Shell-Scott shocked--and a writing method
Nov. 14th, 2004 04:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shalannaI couldn't sleep, so I got up and ambled to the confuser--I mean, the comPUTer. Googled up "Shell Scott," the Richard Prather detective that was in all the funny, wacky, pulp-fiction-style novels he wrote (which are all now out of print, but available through one of those e-book factories--yet I don't have an e-reader and they tell me you can't print their PDFs, so I haven't gotten any of the books.) Thought maybe there'd be some excerpts out there. Instead, I found an interview with the author!
Interesting part is that he talks about his method of working on a novel.
"There's two types of writers: the ones who plot everything first and always know where it's going, and then you have the people who sort of wing it. One isn't necessarily better than the other, but I think the people who plot in advance are more likely to produce books that hold up over the years. I plot out everything before I start writing the story’s first line.
"The way I've always done that is to try to get a fresh idea and just keep working with it. I'd fill up about a hundred or two hundred pages, single-spaced, with just plotting stuff. You know, ideas, characters, and bits of dialogue, actions and reactions. I'd figure out all the movements of the story from beginning to end, and then compress that into a page or two of the just the highlights. I'd then cut those highlights into chapters. I'd then expand those chapter notes, winding up with a separate page or two for each chapter and put all these pages into a folder. With every book I did I'd wind up with what I call a synopsis, it's actually an outline of maybe twenty or thirty pages, with all the action cut up into like twenty chapters. That's all there before I start the first draft."
Read the rest of the interview at http://user.dtcc.edu/~dean/interview.html.
Reading this, I thought . . . Wow! That's what *I* did to start my Fantasy Trilogy Brick novel when I was twenty-three, fresh out of college and a year of working on a teaching certificate at night while I pretended to be programming computers (IBM mainframes--WYLBUR, JES, other evil acronyms) during the day. It's a very left-brained way of working, I think. Kind of less spontaneous than my current way, which works better for me.
I used to have a huge notebook all about that book. I'd typed on notebook paper and handwritten on any paper I could get hold of, thinking that the more random it looked, the more creative it was. I actually wrote the book, including the ending, but left a gap in the middle . . . where the last turning point, climax, and last fourth of the book is supposed to be, it's all this "notes" stuff and partial scenes. I thought I needed to research battles and so forth. A whole LOTR-type thing. The worst battles I'd been through was during junior high, when I became the target of a few really mean girls for a period of a few months. I still have what remains of the manuscript here on the hard disk, but back years ago when I was so sick and in the hospital, my mother and hubby and one of Mama's friends went through and "got rid of all that paper and all those little scraps of dusty trash full of dust mites off your desk and the stacks of paper underneath," and they apparently got rid of those notes. And of a whole notebook full of poems from a poetry workshop I took in college. (I still have copies of most of MY poems, but the examples we'd worked from were lost. I did find many of them on the 'net in the intervening years.) They were awesomely detailed. You could have done a website on that world. I spent too much time on worldbuilding, but it was fun. (Research junkies of the world--dig your way out!)
I still know what I need to know to write stories in that world ("Blackwren," which is--as those In The Know will note--a name that pays homage to Greyhawk, the original Gary Gygax D&D world). But I really don't want to write fantasy "bricks" like that. I only did it originally because I'd met my husband and wanted him to read what I wrote, and that's all he reads in terms of fiction, and he was supportive but said the other stuff was "boring" and he couldn't read it so why didn't I try fantasy like Mr. Lewis and Old Tolk and Lloyd Alexander and the rest? It worked out well as a "learning experience."
