max, Star Wars, Ex Machina, Nightcrawler, Inside Out, Brooklyn, It Follows, Whiplash, The Guest, John Wick, and so many more), listened to a hell of a lot of music (Halsey, Grimes, The Weeknd, Panic! At The Disco, Melody Gardot, Purity Ring, Nero, and holy crap so much more), but played mostly one video game (Xcom: Enemy Unknown).

So, what about next year?

More. More of everything. More novel drafts, more freelance opportunities, more fun at work, more projects on the house, more playtime with my dog, more books to read, more movies to watch, more music to thrive on, more Xcom (the sequel comes out soon), and - of course - much more time with my amazing, caring, fun, can't-survive-without-her wife!

Maybe not as many more vegetables, though. We're starting to get down to the really weird ones.

Oh yeah, and a million times more Tactical Laser Tag. It has seriously been too long since I did that.

-Ryan

NaNoWriMo 2015 - A Recap

You see that up there? That's the tentative cover for the first novel I've ever finished writing. Somehow, I did it. Somehow, I wrote over 50,000 words in thirty days. Somehow, I won NaNoWriMo 2015.

How difficult was it?

It's weird to think about, because on one hand, the entire process was incredibly hard for me, especially when I would have a moment (and there were many) where I knew in the marrow of my bones that the novel wasn't good enough, and that everything I had written so far just wasn't living up to my expectations. On the other hand, though, the entire month's worth of writing seemed to fly by at the speed of light; I'd be writing one day, then look back in the novel to clarify some previously-established information only to be amazed at how far back I had to go to find it because I'd written so much!

Again, I owe it all to my hour-long lunch break at work, the uncomfortable cold weather which encouraged me to stay inside and write rather than going out for some fresh air, and most importantly my own discipline. You can see on the official word count charts below that I kept a pretty steady pace to stay on target every day while always compensating for a missed goal due to a busy weekend.

Is it any good?

The easy question to be asked when telling people that I've finished writing a novel in thirty days is, "is the novel good?" but I stand firm in my answer that whether or not the novel is good isn't the point, the point is that I worked hard at something I love to do. By writing an average of 1,697 words per day, I was practicing and (hopefully) slowly improving at my beloved craft. Creative writing isn't something you just can or cannot do, like any other skill it takes practice and determination to improve. That all being true, I consider myself to be my harshest critic, and let's just say that there will be revisions.

What now?

So where do I go from here? Well, I've still got to finish my years-in-the-making novel about a college-aged girl who winds up in a scandalous romance. It was my last new years' resolution to finish my first draft of that novel by the end of 2015, so I suppose I'll take this discipline I've developed and point it in that direction while I let The Dream House sit in the back of my mind for a month until I'm ready to re-open it and get to the revisions.

For those interested, you can read the current synopsis for The Dream House and even take a peek at a small synopsis here, just bear in mind this is a rough first draft.
-Ryan

Check out these related blog posts:
My First NaNoWriMo - 2013
My NaNoWriMo 2014 Recap
Preparing for NaNoWriMo 2015
Final Preparations for NaNoWriMo 2015

Final Preparations for NaNoWriMo 2015

The concept for my next novel has changed (and hopefully improved) dramatically since my last post about preparing for this year's NaNoWriMo. I suppose that's why they start the official planning period a whole month beforehand.

Whereas I had intended for my 50,000 word novel to be a rewrite that was more-or-less completely loyal to last year's concept, I discovered while outlining that there was barely any sustainable conflict inherent in the idea. You see, I wanted to write about a kid with problems going to another world that seemingly has everything he ever wanted, only to realize that the things he thinks are most important to him can't really make him happy. That all sounded well and good until I sat down and tried to actually plot out the novel. I suppose someone (more talented than I) could make that work, but I humbly realized that I could not.

With time until NaNoWriMo only growing shorter, I had to rethink everything.

I shed away every bit of the plot that I thought I wanted to write until I was left with only the core of my idea. I then brainstormed a whole new story around that core, one which had ghosts of the original idea, but was otherwise entirely new:

"Thirty-something year old Gideon Bradfield has won an all-inclusive dream vacation for two to the world-renowned and extremely exclusive Somnium Domus tropical resort. Though his wife's demanding job has prevented her from joining him on the trip, Gideon still hopes to take the opportunity to work on rekindling their marriage. On the flight to the island resort, Gideon meets Christopher, a charismatic, intelligent, and angelically handsome young man also taking a solo vacation to the famous resort. The two become fast friends, and the resort is everything Gideon could have ever dreamed of, but over time things begin to sour; his wife won't answer or return any of his calls, he's haunted by familiar but strange lucid nightmares every night, and he just can't shake the feeling that there's something not right about the Somnium Domus. What he uncovers will make him question his vacation, his marriage, his new friend, and his life itself."

