Writing 101: When Plans Go Wrong
crossposted from Lee Edward McIlmoyle's blog
I’m caught in the horns of a dilemma: I’m trying to write a novel to a deadline, and I’ve painted myself into a corner.
Now, how many times have you been in this position: You have time set aside for hours of writing and little or no responsibilities immediately demanding your attention; You have just enough of a premise to go on that you know you have a novel and not a short story on your hands; You’ve projected for how long the novel should take to write, based on past performance with similar material; and you even have the basic structure hammered out, based on some concept you had about how many acts, chapters and minimum word counts you’ve projected for. There is some wiggle room to be had, but you’ve learned that structure can be your friend, especially when you’re writing something complicated to a deadline.
The problem is, the novel you set out to write isn’t getting on the page, because you’ve given yourself cues that aren’t matching up with what your gut tells you to write at the time. Now, this isn’t a dire emergency. You can change the plot or change the structure as you go. But the fact remains, you’ve started rewriting the novel over and over again, and each time you do, it changes comprehensibly. The versions you aren’t happy with are fine, or at least they’re passable. You’re just not convinced they’re going in the right direction.
Belatedly, it occurs to you that you haven’t planned it out as well as you could… or perhaps, you’ve planned it out just a bit too well, and it’s suffocating your muse. What do you do?
As I am actually experiencing just this, I don’t have a hard and fast answer, but I’m going to use this blog to see if I can identify my problem and work around it.
DETAILS
First of all, without giving anything away, I set out to structure my novel, which some of you are aware is called PERPETUAL TUESDAY, by stealing the very basic outlines from three of my (many, many) favourite rock albums: Zenyatta Mondatta, Ghost In The Machine, and Synchronicity, all made in the early 80s by The Police. My advice to you is this: if you’re going to steal something, steal from the best. No point risking your reputation on weak material.
Now, why in the world did I decide to do this mad thing, you might ask. The answer is simple: the muses kept hounding me to do this thing. See, I have been a fan of Synchronicity in particular for decades. I’ve come to love their entire catalogue over the years, but the Synchronicity album is an absolute masterpiece, by anybody’s standards. The thing is, each of the songs tells a great story. The trick is, they’re all wildly different stories with no discernible through line. They’re only gathered together because these are the songs they had, and they just happen to fit really well together.
But my brain likes to play these games from time to time. The game this time was to ask myself, what if Synchronicity had been a concept album, with a discernible plot line tying it all together?
ALBUMS AS NOVELS
See, I have this theory about most concept albums: they don’t really work unless you agree that they do. You can very easily disregard all but the most determined of rock opera plot lines, and just see the albums as a random collection of melodies that were shoehorned together into one organic form and assigned a plot almost arbitrarily. Sometimes, the decision to include one song or another makes or breaks the whole concept, even if, like on the Duke album by Genesis, you have half a concept album in the form of a suite that has been broken up and distributed amongst the rest of the songs almost haphazardly, and thus, you’ve admitted from the outset that some of these songs are NOT part of the concept… or at least, they might not be so by design.
You see, because the thing about the Duke album is, even the non-suite songs fit the theme beautifully, thus enriching and broadening what might have been a pretty straightforward plot with some rich asides, which any non-conventional writer will tell you makes for a better (if less linear) novel. And I DO see albums and novels as similar creatures, even if they are entirely different in depth and breadth. Format is just a way of arranging ideas, even if they are part of different disciplines. Having written both novels and albums, I see parallels that some others probably don’t, or at least, not readily.
So the point I’m trying to make is, Synchronicity could very well be a novel in its own right, and not just a collection of short stories. It was up to the listener to try to piece it all together, from the clues in the lyrics.
Now, I’m not a big lyric trivia guy. I write some clever lyrics myself sometimes, but I don’t even pretend to be able to understand half of the lyrics to some of my favourite albums. I just don’t have the necessary frame of reference to be able to interpret all of those phrases and sub-references. And really, that’s how it is in novels, too. No matter how careful you are, you’re going to put something in there that is really only relevant to you and a few others.
And that is as it should be. Your editor might ask you to remove that bit, and they may have a very good explanation for why you should, but if you know that story hinges on certain arcane points that won’t be immediately obvious to your audience, then fight for these elements, because they’re what makes your novel special. Being too obvious and linear may make your novel easier to understand, but, in much the same way as great concept albums are often non-linear in procession, so too are great and memorable novels. The challenge of coming to fully understand a novel makes it more rewarding than a novel that spoon feeds you every plot point.
