The Mailbox: A Trio of Sillies

How do I keep track of characters? What do I do when distractions team up on me? How do I balance social life? 

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer each Friday.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox. I also can do multiples. Oh yes.]    

All of today's questions come from Terra who hoped they weren't too silly to be included. In fact, with my mom in town this week, some low-key questions are probably all I have time for. To tell you the truth, if my mom doesn't stop talking to me while I'm writing, and telling me "We should deep clean your house" I may not even get this meager offering finished.

Terra asks: 

1) Assuming you write works that are more than 10,000 words long, how do you keep track of your characters? Do you make them all up ahead of time, or do you just add a new one in when needed and write their name down on a napkin somewhere?

I've done both of those things at one time or another. Somewhere under the dusty strata of writing stuff that came with me after my divorce, I have these extensive character trees with all kinds of notes about each of the characters in this massive fantasy saga I used to daydream about in high school.

I've also done my fair share of flipping back through old pages thinking, "Wait, what the hell was this guy's name?"

I can tell you what works the best for me is deciding one or two (or a handful) of focalizer characters to follow and I attempt to stay in their heads. Generally, what I find is that if I am introducing characters at a reasonable rate, I know exactly who everybody is. If there is an overwhelming sea of characters that show up all at once (like the first day of school or something), the focalizer is a bit overwhelmed too and I will name those characters when they become important to my focalizer. But I'm one of those writers who has a notebook next to the writing desk at all times, so sometimes I use that to keep track.

I'm probably going to have to pare down these notes.

I also find that a strong ethic of revision tends to make certain logistics like this obsolete. If you are going to go back through your work multiple times, you will come to know even your minor characters intimately, and if you forget a name in the first draft, it's almost no big deal.

Here's my only warning to young writers: don't let some extensive list of all the characters you write out ahead of time be the way you DON'T ACTUALLY WRITE. Starting writers are diabolical with all the ways they have at their disposal to do things that are "writing," but not really writing. It's very easy to fall into a trap of notes and outlines and character sketches and relationship flow charts and never really get around to the writing itself.

Because starting writers pull that kind of shit all the time and call it writing, but then never manage to get anything actually written. So imagine I'm shaking my left hand as I walk away and saying "Bewaaaaaaare the exteeeeeeeensive chaaaaaracter noooooooootes."

2) What do you do, or say, to get back to writing when Unsupportive Girlfriend and Netflix team up against you?

My reply: 

Man, is that really the only kind of "teaming up" I have to look forward to around here??

Well there are two times of times when this dastardly duo might attempt to pull me away from writing. One is when I'm firmly committed to getting some work done, and then they have no power over me. Right now that time is the first few hours of my day. I get up, I grab something with caffeine in it, and I get to work.

Did you know that "Netflix" is an anagram for
"You'll never write again"?
True story.
Labelled as Wikimedia commons.

Three or four hours if the flow is a deluge and my fingers can barely keep up. Five or six hours if it's a steady flow. Seven or eight hours if it's a trickle. And lately with the dribble I've been getting, I wrap up sometimes ten or twelve hours after I first sit down.

The second type of time, when she and Netflix would get a lot more traction is when I'm not really working. Either I've done a good day and I'm riding a wave of increasingly small returns, I've had a rough day of pulling teeth and I'm basically fooling myself that I'm going to do any more good work, or I blew my creative wad all over some article or chapter and I'm tapped and happy and I'm really not going to be able to do any more good work. Those are the times when Netflix and Unsupportive Girlfriend can gain some purchase.

So usually what these bastages mess up is my housekeeping schedule or my reading time rather than my writing time, so I'm apt to feel unaccomplished and vaguely guilty if there's an Orange is the New Black or House of Cards binge, but rarely does it interrupt my days writing. I keep that on an outrageously high priority.

Which actually segues nicely into my answer to the next question...

3) How do you balance having a social life with writing and work? I ask this as an introvert, myself; recently I’ve gone to some (required) social events in the evenings after work and upon coming home found I was too tired/it was too late to write. What do you do when that happens?

