The Headsman Excerpt

I’m not sure how this will work out, but I figure why not.  Here’s an excerpt from my NaNoWriMo novel, now entitled The Headsman.  This is not the final draft, but it has been significantly revised since the first draft I wrote a little over a month and a half ago.  This is the first scene of the first chapter.  Enjoy:

It was a cold autumn morning late in the season and someone was dead.

More precisely, a young Nemurian male was dead, found half-submerged in the shallow banks of the River Samos with his head missing.  At least, that’s what the report had said.

They had told her when she moved from her home world of Zion that Ash was a quiet world.   This was the case despite its influential position as a planet located at the heart of several trading routes that connected the rebuilding Republic of Man and the much larger Genesis Accord, an intergalactic alliance of numerous species.  That wasn’t the only reason why the Republic viewed Ash as important though.  It was one of the first worlds settled after the purging of Earth and the subsequent collapse on the human race.  Despite the establishment of the planet centuries ago, most of the world was a verdant and untouched forest, with the tall alabaster spires of the human cities rising above the forest canopies.

Stifling a yawn, Detective Sarah Kirkland walked through the half-marsh park that rested alongside the Samos.  It was frequented by citizens looking to escape the artificial jungle of Noctuna, Ash’s capital city, and experience the planet’s natural beauty.  A cold breeze, catching the icy breath of Mount Lysander to the northeast, blew through the low river valley and sank it’s teeth into her exposed cheeks.  Luckily, she had a slight refuge from the cold winds in the steaming hot cup of coffee that she cradled in her gloved hands.  She kept her face close to the escaping vapors, and occasionally took a long waft of the smoky haze, thick with the rich smell of fresh hazelnut.

She was a member of the Ash Civil Legion, a quasi military and police organization that maintained order on the planet when the Republic’s Legions weren’t present.  For the most part, that meant that she acted as a glorified police officer, and was occasionally required to react to something more substantial, but those incidents were so infrequent that they were essentially nonexistent.  As one of the three members of the Alien Crimes division of the ACL, she spent most of her time following up with minor complaints and incidents involving the various alien species that tried to also call Ash their home.

Reflections on NaNoWriMo: Part 3

As I wind down my reflections on NaNoWriMo, I feel like I should mention one thing before I continue discussing what I have learned.  And that is that there are no steadfast rules when it comes to writing, I am only offering suggestions and potential guidelines to those out there that want to give writing a shot.  These are just suggestions to try a different method, or a different way of thinking, that can hopefully get you closer towards completing your first project.

That being said, today’s topic is something that I have found, between discussing with fellow writers both inside and outside my writing classes, as something that is very divisive, and that is how do you prepare to write.  I am not talking about your special place, or what music you play in the background as you write, but rather what kind of thought goes into starting a story before even writing the first word.  While there are some differences based on the genre, sci-fi for example can require a lot more preparation (in the form of world building) than character fiction, I am mainly discusses something more universal, such as how much of the plot is prepared beforehand.

In most cases, I hear that people/writers discuss how they plan out the plot of their novels, stories, or whatever well in advance of any actual writing.  They know not only the order of all the scenes, but also very specific details about what the dialog will be used and what actions certain characters will say.  When I first started my writing career, I was a lot like that.  Whether I actually wrote down the specifics or not, I at least had a very clear image of what was going on well before I sat down in front of my laptop, but for NaNoWriMo, I tried a different path, and was pleasantly surprised.

A few months ago, I read Stephen Kings On Writing, and inside the book I found a particularly interesting way to handle the plot that I never really appreciated until I gave it a shot.  King suggested that building out the plot for your novel should be like digging up a fossil.  You should have a good idea of what the finished picture should look like, but you don’t have any idea about how the details look, or if there are any surprises in store.  At the base value, King’s method is about relinquishing control and allowing your subconscious mind to drive the story a little here and there.

As strange as it may sound, the end result of this method is that your characters can and will surprise you.  It feels strange to admit that something you can build can surprise you, but it is a powerful feeling when it finally comes up in your writing.  I had several such scenes come up while writing See No Evil, and almost all of them are the highlights of what I have written so far.  I feel that it speaks to the characters being complete and real people, rather than artificial constructs that seem flat or half-baked.  But you, as the writer, need to give them freedom to surprise you.  The only scene that was really premeditated in See No Evil was the ending, and instead I only had the vaguest idea of what a scene would contain (like for example, a particular scene would end when a piece of evidence was discovered). 