THE PRICE OF OATS
Now, where does that leave me? Ah yes, with three albums’ worth of ideas strapped together to form the spine of an unwritten novel. I’ll explain. See, first off, the novel I’m writing is a direct sequel to TERMINAL MONDAY, a novel I wrote years ago (which not a lot of people have read in its entirety, incidentally), about a guy who isn’t all right in the head. The thing is, his story keeps growing inside of my head, and I figured it was time to have another look in to see if he’s gotten his life together yet.
I wrote the first act to a previous novel, which was intended as an alternate view of how things might have gone for him, called THE APPROXIMATE DISTANCE TO LIMBO, but that novel isn’t finished, because the second act is a bitch and hasn’t come clear for me yet. It’s threatening to be like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, with a strong first half and a weaker second half, so I’ve taken time away from it to contemplate its mystery and see if I can’t come up with a satisfying ending for it.
But in the here and now, I have this novel that wants to be too many things at once. That’s not as bad as it sounds, because that’s more or less what Terminal Monday was. The thing is, I didn’t know that when I was writing it. I am all too aware of how weird that novel was, and I am consciously trying to repeat some variation on that formula, which I am here to tell you is not easy to do. How do you repeat something like that and not have it suck? The answer I came up with is, you don’t. You find a new, equally challenging formula, and introduce your cast to it.
WHY THREE ALBUMS?
So the thing is, Terminal Monday was a three act novel, though the acts weren’t precisely stated as such. I’m pretty sure someone could just as easily break it down into five parts if they wanted to. At one point, I had it down as four. So that’s what I know. But in order to write a novel in a similar vein, I realized I needed to give myself room to breathe, because that’s what Terminal Monday did. It took four months over a period of three years to write the first draft, which endured four years of rewrites and edits before I was satisfied (and there are, as it turns out, spelling mistakes anyway. *sigh*). If I was going to repeat that stunt, I was going to have to give myself plenty of room.
Now, the idea of writing a novel around the basic plot points of Synchronicity had been with me for a few years, but when I decided to write Perpetual Tuesday, I immediately surmised that I would need more material to work with than one eleven-track album could supply. Fortunately, I have the entire Police discography to draw from, and that’s when I realized, it would be just as valid to assume that the previous two albums were also part of the same story cycle. After all, it was on Zenyatta Mondatta that the Police started to stray from their strictly ska formula, though it was still in place at the time. I liken it to their first awakening as an art rock band, as opposed to a straight pop outfit. And of course, it’s no stretch to see Ghost In The Machine as being the spiritual predecessor to Synchronicity, so that was an easy sell. The challenge became, how do I strip these three albums bare and make them the goal posts for a novel about a mad novelist and his relationships?
ANSWER?
The answer hasn’t been so easy. For one thing, I’d hoped and planned to have the first draft done before Christmas. That’s not going to happen now. I got stuck and have to rewrite my way back to some semblance of the original novel I set out to write, instead of the novel I plan to follow it with. The hassle now is, the plot I outlined in my blurb has turned over too quickly. I’m in no danger of running out of material, I assure you. But what I have done is made the pacing a bit too different from what I remember the first novel being. It has to breathe, and so far, that’s what this book hasn’t done. It’s been rushing around to get to the plot I set out to explore, and I fear I may have to start over yet again, only more deliberately, with a fully fleshed out plot line to keep me from rushing or going astray. The reason I haven’t done this yet is, I have a cardinal rule about plot outlines, and that is: Don’t plan a novel too thoroughly, or you’ll strangle the life out of it.
But nevertheless, I have one of two options: rush like mad in the current direction and see where it gets me, or go back to the beginning, plot the sucker out at least in rough form, and then start over with the outline as my guide.
CONCLUSION
It occurs to me that there are benefits to both approaches, so I might actually attempt to do both at once, using the haphazard approach to inform the more deliberate approach I intend to take when I get the plot line formalized. But it requires that I abandon all hope of meeting my deadline. And it may also require that I accept that I’m going to lose the NaNoWriMo challenge this year. I could probably still reach the goal line if I start writing like mad now and keep going until Saturday night. I’ve done it before and hit the mark, and after all, it IS just a first (or third, really) draft. I can afford to get it wrong if I’ve already accepted that I’m going to have to do it all over again. It’s just a decision about whether I really want to deliberately rewrite fifty thousand words’ worth of novel.
And there you have it. That’s what happens when a plot gets away from you because you haven’t planned it out as carefully as you know it needs. Let that be a lesson to you.