(I did send the opening of that novel, Paladin Spellbound, out one time back around 1986 or so, and DAW wanted to see the rest of it, and I sent what I had, sans the final fourth. At that time, I didn't really understand the business. Obviously! I never did hear back from them again. Mother's house burned down that summer, and our circumstances changed, and I never did go back and clean up that book. You know how something looked good at first, like when you first started ice skating, but then later, you wince to see the videotape? Yeah, it's like that after the first three or four "polished" chapters that came to me all in a rush and then were workshopped. It's part of the million words that I wrote before I really had command of the craft, I suspect. Though maybe someday I will still do something with it. The characters are still alive and waiting . . . tapping feet impatiently . . . posed as in a Shakespearean offstage waiting for the cue, alarums and excursions--er, that's for going offstage, but you get my drift.)
Dulcinea is also, in fact, set in Blackwren and the Three-and-a-Half Kingdoms. You wouldn't know that unless you'd read it, though. There are two more books in that series, for which I have written outlines and first three chapters. As I said . . . maybe after I get tired of reality writing, I'll go back and do more with those (like finish them.)
* * *
We should've had just the other food . . . the fondue was not that popular. And now that all our cats are in Heaven, there was no one to jump on the table and check it out when the guests had gone off.
I was as disappointed as I was that time I had saved up all these Pringles canisters and similar canisters that had held salted peanuts and stacked them in the garage so I could do a Christmas-gift craft with the Sunday School kids, but then Don got industrious one trash day and decided to haul all that junk out for the trashman . . . ook! Yes, it looked like trash. Yes, he was mystified. Yep, I felt crappy. But their parents, I reasoned, did not really NEED a Pringles can all tarted up with Con-Tact paper and ribbons and filled with . . . I've forgotten what we were going to put in there. Maybe we were making kaleidoscopes. Anyway, we changed the plan and made some kind of paperweights out of these little shot-glass things and pasted the kids' photos on the bottoms and put felt under that so the parents could use it as a paperweight and paper clip holder but still see the kid smiling up from the bottom. It probably worked out just as well that way.
Okay, I think I can sleep some more now.
Interesting part is that he talks about his method of working on a novel.
"There's two types of writers: the ones who plot everything first and always know where it's going, and then you have the people who sort of wing it. One isn't necessarily better than the other, but I think the people who plot in advance are more likely to produce books that hold up over the years. I plot out everything before I start writing the story’s first line.
"The way I've always done that is to try to get a fresh idea and just keep working with it. I'd fill up about a hundred or two hundred pages, single-spaced, with just plotting stuff. You know, ideas, characters, and bits of dialogue, actions and reactions. I'd figure out all the movements of the story from beginning to end, and then compress that into a page or two of the just the highlights. I'd then cut those highlights into chapters. I'd then expand those chapter notes, winding up with a separate page or two for each chapter and put all these pages into a folder. With every book I did I'd wind up with what I call a synopsis, it's actually an outline of maybe twenty or thirty pages, with all the action cut up into like twenty chapters. That's all there before I start the first draft."
Read the rest of the interview at http://user.dtcc.edu/~dean/interview.html.
Reading this, I thought . . . Wow! That's what *I* did to start my Fantasy Trilogy Brick novel when I was twenty-three, fresh out of college and a year of working on a teaching certificate at night while I pretended to be programming computers (IBM mainframes--WYLBUR, JES, other evil acronyms) during the day. It's a very left-brained way of working, I think. Kind of less spontaneous than my current way, which works better for me.
I used to have a huge notebook all about that book. I'd typed on notebook paper and handwritten on any paper I could get hold of, thinking that the more random it looked, the more creative it was. I actually wrote the book, including the ending, but left a gap in the middle . . . where the last turning point, climax, and last fourth of the book is supposed to be, it's all this "notes" stuff and partial scenes. I thought I needed to research battles and so forth. A whole LOTR-type thing. The worst battles I'd been through was during junior high, when I became the target of a few really mean girls for a period of a few months. I still have what remains of the manuscript here on the hard disk, but back years ago when I was so sick and in the hospital, my mother and hubby and one of Mama's friends went through and "got rid of all that paper and all those little scraps of dusty trash full of dust mites off your desk and the stacks of paper underneath," and they apparently got rid of those notes. And of a whole notebook full of poems from a poetry workshop I took in college. (I still have copies of most of MY poems, but the examples we'd worked from were lost. I did find many of them on the 'net in the intervening years.) They were awesomely detailed. You could have done a website on that world. I spent too much time on worldbuilding, but it was fun. (Research junkies of the world--dig your way out!)