Those of you who read the original synopsis may see the parallels here; Christopher is essentially the same character as Chris from the original synopsis, after all, and honestly even the plot is pretty similar when you boil it down. What's different is the focus. By metaphorically shifting my perspective two inches to the left, I was able to see a plethora of possibilities that I was blind to before. Sometimes two inches make all the difference.

I've successfully crafted a plot outline and will be spending this last week of preparation fleshing out my character and location outlines. NaNoWriMo begins this coming Sunday, November 1st. Though I'll be busy writing the novel, I'll try to blog at least once during November with a progress report.
-Ryan

Preparing for NaNoWriMo 2015

Ahoy people who read my blog!

Last year I said this about this year's NaNoWriMo:

"Perhaps next year I will take NaNoWriMo much more seriously, and really dedicate myself to meeting the 50,000 word goal. I can't help but feel incredibly accomplished and enthusiastic about the future, and I wonder what novel I might be working on next year."

By some miracle I've actually gone and done this. That's right. I'm back in — deeper than ever.

I may have failed in the past — twice, no less — but this year will be different! This year I shall write a 50,000-word novel in only thirty days! Huzzah! I've already started filling out character sheets, drafting up an outline of the plot, and brainstorming every possible facet of my future novel's structure, composition, style, tone, and all that other cool stuff. This is happening! For real this time!

What's my novel about, you ask? Well it's actually going to be a complete rewrite from scratch of the novel I attempted to write last year. Why, you ask? Because it started to suck since it was written completely by the seat of my pants (not sure what that phrase means, will have to look up later). Also I'm pretty sure that writing entirely in first-person present tense is proof of hell on Earth.

So here's my synopsis for the novel, which I hope is proof in itself that my writing has improved since last year and this novel actually stands a chance of, you know, not sucking:

"Overburdened with the stress of school and the recent deaths of several of his loved ones, 17-year-old Thomas crosses paths with a mysterious twenty-something-year-old man named Chris who is the spitting image of everything Thomas wishes he was - unquestionably attractive, muscular, confident, easy-going, and adventurous. Amazingly, Chris takes an interest in young Thomas and offers him the opportunity to enter into his world - a proposal which Thomas accepts, and one which turns out to be much more literal than he ever imagined.

Inexplicably transported to another dimension where youth is eternal and every one of your dreams is easily within reach, Thomas must choose between living the fantasy forever or struggling through his brief existence in reality, all while learning to grieve, love, grow up, and above all, live."

So yeah, I had some trouble picking a genre for that to fall under out of the given options on the website. I ended up picking "other."

So why am I taking time away from writing my years-in-progress novel for this one instead? I dunno, I feel like this event deserves its own story. One that's designed to be written in 30 days. My other novel needs to go at its own pace. Something like that.

I'm so excited!
-Ryan

50,000 Words - An Update On My First Novel

Note: To any of my longtime readers, you've no-doubt noticed that I've been posting less frequently, and that none of the recent posts have had anything to do with my writing. I can explain. At the end of last year I decided to attempt to write more topical blog posts to draw in readers, and while that worked at first, I then realized that I was getting tired of forcing myself to update my blog with content. I thus made the conscious decision to only write when I actually had something to share, rather than trying to force myself into a two-posts-per-month schedule.

As of yesterday I've officially hit the 50,000-word milestone in my first novel, not counting the around 10,000 I deleted during early revisions when I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I've also confirmed that, when formatted to the proper manuscript style, it exceeds 200 pages - which I read somewhere is the minimum or average accepted length.

My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure that my 2015 new year's resolution was to finish the first draft of my novel, and while that goal seemed unattainable for the last few months, it's finally starting to appear within view. You see, while I was initially writing my first draft as if it were a draft I expected to actually try to sell and that people would be reading, I've since realized how terribly stupid that assumption was. It's a rough draft, and the quality is allowed to reflect as such.