My reply: 

I will be posting the seventh and final part of my series You Really Don't Have to Write. Really soon, and in it, I'm going to be addressing this obliquely.

The thing is, and there's really no way of getting around it, I don't have balance.

There IS no balance.

I barely have a social life at all. I get to a couple of conventions a year. I see some friends fewer than once every two or three months. When my mom comes to visit me, I feel like I'm barely writing at all, and she complains that she never sees me. Neither of us is happy. If I go out on a Friday night to play games--a rarity of its own--I'm done for the weekend. My social life is a pathetic joke.

I have basically had to give up on dating people because they wanted to be chased and wooed and I just didn't have the time to invest in something with a much higher time and energy commitment than friends with occasional benefits. Sure, I want love and affection and sexyfuntimes, but I just don't have the bandwidth for someone who's looking for things to be emotionally intense and brain consumey.

Some people think I'm an antisocial snob. Some people think I don't like them and kind of stop being friends with me if I can't be counted on to be at X number of events. (Which leads to a self selection process that a LOT of my long term friends are artists. Funny that.) They say things like "If you wanted me in your life, you'd make an effort," under the impression that there are some other people who are treated better.

There aren't.

Look at Rowling or King or Asimov or Christie or any household name, and the stories all have an eerie continuity of obsession. Writing is an addiction, and they are the junkies. Eight hours is a slow day.  Twelve is more like it. Rowling talks about sixteen hour days. King does ten pages a day, and says sometimes that takes only four hours (though sometimes it takes him more like eight or ten), but then admits he goes back to his office at night to revise and edit. Murakami writes ten hours a day for months when he's working on a novel. Even light weight writers who may have achieved some renown but were never able to live off their writing, you quickly find push six to eight hours a day.

Occasionally you run across a writer who works in pulses, but then you find that during their obsessive "on" phases, they write pretty much all their waking hours. In their off phases, they often diddle with stuff.

Any writer you've ever heard of (who wasn't already in some extended circle of friends or something) probably writes obsessively. This is not a healthy bunch of people who have worked out how to fit writing into some holistic life of equal measures.

And....it's worth mentioning that very few of these writers explicitly mention the time they spend reading when they talk about their writing routines--hours of which (daily) is absolutely fundamental to a writer. (This is what the "pulse" writers do when they're not writing 16+ hours a day; they read everything ever like a starving person at the Bellagio Buffet.)

A second side?
I can fit even MORE writing over there!!!

Balance? What's that?

Some writers can't give up their social life, but they give up something else. They don't have a family, or perhaps they never have kids. They live with their parents so they don't have to work (or don't have to work much) and never have a career. They never get out of the house, pounding away on their keys with every extra sedentary second their lives provide. Most writers have a very acute sense of their own priorities and where anything that might cut into writing time will fall on a scale.

But let me tell you the horrible, awful, no good, dirty, rotten punch line:

I have never--not once in all my travels--met a writer of any success who didn't give up something. I have met writers who gave up on writing more than as a hobby. I have met writers who gave up the idea of publishing more than just one or two books to see their name in print. I have met writers who gave up on being working authors. On careers, on family, on any free time at all.... But never who just casually wrote as a hobby while the rest of their lives went on as normal and then became successful working writers who never put in more than an eight hour day.

It just isn't a story I've ever heard.

And frankly, one of the reasons many writers with great talent and a (floridly) professed love of writing never publish or become the novelists of their dreams is because they never set writing as the priority of their lives and never learn to say no to the other things. Their spoken obsession never matches their day to day choices.

And maybe that is because they tried too hard to be balanced.

Poll: Best Movie Adaptation

Oh yeah, also staring that protagonist guy.

What is the best movie adaptation of a book? 

Please take a moment to vote for the best movie adaptation of a book.

You may use whatever criteria you wish. (The tricky stuff about staying true to the source material was mostly part of the nomination process.) You can pick the closest adaptation or the movies you thought made changes that ended up working. Or just a book you loved and were dying to see turned into a movie, and then it did and you weren't disappointed.

