The Brilliant Joy of Writing Out of Order

The most fun I've had writing, I wrote out of order. I'd think about a scene, get really excited about it, and when I sat down to write it, the words flow, like pouring coffee into a text document. A scene with lavish imagery. A neat bit of introspection. The big reveal! The first kiss! A single line of dialogue that's going to be hilarious. I write what I'm excited about writing, and then the writing is fun. I get the idea out of my head and onto paper before it slips away or loses itself in the mess of scenes that have gone stale in my head.

Now, this means that my most recent project, as fresh and new as it is, is as much of a mess as you can make in an Open Office file. Let's take a look at what I have:

• A two line synopsis. I like the punchline, but the setup needs some ironing before it really works. Why did I write a two line synopsis? Beats me!
• The first chapter, which is in decent shape and a decent length. I could end it where it is, but I think I can add a section about curly fries, and if you ever have the opportunity to add a section about curly fries, you should.
• Four blank lines, the phrase “fight with knives?” and three more blank lines. This is kinda funny, because I think there's going to be a whole other chapter before the fight scene, but I didn't bother leaving myself a note for that. Also, four cartridge returns seems a bit excessive.
• Three lines of ominous forewarning that the twist is coming, followed by a joke.
• Followed by The Twist. These two pages will probably have a chapter break in the middle because it's all “dun dun DUN!” and then abruptly changes tone.
• Seven pages of dialogue from the next dozen or so scenes in no particular order.
• An unordered, unannotated list of nicknames that I came up with while driving. These nicknames are various levels of appropriate, and I'm not sure who I was describing or who was saying the name “Peach Pit.”
• Descriptions of people standing or sitting too close to each other.

So, of course, this process involves a lot of going back over what I've already written to find out where the next scene I want to write fits. But I don't think of this like a bad thing, because each time I read through a section, I can clean it up and make it sharper or leave myself a note that it's not really doing what I want it to do. (Kind of going back to this post.) And, yeah, this goes against the idea to just vomit out everything until it's all there, but I've decided that method doesn't work for me completely and I need to do some revisions just to keep myself sane and keep myself excited about what I've written.

When I was writing Immortal Queen, I did this thing called “prompt bingo” where I would make myself a bingo card filled with one word, random prompts and when one of them spoke to me, I'd write that scene, cross off the box, and eventually get five crossed off boxes in a row and get a bingo and feel accomplished. Eventually, I had a file full of scenes that were roughly in order without transitions, and together I could see the structure of the story.

Of course, then I had to go back and string them together with things like transitions (ick), but I find that if I actually get to the point in a project where it's time to insert these transitions, I'm A. so close to having something ready to go that I don't mind writing them anymore, and B. in a place where I can figure out how to arrange the structure to not write the boring parts. (Because if it's boring to write, it's boring to read, so don't write boring things.)

I've got a few friends who prefer to write in order, and they have really decent reasons for doing so. One is that if you write in order, the narrative can surprise them. It's like driving down a road in the dark with just your headlights to guide you. You can only see so far ahead. But that doesn't work for me because I usually start a story with the climax in mind, and I really want to get to that point. If I start at the beginning and work my way to the climax, that removes the point of letting the narrative surprise me, it can sometimes take a bit of narrative acrobatics and questionable character intentions to get to the scene I have in mind, and I have to wade through boring bits I don't care about in order to get to the thing I really want to write. I lose steam, and then the project dies.

The other good reason I've heard to write in order is that that way the characters grow naturally. Their evolution feels organic. But I generally have a character arc in mind and I'm pretty good at pinpointing where each scene is in an arc (because this is a talent I have, and you bet I'm going to brag about it). Aside from that, once I have a bunch of scenes in order, I can iron out the character arc and fix anything that's out of place. I can make adjustments, and those are fun adjustments to make. (So maybe this isn't really a skill I have, and I'm just pretending it's a skill, but actually a result of hundreds of hours of editing so you'll think I'm naturally talented and then be impressed with me. Have I impressed you? Haha, don't answer that. Of course I have.)

Your Preteen Should Read Hemingway

I wrote an article this week about getting your preteen to read when your preteen hates reading.  It's really a shame that it was such a short article, because I could have gone on and on. 

When I'm writing an article, I like to poke around first and see what other people are writing in their articles that hit the same topics.  I want to make sure I'm not repeating what's already out there (as much as that's possible), and I want to see the state of the conversation which I'm entering.  But this week's article took me by surprise because so many of them revolved around the topic of "What to do when your boy child hates reading."

From just reading the titles, my interest was piqued.  I usually hear about how girl children decide they hate science and math.  This is especially prominent once they hit middle school and suddenly there are all sorts of social pressures that tell them they shouldn't be good at math anymore because this is a masculine thing and they need to be focusing on feminine things.  (Like...pants?  I was very concerned with finding the perfect pair of pants in junior high because I thought they'd make my ass look awesome and get me a boyfriend, and I had this idea that that was a thing I wanted.  But now I'm thinking about it, "pants" aren't really that feminine of a thing.)  It's pretty clear that this decision to hate numbers and graphs is a product of indoctrination from societal forces and not because the girls are particularly bad at math (with their girl brains and their...nail polish? Nail polish makes you bad at math, right?  The fumes?)  So I thought to myself, Oh! Is there a similar effect on boy children who decide in junior high that it's not cool to read because our culture has decided that that's a feminine characteristic?  How fascinating!