Rather than going back and editing for consistency in plot, details, etc. I've taken to just writing the next scene or event that I want to happen regardless if it makes sense given the prior established events or details. That means that plot threads are being dropped and developed as far as 50,000 words into the story because the more that I write, the more I start to realize what the story is actually about and what it really needs. I relate it similar to the storyboard or first script of a movie; you don't pick up a camera and shoot a film as the first step - you draft the entire film up on paper first so you can make the next version of it even better with hindsight.

I currently expect to finish the first draft of the novel by the end of this year, and then I plan on rewriting it more or less from scratch with the benefit of knowing exactly what beats I want it to hit at what times. I'm considering changing the tense, tone, and adding or removing characters and whole scenes. Nothing is sacred in the first draft.

At the same time, I'm starting the slow and steady process of preparing for my next project; currently slated to be a novel concept that I cannot get out of my head and want to spend much more time preparing for than I did for this first novel. You see, this novel had almost no planning whatsoever because I was eager to get started on it after some peers enjoyed the short story it's based on and suggested I novelize it. As fun as it has been, I want to be more prepared next time so that maybe that first draft will be a little bit more fully realized.

So there. Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but that's what's going on in my world of writing.

Oh yeah, and I'm going to teach myself screenwriting because the truth is that I've seen about a hundred movies for every book I've read, so most of my storytelling influence is from cinema.
-Ryan

Different Methods To Write a Novel

For any first-time writer, figuring out exactly how to write a novel is no small task. I myself found that leaving the comfort of short story-writing and venturing into the unknown territory of novel-writing quite intimidating. A quick Google search reveals many helpful articles on the subject, but the bottom line is that there is no single best way to write a novel. It is up to each individual person to experiment and discover how they prefer to write a book.

In my experience, every single method for writing a book can be distilled into only two different methods. I am currently experimenting with both of these methods as, for the first time, I write two different novels at the same time.

My Novel-Writing History

My first real attempt at writing a fiction novel (not counting that one time when I was 14 and thought ten short paragraphs, if separated into their own pages, constituted a complete novel) ended in 2012 when a classroom of students told me it was terrible. I had based the idea off a series of romantic fantasies I'd had which were inspired by awful chick flicks and my own desire to have that perfect Hollywood love (spoiler: it was dating me the whole time). If you read my blog post about it (linked above) you'll notice just how optimistic I was about taking the novel in a new direction based on my peer feedback.

Well here's the post where I talk about restarting it for yet a second time. In the end it turned out that the idea I had for a novel wasn't fleshed out enough to actually be a novel; it lacked any real meaning or planning. I then decided to move onto writing a different idea that I'd actually been thinking about and taking notes on for a while (what a concept!), but then I got bored of that one and put it on the back-burner so I could write more short stories. What a tragic series of errors!

Eventually I wrote a short story that my classroom loved and even demanded that I continue. I realized that, having failed three times before, if I was going to set out to write a novel I was going to have to do it right this time.

Method 1: Plan Everything

For this method, it helps to have real novel-writing software. Believe it or not, Microsoft Word isn't the best word-processing software out there, at least it isn't when it comes to long-form creative writing. Around when I decided to give novel-writing another try, I heard about the novel-writing software known as Scrivener from one of my favorite professors. There are other similar programs out there, so feel free to look around, but Scrivener is a powerful and extensive tool for writing that allows you to organize and plan your novel to an extent that standard word-processing software doesn't even touch.

Scrivener allowed me to easily start at a very high concept level of my novel and work my way downward, slowly expanding on my ideas into an intricate web in a very easy-to-use way. Again, I'm not trying to sell you on Scrivener, I'm trying to sell you on the method that a novel must be nearly entirely written in your head before you start actually writing it.

One very popular version of this method is known as the snowflake method, which has you starting out with a single paragraph that encapsulates your entire novel, then slowly expanding on that until you've got pages written on each character, location, and scene before you even start your first draft. I don't adhere to this exact formula, but reading about it certainly helped me to find a method that worked for me. I found it much easier and less stressful to start writing a novel that I never meant to be a novel by making an outline of the story including plot points, characters, locations, and themes. Some people might then want to adhere strictly to that outline, but I found myself constantly changing details as I developed a clearer vision of what I wanted to write.

