I almost called this post ‘the rituals of Infinity’ because it has absolutely nothing to do with that novel. It does have the ritual aspect and the infinity feel, although I know that is just an illusion, that all books do end… or the author stops writing them or dies.
Sometimes the last option feels like it might win. The second option is an illusion. The author never goes fishing instead of writing. It is all a pigment of your highly colored imagination. Mind you, writing had a lot in common with that entirely imaginary day in a boat I had on Saturday. I wasn’t there, and there were no witnesses, or not ones not sworn the oath of silence that binds us fishermen more tightly than any entanglement. This entirely imaginary self was setting and lifting his longline from the depths – downwind of the line (or it over-runs and tangles terribly – it is easy that way, and doesn’t work) – so you are pulling the boat into the wind, on the first buoy line, and at the same time picking up the anchor (there is an anchor on either end of the line, and it is plain brutal hard work, with very little to show for it. Eventually the anchor gets to the boat, and then the going is a little easier. The line twitches and thrums a bit and looking down – and trying not to pitch over the bow – you will see the first snoods coming up. For some reasons the ones nearest the anchor are always empty. Just like writing, you have set a lot of baited hooks to catch anything. And then you see something dark rising with the line, and lo, it is a piece of dead drift seaweed. And you go on hauling, because that thing in water looks promising – and it is. Not what you set out to catch but a good fish, none-the less. You work at it easier now, knowing all the effort hasn’t been totally in vain. And the next-but-one has the target shark, too small, but what you were trying to catch, and you can see there is something on the snood beyond… it’s what you were after, and pulling the rope is a breeze now. You have your momentum, the boat is moving with it and just so long as you don’t get too puffed, or have something go wrong it’s a job, but you can. Some more of the wrong kind of fish, but still wanted. Then a carpet-shark (these are like lounge-lizards, and just as desirable). All you want to do is unhook the blasted thing and go on, but it is thrashing about tangling the line, and refusing point blank to let bloody go. The best you can do is to unclip the snood and put it aside, or give it to someone else to fight with.
And onward. More fish you were targeting, the right size, and the more fish you were just lucky to catch. And then, inevitably, a mucking big stingray, about half the size of the boat, three loops of the main-line around him, and he ain’t caught (well he is, but by his own greed, he’s eaten one of the hooked fish. You can see it in his huge mouth, and the hook is actually in both of them) he’s just sodding mad, thrashing his spike – about 18 inches of sharp barbed spike at anything that happens to be in his way. Now, if the ray wasn’t tangled in the main-line you’d cut the hook off the snood, and let him go, but seeing as it’s all the rest of the fish, and the fairly expensive bit of gear, you battle away and get the stingray unhooked and untangled and released. It’s taken you more stress and more fear and more time than the rest of the line, but it’s over now, and the rest goes, tiredly, as it should. You lift the second anchor, the second buoy-line is easy. The fish-bin is full. The carpet sharks have parted with the hooks and gone pack to pester the next person. All you have to do now is clean the catch, and take them home. Only, of course, by the time it’s all cleaned and scaled and filleted, you’ve shared the catch with the skipper and given a few folk a you feel need or you owe a favor to a feed of fish or two… it’s not so much in freezer that you won’t have that imaginary bloke at sea again in a week or so.
It’s very like writing a book – to me anyway. There is a lot of preparation and thought, a bait for each scene laid and prepared, and while it is easy to snag the float inboard, and get started, there’s lot of heavy lifting in the early stages of the book, when it seems you’re pulling the world (or at least the whole boat) against the wind. Building the momentum in those unrewarding first parts is really hard, and if you… go fishing, you lose it. Start again to build the momentum (but you do get so puffed you can’t anymore). Not every scene produces anything much and not all of it was what you want, and some of it, hard work that it was, will have to be tossed back. But there is some good stuff there. Then there is almost always (for me, anyway) the mess tangled in the in plot-line which is a merry devil to get loose, and worse to do without making you unable to write, and adds no value at all. And then, once that is done (and if you’re lucky, only once) the rest is hard work but, compared to what has gone before, dead easy. And then you have to clean the whole lot, and by the time the publisher/Amazon have taken their cut, you’ve given folk you owe what you should, you’re not left with a lot, and will be doing it again, shortly.
