LittleWyvern.com

It is 6:15 a.m., the sun is rising, and in a few hours it will be my bedtime.

I am on a backwards schedule once again, currently following a routine that has me sleeping from 9am through 5pm. It is strange, sure, but overall I have been finding it unexpectedly productive. The daytime is too full of random distractions. I might think about working but instead watch tv, go to the pool, skip over to the casino, or any one of a dozen other things. Even my computer is a temptation, the internet calling to me like a Siren to Ulysses.

But in the middle of the night, once the normal world has gone to sleep, my universe becomes much more boring. It is too dark and cold to go to the pool, infomercials play out upon every channel, and just about everything outside of my apartment is closed down. Really, there isn’t much to do but sit in my room and write.

At the moment that suits me just fine.

Recently I have managed to cautiously reignite the failing coals of my personal motivation and actually started to do some writing. In the past two nights I have managed to spit out about two thousand words of plot narrative and outlines. I am determined to write a novel before settling into my next real job – though Novelist occasionally can be a real job – and I am just as strongly determined that the novel not completely suck. The writing is actually pretty easy (see: Purple Elephants). The Not Sucking is staggeringly difficult (see: Purple Elephants).

As part of my efforts I have been listening to a podcast series called Writers Talking. The podcast is a series of 18 1-hour discussions with various professional independent fiction writers. Each show focuses on a different aspect of writing. For example, yesterday at the gym I listened to an hour-long debate about Point of View. I never took any creative writing classes – in fact I made a point of avoiding all English classes in college – so for the most part I am actually learning quite a bit from the podcasts. Hopefully that will be reflected in my own writing.

And speaking of my writing, this time around I am investing a lot of time into planning. My biggest takeaway from the Purple Elephant disaster is that it is impossible to control a story if you write it on the fly. What happened last November is that I started typing with a beginning and an end firmly in mind, but had no idea what would go into the middle. So I started typing at Point A and then followed it logically to Point B. Point B led naturally to Point C and then on to Point D. After a while my story was running wildly in a direction that I had never expected. Instead of ending up where I had planned the story had spun so completely out of control that I was basically forced to just throw a stupid, but somewhat logical ending onto the pile. The final result was completely pointless. It was nothing but a series of scenes – which makes sense because that was how it was conceived.

This time around I am determined to avoid that pitfall. It is especially important because in any good novel – and mine in particular – the overall message is the most important thing. The plot is merely a means of conveying that message in an entertaining way. The various themes of the novel must persist throughout the story-telling and because of that the story must be very deliberately constructed.

This has already been problematic.

I don’t want to give too much away here, but the particular conceit of the tentatively titled Fallen Bridges is that two boys go out onto a bridge one night. One of them ends up dead. The surviving boy then recounts the events that led up to the night on the bridge… and what exactly happened once they got there.

In a way it could be thought of as a mystery, but in my mind it is merely a story with a predetermined ending. A big part of the experience here is knowing from the beginning that one of these two boys is going to die in a specific place at a specific time. The only questions to be answered are the How and the Why. In discovering those answers I intend to present my message to the reader.

To do that effectively I must first solve the following problem:

I have a fixed Point A and a fixed Point Z (which are somewhat bizarrely the exact same event) and I need to craft a series of events that:

1) get the reader from A to Z
2) never lose hold of the overall message
3) are entertaining and exciting to follow

The task is impossible for me to perform on the fly, but with a lot of planning it will hopefully prove to be only nearly impossible. The good news, though, is that from 3am to 9am there isn’t a whole lot else for me to do.