fiction

Gulf City Blues Revision Planning

Sam Falco

I started revising Gulf City Blues with a hands-off read-through of the existing manuscript. It was good!

For about 180 pages. Then the whole thing goes in the crapper with a bolted-on subplot that never makes any sense and isn’t resolved before the grand finale, which connects to the first 2/3 of the story and is satisfactory. That’s what I expected; I remembered how I struggled after about 55,000 words to figure out how to get to 80,000. Next time, I will remind myself that when the story is done, wrap it up and end it rather than forcing a word count.

What I didn’t expect was how good the first 2/3 would be. It’s engaging and fun, and sometimes I even forgot I was reading my own work. Where I have room for improvement is to give Mark a harder time getting information from people. There are a few witnesses who ought to send him away so that he can take a second run at them later. Some people not only give him information too easily, but they give him too much information. Mark ought to have to search a little harder. Since I need to cut almost 25,000 words from the end, I’m glad I see how I can broaden the scope of the story that works.

I’d like to move faster, but I picked up a few classes I wasn’t expecting to teach. Since one of them was a class I haven’t taught in almost two years, I wanted to make sure I gave my students my best effort. I sacrificed a little writing time to make that happen.

I still worked a little each day, though, and I’ll continue. I’m not pushing myself to finish by a specific date. I’d rather have a good second draft than a hastily completed, shoddy one.

Gulf City Blues Revision Stage One

Sam Falco

I finished the first draft of Gulf City Blues a month ago. I set every first draft aside for a while after I complete it. For previous stories, I’ve only taken a couple of weeks before I start revising but I’ve always been too close to the story when I return to it. This time, I resolved to spend a month letting the whole thing go. It wasn’t easy. After the first week, I felt like I was wasting time. Especially since I’m unemployed right now, I felt like I should be taking action. But especially since I’m unemployed right now, I took other action—like looking for work while also trying to build my side gig up.

After two weeks, the feeling faded. By last week, I’d developed a healthy distance from the story. I have the right balance of fondness for it and its characters vs. the understanding that the narrative structure will certainly need to be adjusted. Waiting any longer means my interest will start to wane as other ideas emerge from the primordial soup of my mind.

My first step is to read the whole thing straight through, without marking anything up. I want to remember what I’ve written and evaluate it from a reader’s perspective. Then I can start working on the superstructure. Do I have the right scenes, in the right order, to tell the story I want to tell? That’s the question I want to answer in this draft. I expect that I’ll find there’s a lot to adjust. Once I complete the first read-through, I’ll go through it a second time. The second read-through is where I’ll determine what scenes I need to drop, add, or move. Those notes will guide the work of structural revision.

I have no idea how long it will take. I’m not going to push myself to complete it by a target date. That has never worked well for me. I’ll aim to write a target number of words per day, whether that’s in the form of exploratory writing in the notebook or manuscript words, or a combination. Steady pace with focus will create a healthier experience. Once I’m done, I will let it lay fallow again. I might need a second structural pass, or it might be ready for a revision that focuses on scene-level structure. I won’t know until I get there, and I won’t worry about it until I finish this draft.

I’ll keep you posted.

Ideal Day

Sam Falco
Daily writing prompt
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
View all responses

This prompt reminded me of an exercise a friend introduced me to: “the ideal average day.” Rather than describing the most perfect day you could ever have (which is how this prompt initially read to me), you think about the kind of day you’d like to have, on average, every day.

I like that focus better. The “most ideal” is a day you’re going to have once if you’re lucky. It may be unattainable and then you’re chasing something you can never have. And if you achieve it, it’s all downhill from there. Regression to the mean applies to more than statistics.

Rather than thinking about what the best day ever would look like, I prefer to consider the whole of my life. What’s my ideal daily experience?

What’s Important?

To answer that question, I have to first think about what’s important in my life. Sweetie. Creative expression. Learning. An income.

Yes, I would like an income. As a recently-laid-off guy, I miss the regular paycheck. (Or will once the severance runs out.) Do I want a job, in the form of a forty-hour a week gig? I am looking for one, and I will certainly take a suitable one when I find it. Unless I have another means of making money.

My ideal average day includes the things that are important to me, and it somehow includes an income. For this exercise, I want to envision an ideal average day where my income derives from my creative endeavors.

