GENREALITY

I travel quite a bit — a couple of big trips a year and several little ones.  I often get asked, do I work when I travel?  Yes and no.

I write every day, and I’m pretty religious/superstitious about it.  Good things happen when I write every day, and things have been going so well I’m really loathe to stop.  But I think I’ve mentioned before my definition of “write everyday” is pretty broad.  I don’t have a specific word count.  Intensive brainstorming and outlining counts as writing, as does extensive revising.  And journaling.

Most of the writing I do when I travel is journaling.  Especially if I’m in a particularly interesting place I’ve never been before (last summer I spent a couple of weeks in Hawaii with my family, and over Thanksgiving I went to Barcelona and the south of France with friends), keeping a journal is pretty much imperative.  I want to describe and reflect on the great things I’ve seen, the amazing meals, the little adventures that ought to be a part of every trip.

This may not seem like “work” (work being stuff that gets written for publication and earns an advance check down the line), but it actually is.  It’s practice in writing about setting, describing landscape, establishing a scene.  I love sitting with my journal at the end of the day, decompressing by reviewing everything I experienced, and then finding the right words to be able to capture what I saw and felt.  At some point in the future I’ll need a scene in a novel that uses those skills, and maybe even a similar scene that I can draw on to make the writing that much more vivid and interesting.

Here’s a bit from last fall’s journal:

November 23 2009 (Carcassonne, France)

I just stepped out on the balcony of our room for a moment.  It’s about 8:30 pm or so I’m guessing.  It occurs to me if this was a D&D adventure or a Steven Erikson book, I could watch thieves travel across the Spanish tile rooftops of the town by the light of the just past new moon.  That I could lean on the ledge and be accosted by a handsome stranger.

Had a lovely dinner in (I think) d’Ostel de Troubadours, which had a low ceiling with thick beams, was dark and atmospheric, and had a roaring open fire in a little ancient fireplace.  It turns out they cook dinner on the open fire, and it was marvelous.  I had salad, sausage and potatoes–the sausage was strong and flavorful without being too spicy.  And the potatoes.  The potatoes in Barcelona, too.  Soft, rich, buttery, perfectly cooked.  And ice cream for dessert.  And a bottle of rosé wine.

I’m leaving today for my next trip — Worldcon in Australia, then two weeks of vacation.  Charlene’s going to be subbing for me the next three weeks.  When I get back, I’m sure I’ll have some stories to tell!

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I have less than a week to do everything I need to do before the next trip.  The list is smaller than it was when I started three weeks ago, at least.  It still feels like I’m not getting anything done.

Part of this is the curse of multitasking.  At one point last week I had three story files open, a file of blog posts, two different e-mail accounts, various online discussions I was following, and my phone on my desk, which I’d been using for various housekeeping/administrative calls.  I wasn’t doing everything at once, but I’d do a little piece of each — a phone call, a blog post, check e-mail, work on a story, another phone call when I got stuck, etc.  Everything gets done, eventually.  But it sure feels haphazard.

I know, I know.  I ought to finish one thing before moving on to the next.  But you know what ends up happening when I try that?  When there’s a thing I need to do that I don’t want to?  I play solitaire for two hours.  This is not a good use of time.  Instead, I tell myself:  answer five e-mails, then work on the story.  Or, if I’m stuck on the story, I have permission to go do something else on the list because at least I’m getting something done.  Baby steps, Grasshopper.

I’m one of those writers who discovered that I don’t produce much more now that I’m writing full time than I did when I had a job.  When I had a day job, I was much more careful with my time.  I really wrote for that hour or so between work and dinner because that was all I had.  I’m still writing about the same amount, but spread out over the whole day now.  And I’m pretty sure I didn’t have nearly as much writing-related administrative crap (e-mails, blogs, interviews, travel, contracts, post office runs, etc.) to do when I still had a job (I only started blogging after I quit the job, for example).

But you know what?  I’m a whole lot less stressed about it all than I was when I had a day job.  I really do have the whole day to get things done instead of just a couple of hours, and that’s nice.

Something I started doing off and on last spring:  if I’m feeling useless at the end of the day, I make a list of everything I did.  Everything.  This includes laundry, filling the dishwasher, taking the dog for a long walk, answering e-mails, writing 800 words, updating the website, making trip reservations.  Usually, the list is anywhere from 5 to 12 items long.  Which means I’m getting a lot done, I just don’t often feel like I am.

So, lesson learned:  Spend a bit of time contemplating how much I’ve actually done, rather than focusing on the list of things I still have to do.  I may not feel very efficient about it, but the stuff is getting done.

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I feel obligated to state that there will be spoilers ahead, because I’m talking about endings.