I've been writing that novel on and off for a year now, and despite the outline I've gone back and rewritten loads of pages based on my new and changing ideas, but the outline has still been very helpful in keeping my rewrites in line with the ultimate end goal. The scenes and characters may change as I write, but I can always go back to that first outline to see exactly how those changes can serve the overall original idea.

The drawback to this method, in my experience, is that I sometimes find myself wanting to take a character or event in one direction and then having to work/think hard to make that idea fit into the overall plot of the novel. It can sometimes feel like trying to force a square peg into a round hole; even though I know that square peg is going to look really, really good in that round hole, it won't fit until I make it fit. At times I was spending more time rewriting old scenes than I was writing new ones, which was more difficult and felt less rewarding since my novel's overall word count would fluctuate around the same number rather than going up.

Method 2: Let it Flow

This method is actually nearly identical to how I failed my first three attempts at writing a novel, but there's one vital difference; I'm more experienced now than I was back then.

Planning everything out is great, especially for someone new to the process like I was who wanted to write something with complex characters, foreshadowing, and an overall theme for the first time, but now that I've done that for a while and have grown weary of writing everything with an endgame in mind (and rewriting everything when parts of that endgame changes) I wanted to switch it up.

A few weeks ago I had a dream that I wanted to turn into a story. I considered turning it into a short story based solely on the dream, but the vision grew quite rapidly until I realized that I wanted to write another novel. Rather than start from a very high level, work my way downwards, and then write my way back up, I decided to start with the dream as a base on the lowest level and then work my way up from there.

Attempting this method was partially inspired by movie sequels and long-running fictional television shows; since I find it fascinating that people sometimes completely unrelated to the previous writers of a television show or movie must work within the confines of the entire history of that show or movie to put out something new and interesting.

After less than a month of writing using this method, I already had the urge to go back and change a large detail of it, but I decided instead to just roll with it and make it work. I've now made it a rule for myself that I am not allowed to go back and change anything other than the smallest nagging details while writing the first draft of this novel, and to regard everything else previously written as absolute fact within that novel's world. It is both challenging and fun to resist the urge to go back and rewrite something that I've reconsidered. The reason it is working now more than it did before (so far) is that I have no particular ending in mind, and yet I have developed a clear vision for what the base ingredients are, even if they aren't revealed to me until the very second I write them.

Now let us see which novel turns out the best, and which method I prefer in the end.
-Ryan

I Edit My Stories Too Much

I'm a perfectionist. This isn't always a good trait for a writer.

I once explained in a blog post about a class assignment where we were to share a rough draft with the class that "to ease my paranoia that if nobody likes [my story] I'm a failure as an aspiring author I've recruited four of my closest friends to read it over before I submit it to class." Essentially, instead of a rough draft, I presented my class with a third draft that I'd had edited by a peer. The result was mostly positive, as I noted in my post summarizing the student responses, but I've since begun to learn of the drawbacks to this mentality of perfectionism.

This is a screenshot of the first few pages of my novel after I've taken to editing it. Using Microsoft Word's "track changes" feature, it kept track of all of my changes by coloring additions red, and marking deletions in comment bubbles on the right side of the page. Bear in mind that what little black text you see was already edited numerous times without the "track changes" feature.

The thing to keep in mind is that I haven't written the story much beyond the pages you see here. I went back and started editing the only few chapters I had written, rather than going on and just writing the rough draft. Mostly every writer I've encountered has said that you must simply get through the first draft, no matter what, before going back and editing.

Obviously I didn't feel this way. I was coming up with new ideas for scenes I'd already written, and wasn't satisfied with the characters' personalities as I had originally envisioned them. Obviously it's good that I was thinking of improvements, and it was probably okay to go back and make edits, if only to get a clearer vision for what I would write next.

The problem is that I'd gone back and edited those chapters so many times (often rewriting entire scenes), that if I had just kept on writing, I would at least have more content to show for my effort.

Let me be clear: I'm still conflicted about how I should be writing. I would absolutely love to go back and edit what I have until I feel it is perfect, but I also know that I may never be 100% satisfied, and that future, unwritten events in my novel might require me to change the beginning chapters yet again. Essentially I was setting myself up to be stuck in a never-ending cycle of edits and revisions.

In an attempt to snap myself out of it, I gave my fiancée a copy of what I've written (sans red edits) without making edits that I'd already had in mind. I forced myself to hand over my work, knowing full-well that there are specific scenes that I absolutely hate.

