Chateau Lloyd

I’m not a fan of “Game of Thrones.”  I watched the first season and most of the second, but gave up at the third.  It never seemed to go anywhere and the constant killing of main characters bothered me.

Call me a traditionalist, but I believe that characters in fiction should serve a purpose.   It’s fine to kill off a main character (even the protagonist) if the plot justifies it, but after a while the trick gets old.  I think that more than anything else burned me out on the tv show.

As for the books, they would take even more time and I’m reliably informed that they are hyper-detailed, filled with even more political maneuverings – most of which comes to nothing because of course people keep getting killed.

Still, as I try to wrap up my own modest epic (and let’s be honest, I’d love to have even a tenth of Martin’s success), I find I have a fair amount of sympathy for what he must be going through as an author.

His books are big and sprawling and he’s working on an epic scale – a big part of his appeal, to be sure.  Plotting all of that has to be demanding and stressful, particularly when he’s publishing and writing at the same time.

One of the reasons that “A Man of Destiny” is being held back from publication is that I want to make sure everything lines up before I put it out.  More than once I’ve gotten the notion of introducing a plot twist only to have to backtrack because the downstream consequences were too severe.  In fact, I’d say that this is what I hate the most about writing a really long book.

Of course I’m trying to keep my prose lean and my cast of characters under tight control.  I have a few plots moving, but nothing even close to Martin’s tangled web.  I can only imagine what he must be going through trying to keep them all straight in his head.

The other problem is getting to the desire end.  From the beginning I knew where I wanted to go, but now I’m not sure if that’s the best place.  I have a scene in particular I’d like to write but I don’t know if it is still viable given all that has happened since I first thought of it.

Another problem is that these characters are getting quite interesting and I’m tempted to go in a different place.  Maybe my original ending isn’t the best.  Should I add a fourth book?

Of course, unlike Martin, the only pressure I’m under is what I place on myself.  My fan base is microscopic, and no one is clamoring for the book to be finished.  Martin, on the other hand, has an entire franchise at stake – let alone is reputation as an author.  If he botches the end, it will destroy the value of the show, all the tie-ins and pretty much consign his life’s work to the remainder bin.

Consider what happened to “The Matrix.”  The first move was a sensation and appeared to create a new sci-fi franchise for the ages.  There were books, games and all manner of spin-offs.

Then the sequels came out.  You don’t hear much about “The Matrix” any more.  It plays on sub-par movie channels and the ground-breaking special effects haven’t aged well.  The big thing to come out of it was the “red pill/blue pill” metaphor.  Everyone’s pretty much forgotten the rest.

That’s the risk Martin runs.  He came up with a nice metaphor (“a game of thrones”) and a good tagline (“winter is coming”) but everything else could be swept away in a spasm of fan outrage and a giant literary shrug.

That’s a pretty heavy load.

The tasks before me are twofold – to finish the rest of the series and then get book one ready to go.  Hopefully I’ll be there by August.

A lot of time spent “writing” is actually building the plot.  In fact, I’d argue that “writer’s block” is better described as “plotter’s block.”

Writing is fairly easy once you know where you want to go and (mostly) how to get there.  The hard part is coming up with those things.

I am never happier than when I have the plot all worked out, know how the scenes fit together and am simply putting in the effort to flesh everything out.  At that point, my productivity goes off the charts.

The week I started writing “A Man of Destiny” I put down 20,000 words – not bad for only having nights and weekends open to write.  The thing was, I knew the story and so I raced through it as fast as my fingers could type.

Because my keyboard time is limited, I try to do plotting in the interim.  Basically I have two modes:  when I sit down to write, I write.  If I don’t have the plot worked out, I go for a walk or do something else until I do.

I suppose that would be a problem if I had a deadline, but all of mine are self-imposed, which means I can blow through them as needed.  I still like to set goals (for example, last weekend I hoped to generate 6,000 words – and came up 4,000 words short), but that’s all they are:  something I aspire to without needed to get there.

In a working environment, things are different.  Deadlines are real and have to be kept.  However, in those situations I’m writing non-fiction, which is much easier.  Yes, it takes organization to generate a column, news story or press release, but nothing like the creative energy required to compose fiction.

Plotting is difficult because one can’t really force it.  If the plot goes south, the best writing in the world can’t save it. 

I have a few tools I use to solve plotting problems.

The first (and most effective) is time away.  Taking a break and letting the thing stew for a day or two usually helps.  Research is indicating that like computers, our brains can continue to work on a problem even though it’s not currently “on screen” as the center of our attention.  In fact, the old advice to ‘sleep on it’ is pretty good.

Another thing I do is to get some exercise.  This is usually when I’m trying to flesh out a scene rather than a larger plot, but sometimes a walk around the block is just what is needed.  Exercise forces fresh blood into the brain and that can spur better use of the gray cells.

If those two things don’t work, I might watch or read something to see if it gives me ideas.   Usually it does.

Because I'm not a full-time writer, I try to take advantage of the days when I can't write and use them for plotting.  That way, when I do get some time to sit down and type, I can make the most of it.

There are times when I have the time to write, but am not sure where to go.  When that happens, I write a speculative summary of where I might go.  I learned a few years ago that J.R.R. Tolkien did this - "thinking out loud on the page."  Much of Tolkien's writings were basically layered revisions of plot summaries that got more and more detailed.  I've been doing that and I'm happy with the results.  Hopefully you will be as well.

I've offered the first volume of my projected trilogy for selected folks to take a look at.  So far, the feedback is good.  The working title is:  A Man of Destiny and it's a sci-fi tale of political intrigue, love and war.

All the good stuff.

As it moves to completion, I will offer some selections as teasers before it goes into full publication.