Moving From The Abstract Of Development To Writing Is Jarring


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner


As I keep saying, I have to plot everything out beforehand when I get ready to actually start writing. The one big thing I’ve noticed is how jarring moving from the abstract of development to actually writing the novel is.

And this happens in the context of trying to make sure I get as close to the 90,000-100,000 word count sweet spot as I can. (The issue of word count is something that weighs heavily on my mind. I really want to just write the story the way I want to, but the cold hard truth is every word beyond that sweet spot ups the ante on how well this novel is written.)

Anyway, I’m moving along quite quickly with the first draft of the novel. I still need to do a lot more reading, however. There’s a lot of nuance that I’m discovering I need as I start to write. But I think I’ve finally accepted that the first draft simply isn’t going to be perfect. In fact, it’s going to be really, really bad.

I have to give myself the right to “fail” with the first draft.

Regardless, today I continue to flesh out the scene summary for another chapter.

Struggling With Structuring Scenes #AmWriting


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner


I have no idea what I’m doing. One thing that has come to the forefront of my mind as I get more serious about this novel is how, exactly, to structure individual scenes. I thought I had it figured out by following the advice in the book Scene and Structure, but studying my “textbook” The Girl Who Played With Fire, it just isn’t as effective as I would hope.

So, I’ve gone to a smile Beginning-Middle-End structure. But, really, what helps the most is simply plotting out what I need to explicate in any specific scene. That really helps a lot because all I have to do is follow the scene summary for that scene and move on to the next one.

That’s probably one of the biggest things I’ve learned about how I, specifically, write a novel — everything has to be plotted out. Everything. I have to know exactly what I’m going to write about in a scene well before I sit down to write it.

One thing I don’t know how to do is manage the overall experience of the novel. I just don’t know how to do that. I think the only option I have is to write the first draft, then read it over and manage canon and overall experience that way. That’s all I got right now, at least.

Of #SNL & The Novel I’m Developing & #Writing



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner


A re-occurring theme in this novel I’m working on is how much I want people to really love a place. I want particular place in the setting of the novel to be almost a character unto itself. I’m fascinated by how people love the office politics and history of Saturday Night Live and struggle to figure out how to use that dynamic in the novel.

It’s really interesting that people enjoy hearing old behind the scenes stories from SNL that sometimes that’s Jimmy Fallon’s entire show. I’m still only on my first draft, so there’s a lot of nuance that I’ve yet to figure out how to impart into the novel’s text.

But in general, I want several main characters to have an emotional attachment to a place so when something happens to it, the audience knows it’s a big deal. Being able to actually show that on the page is a lot — a lot — of work. I’ve discovered the hard way that my imagination and my ability to lay what I can think up on the page are two different things. It’s been a two year struggle to get to this point.

Anyway, I’m going to have to give this a lot of thought to evoke the emotional attachment I need.

The Demise Of The Republic & The #Novel I’m Developing & #Writing



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner


I feel rather powerless these days. It seems virtually everyone I know is willfully accepting the rise of tyranny in the United States. It definitively seems as though my worse nightmares from Election Night 2016 are coming true. As such, I have a lot of bent up frustration in me that needs to go somewhere. So it’s going into the novel I’m developing and writing.

The last time I was this focused on something was in 2006 – 2007 when I was working on ROKon magazine. It totally consumed me and ultimately pretty much destroyed me. What makes this different is it’s just me. I don’t have a “tribe” I have to “feed” by publishing the magazine each month. I only have to worry about myself. I keep trying to move forward with development and churning out copy.

My focus grows more intense every day when I have mind-boggling conversations with people who make “Good Germans” like progressives. They have either stopped believing in democracy or they are so short sighted they are indifferent to the red lights blinking that Trump isn’t going to allow free and fair elections in the fall.

As I’ve said before, it seems as though after Trump has brazenly stolen the 2020 election, there will be a lot of people who will want to read about the Trump Era in the form that I have come up with. Though events in Portland involving American Little Green Men make some of the previously outrageous parts of the novel I’m working on seem almost real. (Or maybe eventually real for sooner than you might have expected.)