© 2013 Lee Edward McIlmoyle
I’m caught in the horns of a dilemma: I’m trying to write a novel to a deadline, and I’ve painted myself into a corner.
Now, how many times have you been in this position: You have time set aside for hours of writing and little or no responsibilities immediately demanding your attention; You have just enough of a premise to go on that you know you have a novel and not a short story on your hands; You’ve projected for how long the novel should take to write, based on past performance with similar material; and you even have the basic structure hammered out, based on some concept you had about how many acts, chapters and minimum word counts you’ve projected for. There is some wiggle room to be had, but you’ve learned that structure can be your friend, especially when you’re writing something complicated to a deadline.
The problem is, the novel you set out to write isn’t getting on the page, because you’ve given yourself cues that aren’t matching up with what your gut tells you to write at the time. Now, this isn’t a dire emergency. You can change the plot or change the structure as you go. But the fact remains, you’ve started rewriting the novel over and over again, and each time you do, it changes comprehensibly. The versions you aren’t happy with are fine, or at least they’re passable. You’re just not convinced they’re going in the right direction.
Belatedly, it occurs to you that you haven’t planned it out as well as you could… or perhaps, you’ve planned it out just a bit too well, and it’s suffocating your muse. What do you do?
As I am actually experiencing just this, I don’t have a hard and fast answer, but I’m going to use this blog to see if I can identify my problem and work around it.
DETAILS
First of all, without giving anything away, I set out to structure my novel, which some of you are aware is called PERPETUAL TUESDAY, by stealing the very basic outlines from three of my (many, many) favourite rock albums: Zenyatta Mondatta, Ghost In The Machine, and Synchronicity, all made in the early 80s by The Police. My advice to you is this: if you’re going to steal something, steal from the best. No point risking your reputation on weak material.
Now, why in the world did I decide to do this mad thing, you might ask. The answer is simple: the muses kept hounding me to do this thing. See, I have been a fan of Synchronicity in particular for decades. I’ve come to love their entire catalogue over the years, but the Synchronicity album is an absolute masterpiece, by anybody’s standards. The thing is, each of the songs tells a great story. The trick is, they’re all wildly different stories with no discernible through line. They’re only gathered together because these are the songs they had, and they just happen to fit really well together.
But my brain likes to play these games from time to time. The game this time was to ask myself, what if Synchronicity had been a concept album, with a discernible plot line tying it all together?
ALBUMS AS NOVELS
See, I have this theory about most concept albums: they don’t really work unless you agree that they do. You can very easily disregard all but the most determined of rock opera plot lines, and just see the albums as a random collection of melodies that were shoehorned together into one organic form and assigned a plot almost arbitrarily. Sometimes, the decision to include one song or another makes or breaks the whole concept, even if, like on the Duke album by Genesis, you have half a concept album in the form of a suite that has been broken up and distributed amongst the rest of the songs almost haphazardly, and thus, you’ve admitted from the outset that some of these songs are NOT part of the concept… or at least, they might not be so by design.
You see, because the thing about the Duke album is, even the non-suite songs fit the theme beautifully, thus enriching and broadening what might have been a pretty straightforward plot with some rich asides, which any non-conventional writer will tell you makes for a better (if less linear) novel. And I DO see albums and novels as similar creatures, even if they are entirely different in depth and breadth. Format is just a way of arranging ideas, even if they are part of different disciplines. Having written both novels and albums, I see parallels that some others probably don’t, or at least, not readily.
So the point I’m trying to make is, Synchronicity could very well be a novel in its own right, and not just a collection of short stories. It was up to the listener to try to piece it all together, from the clues in the lyrics.
Now, I’m not a big lyric trivia guy. I write some clever lyrics myself sometimes, but I don’t even pretend to be able to understand half of the lyrics to some of my favourite albums. I just don’t have the necessary frame of reference to be able to interpret all of those phrases and sub-references. And really, that’s how it is in novels, too. No matter how careful you are, you’re going to put something in there that is really only relevant to you and a few others.
And that is as it should be. Your editor might ask you to remove that bit, and they may have a very good explanation for why you should, but if you know that story hinges on certain arcane points that won’t be immediately obvious to your audience, then fight for these elements, because they’re what makes your novel special. Being too obvious and linear may make your novel easier to understand, but, in much the same way as great concept albums are often non-linear in procession, so too are great and memorable novels. The challenge of coming to fully understand a novel makes it more rewarding than a novel that spoon feeds you every plot point.
