The Confabulator Cafe

Author: apoland

  • 46,000 Words, Give or Take

    I used to despair that I would never be a novelist, because I can’t write lengthy, epic novels. And I’m not using despair lightly — we’re talking all the gnashing of teeth and melodrama that comes with being, um, a freshman in high school. Okay, now I don’t even take this story seriously, but hear me out.

    I cap out at about 56K, maybe 58K on a good day. And I mean, 58K would be a seriously verbose novel for me. I’m more likely to complete a story in about 30K – 35K. This is just how I roll, apparently, and I don’t know why. I’m still editing my second novel, so maybe I’ll have that moment where I understand why. But in the mean time I’m okay with this limitation. I believe that I can tell a good story in under 60K. And you know why?

    Douglas Adams.
    (more…)

  • Exercises in Failure & the Editing Process

    I hate editing. I have failed every goal I’ve ever set when editing. I stumble in the same spot every time.

    It’s not killing my darlings. Whatever, kill those bastards. I never liked them anyway.  (Oh my god that’s such a lie, please, come back, babies.) I like going through the novel and finding the things that worked. I like those moments when you realize, “Wow, this is a legitimate novel,” and the moments where you throw the manuscript across the room and scream, “I WILL NEVER WRITE AGAIN.”

    Here’s my process. (more…)

  • A Comfortable Blend (Except When It’s Not)

    I think that when we first conceive a story we all probably start with one or the other: a plot or a character. It doesn’t really matter so much as blending the two by the time you hit your final draft. I usually have a character, and sometimes a vague concept. Almost never a detailed plot. My examples:

    When I wrote my first novel, I wanted to write about a punk stuck with a blind kid while trying to find the kid’s foster mother. The plot from there just happened as I interconnected the other characters. That novel is awful.

    When I started my second novel I had a concept: a cyberpunk retelling of Sleeping Beauty, as told from the perspective of a character who wasn’t the Prince Charming analog. I followed that pretty strictly even when my characters started to deviate. By the second draft I had to pull back on that concept as the characters took the forefront. The undertones are still there, but it’s a lot less overt.

    From this I gather that for me, crafting a novel has to be a balance of the character and plot or it just sort of falls apart.

    What I find interesting is that not all stories and writers need that balance to rock an amazing story. There are stories where the characters are just a means for exploring the world and moving the plot, and stories where the plot is just a means of moving the characters together and solving their nonsense. The difference seems to be largely a matter a genre.

    (more…)

  • Don’t Ban What You Don’t Understand

    Our literary taboos tend to reflect the things that terrify the majority of society. I vividly recall July 3rd of 2008, when I got cornered by two friends while discussing the required reading list for a middle school in Olathe (or somewhere in that area). One, a father of a child a couple years away from middle school, ranted that one of the books has homosexuality and bestiality in it, and damn it, that’s not okay for kids! Except the whole discussion (if it could be called that) became about sex education in schools and, eventually, political conservativeness.

    This discussion wasn’t about homosexuality or bestiality or even the book1 but about the fear that someone else, some stranger, was going to teach this man’s son about sexuality — and in his personal dogma, that’s a moral issue.

    I’m okay with people being offended by the content of a book — everyone cannot like everything. I’m troubled by the message a lot of teen books send to teenage girls, but so be it. My friend is troubled by certain books in his son’s curriculum, and he is welcome to discuss alternative reading with his son’s teacher. These are personal issues, and we are by all means free to take these personal soapboxes and engage in discussion with whoever will listen. We are welcome to say, “No, Child, you will not be reading Abraham Bosnick’s book,2 because I don’t think you should be reading about one zombie’s battle against syphilis.” (more…)

  • On the Construction of Action Scenes

    Action scenes are a special kind of hell. Even now, writing about action scenes is literally painful. You see, action is not my strength; it’s basically carefully crafted description that paints a moving scene. Add the need for carefully chosen pacing — ugh. It’s a nightmare.

    During a conversation I can count on the dialogue to do most of the heavy lifting. I trust the readers to pick up a lot from dialogue, and let’s face it: a good action scene is all about what’s happening, not what’s being shouted across the battlefield. I feel like a decent action scene very quickly becomes a bad action scene when you throw in a lot of hammy dialogue to remind the reader that its emotional too.

    (more…)

  • Commercial Breaks and Soundtracks

    It’s all music and television for me. Though not together. That’s just silly.

    I’m really into television as a medium. I will marathon a television show just so I can watch a whole story unfold at once; it’s the closest we get to novels in a visual format, if novels had filler episodes. (It’s not a perfect metaphor.) And while I have no interest in ever writing for television, I certainly I think that episodic format influences how I craft and manage scenes within a story.

    First there’s the matter of formatting. I will structure a story in scenes, sometimes on the short side, to set up for one relatively long climactic scene. I will set scenes that end in abrupt points, and jump into another scene as necessary to make sure the story is told as I want to reader to experience it — I can’t imagine telling a story without the best characters on the keyboard: ***. This scene’s over? Eff it — put in a commercial break and get on to the next one. I assume that’s normal, but honestly? I’ve never really paid attention to the way scenes are structured while reading. If I did, something is probably going wrong within the story.

    (more…)

  • Where the Character Leads, I’ll Shine a Flashlight

    Thinking about how I develop characters is tricky, because I’ve never given it tons of thought. My only truly conscious choice is that I don’t particularly care for giving characters physical descriptions. As a reader I tend to apply my own biases to envisioning the character. For instance, I read Pride & Prejudice while envisioning the actors from Bridget Jones’ Diary. So I try not to bother beyond broad strokes.

    But that’s not the important part, is it? Everything else is And honestly, I don’t need to know most of the meat of a character I start: just a name and a general idea of who they are. I find that the more time I spend penning back story, the less likely I am to write the actual story.

    (more…)