Link for Sedona writing course

Well, that didn't fit.

Here it is again:

http://www.sedonaartscenter.com/visitingartistworkshops/categories/writing.htm

good end to awful year

After having a novel rejected this past March I immediately started to write another one, to recoup, and to convince myself that I could still write interesting novels. I'm happy to say that the new one has come along pretty well and is nearing completion. I should deliver the manuscript sometime next February. It's a lot simpler and more conventional than the Bad Novel, a lot more like The Good Son. It's about a couple of aging Vietnam veterans who buy a big house in Mexico and run afoul of the drug cartels. It has plenty of action and some observations about Mexico and Mexican culture, sort of along the lines of how Pakistan was almost a character in the previous novel.

I may have mentioned that The Good Son was shortlisted for the Steel Dagger award. In the event, it did not win, but I got to go to London for a fancy party and mingle with the stars of British mystery TV shows, something I did not expect. When they distribute the Pulitzers they do not, I believe, invite the short listed authors to cavort with the stars of the movies that have been made from novels, but it was sort of fun, in a creepy way. They had a stuffed horse and an actor dressed as Qadaffi, if that gives you an idea, and each prize was handed out by a lovely couple, who bandied wit before opening the envelopes.

I am going to teach a course this February about writing commercial thrillers, if anyone's interested.

This is the info:

http://www.sedonaartscenter.com/visitingartistworkshops/categories/writing.h

recovery from near-death experience

I thought I'd add some notes to this describing what happens to a writer when a big project goes down the tubes, or at least my version of it. I suppose that first of all there's a certain amount of rage to get past, rage at oneself, surely, and also at the people who are preventing the project (in this case the failed amnesia novel described in the previous posts) from going forward. One thinks, there must be some mistake here, maybe they just didn't get it. And in fact, there are authors out there who are so prestigious and whose names are so golden on a book cover, that the things cannot be stopped by any human agency and go to press. Thus we have the familiar phenomenon of authors we've known and loved producing stinker after stinker.

I recall the rage; and I also recall after that immediately deciding that the people who rejected the book as written were right. I think there's a good deal of pretty fair writing in it, but it's not a novel. It's a couple or three almost-novels. The main thing that's wrong with it, I think now, is that I was trying to combine things that simply didn't go together, and the result was that the characters lacked all agency. Stuff happened to them and they never actually made things happen, and in the kind of novel I get paid for that won't wash. Obviously, there is a type of really wonderful novel in which the characters are simply acted upon by forces (in Kafka, for example) but it turns out I'm not Kafka.

What happened after the disaster was that I immediately got back on the horse and started writing a novel to fulfill my contract with Holt. This is a thriller somewhat similar to The Good Son, but set in Mexico rather than Pakistan, and involves a couple of Americans driven by guilt and revenge, weird drug gangs, reverberations from the Vietnam War, kidnappings, explosions, and shamanic goings-on. I'm about 100 pp. into it now and it should be done by the end of the year. It will be, I expect, rather more in my usual line than the pathetic Failed Novel.

As to that, I recently came up with a plan to resurrect the good parts of the Failed Novel, and excise all the bad parts, and focus on the one strand that seems to have worked. It'll still be about an amnesiac, but he'll have agency. The whole book will be first person, and the character himself will travel through the world putting together the clues that will reveal his identity and how he came to develop global retrograde amnesia. The Bourne Identity meets Candide, so to speak. I think it's worth another shot.

Book Crash

Just to put a coda on this line of comment.

I finished the book I called Tuxedo Man in September, 2010, and it was not well received by my agent or my editor. They agreed that it didn't work as a novel because there were too many unresolved subplots and one of the main characters, a female neurologist was unsympathetic. After some thought I agreed that I had made errors and so I spent the next five and a half months rewriting. I got rid of the subplots, strengthened the main character, and tried to make the neurologist more attractive. Today I heard that I failed again and was advised that the book should be abandoned. Well, it happens. Quite often when an author with a run of successful books writes a stinker it gets published anyway, and the fans buy it anyway, and hope for the best next time. We decided not to do this, and I will just have to eat all that labor and chalk it up to experience.

