Recapping Drumheart and the use of outlines

Had a conversation with some friends a couple days ago in which we shook our heads over the (apparently increasingly common) practice of writing novels without outlines. I suffered a twinge of conscience, as I didn't think I had a formal outline for Drumheart, so who was I to talk? Then I remembered this post and decided to go back and look at it.

I actually stuck to it pretty well. A couple of things changed: Akshadhen somehow became Akshedhen. I wrote "Nitsur lives as a slave with Akshadhen's family for several years", but it ended up only being about a year and a half. "Nitsur alerts Akshadhen and his father to the secret practices of the temple"-- not exactly, A. and father were out of the city at the time, but N. does alert the authorities and events proceed as described. (This is important, because it sets up A's father's arrest.) So N's section is relatively unchanged.

In M's section I wrote "Along the way, they acquire a motley group of companions: ... even a Kesset who had been stripped of his rights and condemned to slavery for crimes" There is such a character, but he ends up traveling with A. and friends rather than N. and M.

The order of events at the end of this section is substantially rearranged: M's fight with W. occurs closer to the time of their arrival, before the rains and the (re)appearance of A.

A's section is really only hinted at in the outline. Unsurprisingly, it's the part that changed the most in the writing and editing. I notice that there's no mention here of the Locust People having taken Ahon ken Tai.

Overall, I was pretty faithful to the outline as far as it went. What amazes me is what's not in the outline: the tangle of interlocking motivations and event consequences that moves the story forward. Like the Sun temple raids leading to the disorganization of the city, that causes it to fall pretty much without a struggle to the Locust People. The stuff from M's youth feeding forward into W's actions as senior priestess. A's struggles with his nascent status as an Old Man.

I don't remember, now, how much of this was in my head when I wrote the outline: I think actually a lot of it was already implicit. For instance, A's conversation with N. at the gate of Ahon ken Tai-- where he talks about his ambivalence toward the Old Man cult-- I wrote that years before the rest of this.

What can I conclude? I don't think I'd want to set out to write a novel without an outline that's at least this well developed. I see also that the early posts to this blog contained a fair amount of background material, character sketches and the like. All good stuff.

For comparison, I pretty much wrote Killing Time off a plot outline that I spoke to Todd shortly before I started writing; I never wrote it down anywhere but I had it in my head the whole time. Of course, KT took less than a month from start to finish, so it's not as if I had time to forget what I was doing.

Rough draft is done!

Allahu Akbar.

Final word count: 117,418

I averaged 2053 WPD between Nov 1 and Dec 22. That's counting several days when I didn't write at all.

Now I'm going to put it away and not look at it for the next several days. Editing begins Jan 1. After the first editing pass, I'll probably post another word count. At this point, I think it'll get longer rather than shorter: my to-do list has stuff to add, and while I think there's some redundant verbiage and some dialogue that could be tighter, I don't think there's that much.

Thank you, God. It's been a long strange trip.

A long weekend

I'm taking tomorrow and Monday off from work, and then I have Tuesday off for Xmas. By then, the rough draft will be finished insh'allah. I think I probably have some 4000-6000 words to write.

New section titles

DRUMSPEAKER
Captivity
Apprenticeship
Accommodation
Kanti
THE WINDING WALK
Spark of Sun
Pattern Magic
Signs of Drought
Coming Home
Signs of Flood
Walking Outward
OLD MAN'S SHADOW
Betrayal
Exile
Oaths
Allegiances
Storm Warning

Light at the end of the tunnel

Insh'allah, by the end of the week..?

Change of plans

I'm going to have to work on Mafileo's part 3 before I go any further, after all. Because it has implications for everything that happens after, including most of Akshedhen's part. I got him and his friends out of Ahon ken Taridh, and I'm going to have to leave them that way for now: on the run with nowhere to go.

So I'm going to need to print out all the Mafileo stuff I have so far, read through it, and figure out exactly (a) what the emotional tone I'm setting is and (b) what's supposed to happen. I think I need to have them pick up a Woneiyal refugee before they get all the way down to the Delta.

The "chapters" are starting to take on a life of their own. I had originally framed them around breaks in the action; now I find that they're structuring the story emotionally in important ways. One of the problems with M's part 3 is that it hits too many different emotional events: I need to figure out how to unify them, or else split them out.

