Connecting the Dots

I’ve always been one of those people who has imagined that drafting a novel hits some critical point where everything coalesces and then the task becomes more like skiing than rock climbing. Maybe this is true, but I’m having the opposite experience I’ve been really busy in my non-writing life, but thus far it’s gotten more rather than less difficult. I actually write short stories and other things very quickly. I’ve even been known to complete story drafts in two hours. If you think of a novel as maybe twenty five short stories, I should be able to do this in about six weeks. Right now, it’s taking me about a month a chapter.

There are several phases to any fiction project. I’ve come to realize that I’ve very fond of the “explosion of ideas” phase. If you’re old enough to remember them, kids project books used to have these pages with a bunch of points with numbers attached to them. If you drew a line from number to number, a picture would emerge. Some people would start at one and find two then three, etc. Others, like me would try to connect the numbers that would reveal the picture as quickly as possible. Once I figured out what the shape was supposed to be, I sometimes wouldn’t take the time to line in the still unconnected dot/numbers on the page. I love recognizing connections and shapes. To me, the rest is just something you do. I remember there were other kids who would painstakingly fill in all the lines then spend even more time coloring the shape in. Coloring was just never for me.

In developing a draft, I’m having to force myself to go one, two, three, four this time. When I’ve skipped around in the past, I’ve always had some notion of what goes in between, but I couldn’t settle down to fill in the connections that most other people would need to see the picture. The single hardest thing for me though is that as I’ve moved in more linear fashion, each chapter has felt less like an opening out of the material than a shutting off. Let me offer an obvious example. Once Marie appeared in this last chapter, Lucky now can’t be married to someone else, not involved with a woman, etc. At a more serious level, each chapter also commits you to certain themes and stylistic decisions for the rest of the book. It’s hard for me to give up the shuffle of possibilities where any plot card can turn up at any given moment.

Fascinatingly, chapters three and four were parts of the book that I’d refused to fill in for some time. I’d started chapters that included Luke Howard “present time” and Marie, but I’d never sustained them. It feels good to finally set them into the flow of the book. Of course, I may well change my mind soon. It’s also been a struggle.

I did want to mention that blogging the draft has been very helpful. For one, it’s actually very useful to have a single “ordered” draft up that I can access from any place that I can get on the internet. I get to view my “process” including the length of time it takes between chapters, but it also holds me accountable in an odd way. Very few people visit this page (I don’t make any attempts to link it), but I know they can and that if too many weeks go by between installments they’ll see that.

Two of my blog friends, Mr. Pogblog and Bellarossa are, whether they know it or not, doing a similar thing with blogs. Mr. Pogblog is doing his 88 days to Druidic enlightenment and has gotten more or less half way there. Bella’s been documenting her “creative” life since her decision to move to Chicago. She includes pictures, links to articles she’s gotten published, and more recently video clips of performances, events, friends’ performances, shows she’s helped produce, etc. It’s certainly been inspiring to follow and it’s a really interesting way to track someone else’s creative process. I know this notion of “blogging” as something other than an end in itself isn’t exactly novel, but I believe that it has great potential. I think Orson Scott Card, a much better known writer, has also been putting his drafts online so this technique is not limited to those of us who blog in obscurity.

In the meantime, I’m on to Chapter Five and trying to find a way to let the various streams of Lucky, Luke Howard, the Ghost in the Blue Screen, etc. run together for a bit while still moving forward.