But no.

That is not what these articles were about.

They, in fact, just fed the monster, not mentioning (until I dug deeper on a second go around) that there are societal pressures, and thereby ignoring that they exist and what the real problem here is.  Almost all of them encouraged parents to find books about trucks and sports and "not girly" things, because MAN FOLK READ MAN BOOK!  (Boy brains are made of snails and snails can't read.  It's science.) 

So, okay, I get that if your boy child is feeling the need to be all macho, and you want to appeal to his interests, he's going to gravitate towards stereotypically masculine topics.  (Like whiskey.  Or the first world war.)  But why phrase it as "not girly" topics? (That's a quote, by the way.)  Why not phrase it as "topics in which your kid is interested, whatever that happens to be?" 

(For example: your kid is interested in pie, even though all baked goods are inherently girly.  But wait.  Are they?  I'm confusing myself.  On the one hand, I assume all pie is baked by 1950s housewives with aprons and lipstick and heels, which would make pie a feminine thing.  But then, that's insane because, like I said, everyone likes pie.  Placing food on a gender scale is stupid.  So is labeling things like sports or space travel or pants.)

By this logic, would Harry Potter or the Chronicles of Narnia or A Series of Unfortunate Events be masculine enough to get recommended to an apathetic middle grade reader?  (Is Jesus more or less masculine than pants?) This is baffling to me.

One article suggested getting your son a mainly space in which to read, like a tree house (or a leather arm chair).  This is so the boy child's masculinity remains firmly intact even as they do the less-than-manly activity of reading. 

So this advice is basically saying, if your boy child is suffering from the fallout of gender stereotypes, you should help them by pushing them even further into those gender norms!

Books and Moving

These are the books I packed and moved on this last round of uprooting my entire life and moving it down the street and around the corner.

I have a lot of friends who talk about how they go into bookstores and buy everything.  How do they manage?  I haven't bought a hard copy of a book in a year and a half because it's so much easier to hide what I'm reading when it's on a kindle, and I have the vague image in my head of the last time I had to pack up my books.

Funny thing is that the harrowing tower of books in my memories is still not this big. 

Books are flipin' heavy.  This isn't that much of a problem, except for the fact that they also fit really well in boxes.  With a little bit of of spatial reasoning, you can really pack them in there.  But then once you fill a box, you go to lift it, only to find that you basically just filled a box with bricks.

So you have to sacrifice efficient packing for not pulling all the muscles in your back.  For some reason, this irritates me, because efficient packing is a beautiful thing.  But that means that the saving grace here is that these boxes are actually only half full of books and half full of outerwear and towels.  This also irks me, because think of how awesome it would be in the packing process to get to move a super light box full of linens.  Especially after you've moved a super heavy box of books.

Maybe Senpai Will Notice You This Year

(Written instead of "Helping Your Child Cope with Back-to-School Anxiety")

School is starting again! Do you have your cute outfit and hair accessories picked out? Have you called your friends to find out if you have the same lunch? Do you have 8 sharpened #2 pencils and the requisite number of binders? Good job! That's 10% of the battle, and 10% of all your anxieties set to rest.

But what if senpai doesn't notice you this year?!

He's so dreamy. With his hair and his eyes. You really want to touch his hair. I bet it's softer than it looks. And you could get lost in his eyes. There are untold depths there of all the things you don't know about him. And his smile—that secret one, just for you, that he gave you in the hallway that one time. He's so nice and smart and funny. I bet he'd be even more nice and smart and funny once you get around to having a conversation with him about his favorite bands and snack food and tragic back story. It's a very tragic back story. You can soothe his pain with your love. And then get married.

If only he would notice you. But alas. He probably doesn't know your name. Or that you're meant to be together.

It's tragic and stressful suffering through your unrequited love. But good news! Here are some tips for winning him over.

1. Make sure your outfit is super cute. Cute first-day-of-school outfits have a direct correlation with popularity.
2. Trip and fall on him. Surefire way to get his attention. Maybe he'll help you pick up your scattered books. Maybe he'll tell you that your skinned knee looks painful and his eyebrows will furrow with concern. Your heart might explode. Bring a paper bag to breathe into as soon as he picks you up off the floor and leaves with his friends.
3. Talk to him. Haha. No. Just kidding.
4. Check out his friend. He's such a jerk. So rude. You can't stand him and yet you know all about him and you can bicker with him for hours. Spoiler for next spring: he's the love of your life. Move on sooner rather than later.

Columbus Discovers Virginia

The single biggest thing that irritates me while reading is when I can't tell if the author is ignorant or if the character is ignorant.

