Ain't No Grave: Day 10

This week has exhausted me.  After last week's work collapse, I felt like I had to play catch-up in order to keep up with my writing goal for NaNoWriMo.  Not only did I have to put in my six daily pages, I had to write an additional six pages Monday through Thursday in order to make up for the lost pages.

That doesn't sound too bad when you work out the numbers on paper, but actually getting it done in real life is another story.  I hate write first drafts.  Lord, I don't know how many times I've told you guys that.  Sometimes, I can get ten pages out in a flash.  The words flow so naturally.  Other times, I can barely write a paragraph.  It's frustrating.

So imagine my frustration when I had to write thirty pages yesterday and couldn't bring myself to write until late in the evening!  I was so dead tired that I had AC/DC's It's A Long Way To The Top playing on repeat.  Bon Scott's bagpipes solo was like a defibrillator jump-starting me for at least ten minutes.

Finally, this morning, I said to hell with it.  My NaNoWriMo schedule has been dented, and I'm not going to be able to catch up.  That's not to say that I've given up on NaNoWriMo or Ain't No Grave or anything like that.  Rather, I've given up on stressing out over the pages that pile up.  I'm just going to accept the fact that I tripped and won't be able to sprint my way out of this.

The alternative is to constantly deprive myself of sleep, and the result is sloppy, incoherent writing that I'll have to redo anyways.  It's not worth the agony.

Ain't No Grave: Day 5

Setbacks.

Since the start of NaNoWriMo on Thursday, I got fourteen pages down for Ain't No Grave.  And now, those fourteen pages don't mean shit.  I looked over what ideas I had for the plot and didn't like what I saw.

Ain't No Grave was originally supposed to be the opposite of the zombie road trip we've seen lately.  It was supposed to go back to the idea of survivors barricaded in a single place.  Two things worked against this.  First, the plot had the refuge overrun by marauders from a nearby town, and I felt like it would be kind of a let down.  It didn't seem to have enough oomph even when it popped in my head.

The second reason was that the road trip appeals to me.  It's uncertain, episodic, and more importantly allows the reader to see different parts of the society being portrayed.  By having the story set in a single location, I have to try and force various facets of the apocalyptic world to come to the survivors.  The world doesn't conveniently move for one man.  The answer is to have the survivors move for the world.  Do I feel like a poser?  Yes, a little bit, but at least I'm a logical poser.

Another thing I didn't like was the fact that the survivors were a rather large group - about fifty people - and not all of them were going to be introduced as even minor characters.  They were going to be like those people you see in the background on TV, people with no importance whatsoever, people with less value than red shirts on a Star Trek episode.

If certain characters serve no real purpose, then the writer ought to get rid of them.  And so I've rethought Ain't No Grave to focus on three core characters: Donny Moran, Megan Greer, and Allen Freeman.  Donny begins the story alone a month after the apocalypse until he finds Allen, an abandoned boy.  After their hideout is overrun by zombies, they escape to a local farm where they find a lone survivor, Megan, and convince her that she's not safe and would be better off joining them.

That's really all I've got at the moment.  If it seems rough and hastily put together, well, that's because I jotted notes for it an hour ago.  Without coffee.

Yes, it sucks that I've lost a few days of NaNoWriMo and fourteen pages, but setbacks happen in writing.  They've happened to me.  They'll happen to you.  Deal with it.  Honestly, I never had any delusions that I'd reach the 50,000-word goal for NaNoWriMo, but if I can get to at least 40,000 words, that's still quite a feat to me.

Shit's Fucked Up

For a while now, I've been reading Chuck Wendig's novel Double Dead, which is about a vampire trying to survive the zombie apocalypse.  If you haven't read it, get a copy.  Wendig doesn't hold back in his writing.  The vampire, Coburn, is an asshole, comparing his human charges to cattle and calling them his herd.

But the reason I'm talking about Double Dead is because the novel is, I think, the best example of one of Kurt Vonnegut's rules.  "Be a sadist.  No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order to see what they are made of."

Last night, as I put in my six pages for Ain't No Grave, I feared that I was losing interest in the story.  If you've been keeping up with my blog, you know that boredom means the death of any story I work on.  So I need to follow Wendig's example and constantly ask myself how I can make the situation worse for my characters.  After all, they, too, are in the zombie apocalypse (minus the vampire).

I just wanted to make that little observation.  Maybe I'm just thinking out loud.  I leave you now with an excerpt from Double Dead in which Coburn sums up his dilemma quite nicely.

"I've been through some shit over the last several nights," he said, lips twisted sneer, fangs out.  "Woke up.  Ate a deer.  Found myself in the zombie apocalypse.  Fell off a building.  Got chewed up by some zombie bitch in an ugly bathrobe.  Got shot by an old man and then taken in by his sickly daughter.  Got chewed up again by the same bitch-in-a-bathrobe except now said bitch is some kind of undead demon, then got shot by a totally different old man - those old men sure love their rifles - before I got burned up by the sun and had to eat my way out of a morbidly obese cannibal queen.  But you know what, Ginger?  This [being abandoned] hurts worst of all."

Ain't No Grave: Day 2

Ah, NaNoWriMo.  National Novel Writing Month.  That magical time of year when a writer either gets a novel off the ground or breaks something in the process.  Regardless of what genre or theme you write, the central rule of NaNoWriMo is to write at least 50,000 words between midnight starting November 1st and midnight ending November 30th.