What do you think of ambiguous endings, or open-ended endings?  The big example that people are talking about right now is the ending of the movie Inception – does the top fall or not?  It’s similar to the director’s cut ending of Blade Runner — do Decker and Rachel escape or not?  The most famous literary example is probably the short story “The Lady or the Tiger” by Frank Stockton.  What happens when the door opens?

These endings are different than cliffhangers, where the story cuts out in the middle of an exciting bit so you’ll be sure to get the next book in the series.  In an ambiguous ending, the story is pretty much wrapped up — the murderer caught, the ranch saved, and so on.  But questions linger — will the hero and heroine be happy together?  How will the war end?

Cliffhanger:  In the old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials, every episode ends with Flash in some life-or-death-situation — the robot he’s battling has just exploded, the rocket he’s on has just crashed, the ice mountain he’s climbing has just disintegrated in an avalanche.  At the start of the next episode, he gets out of that scrape and lands right in the middle of another one.

Ambiguous:  The story is over, but there are loose ends.  My favorite example may be the film Casablanca – the story doesn’t really have a definitive ending, but it doesn’t matter.  Ilsa and Victor are on an airplane, Rick and Renault disappear into the fog. Does anyone really wonder what happens to them next?  Does anyone really worry that Ilsa and Victor don’t make it to Lisbon and then on to America?  Does it matter that we don’t know how the war ends?  The thing I find so interesting — the film was released in 1942, which means nobody knew how the war was going to turn out.  When Rick and Renault walk off into the fog, the audience was with them.  What happens next, not just in their lives but in the war?  Nobody knows!  Nobody could know.  I think this is powerful, and that the ambiguous ending allows a story to live on in the reader’s or viewer’s mind, playing over endless possibilities, reflecting on what those possibilities mean for the story.

Another example:  John Christopher’s Tripod trilogy (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, The Pool of Fire) is a very excellent science fiction YA series that takes place centuries after an alien invasion has conquered Earth and human beings are slaves to the aliens.  Over the course of the trilogy, the main characters join a resistance movement and manage to defeat the alien invaders.  But human rivalries and politics threaten to destroy the peace they’ve all fought so hard for.  The trilogy ends with a new war about to break out, and the main characters, who started the series as boys but are now grown men, vow to continue fighting for peace, only this time among rival human groups.  It’s a powerful scene, full of depth and meaning.  Some readers might be disappointed that this epic trilogy ends with the beginning of yet another story, but I loved it.

As I get more feedback from readers, I recognize more patterns in my own writing, and I’m learning that I’m very fond of ambiguous, open-ended endings.  I don’t want to answer all the questions.  I rarely allow my characters to ride off into the sunset.  I think this is natural — in the real world, people’s lives go on even after something exciting happens, and the only true ending is death (and some people debate even that).  It isn’t possible to resolve every single issue in a character’s story.

Some examples in my own writing:  Voices of Dragons ends with my two main characters, having completed a risky gambit to prevent war between their people, flying off to discover a secret, legendary haven for people and dragons.  On the last page, they meet a denizen from this haven.  The end.  I have a short story, “The Temptation of Robin Green,” which ends with the main character sitting on a beach, pregnant, after her selkie lover has abandoned her.  In both these cases the stories have ended, even though it’s clear that the main characters will still have a lot of problems to deal with moving forward — those problems aren’t part of the story.  I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback about Voices of Dragons especially — readers have told me this is a cliffhanger ending.  But I don’t consider it a cliffhanger — it’s ambiguous.  I do have an idea for a sequel, but I didn’t write the ending this way thinking there necessarily would be one.

An ambiguous ending doesn’t mean there’s a sequel on the way, just as a closed, definite ending doesn’t lock out the possibility of a sequel.  The ending of Star Wars: A New Hope is pretty unambiguous — we won the war, everyone gets medals!  But that hasn’t stopped endless rounds of sequels and spin offs.

What about you, both as a reader and as a writer?  Do you need all the threads of a story tied off?  Do you like the ambiguity of a few unanswered questions, or the Lady or the Tiger ending of something like Inception?

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I’m finishing up one of the most difficult novel revisions I’ve ever done.  It’s for Kitty 9:  Kitty’s Big Trouble.  It’s not particularly extensive — I’m not moving entire chapters around or changing locations or removing characters, all of which I’ve done before.  But I feel like I’m rewriting the entire thing anyway, sentence by sentence.  That is, I’m making a decision whether to keep or change each sentence as I come to it.

I got my editor’s notes, which were short but unenthusiastic — the gist was that the story was lacking a lot of details, and a lot of plot points weren’t working.  I also got some extensive notes from my very talented beta-reader (who is a full-time, award-winning novelist), who called me out for what was the real problem:  the novel had no narrative drive, no tension — no stakes.  Ouch.