Morning

I wake up around six. Coffee is waiting for me because Sweetie gets up before I do. Don’t @ me; I’m not being sexist. She’s a morning person who gets up at least an hour before I do and she makes coffee. We have our coffee together if she hasn’t already had her two cups. Then we go for a walk together, pet the neighborhood dogs and cats, and come home for a light breakfast. After washing our hands, in case you missed the part about the neighborhood dogs and cats.

After breakfast, I take about an hour to write in my journal. That often segues into creative exploration that bridges into the rest of my morning’s creative expression. Most likely, that’s writing, although occasionally there’s a computer program I want to work on.

Afternoon

After I wrap up my creative morning, it’s time for lunch with Sweetie. We make it together. She tells me about her morning, spent in the garden. She’s seen new growth on her plantings, caterpillars going into chrysalis, and dozens of birds in the yard.

After lunch, I study or do research. Learning feeds my creative mind. Then I turn to business matters. Remember that income I mentioned? My creative work feeds it, and so I have to attend to it. The afternoon is when my analytical mind is at its strongest and the creative mind is quiescent. I leverage that pattern to play to my strengths.

Evening

Dinner with Sweetie. We cook together again, except on the nights when we visit our favorite restaurant. (Good Intentions. Try it. Your taste buds will thank you.) After washing up and doing whatever other daily housekeeping chores need doing, we go to the living room. The television is tuned to a soccer match. I’m not paying attention to it but I like the background sounds as I read fiction, or play a computer game, or write some more. Between 9:30 and 10:00, I brush my teeth and climb into bed. I sleep well.

Persona prompting

Sam Falco

In a recent post on using ChatGPT, I covered four prompt patterns I’d used for a specific task. Today, I want to elaborate on one of them. The persona prompt pattern is enormously useful, and I’ll take a deeper look into how to use it.

What is it?

The persona pattern is named for what it does: it instructs ChatGPT to respond as a specific person or type of person. ChatGPT’s training data is vast. As a result, it can be difficult to get it to focus on what you want. The persona prompt channels ChatGPT to select the kinds of details it should focus on as it generates its output. Focusing the output also helps when you aren’t sure what type of output you want, but you do know the kind of person you might ask for those details. For example, you might not be sure what to describe at a murder scene, but you know that a homicide detective could tell you what’s important and what’s not.

Pattern Structure

The structure is simple: “Act as a {persona name},” replacing the curly bracket text with whatever you need. “Act as a homicide detective…” in the example above. Then you follow it with the body of the prompt. Here’s an example:

Act as a medical historian and outline the important events in 17th century Europe.

You’ll get information about the Great Plague of London, the development of microscopy, and advancement in understanding human anatomy, among other topics. Omitting the persona produces output that describes events pertaining to wars, politics, and arts in addition to mentioning the effects of the Great Plague.

You can also append a prompt with this structure. For example:

The protagonist in my novel is a gambling addict. What are some things she might do to hide her problem from her family? Respond as a behavioral psychologist.

The last statement executes the persona pattern.

Variation: Outputs

A variation on the Persona pattern can help you narrow your scope, especially if you’re not sure what you want. The variation looks like this: “Provide outputs that {persona} would create.” Here’s an example:

My character wants to help a struggling student improve her grades. Provide outputs that a teacher would suggest.

I’m not a teacher, so I might use this prompt to know what kinds of assignments, exercises, or other tools a teacher might provide to the student. Then I could focus on the ones that support your story.

Uses

You can use the persona pattern to support your writing in many ways. Here are some things I’ve done with it:

  • Research assistant. While working out what a fictional Florida city might look like, I didn’t know how to start. I prompted ChatGPT to answer as an Urban Anthropologist and tell me factors I ought to consider.
  • Sounding board. “I’m having trouble coming up with a red herring for a mystery novel. Ask me questions about my plot from the perspective of a mystery reader until you can suggest some options for me.” That combines the persona with another kind prompt pattern, flipped interaction. ChatGPT probed what I already had in the way of plot twists before suggesting options that got my thinking started again.
  • Character development. I’ve provided the LLM with some details of the character’s background and psychology and then asked it to respond to questions as that character. That has helped me generate new ideas to deepen backgrounds, suggest motivations, and dilemmas the character might face.

