^I rewrite constantly. That's why it takes me so long. I'll rough out 3-10 pages, print 'em, scratch all over 'em, rewrite, rinse, repeat. Sometimes there'll be one word in the middle of the page that bothers me. It has to go. Even back in the day of typewriters, carbon paper and white-out. Of course, then I used to write first drafts in long-hand, too. Some passages run smoothly for a couple of pages with no changes. Others need hacking at again and again. And if I have time before my deadline, I'll let the entire ms. "breathe" for a couple of weeks to a month, reread it all in one sitting, scribble in the changes and give it one more pass through the wringer. Wish I could be more facile, but I seem to have the writer's equivalent of perfect pitch. If it doesn't sound right, I literally wince when I read it, and it has to be tuned.
I've always heard that it's best to go all the way thru your story before doing any rewrites. Don't obsess over each paragraph or you'll never get finished. Obviously you still get finished. Hmmm . . .
^Yeah, but that's why I'm so slow. However, sometimes my plots get so convoluted I can't remember where I am unless I keep rereading. And when I reread, I tinker. Not the most efficient way, but eventually I get 'er done.
It's more or less off-topic for the forum, but why "Tony Hillerman's bag lady"? (I love Hillerman, but if it's a reference to something in one of his books, it's either a book I haven't read or a character I've forgotten.)
^It's from a quote of his in the "Writers on Writing" thread. It also steals the thunder from the little boy trolls.
Fascinated by reading through this thread. I've been trying to write a novel... just for myself really, not expecting much of it, because I too am focused on screenplays (well, teleplays really). Wrote a 6 ep commercial 30 min sitcom (of which I'm currently making the pilot - no budget), and that came from a novel which morphed into a play and finally into the sitcom that it is today. I planned the basic events around which each episode would be centered, all of the characters, recurring styles of jokes and then just started writing. My main focus however has been a kind of horror drama series which took me about six months to write the first (commercial hour) episode. That's mainly because of the research and full plot overview I put into it. Essentially it's a strangely (but excitingly) styled story that I wanted to ensure was entirely planned before starting the first script; lots of things tie back to the start, so it was important to know exactly what happened later before writing it. Had a few rejections with it, but I feel so strongly that it's 'my masterpiece' (not 'a' masterpiece, but 'mine') I have no doubt that I'll be returning to it at every opportunity to keep plugging it in the hope that it'll be commissioned. Even now that there's no point in me writing more until when (nothing like confidence... or hope) it's commissioned, it's the project I most want to write out of anything I am working on. So in a long roundabout way, I'm asking garamet, and indeed Jeff Cooper Disciple how you motivate yourself to prioritise projects that you don't necessarily want to. Unless you're lucky enough to always be able to write what you want.
I'm finding inspiration works wonders. just my two bits and I've not written a novel ... yet. But, I've recently been inspired.
Sometimes inspiration is all it takes. A lot of the time people get hung up on whether or not their ideas are "original" enough (everything's already been done before; it's how you as an individual come to it, with your unique background and experience, that makes a work original) or whether there's some list of rules to follow. It's the same as painting, in a lot of ways. Where others see a blank canvas, the painter sees a scene inside their own head. So with the writer. If the inspiration is strong enough, you'll write. At that point you can't and shouldn't think about whether or not what you're writing is publishable. Just focus on telling the story, let it take you where it wants you to go, and worry about the rest later.
I'm at the point in my career now where there's a gun to my head, i.e., a contract with a deadline which says "Quit screwing around and finish this thing!" In the six years of struggle before I sold my first novel, first of all, I didn't have the experience you have of having multiple ideas flying around in my head. I'd get one idea at a time which crystallized into a novel that I'd keep plugging at for two+ years until I got it all on paper. At the time, I set a goal for myself: Sell a novel before you're 30 or go do something else with your life. When my first novel came back covered in rejection slips, I was 26, and I had a fresh idea. So after feeling sorry for myself for a reasonable amount of time, I started work on the new idea, which also had a rough time of it out there in the canyons of Midtown Manhattan, but eventually found a home. I was 28. So I'd achieved my goal, and also gotten a contract for a second novel. And so it went, until the Recession of '82 reshaped the publishing industry, and I had to recalibrate. But, now, about you. Seems as if you're simultaneously blessed and cursed with an embarrassment of riches. My question for you would be: Which medium are you most comfortable writing in, and where would you see yourself as most successful, say, a decade from now - as a novelist or as a screenwriter?