I still know what I need to know to write stories in that world ("Blackwren," which is--as those In The Know will note--a name that pays homage to Greyhawk, the original Gary Gygax D&D world). But I really don't want to write fantasy "bricks" like that. I only did it originally because I'd met my husband and wanted him to read what I wrote, and that's all he reads in terms of fiction, and he was supportive but said the other stuff was "boring" and he couldn't read it so why didn't I try fantasy like Mr. Lewis and Old Tolk and Lloyd Alexander and the rest? It worked out well as a "learning experience."
(I did send the opening of that novel, Paladin Spellbound, out one time back around 1986 or so, and DAW wanted to see the rest of it, and I sent what I had, sans the final fourth. At that time, I didn't really understand the business. Obviously! I never did hear back from them again. Mother's house burned down that summer, and our circumstances changed, and I never did go back and clean up that book. You know how something looked good at first, like when you first started ice skating, but then later, you wince to see the videotape? Yeah, it's like that after the first three or four "polished" chapters that came to me all in a rush and then were workshopped. It's part of the million words that I wrote before I really had command of the craft, I suspect. Though maybe someday I will still do something with it. The characters are still alive and waiting . . . tapping feet impatiently . . . posed as in a Shakespearean offstage waiting for the cue, alarums and excursions--er, that's for going offstage, but you get my drift.)
Dulcinea is also, in fact, set in Blackwren and the Three-and-a-Half Kingdoms. You wouldn't know that unless you'd read it, though. There are two more books in that series, for which I have written outlines and first three chapters. As I said . . . maybe after I get tired of reality writing, I'll go back and do more with those (like finish them.)
We should've had just the other food . . . the fondue was not that popular. And now that all our cats are in Heaven, there was no one to jump on the table and check it out when the guests had gone off.
I was as disappointed as I was that time I had saved up all these Pringles canisters and similar canisters that had held salted peanuts and stacked them in the garage so I could do a Christmas-gift craft with the Sunday School kids, but then Don got industrious one trash day and decided to haul all that junk out for the trashman . . . ook! Yes, it looked like trash. Yes, he was mystified. Yep, I felt crappy. But their parents, I reasoned, did not really NEED a Pringles can all tarted up with Con-Tact paper and ribbons and filled with . . . I've forgotten what we were going to put in there. Maybe we were making kaleidoscopes. Anyway, we changed the plan and made some kind of paperweights out of these little shot-glass things and pasted the kids' photos on the bottoms and put felt under that so the parents could use it as a paperweight and paper clip holder but still see the kid smiling up from the bottom. It probably worked out just as well that way.
Okay, I think I can sleep some more now.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-14 01:54 pm (UTC)I wrote my last book very much on the wing. It went all over the place and wound up being 150,000 words--which I know now, after months of continuously writing short stories--is 50K longer than it needed to be. I'm seriously planning on starting my next book this week, and it will be plotted and outlined before I go past Chapter 3.
Good luck with that
Date: 2004-11-16 07:43 pm (UTC)I also hate hate HATE to have to give up on stuff, but I keep the stuff I delete in lots of "scraps" and "re-use" and "USE THIS LATER" files.
