CYD 2010: Author Advice with Aliette de Bodard
WELCOME TO DAY TWENTY-FOUR OF THE COMPLETE YOUR DRAFT CHALLENGE!
Today's author is someone I've been following on her website for about a year. The premise of her first novel fascinated me (it's out now, which means you can read it too!). She lives in Paris, which is basically my Valhalla, and is a lover of languages and cultures. Also, she writes amazing short stories too! It was love at first read, so I want all of you to go out and read her free fiction. Once you're hooked, get her novel too.
Thanks, Aliette de Bodard, for helping a complete stalker stranger with her mad, mad plan. Can't wait to read 'Harbinger' (out in January in the USA)!
First drafts, molasses and momentum
When it comes to novel first drafts, my number #1 rule is "write regularly, and don't stop".
It's always tempting to stop: novels are long endeavours, and adding a few paragraphs or even one scene--insignificant in the scheme of things--can make you feel as though you've barely made any progress. Sometimes, especially during the Terrible Middles (25% to 75% of the book, in my experience), it can seem as though you're writing through molasses, and you've lost sight of where this was going--if it was going anywhere at all.
I made the mistake once, when working on a multi-POV alt-history book: I listened to the voices and stopped. In fact, I didn't write anything on the book for almost a whole month.
When it was time to come back to it--ouch.
See, the first thing is that there's such a thing as a writing groove for me. I might be typing for only a quarter hour or so every day; producing only half a scene or even less; but the cumulated effect of writing a little, and writing a little regularly (perhaps not every day, but every two days), is definitely measurable. It's partly in terms of writing quality (like anything, if you don't practise, you get worse), but most importantly it's in terms of mindset. When I write a little regularly, writing becomes a natural thing, and--best of all--the voices fall silent. Chances are, you know which voices I'm talking about: they're the incessant chatter in your mind delighting in pointing out you're no good at writing, that the draft is a
failure, and so on and so forth. Those voices are always there; but when writing is a matter of habit, it becomes easier to just plod on, regardless of the chatter inside my brain.
And you want to plod on: one rule of writing that took me a heck of a long time to learn is that there is absolutely NO correlation between the quality of what you're writing and how you feel about it. There'll be time enough later to sort out the dross from the diamonds. That's
what revisions are for. When I'm writing a novel, the important thing is to put the words on the paper, and to wrap up the plot. Finetuning is an editing process, and it requires a wholly different subset of my brain--that's why I don't worry about that when writing a first draft.
The other effect of stopping? It's a memory problem. Especially with complex novels, it's easy to forget who is doing what, and why they're doing it. If you stop, it's going to be even worse. When I came back to my draft, I had no idea why my characters were trying to infiltrate
a heavily-defended complex, or how they'd started bickering (let alone what time of the day it was, or when was the last meal they'd consumed). I ended up rereading the entire book up to then (and taking copious notes). It took me a lot of time--and that was time I could have spent writing.
So--momentum. Gather it, keep it, and whatever you do, don't let it dissipate. Happy writing!
There's a slight caveat to this, which I'm putting in an afternote. If I feel really, really uncomfortable writing the novel, and it doesn't seem to get any better, it might be because my subconscious is trying to tell me I screwed up (typical causes for me are: plot that makes no sense, or cardboard character). It's up to you, first, to distinguish this from the vague nameless dread of screwing up everything (which is pretty standard for novelists, as far as I'm aware of); and, second, to decide what you want to do about it. I like clean first drafts, so I prefer to stop and sort a character out rather than count on rewrites. You might be the kind of person who prefers to keep the momentum, and spend more time on revisions.
Aliette's bio:
Aliette de Bodard is a writer of fantasy and science fiction (and the very occasional horror piece), Campbell Award Finalist, and Writers of the Future Winner.
Her debut novel, Servant of the Underworld, an Aztec mystery-fantasy, is out now from Angry Robot (UK/Australia) and forthcoming September 2010 (US/Rest of the World).
Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of venues, such as Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction.
She lives in Paris, France, in a flat with more computers than she really needs, and uses her spare time to indulge in her love of mythology and history.
As a half-French, half-Vietnamese, Aliette has a strong interest in non-Western cultures, particularly the Aztecs and Ancient China, and will gladly use any excuse to shoehorn those into her short or long fiction.
