(And no, it’s not just the fact that I’m posting and in the morning. Shut up, wretches! No comments from the peanut gallery. WHO threw that orange?)
Back when we were doing a short story a week for my writers’ group, I used to outline the short stories extensively before hand. What I found when I don’t do that is that I hit the deadline and stare in angst at the paper, wondering what this story is going to be.
So, if I want to do a short story a week, I plot it before hand. (And no, I haven’t done a short story a week lately. Though I might, once Witchfinder is done, should I decide it’s not worth it doing another novel in installments – and btw, I think I need to make the installments longer, because I get into it, start going full throttle and it’s hard to pull away and then get into it again.)
If I’m just hit with “Sarah can you do a short story on?” and they give me the theme, the sheer panic of having to write something in two hours usually keeps me running towards the goal. (It is perhaps sad that most of my BEST short stories were written this way.)
As a random, tangentially related observation (I had too much caffeine and I haven’t slept enough so right now I’m sort of like a cat with ADHD.) about fifty percent of my short stories are not actually short stories, but first chapters. I work up till the world build is clear, then chop. For the record, I wasn’t aware of it when I was doing it and also in retrospect, it was the ticker in my head doing it. I knew that anything over six thousand words would be hellish to sell, so I would have a ticker going tick, tick, tick, close to six thousand, CHOP.
Now the two stories I’ve written without length constraints both ended up around 11k words. That might be my natural length and I’m thinking of redoing a lot of the older ones. (Also that would allow me to make endings happier.) Yeah, yeah, I could redo them so they ARE first chapters of novels, but in what time? There’s only so much I can do, and if I can shove these ideas into short stories, most of them will then shut up. As for you – shut up wretches – you’ll simply have to understand I CAN’T start a hundred series, or I’ll never get around to your favorite one. (There, there. Don’t cry. I’ll change the free short story later today.)
Anyway, one thing was inevitable in those short stories, and seems to be inevitable in my novels too. No matter how well and how detailedly I plot in advance, when I’m writing, the short story or novel will suddenly lurch sideways and backwards on me.
Right now, as I’m doing the final on Blood Royale, the second of the vampire musketeers, I just realized one rather aimless chapter needs Buckingham to arrive in England. Unfortunately this means that I need to thread him through the entire novel and he must be relevant, and I’ve got no idea WHY he’s there, or why the chapter insists he must be in it. I am sure he must, though. Go figure.
In other words, stories throw surprises at me in all phases, from first thought to revision. I’ve learned that if I refuse the “surprise” the novel or short fails a bit, and often I have to capitulate, occasionally (Darkship Renegade!) after delivery (Though Darkship Renegade was only one I did after editor had started READING it. That has to be some sort of boneheaded record for me.)
I wonder what causes this. Does my subconscious want me to live in interesting times? Do I secretly hate myself and want to make life difficult for me? Or is it simply that until vision is almost realized, I can’t see every corner of it?
According To Hoyt 
My vote’s for the last possibility: not every corner of the vision is visible at first. I know it’s absolutely true of me. I’ll toss in some seemingly-minor detail, then, as time progresses, discover that working out the implications of that ends up with something that must be accommodated elsewhere. Sometimes the new conclusion (revelation?) is easy to retcon. Sometimes it requires reworking earlier chapters and/or sequences, anything from a few tossoffs to a complete rewrite — or even tossing the whole thing, pending further thought. I have, in my mind, a whole series of stories set in a Universe in which not everybody went along with the Singularity — but I haven’t got nearly enough detail in the worldbuilding yet, and the central story got up to about 10K words before being pruned back to less than a thousand and blocked completely because of that.
People complain that the ending of Temporary Duty feels rushed, and all I can do is shrug sourly and agree. What they don’t know is that there used to be another short novel’s worth of stuff in there, including development of an unsympathetic character into a sympathetic one, that got ruthlessly chopped because it would also have meant a near-total rework of the first third, and I got lazy. Retcons can be hard, people. Do think it through beforehand — but keep in mind that you won’t think of everything, and that sometimes you just have to say “effit!” and engage in vigorous handwaving.
Regards,
Ric
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You have said that part of the novelist’s craft is to make life “interesting” for their characters. Are you surprised that the characters take their revenge?
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I probably shouldn’t be, uh?
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Don’t throw back that orange! With all the eggs, you now have the makings for orange angel food cake.
For me, plot is always a surprise, so I’m used to tearing up huge chunks of writing to accommodate my wandering and unhelpful subconscious. I’m hoping to stop that and be a little more in control in the future.
Sarah, how many drafts do you do? When you do this reworking for plot, do you rewrite chapters from scratch, or just edit judiciously?
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I do three drafts. I shouldn’t call this a final go over, except it is, for plot and structure. The next go over is wording and after that it’s misplaced things. I’m a putter-inner. I finish books very lean, then add subplots. In this case, I’m adding chapters to put in characters who were missing altogether.
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I keep hoping my subconscious will get better at communicating . . .
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Ric’s right. We see the same thing in software development, as described here:
http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/Why-are-software-development-task-estimations-regularly-off-by-a-factor-of-2-3
The map is not the territory. The closer you get to the actual territory, the more you learn. The map is wrong, the map omits important details, the map assumes things that won’t be true when you get there, etc.
von Moltke taught us: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” In this instance, the plan is your outline, and “the enemy” is the actual story as it develops. von Moltke wasn’t saying that plans are bad; but although you have a plan, following it blindly when reality says otherwise is a sure plan for disaster.
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Interesting perspective, and I think you are correct.
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I can relate with that aspect of some short stories wanting to turn themselves into the first chapters of novels. I started a short story awhile back that did just that. Like you, I realise I can’t do that with every short story. I do have one that I would like to turn into a series of short stories, as I think that will be a better format for how I’m writing it. I think you’re right about how it’s hard to see the entirety of the story until it’s almost done.
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