Hopefully she disagrees.
-Ryan

Exciting Existence

As seems to be the norm, a lot is going on in my life right now. Here are some updates separated by topic, so that you may skip to what most interests you about my exciting existence:

Grandpa:

My grandpa is doing better. I just saw him (he's now in a rehabilitation facility rather than the hospital) and despite the fact that he's eating out of a tube and he's lost weight he barely had, he's back to his old self.

When I originally saw him in the hospital he was looking pathetic (for lack of a more appropriate word). He had been lying in a bed, hooked up to machines and feeling like his life was at its end. Of course, his life was at an end; as far as I could tell he'd come dangerously close to passing, and his entire attitude had changed. It's sad to see how much a fear of death will change people who believe it's quickly coming for them. I don't think I'll ever forget how sad he was - believing that his time was almost up.

That was not the case when I most recently saw him. He was up, walking around, talking in his normal tone, speed, and volume as if nothing were wrong. He even did a little dance to show us how good he's feeling (an unexpected side effect of being fed the exact perfect balance of nutrients through a tube seems to be that he feels absolutely fantastic). It's good to know that a disaster was averted.

Uncle:

I wish I could say the same for my uncle. The idea that Mickey is no longer ... a person at all ... still haunts me. I've still not had time for a "proper" grieving (no funeral, as was his wish, but no family gathering yet either), though I doubt that would make me feel much different than I do now. It's just not fair; loosing someone so close so suddenly. It seems that the cliché is true; I'd do anything to talk to him just once more. For the most part I try not to think about it, or I think about it in some sort of abstract, segmented way where I think about the idea of me not being able to talk to him just now, rather than think about the fact that I'll never see or speak to him again.

Wedding:

The wedding is fast approaching (June 14th, mark your calendars!), and I cannot wait! We've met with the coordinator at the hotel (we're doing everything in one location, so people don't have to waste time driving around), my fiancée continues to check things off on the to-do list while I'm at work and she's not, and tonight we'll be taking advantage of a free dance lesson. Aside from the obvious fact that I'm excited to be getting married, it's a bit odd to wrap my head around after being together for six years, living together for four, and being engaged for three. It's weird to think it's finally happening, but it's about damn time.

Writing:

Writing my novel continues to be an educational experience. It's clearly my first real attempt, because I've only gotten a few chapters in and have already had to go back multiple times to change or add details to fit my continually growing idea for what the book should be. All of the changes, I feel, are for the better, but I wish I'd had the foresight to iron out such details before I began writing so that I could just write the damn thing from beginning to end rather than go back and change so many details before I move on. Unfortunately I'm a perfectionist, so I refuse to move on until what I have written is perfect!

Reading:

I'm actively in the middle of three books right now: Doomed by Chuck Palahniuk (hardcover, signed by the author), Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (e-book via my Nook), and Under The Dome by Stephen King (audio book, from the library). There are a few others that I'm in the middle of, but stalled on (my goodreads.com shelf says there are three, but there are perhaps more), not all of which I intend to finish. Gone Girl is by far the best of them, and I'm nearly done with it. Under The Dome is good, but in typical Stephen King style I'm on the sixth disc and not a lot of plot has really happened, which I'm not a fan of. Doomed is by far the most disappointing, since Palahniuk is my favorite author and I loved the original (called Damned) and it has almost none of the things that made the first one good. It's not bad, exactly, but it's nowhere near as good as everything else I've read by him.

Work:

Work is going well. My internship has been extended through September, giving me some more time to impress my superiors and prove to them that they are, indeed, in need of a full-time copywriter. I wish they'd just give me an answer one way or the other already (full time, part time, freelance, or out on my rear-end), but I'll take what I can get. It's not great news, but it certainly isn't bad.

Perhaps I should blog more often so I can make my posts shorter.

-Ryan

A Clearer Vision Means Throwing Out Hours of Work

I've written before about my devotion to writing to the best of my ability, and how that sometimes means throwing out hours of work for the greater good.

I went through a chunk of time in the middle (more like the beginning) of writing An Offbeat Affair where I didn't write anything. This was partially due to a lack of time, but it was also because I didn't feel comfortable moving forward until I had a better idea of where I was going.
You see, gentle reader, despite having planned out my novel from beginning to end, the process of writing is nothing like making a blueprint for a building. It's much more fluid and dynamic; nothing is set in stone. The story takes on a life of its own and you milk that life for every word its worth - initial planning be damned!