For example, I once read a story with beautiful descriptions of this old, decrepit mansion named after the mansion in Citizen Kane.  Awesome.  Awesome until they named the mansion "The Citizen."  And I blew a gasket.  Now, do none of the characters in this book realize that the mansion in Citizen Kane is called Xanadu, thus showing their ignorance as they try to look more cultured than they are?  Or has the author never actually seen this movie?  I feel like the former is more interesting and telling of the characters, but I also feel like there would be further evidence of this in the story.  Like an informed character would call them on it.

This also happens a lot in young adult post-apocalyptic fiction.  Accurate history has been lost, so the characters state facts that are just not true.  I can understand how this would be a difficult line to walk.  If none of the characters in the universe the author has created knows the truth, then mentioning that this isn't how it happened could break several point of view rules.  But on the other hand, I side eye sections where the facts they're repeating already exist in the realm of "common misconceptions of today."  Then I have to wonder if I'm reading too much into it to assume that the characters are just misinformed, when it's just that the author didn't listen in high school history.

I think this partially comes from the modernist lens through which I see the world.  My first question when I get stumped with something is to ask "what did the author mean with this?"  Then if I can't guess, I get frustrated.

As a corollary to this, if I'm stopping to ask myself this, it means I've been thrown out of the story, and I don't like that.

I think it also comes from the long period of time I spent editing the speculative fiction of a group of teen girls.  This creeping horror builds in my chest and climbs up my throat every time I have to write the question, "Do you realize that what you just wrote is sexual assault?"  While in my head I'm screaming, DO YOU KNOW THAT THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE?!  THERE IS NO EVIDENCE HERE THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS NOT OKAY.  Okay, so your characters don't get this, but PLEASE TELL ME YOU ARE NOT BUYING THAT THIS IS ROMANTIC.

And then this leads into the tangled mess of whether or not I think the author has the moral obligation to present a message I agree with.  And the short answer is "sorta."  Romanticizing terrible things makes me queasy, but then I understand that what I think is terrible is completely different from what other people think is terrible.  For instance, I don't care about swearing and don't care if the author glamorizes their profane characters.  But missing an opportunity to use the word Xanadu?  That's unacceptable. 

Fourier Series in Everyday Life.

I'm going to talk about math, and then I'm going to get philosophical, so stick with me.

There is this thing called a Fourier Series.  The Fourier Series is the subject of my favorite joke of all time, and no one ever gets it and that is one of life's cruelties. 

Basically, let's say you have a weird function and you want to find the equation for it. 

Like this step function I made in MS Paint.

Sometimes, it's just too hard to get the exact equation because the function you want was drawn in a default image editor, so you decide to get as close as you can and just use that. 

Oh yeah!  Looking good!

So I draw a sine wave (the blue line), which gets the up and down part but leaves something to be desired.  This first guess is called the first order term, or the first thing you do.  But we can do more.  We can take another sine wave, add it to this one, and together they add and subtract from each other to bring us closer to what we want.

A graph I didn't draw in MS Paint

So here, the black shows the first order term.  The blue shows the first order term added to another sine wave, and the red shows an even higher order term to get pretty close to that blocky function we wanted.  Ta dah!  Close enough!

Yesterday, I realized that I approach projects as if they were Fourier Series.  The first draft or the first try is like the first order term.  It's general and not even really close to what you want, but it's a start.  Then you go over it and make it a touch better, then a touch better than that.  The corners of your blocky function stat to come in.  You iron out individual pieces.  Only later can you start working out details until you get close enough to what you want.

Word Choice to Reflect Character Mood

In the story on which I'm currently working, the main character can possess inanimate objects and make them move around.  He takes it as a point of professional pride that these movements are as lifelike as possible.  His favorite is a paper-craft dog that runs around and acts like a real dog.  The point is that he devotes a large amount of time and effort to making sure people don't know that he's the one moving the dog around, to making it look like he's not a puppeteer, but rather making people believe that the dog is alive and acting of its own volition.

This presents an interesting writing decision.

The emphasis could be on the dog's actions, presented as if it is its own character as most people would see the dog.  "She wagged her tail, the whole back half of her body swinging with her enthusiasm."

Or the emphasis could be on how he is controlling the dog, which makes sense since the story is from his perspective.  "He caused her tail to wag enthusiastically, swinging the whole back half of her body."

So which way to go?  I think it really depends on the situation, and is a line by line decision rather than an umbrella decision that affects each and every instance.

• How much is the main character thinking about his actions?  Is he trying something difficult where he really has to focus on his actions?
• How much has he deluded himself that the dog is a separate entity?
• Is there some fatigue in the paragraph from being specific about that he's controlling the dog.  "Yeah, yeah.  We get it.  He's controlling the dog."  Because it (or at least the example I just used) strikes me as clunky writing and a whole passage written like that is going to slow the story down, but that might be a good device at certain points.  
• How much is he working on deluding others?  Or how plot essential is it at the moment that he's pretending that the dog's a dog?  Reminding the reader that he's controlling the dog would break the illusion.

So basically, it's going to be a continuum, and the choice will reflect the main character's state of mind in the moment.

This is kind of like some previous things I've written where characters use an alias.  Which name I call them depends on who they're with, how they're acting, and if they're identifying more with one personality or another.

I'm sure there are other examples of this.  Any suggestions?