The point is — I’m working so hard not to make this simply Resistance fanfiction and reality is changing so dramatically that for the worse that I’m feeling a lot better about the scenario I’ve come up with.

Of Developing Characters & Development Angst #AmWriting


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner


At the beginning of the process of developing this novel, I spent a huge amount of time on plot. It was a real struggle to work out the structure necessary to support the rather complex situation I had come up with. Gradually, as I got that figured out, the need to properly develop characters grew in significance in my mind.

Now, I spend a lot of time thinking through the main characters, trying to give them motivation. I also have a huge amount of reading to do so I can have a working knowledge of the things I want my characters to know. All of this takes time, however.

That’s time I don’t feel I have — and yet have to allot myself nonetheless. I want to wrap this novel up as quickly as possible and start working on its sequel, but it takes physical time to read and write. But I’m still sufficiently early enough in the process that I allow myself to be delusional. I have to allow myself to think I can actually pull this off, otherwise I’ll stop and not even get close.

One thing people often do when they know you’re writing a novel is to tell you how much you suck. They refuse that you (or at least me) have it within you to write a novel in the first place. They suggest you “write a short story” or “join a writing group.”

Fuck that.

I’m just going to do whatever the fuck I want when it comes to this novel. All I ever wanted to do it is to have a big creative project to think about and I’ve gotten that. I know I have it within me to do something far better than people are willing to give me credit for.

But we’ll see. I just have to keep believing.

Well, At Least This #Novel May Be More Popular As Fascism Arrives In The United States


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner


As America lurches more rapidly into fascism, at least I can take solace in the fact that there’s a good chance this will aid in my novel’s ultimate success. I’m a very abstract, allegorical personal in general and my novel is no exception. I couldn’t help myself — I constructed the canon of this novel in such a way that a lot of the abstract issues of the Trump Era are made concrete.

The thriller part of the plot is simply an excuse to have people run around the allegorical universe I’ve constructed.

That’s the thing about developing a novel — you’re pretty much just rushing into the void. You have no idea what the world will look like when you try to sell it.

Anyway, this novel definitely is, well, ME. It’s very much a reflection of my personal history and personality. I’m trying to make it difficult — at least in the text –to figure out what my politics are, but it’s really tough sometimes. The best I can do at this point is to put all my unpopular opinions, the ones that don’t fit the narrative — in the mouths of the bad guys.

But I am honestly trying to make this story (two novels, one story) a critique of the entirety of the Trump Era, not just the parts I don’t like. I think the center-Left is pathetic in the United States because too often it’s more interested in scoring points on Twitter than doing anything about the rise of fascism in the country.

Fascism has come to America and the real question — at least for me — is how much will I be allowed to get away with in this novel. Freedom of speech will likely be the last thing to go in the United States and maybe I’ll be able to publish this thing in the window of opportunity that will exist in the early months of Trump’s ill-gotten second term.

Mulling My Novel’s Word Count


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner


The key issue with this novel right now is word count. I made something of strategic miscalculation at the very beginning of this process when I decided to use The Girl Who Played With Fire as my baseline for word count. I think it’s about 185,000 words, which is way, way, way too long. I think The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is about 1650,000, which is better, but still not good enough.

The “sweetspot” for a novel is supposed to be about 90,000 – 100,000 and I’m well aware that it would be very arrogant of me to think I can not at least try to work within those guidelines. But this is the first draft we’re talking about, so I’m going to just write the story I want to write and see what happens.

Once I have the first draft finished, then maybe I can dwell on how to pare things down some. I just don’t think I can get down to 90,000. Maybe something in the 120,000 – 140,000 range. The only reason why I’m willing to break this “rule” is I believe by the time I try to sell this novel, people will be so enraged by the Trump Era that maybe, just maybe, length won’t be quite such a big deal.

Though, lulz, what am I talking about.

Of course for purely financial reasons on the part of any prospective publisher, I’m really risking them rejecting me out of hand if the novel is too long, no matter how engaging it might otherwise be.

