The problems with plotting

I like to plot, but simultaneously, I hate to plot. Let me try and explain.

Before I embark on any long piece of writing – erm, which will be all of them, I guess – I like to try and get some sort of plot written down. That way I have some sort of idea where things are going. Essentially, it’s an insurance policy. If I’m sitting at the keyboard wondering where to go next, I can look at the plot and go “Okay, that’s the objective – now I just have to get there”.

This is especially important in serialised fiction (ie Spider-Girl), as if you have no idea where things might be going to, you can’t throw in clues or foreshadowing – and believe me, I like to do that where I can. I also really, really want internal consistency in any series; the world needs to make sense, even if it’s a fantastic one, and there needs to be continuity. (That I can later retcon. Joke for the comics fans.)

Having said this, in the process of writing, I frequently go off-plot. In other words, the plot changes as I write it, usually because I have some sort of brainwave that is just too good to ignore. When that happens I usually end up re-writing my plot notes to accommodate the idea, just so I can basically tell myself the story and make sure it all makes sense. (Believe me, it often doesn’t. I’ve rewritten the plot for the Spider-Girl Crossover arc about five times since the first draft. Looking at those original notes, there are plot holes big enough to drive a truck through.)

So I like to have the roadmap, I like to have the plot written down. It can be nightmarish to actually create that plot though, hence my hating to plot, too. Sometimes I will just not have any idea where the plot needs to go, or worse, I have an idea but it just seems too lame for words. Even worse than that, sometimes I have a plot and it’s written down and… it still sucks.

This is the worse situation a still-to-be-written story can find itself in, because honestly, once I have the skeleton of a plot down I find it hard to throw that away. Why? Because the process is so tough. Believe it or not, getting ideas is easy (Especially in this ‘genre’ where essentially all I’m doing is writing down fantasies…). It’s having those ideas make sense, and putting them into a story where the characters act in a (reasonably) believable manner, that’s the hard part.

Sometimes, the really damn hard part. This is what leads to having loads of half-finished stories, or stories that are plotted but aren’t written. In the former case, I usually haven’t plotted to the conclusion in a way I like. The latter, I don’t like the plot enough to write it – or I haven’t plotted to the end, either.

Like opposable thumbs being what separates man from animal, I think plotting is what separates ‘erotic fiction’ from just ‘porn’. While I often jokingly refer to my writing as porn (Hey there, Mr. High Self-Esteem!) in reality it’s just fiction… that happens to be erotic in a very specific way. Whereas your average porn movie has zero plot (unless you call ‘will the studly handyman fix the broken appliance’ a plot) I like to think that everything I write has a definite plot, hopefully with decent dramatic tension, some character development and yeah, plenty of eroticism.

And that, I hope, is why it’s worth reading what I write. That and you getting off, naturally. (Just couldn’t exit without a dick joke, could I….)

Finished an ish. Maybe.

Might have just finished Spider-Girl 14. Not sure. Gonna sleep on it. Unsure whether the scene break I just came to is a good issue break, or whether I should go on a little further… but then, it’s over 10,000 words (just) and I’m thinking the next natural break is several thousand words away.

Hence: may have just finished the issue.

Had a lovely “Oh, wait, wait WAIT – this would be SO MUCH BETTER if I did it this way” moment earlier, right in the middle of a scene which I already had completed in my head. The change was so blindingly obvious, but at the same time led so naturally to some other stuff that I want to do, that I just had to make it. It’s funny (Well, to me) but I was so excited I wrote the ‘revelation’ down underneath the text as I typed, as if I was going to forget it. Not likely. Still, three words can change a lot of stuff, especially when those words are ‘[CENSORED] AS [CENSORED]!!’

(You didn’t think I was going to spoil it, did you? Especially when the payoff isn’t going to happen until issue 15… at least. I’m not that cruel.)

I have to say, these are the bits you live for as a writer – or at least I do. Not the moments when the characters ‘talk to you’ (because I don’t feel they do; wanky as it sounds, I feel like they just talk, I listen and transcribe) but when the character’s actions suddenly skew the plot in a new and altogether better direction than the way you were already travelling. That’s when you give thanks to The Muse.

Well, I am knackered, as we say in England; I think I’ve written over 7,000 words of this issue in the last couple of days. Don’t get too excited yet but I think the groove may be back. Shhhh! I said don’t get excited….

Happy New Year’s Resolutions

For those of you following the Western calendar, anyway. First day of 2008. We’re living in the future, I tell you. Flying cars just around the corner.