Sometimes, as was true in this case, the story was taking on a life of its own that was quite terrible. I fell into old habits of giving characters traits that were nothing more than gimmicks. It makes sense why I did - I'm used to writing short stories where a character's intentions and psychology don't go nearly as deep as they do in a novel. In a short story I can get away with a character having a gimmick, because the story won't go on long enough for you to realize how shallow a character trait it really is.

I didn't even realize this at first - what I realized was that my story was uninteresting and I had no idea what the characters were really like. I didn't even know what fueled my own main character. Luckily, all I had to do in her case was to go back to the short story I'm basing this novel on and examine her from a new perspective. Her actions could no longer be described simply as "interesting" or "funny," as they had been when all I was concerned with was a short story. I needed to understand why it was interesting or funny. I needed to get into her head and see where she was coming from.

The other characters weren't as easy. In the short story you barely get a glimpse of each one; they hadn't been fleshed out nearly as much as my main character. For her roommate (who actually only appeared in one of my other short stories), who suffered from the most from gimmicks and stereotypes, I had to re-imagine her mental state in a way that was different from her stereotype, and added to the story in a way that the main character did not. I ended up taking a bit of advice from Pixar (yes, the studio that made Toy Story); the best stories come out of forcing two complete opposites to interact with each other (for Toy Story - Buzz and Woody being the new vs. the old).

With a better understanding of who my characters were, I set off to edit what little I'd written of the novel, only to find that there were entire scenes that no longer made sense. As I said earlier, I'm not one to dwell on something I've spent hours working on if it doesn't end up adding to the overall story (a characteristic I surely hope an editor will someday love about me). I've thrown those scenes out, and am going to approach the story from the new understanding of what these characters are like and how they would interact with each other. Throughout this entire process, I've also begun to re-imagine what the ending might be like - again deviating from my initial plan,

So what do I hope you get out of all of this? After all, my blog shouldn't just be me shouting out my struggles and triumphs into a great empty abyss.
If you are a writer: I hope that this inspires you to look at your story with a more critical eye - to realize that parts of your story that you love just may be holding it back from greatness. Realize that your story can be better, but first you need to be willing to let go of what's holding it back.
If you're not a writer: take this example to your own life. Is what you're doing going to be worth it in the end? If you spend hours a day sitting in front of the computer or television, ask yourself if it's worth it. Realize that you can be better, but first you need to be willing to let go of what's holding you back.

If you're an editor: please give me money to write this story for you.
-Ryan

Lack of Apples, NaNoWriMo, and a Rename

Just when I was starting to think I was running out of things in my own life to tell you about, and was about to resort to mindless rantings, a whole bunch of interesting things happened.

Firstly, my plans to plant an apple tree have unfortunately been cancelled, on account of me accidentally killing the apple seeds that I was so excited to plant.
You see, the instructions I had found online (which I will not be linking you to) told me to germinate the seeds in my refrigerator for at least six weeks. Last week would have been five weeks, so I checked up on them only to find that not only had the seeds not sprouted at all, but there were spots of mold forming on the damp paper towel around the seeds. I promptly threw them out and consulted a real live person who told me that I should have put them somewhere warm and in the sun -- you know, the type of place that plants actually grow.

Secondly, I've officially decided to take part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo.org) for the first time. I've signed up on the site and have started tracking my word count. The unfortunate irony, of course, is that I cannot count the words written in my blog, making the time it takes to write this very post a bit wasteful when you consider the difficult goal of 50,000 words of a story in a month. I'd been aware of NaNoWriMo in the past, but this was the first year that I realized that it's an actual organized event and not just a title slapped onto a time of the year.

Lastly, and tied to NaNoWriMo, is news about the novel I'm writing. I've been writing the novel based on my short story titled "The Other Woman," and so I was tentatively using the same title as the short story for the title of the novel. I never wanted to use that title, as the novel is about much more than the main character being "the other woman" (dating a cuckold/married man). For the longest time I couldn't think of one, but didn't stress over it since I'd barely finished the first two chapters.

On the NaNoWriMo forums there is a place for people to get help with the titles of their works, and I was tempted to use this resource since part of NaNoWriMo is putting the title, description, and excerpt of the novel you're writing in your profile. It embarrassed me to have such a simple and inaccurate title.
Instead of using the resource, I started brainstorming while simultaneously using an online thesaurus. I wanted a title that couldn't be thought of in five seconds, and I'd always been fond of titles of classic literature (I had joked a few times of calling my novel "Having Once Been Normal" simply because it takes a simple phrase and makes it sound elegant).