Anyway, I’m plotting this novel very methodically right now. It just takes time to do it the way I want to do it. So I find myself at times like this where mentally I want to work on it, but physically I’m pooped.

But we’ll see I might get some more work done tonight.

Choreographing A Scene #AmWriting


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner


While the nation I love is being burned to the ground by a bunch of fucking incompetent idiots, I find myself working on a more complex scene in the novel I’m working on.

All I can say is it’s times like this when the white hot rage I feel towards the Trump Administration comes in handy. I have a scene I’m working on that requires a lot of work because it has one or two extra people in it. It’s an important scene because a lot of information is being conveyed within it meant to push the plot forward.

I have come up with a unique way to address the #MeToo movement that I think a lot of men will enjoy. The point of telling a story with a message is that, like, people actually enjoy enough to consume it. That was the big problem with the movie Booksmart — I hated that movie, even though I was empathetic to its message because it insulted me.

With the novel I’m working on, I want everyone (expect maybe fucking shithead MAGA people) to have a good time. If you’re just a regular old conservative, I really hope you’ll find something to hang your hat on. I want my protagonist to be more conservative than I am, but it’s a struggle. It’s difficult — given how fetid MAGA has made the conservative movement — for me to figure out how square the circle on that one. But I’m trying, at least.

One thing about this novel, at least in the first draft, is it’s not dark and scary. It’s no Gone Girl. It’s no The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I’m just not that type of person. But it’s the first draft still. The point of this draft is to just get the story down. In the second draft I’m going to work on tone more. I think having a dark and scary prologue will do a lot to set the tone of the novel from the beginning.

But anyway. I have a huge amount of work to do on this scene. My rage against the Trump Administration is dragging me by the collar. I’m absolutely focused — obsessed, if you will — with using what little talent I have to lay out an indictment of this fucked up moment in our nation’s history.

My #Novel & The #Trump Era Endgame


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner


The thing about working on a novel seriously, especially the type I’m working on, is you pretty much are flying blind into the future. I have no idea what is going to happen with Trump, who flies by the plot of the novel like a blackhole.

I believe absolutely that Trump is never leaving office. Never. He will steal the 2020 election then demand a Constitutional Convention that will allow him to never, ever leave office.

As such, this fills me with an absolute existential rage and I have no way to express it other than creatively. That generates the massive amount of motivation needed to develop and write a novel the way I feel is required. I have a very brutal personal editor and it’s only been gradually over the last two years that I’ve finally figured out how to tell the story I want to tell the way I want to tell it.

Of course, there’s always that .0000000000000000000000000001% chance that I’m wrong and somehow we manage to physically remove President Bonkers out of the Oval Office without him blowing the world up. In that case, I think people will still want to read this novel, but for a different reason — it will be a great way to have a macro review of the just-concluded era.

Anyway, things are moving really fast with development and writing for the moment. I’m just about to start writing Part 2 which is meat and bones of the first act. I still have a tone-setting prelude I think I want to write, but I’ll probably save that when the mood strikes me.

I’ll Put A Move On You, Redux


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

People are always underestimating me. Always. In large part, this comes from I’m such an extroverted daydreamer that any normal person (if they’re paying attention) sees me as little more than a fool, and a drunk fool at that.

And, yet…

Things have changed. My life has changed significantly in the last year, affording me just the right set of circumstances necessary for me to be within shouting distance of actually being able to have the time necessary to develop and write a damn good novel.

So here I am. I’m completely, totally obsessed with this novel. It has consumed my every waking moment. So much so that sometimes I need to distract myself to get any work on it done. I’m so wrapped up obsessing about the exact sequence of events in the plot that my mind grows clouded and I need to read something or go for a walk. Anything to not think about the issue at hand.

But things are moving along quickly. I’ve finished “Part 1” of the novel, and now I’m well on my way to wrapping up development on the first draft of Part 2. I’m going to give myself some wiggle room in my timetable, however. It seems as though sometimes I need to just clear my mind a little bit before I can produce my best product possible.

Anyway, once more into the breach.