So I’ve been gone for a while again, but rest assured I’ve been thinking of you (and replying to the odd comment, and email). It’s funny, I realised yesterday that while I scour YouTube and Yahoo! Groups for the occasional masking-related bit, then get all bitter and upset that no-one’s doing anything, at the same time… I’m not doing much of anything myself. Which seems a bit two-faced, if you’ll excuse the pun.

New Year’s Day is a very good time to look at that sort of thing and wonder if you can’t make a change. So here I am, looking at it.

In the past couple of days I’ve dug through Google Docs, and a few other spots on my hard drive, checking out unfinished work. I have a lot of it. (Not all of it has seen the light of day, either.) I’m sure a lot of writers have similar issues, and many more ‘wannabe’ writers (which I still classify myself as, really) but I doubt many of them have the same issue… which is that often these stories are left unfinished by me because they served their purpose. In other words, they got me excited, and that was that.

Bugs me, though.

Sure, there are some stories that haven’t been finished because I can’t figure out how to finish them, or more likely, I don’t have an ending that I’m happy with. (Father Knows Best is a large, irksome example of this. Part 4 has an ending. I’m just not sure it’s the one I want.) There are others which I abandoned because I just decided the idea wasn’t worth spit anyway, or that basically I didn’t want to write that any more.

Truth is though, if I get right down and look at it, many if not most of these things I could finish… I just choose not to. I was looking at a couple of particular things in the last couple of days thinking “Might be fun to finish that”. So that’s why my New Year’s Resolution – as regards ‘this field’, anyway – is…

… finish more stuff.

Oh, and I think I might ask for your help in that. So stay tuned.

Soooo…

… he said, looking around a little furtively. What’s going on with me?

Well, the mask fiction – indeed, the prose fiction – is a little light, right now. As I said in the previous post, I’ve been concentrating on ‘other’ writing recently. I’ve finished another play recently (Yaaayyyy!!) which is going to require a lot of polish to get to a performance level. At the same time, in conjunction with the actors I worked with for the reading of the first play, we’ve decided to stage it next year at a fringe festival here – so that is now taking up a certain amount of time too, with new drafts and revisions and discussions about all sorts of stuff.

The interesting – well, to me – side effect of all this is that the moment this stuff takes off, my urge to write mask fiction diminishes. No prizes for guessing the two are sort of interconnected. The better I feel about me, as a person and as a writer, the less I feel the need to write fiction that frankly, doesn’t do much for making me feel recognised and validated. (Perhaps now you can see why I value your comments so much.)

So, that’s why the fiction you’re used to seeing here has pretty much dried up. I don’t have enough time to sustain two writing ‘careers’. However… before you write me off, here’s the good news. I’m smart enough to know this doesn’t mean I’m quitting. Hell, I drafted this post once before, and something about writing it made me go scribble down 1,600 words of Spider-Girl issue 14, so I still like doing it. I’ll just be doing it a lot slower. Make sense?

Anyway, my sustained mask fiction burst at the beginning of this year had a lot to do with getting my other writing going, so much as you might hate it, dear reader, you had something to do with this situation. Which I won’t forget… and I thank you for.

Okay, back to writing… of all kinds.

Three lines = three thousand words

In another tab, Project T is sitting at 34,390 words… so about 3,000 more than last night. That’s 3,000 words drawn from three lines in my plot description, and there’s a lot more to go… lots of fun stuff I hope.

In case you’re wondering that 3k took about two and a half hours, with few interruptions (assuming that rating songs in Pandora as I listen to them doesn’t count as an interruption). Not much of a boast by the way. Well alright, a little one. Generally though, I can churn out 1,000 words or so an hour of any kind of writing if I’m ‘in the zone’ and know where I’m going. In this case, I have a pretty good roadmap.

In a comment on my previous post, RJW suggested that I might give out some practical tips to writers. Well, here’s an easy one to start with: just write. Sounds pretty frickin’ obvious I know, but unless you’re willing to devote close to three hours of a weeknight to just sitting at the keyboard and getting the words done, you won’t get much accomplished.

Of course, I only get to issue smug directives like that on nights like this. Come back when I’ve been staring at a blinking cursor for a whole evening – you’ll get a different GW.

Ten minutes in a hotel room

Call this a writing exercise if you like; call it stream of consciousness, call it a warm up. Here’s ten minutes worth of waffle from a hotel room. I’m away on business, and as often happens in these situations, the siren’s song of an empty hotel room, an active internet connection and time on my hands leads me to want to do one thing: write.

