mystery

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.

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.

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.

The Midpoint

Sam Falco1 Comment

Yesterday, I reached the midpoint of Gulf City Blues. 40,000 words of a target 80,000. More than that, it was the midpoint of the story where Mark thinks he’s solved his case, before he discovers how much trouble he’s really in. This is the first time I’ve ever made the word count midpoint coincide with the story midpoint, so it’s a big deal for me.

When I started the novel on October 20 (and then started it over again three days later), I said I wanted to finish by the end of the year. It was an arbitrary deadline, but it was a good goal. Challenging but achievable. When I found out I was being laid off effective 12/29, I shifted the deadline forward two days. Wouldn’t it be cool to say that I basically got paid to write my first draft?

But I missed a day of writing here and there, and the necessary average daily word count kept creeping up. It was eleven hundred on day one. Now it’s over 1,300 per day, but that’s only if I manage to write every day. I rarely get much writing time on Saturdays. It’s unlikely I’ll write on Christmas, and the day after that? That’s a full day of Premiere League soccer and I know better than to tell myself I won’t watch it. To meet my deadline, I need to average 1,650 words on the days I write.

That is a big stretch. I usually start to falter around 1,200 words. Pushing myself to write a third more than that, daily, might be pushing myself too hard.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I’m not sure I can hit my deadline. I write for fun, and I don’t want to turn it into anxiety-causing drudgery. I’ll still write as fast as I can, and if I make it, that’s great. If I don’t, it’s not like I’ll get in trouble or suffer any consequences. Another couple of weeks won’t change much.

33,280 Words

Sam Falco

I am about forty percent of the way through the first draft of Gulf City Blues. It’s astonishing how quickly I’ve been adding words. It’s still not as fast as I’d like to go. I’m learning to deal with distractions.

The biggest distraction last week revolved around my search for a new job. A recruiter had a hot prospect. I had some misgivings but I agreed to a screening interview. That went well. Next step would be to get me the interview with the hiring manager. The recruiter called a couple times, updating me, asking questions. The back-and-forth disrupted my writing time. I allowed it to disrupt my writing time.

Then the job evaporated. The client wanted to hire someone so quickly that they, well, hired someone. I probably should have seen that coming. I lost two days of writing. At least another 2,600 words. Maybe more. Who can say?

I won’ make the same mistake again. I’ll set boundaries. I won’t accept calls before lunch. I won’t interview before lunch. Writing is what I want to do most. I need to protect the time when I’m at my most creative.

I need to average 1,298 words per day to finish by the end of the year. It’s an arbitrary target, but I would love to say that I wrote a whole new novel the same year that I finished revising another one.

Friday Five: Recent Reads

Sam Falco

It’s late and I’m too wiped out from a busy day to write a full entry. Here are five books I’ve enjoyed recently:

The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. This follow up to Ruff’s 2016 dark fantasy horror novel follows the further adventures of Atticus Turner and his family. It’s a fun read in its own right, although I thought it was less compelling than the original. I never really felt like the Turners were in real danger the way I did in the first book. But I was still glad to spend time with these characters again.

The Kingdoms of Savannah by George Dawes Green. Southern gothic at its finest. I can’t possibly do it justice with a capsule description, so I’ll say this: get it, read it, let it take your breath away. Then thank me.

The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon. This story of a serial kidnapper/killer reminded me of The Collector by John Fowles. Unlike Fowles’s classic, this one is told only through the perspectives of the three women in his life: Rachel, the one woman he has kept prisoner instead of murdering, Emily, the woman he wants to make his next victim, and Cecilia, his daughter. It’s terrifying and compelling.

How to Speak Whale: The Power and Wonder of Listening to Animals by Tom Mustill. In 2015, a breaching humpback whale landed on the kayak Mustill was paddling with a friend. You might have seen the viral video. The experience led him to wonder about what we could learn from this encounter. The book follows his journey to understand how whales communicate, and the possibilities that we might someday be able to communicate with them. It’s a fascinating look at the history of human-cetacean relations and what might be.

An Immense World: How Animal Sense Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. I picked this up the same day I bought How to Speak Whale, and technically I haven’t read it yet. I’m about two-thirds of the way through it. It’s a perfect complement to Mustill’s book because it broadens the question Mustill asks to the entire animal kingdom. What can we learn from the way animals perceive the world? Thought-provoking and a delight to read.

Gulf City Blues Update

Sam Falco

I started the first draft of Gulf City Blues Friday morning. I wrote about 1,000 words, and it was awful.

I expected a certain amount of awkwardness at the start. What I wrote Friday went beyond the usual authorial throat-clearing. My protagonist was OK, but his client was flat and the scene lacked tension. What happened? I’d spent over a month thinking and writing about Mark and his world. How did I run aground so quickly?

In a lecture I attended many years ago by Andre Dubus III, he made a distinction between “imagining” and “making things up.” I didn’t quite grok the difference then. But his point seemed similar to Flannery O’Connor’s complaint that in so many stories she read, the author had a plot in mind and then dragooned characters into performing it, rather than creating realistic characters and then seeing what they would do.

That’s what I’d try to do with Mark’s client. Delia Kane was a cardboard cutout. I knew what she wanted, but I didn’t give any thought to her as a fleshed-out character. I didn’t know what she looked like or how she would behave. Because I was so anxious to get started, I didn’t stop when I encountered questions I didn’t have the answers to. I made something up on the spot. No matter if it didn’t fit. I was determined to force her to act out my plot.

Once I realized the source of my problem, I stopped trying to brute-force my way into a story. Instead, I spent my weekend writing time imagining Kane. Her motivations, her thoughts, her behavior. Yesterday, I decided to throw away the 1,000 words I wrote Friday and start fresh.

Normally, I wouldn’t do that. Once I get a story under way, I leave the inconsistencies and problem spots where they are, to be remedied in the first revision pass. But this time, it felt right to start again from nothing. The existing material was too different from what I’d imagined since writing it. It would be more difficult to try to salvage any of it than to pretend it didn’t exist.

That was the right move. I’ve written 1,500 words in two days. That’s fewer words than I’d like, but I’m still building momentum. (And dealing with the aftermath of being laid off. That hasn’t done me any favors.) The new scenes work better than the original attempt. I’m headed in the right direction. I expect to pick up the pace over the next few weeks. Who knows? Maybe with extra time on my hands, I’ll finish the first draft in record time.