ER, NOT FINISHED AFTER ALL

My last post said I was finished. I'm not. I think I have three more days' work to do. How do I know this when the novel is now safely locked away in a drawer, unread, I hear you cry?

Because I didn't manage to put the novel away in a drawer for a week. I was flipping through it barely twelve hours later. Thank goodness I did, as I discovered three tiny problems with it:

1. Everything between pages 58 and 82 reads like a three year old wrote it.
2. The ending still makes no sense becuase I haven't set it up properly (see 1.)
3. All the characters speak with the same vocab, same tone of voice, no matter they're present day teenagers, a mad Victorian inventor, a megalomaniac and a woman from a civilization so strange normal physics doesn't apply.

Oops.

More on Life as a Writer...

FINISHED!

The novel is finished!

I'm not going to look at it again for a week. I'm hoping I closed up all the major plot holes, logical inconsistencies and miscellaneous things that made no sense at all. So next time when I read it, there won't be much to do.

The best way I can explain how I feel now is 'good'. But also like someone squeezed out the inside of my brain.

More on Life as a Writer...

FROM BAD TO WORSE

Out of Time is a thriller. It has long action sequences and the characters' situation goes from bad to worse. Just when I think I can't think up any ways to make it any worse, something else occurs to me.

For instance, the main characters discover their father is trying to kill one of them. They escape using a time travel device into a desolate ancient landscape and are captured by cannibals. More cannibals attack the first cannibals. Then the main characters discover they aren't in the past, they're in the future. Civilization collapsed. Then they lose the time-travel device. Then cannibals attack and kill one of them. (it gets worse...)

Is this exciting? Or does the horror get monotonous after a while? I thought I might read it over and see if I couldn't inject a bit of fun into it. The trouble is, getting chased and killed by cannibals doesn't offer too many opportunities for fun.

More on Plot Structure...

BANG!

Can't remember who it was who said - if there's a gun on the mantelpiece in act one, by act five, someone has to get shot. I'm dealing with this at the moment. Except I'm doing it backwards.

In the new ending of the novel, I decided to 'shoot' one of my characters. It was a last minute decision. Then I realised I hadn't put the gun on the mantelpiece. So I went back to the beginning of the novel and planted the gun. Then I realised the character who shoots the other character has no good reason to do it. So I went back again and gave them a reason. I ended up writing it backwards.

Obviously I don't really shoot my character at the end of the novel - it's more of a metaphor. Though I do in shoot one of them earlier, literally, with an arrow. In the arrow-shooting scene, the bows and arrows came first. Then it occurred to me that if the characters were being shot at, one of them would get shot. In this case it happened in the right order.

Sometimes I write in the right order. Other times I do it back to front. The right order is better. But sometimes you really, really want to shoot someone.

Or maybe that's just me...

More on Plot Structure...

LOOK AWAY NOW!

If you don't want to know how it ends, look away now!

I'm currently editing the ending of the novel. I say editing. What I really mean is 'writing'.

The major problem my editor picked up with Out of Time was with the  end. It didn't have one.

I sprained my brain thinking about it, and came up with something that works logically. The thing is, it isn't enough for it to make sense. It's supposed to make the reader go

OH MY GOD!!! AAARGH!!!! OH MY GOD!!! repeatedly.

The problem was my ending comes in two 'chunks'. One in a white space place, the other in the real world. It worked, but seemed a bit anticlimactic. When I thought of a way to make it more exciting, I ran into another problem - how to make it not like The Matrix (this has been a nightmare the whole way through).

Right now, I'm supposed to be writing this earth shattering finale. Instead I'm blogging about how I'm going to write it.

I read somewhere that Flaubert vomited repeatedly when he wrote the ending of Madam Bovary. I know how he felt.

Read more about Plot Structure...

MIND BOGGLING

In the course of researching Out of Time, I thought I ought to improve my philosophy knowledge, so I picked up A History of Western Philosophy. I'm still part way through. It reads well, makes sense of a lot that I kind of knew but didn't really understand and is an easy way into a big, and frequently mind-boggling subject.

I also got hold of A.N. Wilson's coffee table book, The Victorians. As I was writing about an alternative Victorian, 'Clockwork Empire', I thought I'd better find out a bit more about what the real one was like. It's easy to read and has a distinctive take on the period.

The book I enjoyed the most was probably The Birth of the Modern 1815-1830. At 1,000 pages it's a hefty tome. It covers a fifteen year time period in incredible detail, taking in all of Europe, Russia, America, South America, China, the pacific rim, art, music, literature, politics, science and just about anything else you can think of. This covers the time period the Professor begins his machinations.

Read more about Research...

SOMETHING USEFUL AT LAST!

I thought maybe I ought to explain the reason for the weird, tattoo-like markings on my characters...

Take a deep breath.

The Dreaming writes it into their DNA when they're incubating in the Invisible City. The markings can be read. They tell the past and future history of the Invisible City.

No one in the Invisible City put the markings there, so it's not really like a tattoo. Past and future history is coded in the Citizens' DNA, so they never forget. This is done by the Dreaming itself, which is coming alive!

Needless to say, past and future history is BAD!

If you want to know what any of these things are, or what these words mean, go read the book!

Read more about Plot Structures...

MAKING IT UP

I knew I wanted to have weird tattoo like markings on a lot of my characters. Why? Because it would be cool. Apparently this is not a good enough reason.

The editor asked about these markings. I thought about writing back, 'because it's cool', but decided against it. I put 'thinking about why the characters have these markings' on my To Do List. It stayed on my List for about seven weeks.

Then I was in the car and my husband asked the same question. There's something about being put on the spot that adds a sense of urgency. I thought hard. My face contorted. Cogs crunched and clunked. I think I started speaking. I'm not sure what I said.

'You're making this up, aren't you?' my husband said. This is almost his favourite phrase where I'm concerned, writing or not.

I surprised myself. The reason came to me as I was thinking about it. Even my husband was forced to admit that my explanation made sense. (Or at least, this is my recollection of what happened. Find the reason for the markings here)

I like to think this is the work of my unconscious brain, chugging away when I'm wandering about the place, looking confused with a blank expression on my face.

THE REASON IS...

It's so obvious I wonder that it didn't occur to me earlier. Or, it did occur to me, but I thought it wasn't important. It is.

Characters need  reasons for doing what they do (apparently). Especially if they've decided to do something that might unravel reality. Or destroy civilization. It took me a lot of time and pain to come to this realisation. Insufficient motivation is a huge problem for plot, and I had it in spades.

In life, people start with the reason that impels them to do what they do. When I was writing it ended up the other way round. I thought - what would be really cool here is a city made of flesh and characters getting shot at and one of them gets killed (in a children's novel!!!!) and they should phase through furniture in slow motion!!!! And the apocalypse should happen backwards!!!!

I had about a hundred four-exclamation-mark ideas for this novel, and barely one reason why. Putting the motivation into the novel meant smashing up every polished four-exclamation-mark scene I had, and a lot of four letter words.