I wrote a TOS Star Trek novel almost ten years ago as a Xmas gift for my Dad. He loved it and keeps telling me I should try to get it published but I think it's crap. I had to rush the ending due to running out of time. So it has a Voyager type of quickie finish. I also threw in some inside jokes that I'd have to remove. I don't know. Maybe I should dig it up, clean it up, get an agent and give it a shot.
I'd definitely say that my novel is a free time thing, whereas I consider my screenwriting to be what I'd like to do career wise.
Current policy at Pocket is that you need to have sold something non-Trek first. And the studio's decision a couple of years ago to cut back on the number of books released annually means there's a lot of stuff already in the pipeline that'll have to be moved out before the editors can even look at new submissions. If you really want to sell your ms., you might consider removing all of the Trek references and pitching it as straight s/f. Although even that's a crapshoot these days. An agent I know told me recently that the s/f market is "listing like the Titanic." He's been in the biz for 30+ years. Coming from him, that's an alarming assessment. Publishing as a whole is in a state of transition right now. The mid-Manhattan dinosaurs don't quite know how to deal with online publishing, and online publishing itself has its share of take-your-money-and-run vanity presses, with a few reputable houses emerging above the fray. And now Amazon's putting the squeeze on them in an effort to hog the field. It's complicated. Give it another 5-10 years and it'll sort itself out. In the meantime, as the saying goes, one door closes and another opens. Back in the day, your only recourse was to get in line behind the 200,000 other first-time authors trying to break in with an established brick-and-mortar (or, in reality, glass-and-steel) publisher. Online publishing offers more opportunities for the first-timer, but it's hard to pick the gem out of the dross. Anyway, long and the short of it - you're not happy with the ending anyway, so if you like the story enough you'll want to rewrite the ending at least. While you're at it, may as well rewrite the whole thing as a straight s/f piece and then either start pitching it to agents, or look into online publishers. Qapla!
Well, then, if you can manage to do both, treat the screenplays as the main course, and the novel as dessert.
I shall indeed My only trouble in terms of the screenwriting is concerned is to motivate myself to write a new project that I'm not as excited about as the one that there is literally no point in me writing more yet.
Maybe you can just set that one aside for now and work on something else. Often you have to clear one project out of your brain before you can work on others.
That's discouraging news about the Trek books. I had noticed a serious decline since the glory days of the 80's and 90's where you got a ton of new books each month. I actually have 2 novels that I'm close to completing. One is a prequel to the other but I didn't start out that way. I had an outline of the first one written back in 1993 where it sat forgotten on a floppy disk for years. I started writing the second one maybe 3 years ago. It wasn't until I found the first one that I realized that they existed in the same "universe" and that with no real effort I could turn one into a prequel. I like them because they can be read independently and out of order so that one is not handcuffed to the other.
^Sorry about that, Baba. Thought I was in the "quotes" thread. No, no naval science books. The nice thing about Trek is that the science is already in place, and my non-Trek books don't involve space travel, except peripherally. I'm familiar with the sources Roddenberry used - Hornblower and all that - but haven't found the need to go much further in-depth than that. Politics and social allegory, hmm. That's a question of thinking of what's important to me and saying How can I explore that in a fictional context that will not only entertain, but will make people think? Again, Trek is set up for that, so it's easy to say "Let's take a concern from 21st century Earth and set it in the Romulan Empire, and see how our heroes would cope with biological warfare." In my non-Trek stuff, I created a three-novel arc around the question: What if Christopher Columbus had crossed an ocean and, instead of a hunter-gatherer society, stumbled upon a 21st century society that hadn't fought a war in over a thousand years? Then you just play "What if?" and the story more or less tells itself. Good question, Baba - thanks!
Sorry! Haven't been in this forum for a while. It's called "The Greater Good," and it's based on a single line from the episode "Mirror, Mirror," where the computer reads out Kirk's service record: "Captain James T. Kirk succeeded to command I.S.S. Enterprise through assassination of Captain Christopher Pike." I get to tell how he did it.
Resurrection time! Garamet, which do you find more enjoyable: writing based on other people's work (Trek, etc) or writing your own original stuff?
