I’ve thus far finished the first book of the Dark Elf Trilogy, Homeland. It was a fun read, but it could have been better; there were some things in it that drove me a bit bonkers, to be honest. One in particular? Salvatore’s (over)usage of varied tag lines in dialogue. In a short guide for writing dialogue, the guide at fictionwriting.about.com wrote:

6. Don’t try too hard to vary your tag lines when writing dialogue.
Veering too much beyond “he said/she said” only draws attention to the tags. Readers tend to read over these phrases anyway, whereas obvious efforts to insert variety, through words such as “interjected,” “counseled,” or “conceded,” draw the reader out of the action. If the writer is doing his or her work, the reader is already aware that the speaker is interjecting, counseling, or conceding. The writer won’t have to say it again in the tag.

I’ve seen this advice elsewhere on the ‘net, and it’s true – while you’d think “he / she said” over and over would get old, it really doesn’t. We’re used to it, we see it, we skim it, it’s gone – all we’re really taking in are the words that the characters are speaking. This is infinitely better than the reader stumbling over different (and at times peculiar!) tag words repeatedly.

Salvatore’s evil dark elf characters “said” a lot, but they also “grumbled” and “mumbled” a good deal. The two tag words that topped the charts, though? Snapped and growled. While I’m sure my perception of them was exaggerated due to some mild frustration on my part, I would have swore that one of these words adorned every single page of the book. Had they been used once or twice in the whole book, they would have caught my attention and given weight to the dialogue. Instead, due to how often I saw them, I started to think – do dark elves have a bit of canine DNA in them or something? They sure do growl and snap a lot…

I’m 15 pages or so into Exile, book 2 of the trilogy; we’ll see if the growls and snaps scare me away. Please, future fiction writers – go easy on such things.

1. Yes, I’ve played these before. No, my love affair with them will never truly end
2. The Forgotten Realms is one of the Dungeons and Dragons settings. More info can be had here.

At the end of last semester, I actually said I’d be away from the blog for a week or two, due to lack of time. I’m not at that stage yet, but it may be quickly approaching.

Like last semester, I’ve got to write a term paper. 8-10 pages long, on anything I want, as long as it ties in with the American Revolution. Compared to the last term paper I had to do, which was about the American South, I figured doing one about the Revolution would be a piece of cake; I mean, it’s the Revolution, there should be plenty of articles about it!

Sort of.

There are indeed masses of articles about the period. However, I’m having a really hard time finding 3 good articles about the same thing. I’ve gone through hundreds of search results in research databases, probably having spent 8 or 9 hours on it at this point, and I’ve just not come up with anything solid. The first topic I wanted to tackle was how the American Revolution was received in European countries, and how the Revolution influenced conditions there (besides the obvious “It helped lead to the French Revolution!”). This ended up being a total flop. While I was able to find some books on Spain’s involvement, they didn’t lead me to any usable articles; I simply didn’t find anything at all in the research databases on the topic.

The next topic I chose, which I’m still fighting with, is espionage during the war. I’d prefer to focus in on one facet of it, such as military intelligence or political espionage, but again, I’ve not found enough on either of those to prop a paper on. I’ve found one excellent article on the development of the British military intelligence; one article about Britain intercepting letters from the colonies and creating extracts to see what colonial opinion was (not very suitable for what I’m trying to do); and one article that, while I thought it was going to be excellent, is ultimately, I think, not going to work. It had no abstract, but was entitled British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance. Well, hey, the title sounded great… Unfortunately, when I received it through interlibrary loan, I discovered that it’s an examination of a few people in London who were double agents. The extreme focus on these people, rather than a wider view, is not going to work, I’m afraid.

I’m at a standstill right now. I’ve one more article on the way via interlibrary loan which I hope will give me enough overall to work with. I’ve a long list of other articles I can request through interlibrary loan, but I’d really prefer to see if the one that’s (supposedly!) on the way will allow me to get to writing or not. The paper is due on the 2nd, so I’m running out of time, and ILLs take time. Furthermore, I have to pay for every article I get through interlibrary loan, and if I start requesting things willy nilly, I’ll soon have $50+ in my paper, which I’m not exactly keen on doing (at all). The articles are only $.10 per page, but those dimes add up quickly.

