S.G. Browne

I can’t seem to figure out how to re-write two chapters of my next novel.  I’ve been working on these two chapters for three months, which is about two months too many.  Just can’t seem to find the pulse of the characters in the chapter.  It’s frustrating, especially since I feel like I can’t move forward until this is done.  Until I have closure.  King of like ending a relationship.  I have to get this novel out of my system before I can be free to start courting my next novel.

So I thought, maybe I should write a scene with an author who is trying to break up with his novel.  And this is what I came up with:

“We need to talk,” said the writer, opening the novel’s file and leaning back in his chair.
“About what?” said the novel, her characters glowing on the monitor.
The writer pursed his lips, started to say something, then closed his mouth.
“What?” asked the novel.
“This just isn’t working,” he said.
“What do you mean?” asked the novel.  “What’s not working?”
“You,” he said, gesturing toward the screen.  “Us.  This.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.  “I thought things were going so well.  I thought we were having so much fun together.”
“We were,” he said.  “That’s the problem.  We were having fun.  Now it just feels like work.”
“What happened?” she asked.
The writer shook his head.  “Things just changed.”
“Is it something I did?” she asked.
He looked away, not wanting to admit the truth.
“What?” she asked.  “Tell me.  What did I do?”
“You stopped making sense to me,” he said.  “You stopped inspiring me.  You became a burden.”
The novel just sat there, too stunned to reply.
“I’m sorry,” said the writer.
“I’m sorry, too” she whispered, her words barely audible.
They sat in silence, neither one of them knowing what to say.
“I wish things would have worked out,” he said.
“Me too,” she said.
The writer reached out and clicked EDIT, then clicked SELECT ALL.
“No.  Don’t do this!” she pleaded, her words highlighted in black.  “Can’t we give it one more shot?”
The writer shook his head.  “I’ve been trying to make it work for the last three months and you haven’t changed,” he said.  “I can’t keep going like this.”
“Please,” she begged.  “I know we can make it work.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, then he hit the DELETE key.

So there’s a new garage going in across the street from my apartment.  Which is apparently going to take from now until sometime next April to complete.  I’m not sure how long this phase of the construction is going to last, but they’re using jackhammers.

Awesome.

Typically, the jackhammering starts at about 8:00am.  I write from 7:00am-10:00am before heading off to my day job.  Now, while most writers I know seem to be able to take their laptops to cafes to drink coffee and pump out a few pages, I don’t go to cafes.  One, I find them distracting.  I prefer to write in the space I’ve created at home.  Plus until two months ago, I didn’t own a laptop.  Wrote longhand in a journal.  I was old school that way.

The other reason I don’t hang out in cafes is that I don’t drink coffee.  Just was never my thing.  And since there aren’t any bars open around me at 8:00am, I’m stuck in my apartment listening to the jackhammering and wondering how much trouble I could get in if I took an axe to the pneumatic hose or took a bat to the compressor.

So instead of going to jail or getting hit with a hefty fine or lawsuit, I grab my iPod, put on some Mozart, and crank up the volume until I drown out the jackhammering.  I write best to Mozart.  No lyrics.  And there’s something about his compositions that inspire me more so than Bach or Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.  And with my laptop, although I can’t get away from the noise, I can find a space in my apartment a little further removed from the noise.

So hallelujah for technology.  Praise Apple and praise Dell.  And if it could start raining soon so the jackhammering could stop, that would be cool, too.

“All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me.  I look like you want to look, I fuck like you want to fuck.  I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”

– Tyler Durden, Fight Club

As writers, we’re always pretending to be someone else, especially when you write in the first person narrative like I do.  For some writers, that line of reality between author and character is blurred a little bit more.  For others, the voice that comes across on the page is the same voice of the author in real life.  And for those like me, our characters are the alter egos that come to life in our writing.

In much the same way that Fight Club‘s Tyler Durden is a representation of who Edward Norton’s unnamed narrator wants to be, the main characters in my novels are a reflection of me, of who I imagine I am.  My characters talk the way I want to talk and always seem to know exactly what to say at the perfect moment.  In real life, I seldom have the words I want to say at my disposal.  Most of the time I come up with the perfect response about five minutes later, which doesn’t really help when you’ve already conceded the argument or missed the opportunity to say something unforgettable.

Of course when I’m writing, I have the luxury of editing, of creating and controlling the entire situation in which my characters find themselves, so the dialogue and the reactions are re-written and crafted until they’re just the way I want them.  So yeah, it’s a little like cheating.  But sometimes, the line or the comment or the response will come out of me with no effort, with no hesitation, and I know it’s perfect.  And that’s when I get this rush, this connection with my character, that makes me realize why I do this in the first place.

I read once, I believe it was in a listing for a literary agent in the Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents, where an agent suggested that any aspiring writer should read the best-sellers and blockbuster novels to get a feel for what to write and to write something similar. That was the secret to being a successful novelist.

Hmm. Okay. I’ll read Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy or Stephen King and then emulate them in order to get published. What a brilliant gem of professional guidance.

We’ll call this advice crap.

Sure, you can learn something from reading best-sellers and blockbuster novels. Literary agent Albert Zuckerman even wrote a How-To book called Writing the Blockbuster Novel, providing experienced writers with the tools to get their novels on to the best-seller list. But to suggest that a beginning novelist try to write a best-seller is ridiculous. The chances of success are about as likely as finding a Human Resources administrator on an 1860 Georgia slave plantation.Instead, how about suggesting that an aspiring novelist write something original, something that resonates, something that means something to the author. Because if it doesn’t mean something to the person who wrote it, then it’s not going to mean anything to the person who reads it.

Or maybe that’s just me.

People used to give me books about novel writing by various best-selling authors, in which the authors described how they went about writing their novels.  Some created detailed outlines.  Others plotted out the major points.  Others mined their novels from their subconscious.

I think that one was Stephen King.

While I don’t have anything against outlines or plotting or character sketches or back-story, that just seems too much like work to me to be fun.

Personally, I write like I’m on vacation.

Not a guided tour, where I have everything planned out from my starting point to my ending, with all the hotels and meals and points of interest scheduled and plotted out with no room for flexibility.

That’s not my kind of vacation.  And that’s not how I write.

I prefer to start out with an idea, a scene, an initial destination, then develop a general idea of where and how I want to finish up my vacation.  While I have a few places I definitely want to visit along the way, for the most part, I leave the rest of the trip open for unplanned options.  And it’s always possible that those unplanned options will take me to a final destination that I hadn’t originally planned on.

In other words, I make it up as I go.  I discover the story as I write it.  Which isn’t always the easiest way to go about writing a novel.  It’s easy to get yourself two-thirds of the way through and then realize you hate how the third act is shaping up.  But I’ve just never been a big fan of outlines or plotting on index cards.  So far, it’s served me well.  And it’s a lot more fun figuring things out along the way than knowing exactly where I’m going.

I’m not sure if this somehow transfers over to the reader in some cosmic or synchronous manner, since they’re discovering the story more or less the same way I wrote it.  I don’t know if novels that are outlined or heavily plotted read that way.  But I like to think that it makes for a more adventurous read.

How do you write?