My only request is that you are rating the adaptations, not just the movies. This isn't a BEST MOVIE poll. If you haven't read the accompanying book, please don't assume the adaptation is a good one. There are lots of places you can vote for your favorite movie.

No movies that didn't have a second went on to the poll. It would have been more like twenty if not. That's why it's really important to check back on the nomination posts and second the choices you like.

Everyone gets three (3) votes.  The poll itself is in its usual place at the bottom of the left hand side widgets. It is long and black.

Last Call for Movie Adaptations

Ben Stein himself could not properly do the dead-pan
needed to convey how "shocked" I am to see Stephen King
make our poll.  (Personally I didn't like this adaptation
because of how much it (had to) cut, but I just tally up the numbers.)

Though I have enough nominations to run a poll, if you want to see another book make it, hurry to our nominations page and get that puppy written in.

Also you probably want to hire a lackey right away so that they can come and give it a second. The poll will already be too long, so nothing without a seconding will be making it.

In fact, if we get a run of THIRD "secondings" (third secondings are totally a thing!) I may use only those titles in order to keep the poll manageable, so you really probably want to go make sure you've given a shout out to all the books you think made great movies and deserve to go on to the poll itself.

[My mom is in town for a few days to see The Contrarian, so I may be cutting entries a little shorter than normal, but they will still be here.]

Are You Not Entertained?

Writing About Writing is and will always be free to the readers. However every six weeks you have to put up with me reminding everyone how to help us out so that we can do awesome stuff like improving the blog and totally not spend it all it on hookers and blow.

I gotta tell you guys, that's even better than NPR. They may only ask for money twice a year, but they do it for two weeks straight.  All you guys have to put up with is one post in about 35.

Your contributions to Writing About Writing have already helped to improve the blog.  Because of you, we have been able to:

• Bring you more and higher quality articles than last semester.
• Continue posting every day instead of dropping down to once or twice a week.
• Bring you more fiction
• Make fewer jokes about the Welsh
• Get at least a second set of English major eyes on posts before they go live with a gagillion mistakes
• Get about 1/5 of what we would need for a major revamp to the blog layout. (I think.)

If we are able to continue growing the meager income stream of W.A.W. we will be able to bring you:

• Copy editing
• Possibly even content editing (nothing like a perfectly punctuated sentence that makes no sense to remind you that we all need an editor)
• The other 4/5 of the budget for a major blog layout/revamp/overhaul (I'm talking drop down menus, baby. And if you have one of those USB animated glove things, we'll totally give you a happy ending.)
• Much more fiction

If Writing About Writing continues to improve its revenue stream, we also hope--one distant day--to be able to do the following:

• Provide all fiction I write (even books) for free--either as a PDF or serial posts.
• Provide an ad free website.

So if you've enjoyed your time here at Writing About Writing and you have a few dollars to contribute, please consider using that Paypal link over to the left. There is even a way to make a small donation reoccur monthly (it's just a button you can click when you sign up to make a donation that can make it a monthly donation).  So if you are, indeed, entertained, please give Writing About Writing the opportunity not only to keep entertaining you, but to do so with higher quality and more frequent offerings.

Don't forget, for those with tight budgets and limited funds, there are lots of other ways to help Writing About Writing that don't cost you anything at all.

And The Winner Is....

Ursula LeGuin eeks out a NARROW victory against Terry Pratchett making her the Best Science Fiction author for BOTH the Classic and the Contemporary poll.  Way to represent U.G.

(Shhhh. You're my favorite too.)

I don't think I'm going to do author polls anymore. The nomination process was like pulling teeth, and the voting enthusiasm was tepid. Plus all I got for my trouble were a lot of people cranky about Terry Pratchett being on a Sci-Fi poll.

Please don't forget to head over to the post where the nomination process for February's poll is going on right now. While we could always use a few more good suggestions, what we really need right now are people to second the existing nominations so that a few titles stand out and the poll isn't too long.