I’m meeting with the professor of the class Friday to essentially show him the articles I have and say “help!” Hopefully he can help me get things going. This is driving me nuts, as those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed.

I’m enjoying The Pale Horseman well enough: the setting is interesting (Anglo-Saxon England), the characters are decent. But, as I’ve mentioned before in my posts about other Cornwell books, his writing could be better. A lot better. In particular, the man has a terrible problem with run on sentences. I’m truly surprised that many of his monstrous bits of prose haven’t been caught by editors.

While reading some of the book a few nights ago before going to sleep, I ran into an enormous construction. See how long you can hang on. Also, if you’re going to read it out loud – take a deep breath! Okay, here we go:

I let him drive me, then dodged to my right where my left foot slipped and I went down on that knee and the crowd, close behind me now, took in a great breath and a woman screamed because Steapa’s huge sword was swinging like an ax onto my neck, only I had not slipped, merely pretended to, and I pushed off with my right foot, came out from under the blow and around his right flank, and he thrust the shield out, catching my shoulder with the rim, and I knew I would have a bruise there, but I also had a heartbeat of opportunity and I darted Serpent-Breath forward and her point punctured his mail again to scrape against the ribs of his back and he roared as he turned, wrenching my blade free of his mail, but I was already going backward.

One sentence! My, my.  I don’t know what Cornwell was after there. Perhaps he was trying to catch the speed and tenseness of a one-on-one sword fight, but if that was his goal, I think he failed. All the sentence did for me was give me a bit of a headache. I doubt it truly is the longest sentence ever, but it’s still pretty damn long. Someone mail that man some periods.

A lot of my time lately has been eaten up by studying, particularly for my history exam (which is today, coincidentally). My math exam is tomorrow which, ironically, I think I’m better prepared for than I am for the history one.

And, truthfully, a lot of my time has been eaten up just doing things other than working on my novel. I’ve fallen victim, in a way, to Newton’s first law of motion:

An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force . An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force.

I stopped writing for a few days due to being swamped with other things. Essentially, my novel writing stopped. Then I took another day off. Then I took another. And then, I let me being behind affect me in a dumb way: I put off my writing some more. And now, I find myself at close to the end of the month with 8,300 words instead of 35,000. I haven’t given up though – there are plenty of NaNoWriMo tales of people who were dreadfully behind catching up in the last few days. Maybe I’ll be one of those people. Maybe I won’t. We’ll see.

(Oh, and for those who are keen discerners of truth: yes, I know. I could have been writing some more of my novel instead of writing this blog post. Shhh…)

Yeah, I didn’t think so either…

* By saying that readers will need to be able to see the lay of the land on a map, I’m not implying that this terrible, horribly written piece of fiction, which is full of plot holes and stiff characters novel will ever come even close to seeing the light of day. In all likelihood it will be burned and then buried in an atomic waste facility.

** I use the term ‘story’ very loosely here. It’s probably more similar to taking fifteen dictionaries, cutting out all of the words, and then arranging them randomly. Yes, it’s that bad.

As a way to try and re-motivate myself, I checked out No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. It’s by Chris Baty, the mastermind (crazy mind?) behind the whole NaNoWriMo thing. After reading about 40 pages, I was ready to leap back into the novel. He stresses repeatedly: don’t analyze, just go go go! I particularly liked a quote from Ernest Hemingway that he used to get the point across:

The first draft of anything is shit.

That’s certainly comforting, because my first draft is pretty crappy! Oh well. After jumping back into it tonight, a new plot line opened up which I hadn’t really expected (at all). It’s kind of cool, really. Now that I’m actually trying to write a novel, a lot of my assumptions about novel-writing from the past have been shattered. In particular, I used to think that when novelists would say, “I didn’t expect that to happen at all with my characters, but it did!”, I’d think… bullshit. You’re a novelist. You knew the whole plot before you started writing! You all do! Novels don’t just “happen”; things don’t just “happen” without you planning it.