Long story short (arguably), I've thought of a new title for my novel, which, henceforth, shall be called "An Offbeat Affair".

Wish me luck in reaching 50,000 words in a month!
-Ryan

The Directions My First(ish) Novel is Taking

For those of you who haven't been living under my rock, I'm writing a novel based on a short story I wrote for college.

It's still going pretty well, honestly. Despite some stressors and events in my personal life, my mind keeps coming back to the story with more ideas of how to expand it. I'm constantly adding layers to the plot and characters in my mind, and I've been puzzling together how they'll add to the overall story, and in some cases I'm realizing just how much potential this novel has to become something more.

At the risk of regretting it and not being able to live up to promises, I'm going to share details that are very subject to change regarding the direction of the novel right now, with you, my loyal readers.
Again, this is subject to change, and this is a really personal project to me. Pretend I'm naked while you read this so you feel as awkward about it as I do, since I'm exposing a bit of what goes on inside my noggin.

My Brain: It's not empty! It's full of potential!

For starters, I'm mixing genres. I've only drafted up a few chapters (and one is facing a pretty large rewrite), but right now the novel is heading in a sort of comedy-drama direction that feels completely natural to me, since I love dramas and thrillers but I'm a positive and humorous person. It's also a love story as could only be told in the 21st century that sheds light on a subculture that society has yet to acknowledge on a larger scale, and to top it all off, it only feels like the beginning of something bigger.

My primary influences are the Millennium trilogy and everything by Chuck Palahniuk, which should give you an odd idea of what to expect.

I don't expect success. That would be foolish of me. What I expect is to continue to surprise myself. I just happen to be checking off all the boxes that I've had in my head for what makes a good novel great, and I'm excited to see if I can pull it off.

If I don't pull it off, at least you'll have these lovely blogs to read over and over again until you rot away!
-Ryan

Non-Linear Writing

As those of you who read this previous post know, I got the program Scrivener for graduation, which helped me to plan out my next big project; a novel based on my well-received short story.

Well I'm here to tell you, firstly, that the writing is going well! I'm taking this project very seriously, as I've not only been having a lot of fun with it, but I honestly think it might go somewhere (and certain friends of mine have told me the same). Secondly, and mainly, I'm here to tell you how the writing process of this story is very different than any story I've written before, and why that's a good thing.

Thanks to the aforementioned Scrivener program, I've got a rough layout of each chapter of the novel (in the form of digital note cards with brief summaries of that scene or chapter written on them), and the great thing about the program is that it treats the digital note cards as individual text documents. That means I can see my story laid out as note cards, easily find a chapter or scene that I want to write, click on it, and begin writing that chapter or scene. I can rearrange the note cards however I want and their content moves with them, so that when I'm all done, the program will save or print the whole story entirely in the order I've chosen.

When I wrote all of my other stories (including my first few attempts at a novel), I was using Microsoft Word, which doesn't really have any good organizational features, and I hadn't been introduced to (or just hadn't seriously considered) drafting out an outline of my story or using real notecards for organizing my thoughts. I wrote all of my stories the same way a person would read them; in order from beginning to end. I would then go back and edit it multiple times to tie scenes together better etc, but even that was a linear process.

This story is the first time that I've been able to write whichever scene I feel most prepared or interested in writing, regardless of where it takes place in the larger narrative. I once had an idea for a scene while driving, and instead of having to commit the idea to memory or write a note for later writing, I had the luxury of being able to go home and write out that entire scene from beginning to end while it was fresh and exciting in my mind. I've talked to writers who've always written their novels like this, so to them it may not seem like a big deal, but for me it's huge.

I honestly think that learning this new writing process could save the novel from being put on the backburner, as it means that if I come to a scene that I'm not sure about writing yet, I can put it aside and work on another. I've embraced the non-linear process so much that I've been writing in Scrivener, in Google Docs/Drive, and on a small legal pad depending on where I am or what I have access to. Each medium may have a completely different part of the novel than any other at any given time, but in the end I'll be able to put them all together in one place very easily.
It's so weird, but so cool.

In other news, I've been regretting not having my stories accessible on this blog for free, so maybe I'll get around to that soon.
-Ryan