I did some soul searching.  Sat down and wrote out about three or four pages of what I think the novel is about.  Took some of my friend’s suggestions and thought about how the book would look if I incorporated them.  I took the manuscript with me on my trip, read through it, used up an entire pen’s worth of ink marking it up.  Was seriously daunted, but did what I always do when I sit down to start revising:  start on page one.  Keep going, one page at a time.

Like I usually feel on revisions, I’m furious at myself for not getting all this the first time around.  Clearly, this was a case where the first draft was figuring out the story, and this draft is making the story work.

Here’s an example of what I changed:  There’s not enough suspense/narrative drive.  So, instead of having my characters wandering aimlessly in San Francisco waiting for something to happen, as they do in the first draft, they’re actually aware that the bad guys are on their tail, and they’re trying to flush them out first.  This means that they’ll actually have to carry around the gun that they left in the glove box of the car in the first draft.  This means that later on, when I want the bad guys to beat them up, I have to think of a plausible way for them to lose the gun, or have the shot miss, or something — or have them shoot one of the bad guys instead of just having a fist fight.  Then what would happen?

That’s how revisions snowball.

Changes like this will definitely make the book better, but they have a ripple effect.  Giving a character a gun in the third chapter means I now have to deal with that gun for the rest of the book.  Part of the plot centers on a powerful magical artifact.  In the second draft, the bad guy gets possession of it, which he doesn’t in the first draft.  That changes the characters’ goals in the second half of the novel.  The structure of the novel hasn’t changed — they’re chasing down the bad guy in both drafts.  But in the second draft, the reason has changed, the stakes are higher, and it’s more exciting for the reader (I hope).

Which means I really have to pay attention.  What have I changed?  What’s the story saying now?  It feels like I’m weaving a blanket, decided to change a color in the middle of the project, and am doing it by replacing individual threads with tweezers.  Every blue thread now has to be red.  How freaking tedious!

What’s made it difficult is working on this thing for six to eight hours a day for the last seven days but only netting about a 3,000 word increase in my word count.  I’ve written a ton more than that.  The trouble is, by my estimate, I’ve taken out about 700 words for every thousand that I’ve written, and most of it has been sentences and paragraphs, not whole sections.  I’ve completely rewritten maybe three big scenes, for a net word increase of. . .zero.  The overall book has maintained its shape and structure.  But I’m thinking it reads very differently because of how many of the little pieces have changed.  I’m also thinking that when a story is the right length it really is the right length and all the revising in the world isn’t going to make it shorter or longer.

Next step:  Read over the whole thing and see if changing out all those threads really did make a difference.

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I got home from my book tour Friday and have spent the last couple of days doing laundry and trying to recharge.  I thought I had dodged a bullet and avoided the traditional getting sick after a trip — not so much, it turns out.  I woke up with a sore throat yesterday and today I’m rocking a full-on cold.  I’ve been running hard for three solid weeks, and it’s like my body went, “woohoo, a break!” and my immune system promptly shut down.  Sigh. . .

A recap:  the tour was eleven days, eight flights, seven hotels in seven cities, eight signings, and two stock signings at additional stores.  Best of all, people showed up for every single event.  Yay!  Met with friends for meals four times (including breakfast with our very own Ken Scholes and his family, when I got to meet the babies!), saw a movie with my brother in Portland, and caught my first episode of True Blood on the hotel’s HBO.  (Reaction — whoa, I shouldn’t have jumped in on the middle of this one. . .)  It was too cool for swimming in California (overcast and windy.  In July, in California!) and in Phoenix, when I thought I was going to get to hop in the pool, there was a thunderstorm.  Ah well. . .

Things learned:  Grabbing a Danish or muffin right before an early flight and calling it breakfast might work at the beginning and end of a long trip, but doing that five days in a row doesn’t work so well.  The iPod Touch I got to check e-mail and stuff in lieu of carrying around my laptop worked just dandy, and I even read a couple of books on it.  All the cities kind of blurred together — I remember meeting lots of people, but I’m not quite sure where I met whom.  Next time, consider taking pictures.  Also, keep a better record of my contacts (book stores, etc.) in each city so I can arrange meetings and stock signings and things before the trip instead of trying to plan them during.  Also, never hesitate to contact the publicist who arranged the tour for help in making adjustments.  Take notes.

This was a pretty short tour all in all, and it wasn’t too strenuous — a few hours of being “on,” and a lot of waiting at airports for the next flight.  I even got a couple of books read and marked up most of the manuscript I’m working on.  But what I’m wondering is how the big guns who do six-week-plus tours all over the country manage it.  You’d pretty much have to do laundry a couple of times, and I don’t think you could fit everything in a duffle bag like I did, and how do you get any work done?  How do you put your life on hold for six weeks?

Maybe I’ll find out someday.  But if I do end up on a long tour like that, I think I’ll see if I can corner someone who’s done it and get some advice.

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