As it happens, I just got an idea a week or so ago for a new novel and so I'll start on that in a little while. Then we'll see if the failed work was an aberration or if I've lost it, whatever the it is. Stay tuned.

Finished this book

I finished this book on September 3, 2010, and sent it off on September 8, after the usual reading over and fixes. I see that my original plan to keep a running record of writing it didn't work out too well. This is because what goes on in the writing process is not all that interesting, even for the writer. Also, if you read through all the problems a writer has in, say, devising a plot, and the ways in which he solved them, then there's no reason for you to read the book. Obviously, if you read the book cold, and enjoy it, it might be interesting to examine the sausage-making aspects of how it got written.

The title of the book will not, however be Tuxedo Man. The publisher has declared that it's not a good title from the marketing perspective. I don't know what this means, but it's their right to approve titles. I have actually picked very few of the titles of my books. I always suggest No Drums, No Trumpets, when they ask for suggestions, since my books rarely have drums or trumpets in them. I am actually thinks of a book that does have drums and trumpets in it, and maybe I will write it some day. Perhaps A Few Drums and Trumpets will be its title, I don't know.

I have to think up what to write next. Maybe I will bring back Jimmy Paz. The publisher would like me to write a book with angels and vampires in it, since these beings seem to sell a lot of books. Maybe I will do a Jimmy Paz with angels and vampires. Why not?

Writing Crash

I haven't posted here recently because Tuxedo Man crashed on me. This has happened on the last three books and I thought I was controlling it, but I wasn't. It's sort of like a stall in an airplane that turns into an uncontrolled spin. One day you're writing a novel, you have 350 or so pages and you think you're closing in on the finish and then you realize that all you have is pages. Maybe there's some interesting writing in there, some good characters, a few scenes that work, but it's not a novel. There's no narrative arc, there's no point, it's a bunch of almost- novels stuck together and it's not going to be possible to weave the threads together in a reasonable number of additional pages.

How could this happen? This is my twenty-second novel. I'm supposed to know what I'm doing. Well, seasoned pilots fly airplanes into terrain, and I suppose its a similar thing, composed of slackened attention, routine and over-confidence. If you read a lot of popular fiction you may have noticed that the later novels of successful popular writers tend to be baggier than the early ones, sometimes twice or three times as large. I suspect that what happened to me happened to them too. You get to page 400 and you find you have twenty unresolved threads, and it's so interesting and you've invested so much time in getting all those subplots in there that it's unbearable to go back and pare it all away so you keep writing, 500, 600, 800 pages! And then you run out of steam and ship the damned thing off.

Unfortunately, or fortunately I have an editor who doesn't tolerate this. I'm contracted to write one thriller novel and not four half-thrillers so I decided I had to rip the whole thing apart and start over. Here's the reason I got into this fix. When I first started to write thrillers twenty-five years ago I first wrote out the plot in a synopsis, maybe five single-spaced pages, the basic story of the book. Then I wrote a detailed chapter outline telling what had to be written in each chapter, which is really important to the kind of book I do, with parallel plot-lines that all have to intersect to advance the tension and suspense that are essential to the thriller genre. Then, finally, before I started each chapter I wrote out the scenes and character interactions that had to occur in that chapter. Only then did I start on the actual text.

Now it turns out that in order to have a lively book with real breathing characters in it, you can't push this method too far, because as strange as it is to say it, characters make demands. They 'want' to do stuff that you hadn't thought of beforehand and you have to indulge them up to a point. (But not beyond that. We've all read books with fascinating characters and plots that when they conclude make us say, "What the . . .!") So toward the end of a good thriller you get twists that you didn't write down at the outset. That's fine, because if the author didn't know what was going to happen, it's pretty sure that the reader won't know either, which makes for a certain excitement.

But in my last two books, Forgery of Venus and The Good Son, I didn't do any of this. I just sat down and started to write, bareback, as it were, just keeping the plot-lines in my head as I write and following my fancy. And I have to say, this was a terrific feeling, sort of like surfing on the creative wave. Writing the thriller became actually thrilling. Because writing thrillers off a tight outline is, I have to say, a lot more like assembly line work than most people imagine, even if the thrillers are not formulaic, as I don't think mine are. So, a sort of interior rebellion--there are themes you can't really handle in the thriller genre and I suppose a part of me wants to deal with them, hence the mini-partial-novels that popped up like fungus within my thriller structures.