You can combine multiple personas to examine a question from different perspectives. In the city-building example, I didn’t stop at Urban Anthropology. I also asked about the city from the perspective of the 19th century robber baron who founded it, a 1970s civil rights activist, and a teen who lives there today. Those outputs gave me fresh ideas to pursue.

These three ideas only scratch the surface of what you can do with the persona prompt pattern. Try it out, and please leave a comment telling me how it worked out for you.

77,752: The End

Sam Falco

I finished the first draft of Gulf City Blues moments ago. I need to take some time to reflect on the process and so on, and I will certainly do that. Right now, I’m basking in the satisfaction of completion.

I’m especially happy that I wrote a solid ending. That’s always a challenge. I tend to describe my endings as “crash landings.” Early drafts are the worst, but I have declared project “done” even though I wasn’t happy with an ending that feels abrupt and lacking something. To finish a first draft and think, “Yeah, that has legs” feels so good.

I always take time off between drafts. At least two weeks, but preferably a month. I like to empty my mind of the whole story before I come back to it. Attention residue is proportional to the size of the project, and two weeks usually isn’t enough to stop thinking and rethinking the plot.

I had planned to use the time between to revisit world building for the novel. But I’ve changed my mind. I might waste my time on things that aren’t necessary for this story, and keeping my head in Gulf City will make it hard for me to forget the story I told. It’s time to let everything about Gulf City lay fallow in my mind while I attend to other things.

Dropping out of warp

Sam Falco

Last weekend, I joined the members of my critique group for a writing retreat. Over four days, I logged thirty hours of writing and added 9,000 words to my manuscript. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re in a house with three other writers and no one wants to break anyone else’s focus. Coming home to a normal writing schedule of about two hours a day feels like dropping out of warp speed.

I’ve begun every session of this project by writing, “My primary objective is to write an enjoyable PI story.” Every prior attempt to write a novel has been haunted by the ghosts of my graduate studies in literature. No matter what I wrote, I felt I ought to be writing something with deep significance. I never could live up to the ideal, and I berated myself for it. Filled with despair and self-loathing, I’d shift the story toward a didactic theme. Characters turned into mannequins and plots turned into lectures. I’d hate every minute of it, veer back toward more adventure-style fare, and begin the cycle anew.

With this story, I wanted to remind myself every day to focus on writing a story people would enjoy. “Social significance” would have to emerge—if it emerged—on its own. The mantra did help in that regard. Police corruption is an integral part of the plot, but the story is not a lecture about how All Right-Thinking People Must Stand For Justice. I’ve built characters with interesting motives, flaws, and strengths and let them interact.

But this weekend, I realized a curious thing had happened over the course of writing the first draft. My objective shifted from “write an enjoyable PI story” to “write 80,000 words.” The shift translated at first to setting a punishing daily goal. Even after I moved the target date to the end of January, I still focused on the target total. I wrote a lot of material not to serve the story but to pile up word count. If my focus really had been on writing an enjoyable story, I’d have stopped, re-examined my plans and the state of the story, and adjusted what I was writing.

It’s funny because I chose one word in my objective deliberately so I wouldn’t worry about length: “story.” I didn’t say I wanted to write “an enjoyable PI novel.” I chose the word “story” because I wanted to leave it open to finding the right length. I wasn’t sure whether it should be a short story, a novella, a novel, or a series. But once I recognized it was going to be a novel, I focused on the target length and sacrificed good storytelling.

Today, there’s not much story left. Mark knows who the killer is and needs only one crucial piece of evidence to prove it. There’s one subplot to wrap up—will he reconcile with his ex-girlfriend? (I don’t know yet.) Two to four scenes will take care of plot and subplot. Regardless of the final length of the draft, I will type “The End” once I write them. If the book is too short, well, there’s another draft after this one, and I can worry about it then.

2024: The Year I Don’t Write a Novel

Sam Falco1 Comment

Every year, I tell myself that this will be the year I write a great novel. It never quite works out that way. The truth is that I don’t so much “finish” a novel as “get bored with and abandon” novels. I am always looking forward to the next one. The one that’s going to be so great, not like the puddle of puke I’m working on now. The next novel will flow from my pen like liquid chocolate, rich and delightful. It will not take much revision because I’ll do it right this time.