I have a weird thing about hotel rooms, and being alone in them far from home. They bring out this guy, the guy I am now, the alternative writing persona who’s not that far removed from “randy Pan, the Goat Boy” as Bill Hicks would say. I’ve written some of my best stuff in hotel rooms, to be honest, although one problem I definitely do have is starting stuff in environments like this and not finishing. Not a good habit.

I don’t know what it is, but I’ll struggle to define it. It’s something about the delicious anonymity of hotels, the idea that anyone could be here, that anything could happen. You could do anything in these situations and the likelihood is no-one would ever find out. I should stress it’s never, ever happened to me, at least not since I’ve been married. I’ve had a couple of intimate encounters in hotel rooms, and only one of which I can recall being particularly fun… but they were all in my ‘wild’ and ‘carefree’ single days.

These days, I tend to confine myself to wild and carefree writing. Here, undistracted by anything else, I get some of my best ideas down, my best work. I think it’s partially just because of the inherent romanticism (for me) in the idea of being a writer at work in some hotel room. There are plenty of examples of writers who have holed themselves up in hotels to do their work, so many in fact that there are well known fictional examples too (The Shining, anyone?). We like the idea of being focused. No past, no future, just the present – the keyboard, the screen (or paper) and The Writing.

Three minutes left. So what’s it going to be tonight? I don’t know. First of all I think I’ll get down some of the ideas I have had rattling around my head in the past couple of days. A refinement of an old idea, a sort of riff on Charlie’s Angels. Something involving twins, and probably, trains. Something else that just came to me involving a hotel – duh. When those are noted (Never, ever let go of an idea, folks… you never know when you’ll need ‘em) I’ll strive to work on something in progress. Inch towards completion.

Dying seconds. Hope you’ve enjoyed recent stuff, I really appreciate all the comments; feel free to keep ‘em coming. I’ll be releasing something else next, something not Spider-Girl; there, I said it. We’ll see.

Right. Off to it.

Heads up

This is a quick post to give you advance notice that I can’t guarantee Spider-Girl #12 will go online this weekend. I know I’ve left you all hanging on anxiously, but don’t get too excited. The next issue wraps up the whole Doc Ock arc, and while I hope you like it, I doubt you’ll like it as much as #11. I know I sure as hell didn’t like writing it as much.

Anyway, I have quite a few things to do this weekend and also I know I’ll want to take some time to edit and polish #12, so I’m just saying right now that I can’t guarantee it’ll appear in the next two days. Just FYI.

Elsewhere, I’ve been enjoying moving forward with Project T, which sits in another tab at just over 28k words now. I don’t think I’ve said this before specifically, but I generally aim for a PG-13 (in US parlance) sort of rating with Spider-Girl… there’s quite a lot of talk about sex, and implied sex, and occasional actual sex… but it’s not full-on, Technicolor sex. Nor are there curse words – y’know, to save the kids.

Well, it’s nice to occasionally write full-on Technicolor sex and use as many curse-words as I like, put it that way….

Oh! Also, I came up with something entirely brand new in the ol’ shower this morning. By the time I’d had breakfast the idea was pretty much locked. However, I had another thought this evening which I thought I’d run by you.

This story idea could basically have a character in it that’s a female, masking as another female. Or, it could be a man, masking as a woman. Then it hit me; maybe it could be both. It might be fun to actually write two different endings to the story – or two different second halves, I guess – and let you choose your preferred kink.

Good idea? Bad idea? Let me know. Got no idea when I might get to writing said idea, but hey. We’ll call it Project B for now.

At long bloody last

Just wrote the last few words for issue #12 of BBTSSG, as you might want to call it. FI-NA-LLY.

I tell you, this issue has been an absolute bitch to finish. Even though from the looks of things it ‘just’ took me a month or so to write, it felt waaaay longer to me. The whole thing seemed to move along in fits and starts, and I mean literally – some nights I’d sit for two hours and write two paragraphs. First I didn’t feel like the issue had enough, well, eroticism in it. Then, after I figured that out, I realised I had to go back and rewrite something in issue #11 that changed quite a few things in issue #12. Gaaawwwwwdddd! With all that crap in my head it’s a miracle I can come up with new ideas.

Oy. So where does this leave me?

Well first of all, my early plans to keep at least a ‘clear arc’ between whatever I’m currently writing, and whatever I’m currently releasing, are shot to hell.