Anyway, lesson learned. For the past few weeks I have been writing an outline for this book and targeting vast swathes for excision. My sense is that the writing should go a lot faster now, and that I won't have to do a massive revision when I finally turn it in. I should say that there are many writers who don't outline, who just write away, let it all gush out and then cut, paste and rewrite. That's perfectly okay, but it's clearly not my native mode. I suppose the moral is to be the writer you are, not some other kind: fewer thrills, better book, or at least that's my hope.

Next: crash recovery

Writing Crash

I haven't posted here recently because Tuxedo Man crashed on me. This has happened on the last three books and I thought I was controlling it, but I wasn't. It's sort of like a stall in an airplane that turns into an uncontrolled spin. One day you're writing a novel, you have 350 or so pages and you think you're closing in on the finish and then you realize that all you have is pages. Maybe there's some interesting writing in there, some good characters, a few scenes that work, but it's not a novel. There's no narrative arc, there's no point, it's a bunch of almost- novels stuck together and it's not going to be possible to weave the threads together in a reasonable number of additional pages.

How could this happen? This is my twenty-second novel. I'm supposed to know what I'm doing. Well, seasoned pilots fly airplanes into terrain, and I suppose its a similar thing, composed of slackened attention, routine and over-confidence. If you read a lot of popular fiction you may have noticed that the later novels of successful popular writers tend to be baggier than the early ones, sometimes twice or three times as large. I suspect that what happened to me happened to them too. You get to page 400 and you find you have twenty unresolved threads, and it's so interesting and you've invested so much time in getting all those subplots in there that it's unbearable to go back and pare it all away so you keep writing, 500, 600, 800 pages! And then you run out of steam and ship the damned thing off.

Unfortunately, or fortunately I have an editor who doesn't tolerate this. I'm contracted to write one thriller novel and not four half-thrillers so I decided I had to rip the whole thing apart and start over. Here's the reason I got into this fix. When I first started to write thrillers twenty-five years ago I first wrote out the plot in a synopsis, maybe five single-spaced pages, the basic story of the book. Then I wrote a detailed chapter outline telling what had to be written in each chapter, which is really important to the kind of book I do, with parallel plot-lines that all have to intersect to advance the tension and suspense that are essential to the thriller genre. Then, finally, before I started each chapter I wrote out the scenes and character interactions that had to occur in that chapter. Only then did I start on the actual text.

Now it turns out that in order to have a lively book with real breathing characters in it, you can't push this method too far, because as strange as it is to say it, characters make demands. They 'want' to do stuff that you hadn't thought of beforehand and you have to indulge them up to a point. (But not beyond that. We've all read books with fascinating characters and plots that when they conclude make us say, "What the . . .!") So toward the end of a good thriller you get twists that you didn't write down at the outset. That's fine, because if the author didn't know what was going to happen, it's pretty sure that the reader won't know either, which makes for a certain excitement.

But in my last two books, Forgery of Venus and The Good Son, I didn't do any of this. I just sat down and started to write, bareback, as it were, just keeping the plot-lines in my head as I write and following my fancy. And I have to say, this was a terrific feeling, sort of like surfing on the creative wave. Writing the thriller became actually thrilling. Because writing thrillers off a tight outline is, I have to say, a lot more like assembly line work than most people imagine, even if the thrillers are not formulaic, as I don't think mine are. So, a sort of interior rebellion--there are themes you can't really handle in the thriller genre and I suppose a part of me wants to deal with them, hence the mini-partial-novels that popped up like fungus within my thriller structures.

Anyway, lesson learned. For the past few weeks I have been writing an outline for this book and targeting vast swathes for excision. My sense is that the writing should go a lot faster now, and that I won't have to do a massive revision when I finally turn it in. I should say that there are many writers who don't outline, who just write away, let it all gush out and then cut, paste and rewrite. That's perfectly okay, but it's clearly not my native mode. I suppose the moral is to be the writer you are, not some other kind: fewer thrills, better book, or at least that's my hope.

Next: crash recovery