A more extensive biography is available here, and a list of her fiction can be found here.
Today's author is someone I've been following on her website for about a year. The premise of her first novel fascinated me (it's out now, which means you can read it too!). She lives in Paris, which is basically my Valhalla, and is a lover of languages and cultures. Also, she writes amazing short stories too! It was love at first read, so I want all of you to go out and read her free fiction. Once you're hooked, get her novel too.
Thanks, Aliette de Bodard, for helping a complete stalker stranger with her mad, mad plan. Can't wait to read 'Harbinger' (out in January in the USA)!
First drafts, molasses and momentum
When it comes to novel first drafts, my number #1 rule is "write regularly, and don't stop".
It's always tempting to stop: novels are long endeavours, and adding a few paragraphs or even one scene--insignificant in the scheme of things--can make you feel as though you've barely made any progress. Sometimes, especially during the Terrible Middles (25% to 75% of the book, in my experience), it can seem as though you're writing through molasses, and you've lost sight of where this was going--if it was going anywhere at all.
I made the mistake once, when working on a multi-POV alt-history book: I listened to the voices and stopped. In fact, I didn't write anything on the book for almost a whole month.
When it was time to come back to it--ouch.
See, the first thing is that there's such a thing as a writing groove for me. I might be typing for only a quarter hour or so every day; producing only half a scene or even less; but the cumulated effect of writing a little, and writing a little regularly (perhaps not every day, but every two days), is definitely measurable. It's partly in terms of writing quality (like anything, if you don't practise, you get worse), but most importantly it's in terms of mindset. When I write a little regularly, writing becomes a natural thing, and--best of all--the voices fall silent. Chances are, you know which voices I'm talking about: they're the incessant chatter in your mind delighting in pointing out you're no good at writing, that the draft is a
failure, and so on and so forth. Those voices are always there; but when writing is a matter of habit, it becomes easier to just plod on, regardless of the chatter inside my brain.
And you want to plod on: one rule of writing that took me a heck of a long time to learn is that there is absolutely NO correlation between the quality of what you're writing and how you feel about it. There'll be time enough later to sort out the dross from the diamonds. That's
what revisions are for. When I'm writing a novel, the important thing is to put the words on the paper, and to wrap up the plot. Finetuning is an editing process, and it requires a wholly different subset of my brain--that's why I don't worry about that when writing a first draft.
The other effect of stopping? It's a memory problem. Especially with complex novels, it's easy to forget who is doing what, and why they're doing it. If you stop, it's going to be even worse. When I came back to my draft, I had no idea why my characters were trying to infiltrate
a heavily-defended complex, or how they'd started bickering (let alone what time of the day it was, or when was the last meal they'd consumed). I ended up rereading the entire book up to then (and taking copious notes). It took me a lot of time--and that was time I could have spent writing.
So--momentum. Gather it, keep it, and whatever you do, don't let it dissipate. Happy writing!
There's a slight caveat to this, which I'm putting in an afternote. If I feel really, really uncomfortable writing the novel, and it doesn't seem to get any better, it might be because my subconscious is trying to tell me I screwed up (typical causes for me are: plot that makes no sense, or cardboard character). It's up to you, first, to distinguish this from the vague nameless dread of screwing up everything (which is pretty standard for novelists, as far as I'm aware of); and, second, to decide what you want to do about it. I like clean first drafts, so I prefer to stop and sort a character out rather than count on rewrites. You might be the kind of person who prefers to keep the momentum, and spend more time on revisions.
Aliette's bio:
Aliette de Bodard is a writer of fantasy and science fiction (and the very occasional horror piece), Campbell Award Finalist, and Writers of the Future Winner.
Her debut novel, Servant of the Underworld, an Aztec mystery-fantasy, is out now from Angry Robot (UK/Australia) and forthcoming September 2010 (US/Rest of the World).
Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of venues, such as Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction.
She lives in Paris, France, in a flat with more computers than she really needs, and uses her spare time to indulge in her love of mythology and history.
As a half-French, half-Vietnamese, Aliette has a strong interest in non-Western cultures, particularly the Aztecs and Ancient China, and will gladly use any excuse to shoehorn those into her short or long fiction.
A more extensive biography is available here, and a list of her fiction can be found here.