That’s because right now, there’s no bloody way I can dive into issue #13 and beyond – which starts the next big arc, codenamed ‘Crossover‘. (The way I was previously planning, I’d finish ‘Crossover’ before I’d even release the arc I just finished, which covers issues #9-12.) I can’t do that though. For one thing, I have no idea where ‘Crossover’ is going, precisely. It’s like I can see the target but I need to hit the bullseye. I need to re-plot the whole thing, figure out what the high points are, and hopefully get a handle on how many issues it might end up being. (Because one thing I am going to keep doing is completing arcs before I release them. If – God forbid – I give up on the series entirely, I don’t want to do it in the middle of a half-released arc. I’m not that cruel….)

More importantly, right now, I’m just plain tired of writing this series. Issue #12 took a lot out of me – this arc as a whole, in fact. I still love the characters, love where they’re going, but it’s starting to feel a little same-y. The plot of ‘Crossover’ should freshen things up a bit, but I need a break, to let me recharge the batteries, get enthused for it again… so that it feels fresh when I write it.

So what about that break. Well, I have a couple of other things on the go. I have an old, half-completed story (called ‘Love Hotel‘) which I dusted off recently and might well try and complete; it’s maybe a third, perhaps half-finished, and after some intensive plotting sessions with a fellow author recently I know what I need to do to finish it off. It’s a ’straight’ (ie, no superheroes!), one-off story too… and pretty damn hardcore. So it’d be a real change of pace for me right now.

Second, I do have that Susan Storm mini-series idea… but I’d need to knuckle down and plot that a bit more carefully. I also now know, having finished issue #12, that I’d probably have to write issue #13 before I can get to it. That’s because…

… issue #12 ended up being looooong. For the record, it’s the biggest issue to date; over 12,000 words in total. Partially that’s because I added all that ‘extra sauce‘ to it (Yeah, ’slight twist’, my ass), and partially it’s because there was a lot of plot to get in. And there was actually even more to fit into it in the original synopsis. So that stuff, which is an essential bridge to the Susan Storm mini, will now have to go in issue #13. Which as I write this, I’m starting to think might have to be a standalone issue. Followed by the mini. Oh God, I’m rambling like a maniac.

Alright, one more thing and out. The nice coda to all this is my word count. Issue #12 takes me to over 100,000 words written for the series so far; that’s the size of a decent novel. Pretty cool.

Now click an ad and get outta here. Issue #9 will be out before the week’s over. Promise.

Rewriting ripples

Issues #11 and #12 of Spider-Girl dive into her family history in a big way, so I did some research early on… although that mostly consisted of reading early Amazing Spider-Man issues.

Turns out though, thanks to the industrious Kurt Busiek, I had some more history to read about. See, Busiek wrote a series called Untold Tales of Spider-Man, which basically ‘filled in the gaps’ in the really early issues of Amazing, adding extra detail. Detail’s great, don’t get me wrong, but recently I found some details that basically meant something I’d already written… really needed to get re-written.

I put it off for a while but this morning decided I wouldn’t be able to keep writing issue #12 until I’d re-written the portion of issue #11 that was affected by this history change. Y’see, this is a fairly crucial part of the plot, and I knew when I made these changes it’d affect a lot of other stuff; like chucking a rock into a pond and watching the ripples. Sure enough, as I rewrote the one scene and started skimming through the rest of the issue, I began tinkering with lines, changing reactions and so on.

That process is going to have to continue with issue #12, which I’m motoring along on now. The good news is that this change gives me a potential plotline which might be interesting – and might lead to Betty doing something constructive with that Peter Parker mask she found….

A peek at my folders

As I may or may not have mentioned before, I’m using Google Docs & Spreadsheets to write with now. I like it a lot, because it lets me write with all the tools I generally need (word count, spell check, etc) and generates simple files when I’m done. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn good for a free web app. (Biggest limitation is, of course, that it’s on the web – but I haven’t had much need to do offline writing for a while.)

Today Google updated Docs & Spreadsheets with a new look, which was a pretty big surprise when I logged in, considering I’ve been looking at the same interface for over six months, I think. So when I saw the new layout I thought I’d give you a peek at what I see every day when I sit down to write – click to make big:

Yeah, I obscured some stuff in there. C’mon, you’re not the kind of kid who opened their presents before Christmas morning, are ya? No, of course you’re not… just keeping a few things hidden before they’re ready to be revealed. Had to rename a few folders too – ain’t I a stinker?

Alright, off to bed. I have a feeling I’ll be turning over the Brant family tree in my head a few times before I drift off.