Nonsense. I’m finding that if you get in the groove of writing fiction, and just let go without worrying too much, things do happen on their own. You start clacking away on the keyboard, and before you know it, there’s a bunch of stuff staring back at you that you did not expect to happen at all. Things that hadn’t even crossed your mind before. It’s a pretty awesome feeling. I won’t say this is easy – as noted before, my analytical brain is trying to beat me senseless – but this is turning out to be a bucketload of fun, and also rather insightful.

Don’t hold me to that, though. By the end of the month, this could be me, along with many of my fellow NaNoWriMo-ers:

• Find some music you love, crank it up, and then start writing. (Thanks, Brendan)
• Don’t think about it too much. I really, really need to keep this one in mind. I am THE Mr. Over-Analyzer. (Thanks, Zeitlos)
• Repeat the phrase from Star Trek, “You must return Spock’s brain”, followed by “You must write more.” Rinse and repeat. Or, if you’re feeling feisty, drink some Jamesons. (Thanks, David)

A few that I’ve thought of whilst writing:

• Write late at night, or whenever you’re tired. The tiredness will make you not care much about how very awful your novel (mine, anyway) is turning out.
• In a similar vein as the one above… Laugh. A lot. Whenever you write a sentence or paragraph that you know is dreadful, laugh and move on. Remember: you don’t have time to make it any better. You’ve got a deadline to make. Quantity, not quality. Quantity, not quality. That should be your mantra for the next month!

That last one is really important, at least for me. If I didn’t laugh at the absolutely horrible prose I’m producing (and I’m producing quite a lot of it – I’m already up to 3500 words), I’d cry and give up on the whole thing. It goes against my very nature to not tweak, tweak, and retweak. This is harder than I thought it would be.

I know what’s happening, too. When I first started writing, I was in “full speed ahead!” mode. Now that I’ve written a bit, the analytical bit of my brain is trying to take over. It’s saying as I write: ehh, no, that’s not quite right. No, that could be better. What’s the backstory for that? Why would that character do that? These are all very good things to be experiencing while writing, but doing so and listening to this mental banter while writing for NaNoWriMo isn’t the time or place. I need to keep this bit from the NaNoWriMo About page in mind:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

My brain is definitely trying to kick in and make me start tweaking, editing, and ultimately, tearing down and rebuilding various passages. I can’t do this, or I’ll never make the deadline of 50,000 words by the end of the month. After a quick looksie at Windows Calculator, from this point forward, I need to be writing an average of 1850 words per day, every day. It’s time to tell my analytical brain to piss off, and start writing with wreckless abandon. Wish me luck!

I’ve found that by jumping in and starting to write, ideas come naturally – certainly easier and more naturally than when I’d sit down with a blank piece of paper and tell myself to “come up with a plot, and a background setting, and a cast of characters, and the life histories of all of the characters, and…” Instead of doing that, this time I just opened up Word (well, technically, Google Docs), thought of a simple scene, and went from there. Doing that for 1000 words, I’ve come up with a general plotline that I’d like to follow, as well as a few characters that will be major players in the story.

I decided against the weird concept of fantasy / sci-fi / comedy. While I’m sure it’s doable, I wanted to go with something a bit more mainstream, as well as something I’m comfortable with. So, the novel will be joining the vast (vast, vast….) ranks of the medieval fantasy genre. The major difference that I’m going to try and put in my novel is a heavy dosage of medieval grittiness. That’s probably one of my major gripes with most fantasy novels I’ve read in the past: they’re too clean. In a bizarre way, they’re too modern. The swords and sorcery are there, but the medieval edginess isn’t. The whole vibe that life was extremely rough during the medieval period and before often seems to be erased with perfect, shiny suits of armor and gem-encrusted swords. I think that in a way, the novel may end up being more historical-based fiction with light elements of fantasy, rather than an all-out fantasy. As regular readers can probably guess, quite a few characters (actually, a whole kingdom, really) is modelled on the Norse people. They’re certainly not copies with a different name (they aren’t highly capable seamen, for example), but I am going to try and get the Norse feel going with them.

More on this tomorrow most likely, after I’ve written (hopefully) a few more thousand words. If you’re taking part in NaNoWriMo this year, best of luck to you!