My last couple attempts at getting the voice right in Forever By His Side, my current novella-length work, met with more mixed reviews at our last critique session. With another tweak I should have the right balance of Appalachian twang and real-world readability. This process has been a hard-fought one, taking place in the story's first four chapters. My first attempt was promising but difficult to read. My second attempt was flawed in that I attempted to tackle the voice and unplanned-for backstory at the same time. This last -- my third -- attempt revisited the first chapter the critique group read. It was largely a retelling with more approachable language. Whereas the language worked well enough, some suggested that I keep my sentences shorter. Readers, the felt, could lose the meaning of longer sentences if even a little odd syntax and terminology was thrown in. The main problem, though, with this last submission was the story itself. Too much meaningless fluff. I think I may have gotten lost in the testing of the voice. I kept too much in that should have been excised.

This has all lead to my having taken since the last  critique session on Tuesday -- 5 days -- to not write much. What has happened in the past when my work has received luke-warm reviews is that I tackle the changes before I've had a little breather, a little time to stand back from the story to see what all the critiques meant. I'm a huge advocate of writing every day, but I could tell clearly and without guilt that my attachment to this self-imposed dogma was standing in the way of good logic. It was also proving lethal to my love of the story. Over and over in the past, I've lost steam due to overworking the mechanics. I end up forgetting why I wanted to write the story in the first place.

I still like the idea of a detailed outline. For someone like me, it's a proven necessity; however, I need to do some thinking/meditation on how to keep up the fire when I hit a bump. In this time of short attention spans and instant gratification, I need to find a way to maintain my momentum. Right now, I believe I'm burning too hot at certain points of the work when I should work toward an overall even heat. Hrmm. I may be onto something.

This is probably a good time to think. Keep writing. 

I'm heading out the door shortly with my younger boy to:

1] Visit the San Antonio College's drama building to check the place out prior to his upcoming drama camp. I participated in a few camps and programs that took place on college campuses and would have appreciated a bit of familiarity about where I would be going.

2] Finding free wifi locations in the area of SAC because I'll be driving him there and back each day and it will make more sense for me to work in the vicinity of the college -- at least for some of the days.

3] Heading to the downtown branch of the San Antonio Library. We are looking for monologues for his rehearsal on the first day of camp. When I originally looked into "Free Monologue Adolescent Male," I came up with nearly nothing. I don't think he's ready to spit out even a quick minute of Shakespeare and everything else seems to be locked away in books or must be purchased per performace. New territory for me.

Even if I find a great one tonight, this brings me to a cool solution. I decided yesterday that I'd write him a 1-minute monologue myself.

I'd never done it before, so I wasn't sure where to start. That never being much of a problem for me -- at least in the sense of writers block -- I plunged in, figuring I could read the dos and don'ts later. I'd love to show what I came up with, but I'm adverse to showing first drafts of anything I do lest it be founds via a search and mistaken for my finished work. Not a great association.

Anyway, the first run was successful to a point, as much as can be expected of a first draft, maybe better. I showed it to my critique group and they offered great advice, though none of them has much (or any?) first-hand experience with screenplays or monologues. 

I'm looking forward to tweaking this in time for my boy to practice it for the camp audition. Doing so will also provide me a welcome break from my Wady/Appalachian story. I haven't lost steam or passion but a tiny bit of distance usually pays good dividends.

Argh.

Could I have been more frustrated a couple days ago when, despite having written a 40-ish page synopsis, I still managed to create a plot hole. I've had a couple of days to sort it out. It's not so great a problem that I have to walk away from the story, it's just that I went to such lengths to avoid stumbling into plot holes that having done so again has almost driven me mad.

Here's the deal. I had all the details of my current work, Forever By His Side, nailed down tight. There is a relationship that runs into difficulty. There's a complex magical element. There is a spooky backstory vignette. And there is a mystical meeting that leads to final closure. I needed to have all my ducks in a row to pull this off. Thus the 40-something page synopsis. I took a month to work through it. I read and reread. I gave it a couple of days off so I could triple-check it with somewhat fresh eyes. I was confident everything worked, that there weren't plot holes. All I had to do was follow the synopsis and I was home free.

It sounded great. In theory.

I wrote my first two chapters. They're told from the POV of the main character, a 14-ish-year-old Apalachian girl named Wady. I figured I'd go out on a limb and mimic the Appalachian dialect. So when my critique group got hold of it, I would have expected the critique would be limited to that, the thick dialect. While they did hammer the depth of the dialect, they all agreed that I needed more backstory prior to where I had chosen to start the story. I agreed. During that initial critique, the group had also mentioned that the magical element also needed a bit more clarification. This is where the problem came in.

I was so excited to get started. Even before I got home from the critique, I had what I thought was the solution to all my problems. I would switch up how the magic worked. It would solve all the critique group's concerns.  That night and over the next two weeks, I crafted two chapters that would precede the action of the original two chapters. Never once did I feel concerned that making this little tweak would affect the later action.

Well, I was wrong.

The two new chapters finished and well-received, I looked forward to moving on with the rest of the story. That's when I realized that the "tweak" I had made to the magic element rendered the most important part of the story, the very culmination of the action near the end, impossible.

How could I have missed this? I KNEW the synopsis. I KNEW what had to and what could not happen. I had the synopsis open behind my manuscript document. Still, it didn't occur to me. I simply didn't think it through. 

And I've been taking this as a personal shortcoming. It's simple laziness or denial. And it's not like this is the first time I've done this. The whole reason I wrote out a synopsis of this detail was because I had failed to think my plots through adequately, leaving me in the middle of an impossible situation, where only a mediocre ending could be reached. Huge time wasted unless I took away something that would better my writing in the future.