Of course, that never happens because first drafts are never like that.

And then my mind is looking forward to the next thing, instead of working to refine and improve what’s right in front of me. It’s as if, having arrived at an oasis in the desert, I go chasing the mirage of a bigger, better oasis that might not exist.

This year, I am not resolving to write a new novel. I’d like to finish Gulf City Blues without rushing it. I’d like to set it aside for a month and not start the next thing, so that I can return to Mark Marshal and his problems without having another story gnawing at me. I don’t know what I’ll do with the down time. I might take that time for related research, or to develop elements of the setting that I know need attention. But I won’t start a different project.

When I come back to the story for revision, I won’t rush that, either. A few pages a day is plenty. If it takes months, then it takes months. Maybe it will take the rest of the year. Maybe it will take longer. I don’t care. I can’t rush through stories anymore only to abandon them before they get good.

60,000+ words

Sam Falco2 Comments

I ended yesterday’s writing session thirteen words shy of 60,000 total. Today, I blasted out over a thousand. I am 76.25% of the way toward my target or 80,000.

Three-quarters of the way through a story is roughly where heroes are at their lowest. They have failed, utterly. They are farther from solving the riddle, answering the question, or discovering the mystery than they were at the start. They’ve lost everything–which is why this beat is called “All is Lost” in the Save the Cat storytelling framework.

I honored that “rule” of fiction by destroying my protagonist’s world. His apartment and his car are in flames. He escaped the blaze wearing only a pair of shorts–no shirt or shoes–and carrying the gun he managed to grab on his way out. Having pushed away all of the people in his life, he has no one to turn to. Oh, and he’s wanted by police, so having a gun isn’t going to do him any favors in a few minutes.

The next 20,000 words are going to be a hoot.

50,000… and holding

Sam Falco

I crossed the 50,000-word mark on Gulf City Blues this morning. Pretty cool! 40,000 was a mere week ago. But as I wrote at the time, the pace was starting to feel punishing. I’ve pushed myself to keep it up this week, but I fell a little short of the necessary word count each day. Worse, when I look at what I wrote yesterday and today, it’s clear that I’m sacrificing quality for quantity. It’s time to throttle back.

Before I started the first draft, I spent a lot of time writing and thinking about the characters. I wanted to allow the characters to emerge rather than construct them in service of a plot. As a result the central mystery feels real to me, not contrived.

Once I began the story, I balanced advancing the manuscript with continuing character discovery. Eventually, I started building momentum on the draft and my focus shifted almost exclusively to that. Now I’ve reached a point where I need to return to discovery. To do that, I have to slow down. There are seventeen writing days left between now and December 29, my arbitrary, self-imposed deadline. To make it, I’d have to write 1,775 words per day. That’s too much even if I knew exactly how the rest of the story would unfold.

January 31 is my new goal. I’ll need to average about 650 words per day. That’s much more reasonable and I’m not even accounting for the four-day writing retreat I’m going on after the new year starts. I feel good about slowing down.

10,000 Words

Sam Falco

Yesterday, I reached the threshold on Gulf City Blues where my thoughts shifts from, “I don’t know about this,” to, “Yeah, I’ve got something here.” It’s when I start to believe that my idea is really a story. That’s usually right around 10,000 words. I was within a few dozen of that total when I knocked off.

I wrote the first 6,500 entirely with pen and paper. I’ve been writing journals in longhand for a few years, and it has made the experience much more enjoyable. After hearing Eli Kranor talk last spring about his writing process, which begins with writing his first drafts that way, I decided to try it for my next novel. It worked, to a degree. I made steady progress but not as much as I wanted to, averaging about nine hundred words per day. On Monday, I turned to the keyboard and wrote 1,600. Yesterday, almost 2,000. This morning, I hit 1,300 before an interruption destroyed my focus.

Regardless of whether I write the draft on paper or on screen, I start each session by writing about the scene. That’s best done in longhand, because I am less likely to brainstorm myself into oblivion if I don’t have an infinite page to work on. I spend a short amount of time exploring what the scene is all about, who’s in it, and where it’s set. What complications could arise? Do I need to think about any more information, like new character or setting details? Once I understand the contours of the scene, I can keep a tight focus.

I’m aiming for 80,000 words. I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens next.