Writing-as-fishing does involve preparing each hook with a bait – ready for the set, and that means thinking about it all before you put it in water, choosing your water, choosing bait and setting distance. This to me is my outlining and plotting. There are those who who put bait on the hooks and hooks on the line as when the fancy takes them… and works for them. For me it ends in a big tangle in the bottom of the snood-bucket, and I have to do it anyway before I can finish the job. For me it becomes a very careful ritual – or you end up with a hook in you, going overboard with the line, or getting bitten, spiked, spined or losing the lot.
And while I admire Lois L’Amour and wanted to write like him, I soon realized that I was not like him. I cannot write anywhere, anyhow. Each scene is like each bait, and must be prepared and clipped on in the same careful way or I’ll cut my fool fingers off and hook myself and go overboard (on the big boats I used to work on, that was a death sentence, and the setting was fast so we didn’t lose steerage. I used to work with a really sharp knife strapped on my right forearm – a life-jacket on, and a deckie on watch. If I got hooked by one of those fast moving 13/0 hooks I’d be overboard and down at 20 fathoms and going down before I could yell. Cutting the snood with my left hand was my only chance.) For me, preparing my work environment, getting my head in the right place, and above all concentrating ONLY on the task in hand is vital. My pattern – and my workspace – follow a very precise recipe. A ritual, if you like. My work starts with a piece of music – the same piece for the book, and a single game of Freecell (no other games are allowed on my computer). Mind clearing. And then it is read the previous two pages, and then do not move, neither to eat, or drink or ANYthing else, for 200 words. Any stops this side of the day’s quota are strictly timed to a half hour, with an hour for cooking our supper. Some days it’s half an hour on half an hour fixing xyz, and two hours on, half an hour weeding – and so on for a very labored 2K. Some days I’ll only get up when bladder pressure forces me and I’ll exceed my word-count nicely. For me a wonderful day is 5K. And eventually the whole long-line/ book is in and there only the messy part of gutting and filleting it.
But if I take it as the muse drives me… I don’t get anywhere.
What works for you?
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “Eat no bread, nor drink water”
Not reading Blog posts. *grin*
The internet is an especially pernicious distraction, since as it’s right there all the time on the same computer where I do my writing. It can be a great research aid, true, but you can get lost in it like reading through the dictionary or the thesaurus. And while sometimes a tiny micro-break can actually help your subconscious arrive at the solution for a sticky bit of dialogue, all too often that micro break turns into a long excursion into the wolds of the internet.
I have been known to disconnect the internet during particularly fraught bits. ;-/
I’m learning that ‘bridge’ scenes are the worst. I want to skip ahead and write the action, already. But I make myself get through it, only not too long, because I figure if I’m bored, my reader will be, too. Right now I’m in a prolonged logistics chapter. Can’t be helped, when you are going to make an expedition into hostile territory with an ambush at the end, you need to work through some of the hows. I mean, as an author, I can simply drop them into it, fully equipped and ready to go, but that seems like a cop-out.
As for the internet, I either shut off the distraction sites and don’t open them (I’m often writing using an online word processor, from remote locations) or I use a cute little timer to “allow” myself breaks that have a set time limit.
Agreed. Bridge scenes, done well, are very hard. But i have been known to skip ahead to keep momentum, which I find important.
I can’t plot ahead, or it all tangles.
I think my subconscious takes it as an affront and refuses to stick to it. Mind you, I need a fairly good idea of the ending. “So-and-so is discovered to be the Bad Guy and they have a fight all over the shop. Good guy wins.” But the last time I tried to have a nice solid outline–an organized investigation into a murder–the back brain changed the killer twice, committed arson and kept writing funny scenes that just simply were not in the outline . . .