I know I've mentioned before (in earlier entries, probably) that I normally "get" the first line of a novel FIRST. And I usually keep that line, even if it goes somewhere a bit later on. And I get the character and his/her thoughts and situation right off. As I get the first paragraph or two down, and "hear" the character talking to whoever else walks into the scene, I get the ending of the book and often can go for about five to ten pages until I run out of steam and have to say, "Okay, what do we have here?" I can usually freewrite some of the plot points and what's gotta happen to get us to that ending from here, too. But I don't do anything that detailed. Once I tried listing the scenes I'd need, but then that turned out crappy in a way, 'cause I turned out not to need some really cool scenes that I'd spent a lot of effort researching and polishing. What I needed were some different scenes. That's because things changed on the fly as I watched my mental film and discovered what they were really doing, and what they really wanted, and what happened on the way. So I have to just have a vague idea of what happens and what locations/events are coming up, and the scenes kind of come to me. This is seemingly the easiest way to work. I couldn't do it if I had to do it another way, I don't think. (No more than I could continue playing piano if I couldn't play by ear and had to ONLY play from printed music.)
But, BUT, and again *BUT*! (As Ian Fleming warns in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang</>.) This method has come to me or has evolved after more than TWENTY YEARS of fooling with writing prose and poetry. First plays that we put on in nursery school and first grade, then short stories and abominable poems with insistent rhyme and meter, and then the first novellas and finally novels. I have done this on and off for thirty years, but only seriously for the past twenty. I can't be old enough to have done this for twenty years, but there you are.
So don't expect that this should be the way anyone else works. It's just ONE way.
It'd be kind of nice to have an outline and then be able to send that with the first three chapters (the ones that came so easily) and then sell the book. Whee! But this is not something to count on.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-14 04:58 pm (UTC)I really, really wanted to type "wung it," but I refrained.
Pamela
Wung it. . . .
Date: 2004-11-16 07:54 pm (UTC)I'm glad to be reminded that Tolkien was winging it. I think stuff that lasts comes out of the heart, and it resonates with the archetypes that all of humanity is somehow connected to inside. If your work says something about the eternal human condition and it has characters that people remember fondly after they close the book, it's going to last. Plot fades. *Story* doesn't fade quite so much, although a recitation of the storyline may not be impressive when taken by itself. But your memory of the character and some of the really fine quotations from that character is what remains. When I think of books I love, I often am thinking of characters in a particular scene or situation and how funny or endearing it was. Or how brave/proud/happy a character was, and maybe a smart remark that character made. Or an authorial observation (such as Vonnegut's "So it goes" or some insightful narrative or a beautiful short description or a metaphor that was fresh and spot-on). But it's not the "action plot."
I'll bet that lots of moviegoers can't really remember all the twists and turns of the latest action flick they went to, but when pressed about what happened, they'll come up with some fragment of story about the people who were in the tale experiencing the action. It's not so much the tightly plotted or plotted-ahead stuff that's going to stay with them.
I could, of course, be wrong. Maybe it depends on the kind of viewer we're talking about. I often pull out themes from a story, and THAT is what I remember about it. My husband doesn't get those as easily. He thought PULP FICTION was just a senseless, violent, FUNNY AND HILARIOUS romp. I avoided it for years because that was what he said it was, just a bunch of senseless and crazy shooting with people talking as if it were all in a day's work (which he saw as funny). Finally it was on TV and he switched to it and said, "I want to show you this one scene." But the scene wasn't at all about what he thought it was about! The film is a study of sin and redemption! (sigh) It was for ME, I mean. He finally began to see that, at some point afterward when I was carrying on about how perfect the story was and how it was shown all out of order (he hadn't even really comprehended that; he thought the Travolta character must have somehow survived being shot earlier. Whereas that's not the case in my interpretation--I think he had to be shot because he didn't repent and get redeemed the way the Samuel L. Jackson character did. But I digress.)
Anyway. So different readers bring different things to each tale. And they get out of it, in part, what they bring to it and what it brings out in them.
Which is really kind of cool.
Shell Scott and Hossie
Date: 2004-11-16 07:34 pm (UTC)Should've mentioned that.
I still wouldn't be able to do that much preparation before I started writing.