With Eat the Rich abandoned, I decided to return to zombie fiction with Ain't No Grave, a story that I tried writing earlier this year.  Unlike the earlier version, which was about kids raising themselves in a zombie apocalypse, this one is about survivors trying to fortify and settle in an abandoned town in Southern California.

I picked Ain't No Grave for a few reasons.  Halloween just ended (I hope you all had fun gorging on candy, liquor, and candy-flavored liquor).  Secondly, I've always kept alive the ambition to do a zombie story, even after it didn't work out the first time.  And finally, come on, listen to Johnny Cash sing Ain't No Grave and you can almost imagine zombies shuffling around.  I just had to write a story with that title.

Just as I did with Eat the Rich, I'm chronicling my progress with Ain't No Grave, and I hope I can reach the 50,000-word limit for NaNoWriMo, or at least get pretty damn close to it.

Eat the Rich: Day 38

It's happened before.  It'll probably happen again.  It happened today.  I've lost my mojo.

When I started Eat the Rich, I thought it was great getting in three pages a day (I'm very proud of that pace), and having a hundred pages in about a month, and this and that.  It was a wonderful high.  And taking time off this weekend, I thought I'd come back to the story typing and picking like a motherfucker.

That didn't happen.

I thought, "Twenty pages is good.  Fifty pages is great.  A hundred pages, this thing could really take off."  Hell, I thought that reaching the hundredth page would put me in the clear for sure.  It didn't.  I found myself struggling to get the story across.  Those three pages came out sounding forced.  And then, this morning, I thought how the story was boring me.

I feel bad about this.  I really do.  I've got friends who were really hoping to read this.  But if Eat the Rich bores me, it'll bore the reader too.  Always trust that rule: if you're bored, the readers will notice it and feel the same way.

Now, granted, it's a month of my time gone, but it could have been worse.  It could have been a few years.  When a story doesn't work, I step back and think of the pros and cons, and hopefully learn something.

Pros.  I know that I can work very diligently.  Just about every day, I'd tell myself that I'd meet my three-page quota come Hell or high water.  For the most part, this was done.  Early on, I committed to two pages a day, but then I upped the dosage.  So as far as getting the work done, I feel very good about that.

Cons.  I strayed too far from the premise of cannibalistic celebrities.  That was a cool idea to me, but after the first big murder scene around eighty or ninety pages in, the story shifted from cannibalism to murder and covering up that murder.  I don't like murder stories.  I don't think they're bad.  I just don't find them interesting.  Again, boredom is infectious.

Once again, I'm proud that I got through a hundred pages of Eat the Rich considering that I was making it up as I went along, but I think I need to try something else.

We'll see what happens.

Eat the Rich: Day 35

I'm out of town this weekend visiting friends in Thousand Oaks.  Naturally, I brought my computer with me because I thought I'd be able to get in a few pages.  Wrong.  This is not a weekend for writing.  Instead, it's a weekend to refill my well of anger.

I checked in at the hotel yesterday afternoon.  It was a comfy $50 a night.  Unfortunately, the reason it was so crappy was because it was such a dump.  My non-smoking room had clearly been smoked in; there were cigarette burns on the bed.  Some of the lights didn't work, and one of the plumbing fixtures was loose and ready to fall off the wall.  It looked like a place rented out to film amateur porn for the internet.

Luckily, I've got a friend in Camarillo who's kind enough to let me crash at his place for the weekend.

Now, I'm hanging out at a Starbucks (yes, a Starbucks) trying to get in some writing while my friend is out running errands.  Some of my friends are proud hipsters, so I figured I'd join the club.  Sipping coffee in a Starbucks, in one of those antique-looking chairs, while typing away at my novel.  That's hipster, right?  That's in no way corporate.  Right?  Right?!

The writing isn't getting done today.  Starbucks is a magnet attracting annoying people, and by that, I mean high school students, two of which sat across from me chatting and rating which of their classmates are hot.

One of them said, "My baby said hi to me."  Her friend said, "Awww, I want a baby!"  I'm hoping their talking about boyfriends rather than skanking it up and getting preggo.

There are other annoying people, but those two have taken the cake so far.  So, no, the writing is not getting done today, not when I'm in the middle of the Annoying Zoo surrounded by so many exhibits of stupidity.  It makes me feel normal.

Besides, after working hard on Eat the Rich for the last month, getting to a hundred pages, I think I need a few days to unwind and let myself reset.

But come Monday when I'm back at work, my well of anger will be refilled thanks to the patrons of Starbucks.

Truby's Plot: The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

In this analysis of Truby's plot in relation to Full Metal Jacket, we've covered how to story connects to each of the seven basic elements of story.  Now we move on to the extra steps.  This can be a bit murky because a writer is free to use or discard any or all of these steps.  I certainly don't expect Full Metal Jacket to use all of them.

If you look at Truby's plot points in a list, the first item is self-revelation, desire, and need all packed together.  This might seem repetitive since we've gone over them already in previous posts.  You're right.  It is.

The point of putting these three things together at the very beginning isn't to learn something new about how the story will evolve.  It's to give the writer a target to aim for.  Without that goal, you'll wander around blindly.  For me, putting these elements down on a single note card gives me a convenient touchstone that I can quickly glance at when I need to remind myself what every other plot point is trying to get to.