Everybody's Sick!

The entire house Hall of Rectitude is sick. 

Some nanobot virus from Plaguemaker finally managed to get through The Brain's biofilters and infect the lot of us. Only The Contrarian has managed to avoid it. (He used his power: "I think he might be sick." "I AM NOT!!") So while we sit around trying not to die, The Brain is working feverishly (ha ha pun totally intended) to find a cure.

I now understand why I was able to do a minimum of writing yesterday--wrapping up one article and then crawling into bed for a four hour nap. I may also owe Uberdude an apology for saying something along the lines of how his face looked like The Beaver ate it. (Or something. I don't really remember it too well.)

At some point during my convalescence, I need to write my latest article for one of the other blogs I'm writing for. They sent an enforcer by the house who peed on my carpet and knocked over a vase and said "We want you to write for us. Why you gotta go and break our hearts by not writing for us?"

I also have been hoping to get the latest section of A Demon's Rubicon up for two weeks now.

And if this reggae band would stop doing their percussion demo right behind my eyes, I could totally get started on all of that.

Also, totally vote in our poll.  I can't seem to break this Pratchett/LeGuin tie, but one way or another, the results will be posted tomorrow.

AND...we're getting lots of nominations for best movie adaptation of a book, but almost no seconds.  Most titles will not go on to the poll if no one seconds them.

February's Poll: Best Movie Adaptation (WRITE IN)

What is the BEST movie adaptation of a book or novella?

It's time to start writing in nominations for February's poll. Think of that movie (or miniseries) you thought was just a perfect adaptation of a book (or novella). Game of Thrones? Shawshank Redemption? Carrie? Stand by Me? Interview With a Vampire?

As usual, I am not going to "police" your nominations.  I'll assume that if you believe that the changes made to a movie from a book (and they all have some) were good decisions on the part of the movie makers, that you have rational reasons for thinking so. I'm not going to "veto" anyone for their choices*.

However, I would everyone to keep in mind that this is not about good movies.

Plenty of good movies are based on books, but that doesn't mean they are true to their source material. The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo is an excellent movie, but the novel is like trying to read a phone book. And the last three Harry Potter books are arguably better as movies. This is about good adaptations and so integrity with source material must be considered. Most movies not based on a novella will have to cut something, but consider what they cut and why in making your nomination.

*Actually that veto thing above isn't exactly true. If you nominate World War Z, I will have to find you and do the burning dog poop trick on you. Or at least do like thirty reps of power facepalms. Also insta-veto.

FOR EXAMPLE: If you liked Lord of the Rings, that's awesome. The movies and the books were both incredible for different reasons. However, if we look at the movie compared to the books lots of stuff was taken out (Tom Bombadil, Glorfindel, the scouring of the Shire), lots of stuff was added in (the romance sub-plot, elves at Helm's Deep) and many characters were altered substantially (Aragorn, Gandalf). While some of the changes were mostly cosmetic and added to the cinematic pacing of the three movies (like having Boromir killed by Lurtz instead of many unnamed orcs) in some cases even major thematic elements were altered (the grim determination of the Lords of the West struggling against Sauron vs. the movie's abandonment of all hope or the general shock everyone has about Sauron being back even though the events of The Hobbit were intended to check Sauron's easy incursion from the north). If someone thinks that despite these difference Lord of the Rings should be the best movie adaptation of a book, I'll take the nomination, but please keep the source material in mind.

I will be adding STARDUST to the list.

Everyone may nominate TWO (2) movies. You may also "second" as many nominations of others as you wish. I have a feeling this will be a popular topic, so the movies that end up going on will probably have multiple "seconds." Be sure to check back and give "secondings" to the movies you think should be on our poll.

As usual, I will break any ties with people who nominated their movies here in the comments rather than on other social media.

Also please take a moment to vote on January's poll if you haven't yet. (Who is the best contemporary science fiction author?)  I will keep that open until Tuesday when I post the results.