Fortunately it's fixable, but, as I alluded to at the beginning of this post, I was so frustrated I could have scrapped the whole thing. The chapters, the story, writing, everything. And argh.

Folks, the synopsis is there not only to craft the story into something that works; it's there to maintain direction. It's a reference, so if you don't refer to it, you get what you deserve.

A quick note about backing up your writing...

it just occurred to me after a recent speaker at the San Antonio Writers Guild related a story about his having lost literally all of his digital files that there's really no need for this ever to happen if one joins a critique group.

Every two weeks, my small critique group meets. There are between 4 and six of us depending upon the state of the world -- we have a military officer and a police sergeant among our ranks -- and we send our work to one another digitally a few days before each meeting. 

While filing two of the members' work into tidy folders, i mis-clicked a folder that turned out to be from August of '08. In this folder was a now-published story in a near complete state. Seeing that file made me realize how lucky we all were to have one another as yet another layer of protection in the event of calamity such as fire or  theft, crash or clumsiness.

A quick email to these friends and, voila, I'm back in business. Maybe I'll lose a day or a month, but I won't ever lose it all. I might lose all of a few of the more obscure works, those that I didn't complete, but I wouldn't jump off a bridge to lose them.

So, if you don't want to lose your files, don't lose your friends!

This morning, early enough that it could have still been night time, I stood behind my house as I do multiple times daily to watch my two small dogs drag their paws in a seemingly needless search for the perfect spot to relieve themselves -- a constantly rubbing aspect of working from home. With as much time as they give me and with so few details available in the low light, I often watch the clouds cruise by, usually on their way north. I live on a hill, so the clouds often appear on a course that should smash them into houses further up, only dozens of feet overhead.

The scene is often dramatic. On quiet days, the clouds hang impossibly heavy overhead, drifting like an iceberg. On wilder days they scream by, broken into racecar-sized clumps behind which the Texas stars blink in and out of view. It was on one of these more dramatic days I felt the call to write in the serious fashion I have dedicated myself to in the last four years. The call came in the form of a puzzle. I put a challenge to myself to describe in satisfying and concise terms what all I saw and experienced in that unique sky.

Begin with the speed of flight? Begin with the impossible mass? The poetic feelings the scene inspired? Begin with the shapes or colors? Perhaps begin with the stars behind or the houses on my side of the bank? Over and over and for days, I tried unsatisfactorily to sum this one thing, the clouds moving behind my house. Like too much water through a pipe, I could not describe one thing without leaving all the rest behind. But those details were equally important and individually addressed I could make them so. Taken as a whole, though, I was not up to the task. How is it done, I asked myself.

At the time, I had a strand of a story idea. I've heard many of us do, writers and non-writers alike. Instead of sitting down and writing what I possibly should have, my best attempt at describing that elusive cloud bank, I wrote the first peculiar version of my head-on-a-stump story. It was only a chapter, and a poorly-writen one even if at the time I was inspired, but it was a beginning.

As with any art, the path from initiate to master is one of years leaned solely toward a single goal. Some have said in writing that journey is no less than a million careful words. Lazy words don't move one toward the goal. And as with any art, that goal is achieved in steps, not as a gradation or a gently-rising hill. Along the way are apparent setbacks -- many or perhaps all of which reveal themselves to be steps forward when viewed from a future, wiser standpoint -- lapses in faith and dreadful mountains of rewriting. Accepting that those negative aspects are as necessary as weather along the way is probably the most important lesson to learn early on.

The fact that I was taking on  the various aspects writing one step at a time only recently became clear to me. With my first real story, a novella called Southern Sun, I focused almost entirely on character and emotion, neglecting every other important aspect of writing. The reader was left with a fantastic character dropped in a white featureless place and left to perform vague tasks in awkward order. In my next real story, a children's work called Hilmer Gibb and the Honkin' Huge Bib, I brought in pacing. The reader enjoyed couple of fun characters doing things in a fun, reasonable order but the things they were doing didn't end up leading much of anywhere. With my current piece, what appears will be a short novel or more likely a novella, Forever By His Side, I'm closer than I've yet been to including everything one needs to successfully tell a story: Character, plot, pacing, emotion. Ironically, seeing as how my path toward becoming a skilled writer began with a challenge to describe my real life setting, I still haven't been able to integrate setting into the story in a satisfying way.

I never set out with a specific goal to incorporate these writing elements one at a time and I believe there is a certain organic correctness in not going so. I believe that writing should be discovered in order to find ones personal style. That is not to say critique is not important. On the contrary. It is the most important tool -- the fuel -- that drives one's career forward. I only mean that one can't know prior to setting out on the journey in what order the aspects of writing should be addressed. In fact, at the time of writing, one can only write the best as one knows how and from that perspective look back and notice how those aspects integrated themselves.

Once I have satisfactorily incorporated setting into my writing, I may then be in that golden position any artists strive for, that of beginning the long process of forgetting all the crap I've just described: the unlearning. It is a sought after place because -- again, I only believe because I haven't myself been there -- not until a writer can NOT think about his writing can he truly call what he's doing writing. Only when one can concentrate on his subject without awareness of his craft can he produce without a screen dimming his view. Knowing that I am not even to the top of the climb could be daunting, especially since I am 42 years old, but I find it inspiring. I imagine the real fear will be well after the learning, after the unlearning, when I have reached something that resembles mastery. At that point, I will only have me and the subject and there will be no excuses. I'll finally be naked, faced with describing that speeding wall of clouds.