In a way, I feel like this method also helps deal with the threat of writer’s block (which I was mostly spared from over the course of NaNoWriMo).  At the heart of writer’s block, I think is that the belief that a particular scene (or even sentence) isn’t as good as it should be, because you have pictured it a dozen times over in your head and it’s just not as good as what’s on the paper.  But when I go into a scene with no expectations, I don’t feel that drive to make it perfect.  It’ll be cleaned up eventually (and I’ll probably have to deal with writer’s block then), but the story will still be written, and that’s an important milestone in writing.

This isn’t to say this particular method isn’t without it’s faults.  Yesterday I finished the first draft of my novel and ended with around 64,800 words, but the novel is far from finished.  Besides scenes being weak and needing revision to fix continuity errors, there are more pressing matters.  I believe that I have written all the important scenes in this story, it is just their positioning is dramatically incorrect.  The pacing of the novel is flawed (mostly because the escalation isn’t as good as it should be), leaving long periods of little or no movement, and quick bursts of energy in other parts of the novel.  This is in addition to a few scenes that I had to put off to the side, or scrap, because I couldn’t make them fit within the current structure of the novel (most of which are the results of awkward transitions that could not explain how one scene leads into another), but that can be fixed, like the rest, in revisions, which officially started today.  It’s a lot of work, but I’m glad that I have at least the framework of the larger novel in place, and now I am just fine tuning various scenes to make them fit the story as a whole. 

In essence, that concludes my reflections on NaNoWriMo.  A bit wordy, but I had a lot to tell, and that’s only discussing what I learned over the course of the month.  As I begin working towards a finished product (and agent queries), I’m not exactly sure what the activity level of this blog will be.  I’m not sure if I want to move this towards writing advice, reflections on the rest of this novel process, my own random thoughts, or a foul combination of all three (probably that), but I’m sure some direction will present itself. 

Who knows, maybe I’ll share some excerpts from my writing once they’ become more readable.  We’ll see.

Reflections on NaNoWriMo: Part 2

If there was one thing that my writing teacher drilled into my head over the course of the several semesters I spent in various creative writing classes, it was the notion of the bad first draft.  He went to great lengths to argue that it is nearly impossible for someone to write a great story on the first go, and that the true measure of a writer was his or her ability to revise it to something truly spectacular.  And after spending a month trying it his way, I am becoming more and more convinced of the wisdom behind his words.

Prior to this month, my usually writing process (especially for my attempts at longer works, including last years botched attempt at NaNoWriMo) had always followed the same basic pattern.  I would write the first chapter or two, and then ultimately return to those scenes again and again.  I found myself rethinking how I wrote a particular scene, or reimagining a character, or getting some brand new inspiration for the piece’s tone.  I always justified going back and retreading old ground by saying I’d save some time by making sure the I only have to writer the later parts once, or thinking that I simply cannot progress the story if it doesn’t line up.  The end result, however, would be that in a month or two, I’d be no further in the story and just had a more well written chapter one and two to my book.  By then the novel had stalled, and any hope of finishing it died along with it.

I made a deliberate decision when starting up this month’s attempt at NaNoWriMo to never look back.  When I wrote a scene, it was done, and I would never look at it until the rest of the novel was finished.  This ultimately proved to be the hardest part of NaNoWriMo for me.  While motiving myself had its ups and downs, the desire to look over my old content was a constant frustration of mine for the entire month, and one that still bothers me as I race towards a conclusion of the novel over the next few days.  This isn’t to say that I didn’t adapt my writing as I went, things changed, I just never went back and changed it to make sense.  The end results are that there are some amusing continuity errors/changes as you go through the story, including, but not limited to, a certain character going from a grizzled old policeman to an eager, young woman looking to prove herself in between chapters.

Despite the trouble I had with the goal, I think the end results speak for themselves.  November is gone and I’m sitting on a now fifty seven thousand word novel that is still progressing well.  Revisions will be a pain, but at the end of the day, it, like the first draft, is part of the writing process and what I have agreed to by becoming a writer.  Scenes are missing, characters need to refined, tone needs to be improved, and the pacing needs to be totally reshaped in my first draft, but that’s okay.  Being a writer is about dealing with and conquering failures, whether it is rejection from publishers or failed attempts at deadlines, and growing beyond them.  I understand that now, and I’m glad for that lesson that NaNoWriMo has provided me.

So to any writer’s out there, come to terms with how bad your first draft will be and relish it. 

That isn’t to say I went into NaNoWriMo blind, but I’ll save that rant for part 3 of this little series.