I’m with Pam. I have to toss the line in and see what bites. I know that I need to select the right tackle and bait for trout, or salmon, or marlin, but once the line’s in the water I have to play it and see what comes up. More than once I’ve caught marlin on a fly line, with the effort and mess you’d expect. And I’ve cast for tarpon and come up with a minnow in a tin can. *wry grin* I envy the writers who can get catfish: mash white bread onto a hook, drop the line in the water, nap, remove line and fish from water, repeat. But they also know where the catfish are, and are content with catfish. And their readers like catfish, too.
Oh GAWD. I can’t plot, I can’t outline and anyone who tries to make me can…
Uhhh…
Yeah.
Anyway…
My second semester of college I took a term paper class. The prof made us all do outlines. The last week of class everyone else was freaking out and I Was doing basically nothing. She pulled me aside one day and we had a conversation that went something like this:
Prof: Aren’t you working on your paper?
Jim: Nope, it’s done.
Prof: Are you sure? No one else’s is.
Jim: Oh, I know. I had to write it early.
Prof: I see. Scheduling issues?
Jim: Nope. I can’t work when I’m shackled to an outline. I had to write the whole thing a month ago and the go through and outline what I had already written. I liked the part where you made me re-arrange it though. It works a lot better that way.
Prof: *boggle*
Yeah, it’s like that for me.
While mine do sometimes deviate, I suspect the difference is that I plot in a lot of depth – de facto writing the book without as much dialogue (will run to 40-50 pages), and I only do so after I have ‘ snagged the float inboard’ – written 3-5K to get the characters voices in my head.
I have always tended to be far more vocal into the late evening. But, like wine, fatigue gives helps the desire, and takes away some of the ability. Plus, a burst of productivity that cuts into sleep tends to be counterproductive in the long run.
I do have this over-run today, under-run tomorrow problem, when I work too late and go to bed (not sleep) with my brain in ferment. I try to leave off mid scene, making restarting easier.
What works for me CHANGES. I used to be an hyper plotter — 100 pages for a 300 page book. Now it won’t let me. It just won’t. I seem to be pantsing. I don’t like it. As a driver I hate cruise control because I feel I’m not driving, SOMETHING is. Pantsing is like that, and I can block myself just by panicking. For months. Weirdly, the result looks tighter than when I plotted. I don’t get it. I’ve been fishing these where waters for 12 years AS A PROFESSIONAL, 27 years of trying. And I still don’t know what moves in the depths. It might be Cthulhu.
Dean Smith says we train our subconscious. All I can add is, and then we have to let it have control of the fingers, because nothing else works.
I’ve written a few pantsing. The only major difference is how long it takes me to finish the book (much longer pantsing)
I keep hoping that, eventually, I’ll be able to pre-structure enough to minimize the flailing about and excessive editing my first drafts always seem to require. So far, all my attempts that direction seem to get tossed almost immediately.
The only thing that works for me, Dave, is just keep on pushing that wheel up the side of the mountain. (Even though it comes rolling down again, and I have to keep doing it, just like Sisyphus.)
If I didn’t have that sort of persistence, I would’ve given up long ago. But I refuse to do that . . . and I’ll follow my muse wherever it leads, giving it a kick in the nether regions whenever it falters. 😉
Hello everyone,
Lady Hoyt, may I offer the suggestion that perhaps what works for you is changing because you yourself are changing. I would imagine becoming a paid author has allowed you to find out what works and what doesn’t as far as plotting out a story goes. You have mentioned that you are working on learning different aspects of self-publishing, such as working on book covers. Perhaps that is where the ‘plotting brain’ is occupied leaving space for ‘pantsing’ in your writing. Just a random thought. Feel free to kick the little bugger away…
For me Mr. Freer, different scenes/plot bunnies come at me fully formed. Sometimes I have to plot those pesky ‘bridge scenes’ (I so feel your pain Lady Sanderson!!!) but overall I agree with Lady Uphoff and Mr. TXRed.
Mr. McCoy; I’m glad I’m not the only one to write my outline after my paper was finished. Luckily, my teacher was very understanding and had a great sense of humor. (Probability didn’t hurt that I obviously loved her class and writing in general. Teacher had to push my classmates for a 3 sentence paragraph while reminding me I couldn’t go over 2 pages–again!)