THE PRICE OF OATS
Now, where does that leave me? Ah yes, with three albums’ worth of ideas strapped together to form the spine of an unwritten novel. I’ll explain. See, first off, the novel I’m writing is a direct sequel to TERMINAL MONDAY, a novel I wrote years ago (which not a lot of people have read in its entirety, incidentally), about a guy who isn’t all right in the head. The thing is, his story keeps growing inside of my head, and I figured it was time to have another look in to see if he’s gotten his life together yet.
I wrote the first act to a previous novel, which was intended as an alternate view of how things might have gone for him, called THE APPROXIMATE DISTANCE TO LIMBO, but that novel isn’t finished, because the second act is a bitch and hasn’t come clear for me yet. It’s threatening to be like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, with a strong first half and a weaker second half, so I’ve taken time away from it to contemplate its mystery and see if I can’t come up with a satisfying ending for it.
But in the here and now, I have this novel that wants to be too many things at once. That’s not as bad as it sounds, because that’s more or less what Terminal Monday was. The thing is, I didn’t know that when I was writing it. I am all too aware of how weird that novel was, and I am consciously trying to repeat some variation on that formula, which I am here to tell you is not easy to do. How do you repeat something like that and not have it suck? The answer I came up with is, you don’t. You find a new, equally challenging formula, and introduce your cast to it.
WHY THREE ALBUMS?
So the thing is, Terminal Monday was a three act novel, though the acts weren’t precisely stated as such. I’m pretty sure someone could just as easily break it down into five parts if they wanted to. At one point, I had it down as four. So that’s what I know. But in order to write a novel in a similar vein, I realized I needed to give myself room to breathe, because that’s what Terminal Monday did. It took four months over a period of three years to write the first draft, which endured four years of rewrites and edits before I was satisfied (and there are, as it turns out, spelling mistakes anyway. *sigh*). If I was going to repeat that stunt, I was going to have to give myself plenty of room.
Now, the idea of writing a novel around the basic plot points of Synchronicity had been with me for a few years, but when I decided to write Perpetual Tuesday, I immediately surmised that I would need more material to work with than one eleven-track album could supply. Fortunately, I have the entire Police discography to draw from, and that’s when I realized, it would be just as valid to assume that the previous two albums were also part of the same story cycle. After all, it was on Zenyatta Mondatta that the Police started to stray from their strictly ska formula, though it was still in place at the time. I liken it to their first awakening as an art rock band, as opposed to a straight pop outfit. And of course, it’s no stretch to see Ghost In The Machine as being the spiritual predecessor to Synchronicity, so that was an easy sell. The challenge became, how do I strip these three albums bare and make them the goal posts for a novel about a mad novelist and his relationships?
ANSWER?
The answer hasn’t been so easy. For one thing, I’d hoped and planned to have the first draft done before Christmas. That’s not going to happen now. I got stuck and have to rewrite my way back to some semblance of the original novel I set out to write, instead of the novel I plan to follow it with. The hassle now is, the plot I outlined in my blurb has turned over too quickly. I’m in no danger of running out of material, I assure you. But what I have done is made the pacing a bit too different from what I remember the first novel being. It has to breathe, and so far, that’s what this book hasn’t done. It’s been rushing around to get to the plot I set out to explore, and I fear I may have to start over yet again, only more deliberately, with a fully fleshed out plot line to keep me from rushing or going astray. The reason I haven’t done this yet is, I have a cardinal rule about plot outlines, and that is: Don’t plan a novel too thoroughly, or you’ll strangle the life out of it.
But nevertheless, I have one of two options: rush like mad in the current direction and see where it gets me, or go back to the beginning, plot the sucker out at least in rough form, and then start over with the outline as my guide.
CONCLUSION
It occurs to me that there are benefits to both approaches, so I might actually attempt to do both at once, using the haphazard approach to inform the more deliberate approach I intend to take when I get the plot line formalized. But it requires that I abandon all hope of meeting my deadline. And it may also require that I accept that I’m going to lose the NaNoWriMo challenge this year. I could probably still reach the goal line if I start writing like mad now and keep going until Saturday night. I’ve done it before and hit the mark, and after all, it IS just a first (or third, really) draft. I can afford to get it wrong if I’ve already accepted that I’m going to have to do it all over again. It’s just a decision about whether I really want to deliberately rewrite fifty thousand words’ worth of novel.
And there you have it. That’s what happens when a plot gets away from you because you haven’t planned it out as carefully as you know it needs. Let that be a lesson to you.
© 2013 Lee Edward McIlmoyle