This is editing-while-writing and is exactly the stuff one isn't supposed to do. My word count average is going to take a hit. But what the heck: I met the NaNoWriMo goal. And I'd rather do the rewriting now then keep forging ahead along what might turn out to be a wrong path.

I'm going to try to straighten it all out this weekend insh'allah and get back to producing verbiage for December. In the meantime I probably won't bother posting any word counts... I feel like the end of the tunnel really is in sight. Still aiming for a complete though very rough draft by the end of 2007.

To-do list

To do after I finish the rough draft, but before I send to alpha readers:

Expand the section on Nitsur's training by replacing exposition with scenes that illustrate the principals. Ideas: Hingol plays at a variety of village events; conversations between him and other villagers

Rewrite Mafileo's part 3. Too dialogue-heavy and not ringing true emotionally. She should be angrier and more damaged. Difficult writing. If I write the end of her part first, with what happens in the Delta, I think I'll be able to see how to get there.

Still averaging >2000 words per day. Last night I wrote Akshedhen and Co's escape from the city while the Locust People attack completely in my head: wrote it down this morning and it came to over 1700 words. Good stuff, but fairly gruesome.

Another milestone

I've reached the NaNoWriMo goal: I've written over 50,000 words in November, and it's only the 25th.

Alhumdulillah.

My total now stands at over 64,000... and I feel like I'm about half way, maybe a little more. This is going to be a 100,000 - 120,000 word novel. Allahu akbar!

The plan right now is to try to keep the pace through December. I'm actually averaging over 2000 words a day (including Thanksgiving Day when we were on the road and I wrote 0 words). At that rate, by the end of November I would have about 74,000 words. 30 or so days in December would give me another 60,000. I should be done by then.

I hope.

Then I have to do some editing. I know there's redundant dialog that I have to pare down and tighten up. There are some places where I want to cut out some description and instead write scenes that depict what I'm saying. Also check for minor continuity errors, etc. And run a spellcheck *cringe*

What I think I'll do is finish the rough draft and maybe make one editing pass... then send it out to some alpha readers, at least three or four. And put it away, and not look at it or at their comments on it, at least until I get them all back. Then (we should be well into the New Year by this time) I'll settle in and do some serious editing.

Then I get to start looking for a publisher. Wee ha! But the first step is to finish the beast.

It's a damned good story... and there are some bits of really good writing in it. I just have to try to keep the level up. May God help me.

Best-laid plans

So I got no writing done yesterday as we were on the road. I expected that. Luckily I had lots of overage.

But with the bad news, I may or may not be traveling in the next few days, and I may or may not have access to GoogleDocs. So the word count may collapse.

That's OK. I have to do what I have to do. Besides, the important thing is: I've proved to myself that I can sustain a 1500-2000 word per day pace for a good long time, and I've proved to myself that the novel is both feasibly finishable and worth finishing. The success of this project is not really dependent on my meeting the NaNoWriMo goal, although it would be nice to be able to say I'd done it.

Actually, I've written over 46,000 words already. I only need some 4000 to make the goal. I could get that done in two or three days, God willing.

Milestones

I now have over 50,000 words written, including the 12,000-plus I had at the beginning of the month. I'm not half done. I think I'm close to half done.

It looks like we're not going to the coast after all, but I'm still taking the next couple of days off for the heck of it.

If I can keep this up for 11 more days, I will finish the month with a total of well over 70,000 words. Then I'll have a decision to make. Back off from it and get back into the poetry groove? Or forge ahead and try to finish the rough draft? Watch this space...

Something else to note: After a scare about the home computers, I've uploaded all my Drumheart files as Google docs. Let them worry about backups. The only drawback is that some weird things happened with the formatting: I lost all my tab-indents and I got a weird mix of fonts. Some of this is probably due to the way my docs have been shipped back and forth between OOWriter's .doc format and genuine MSWord format (I have to figure out how to get all the quotes to line up...), but some is just GoogleDoc weirdness. Probably what I should do is download them all into one format, fix whatever needs fixing, and then do copy/paste instead of upload to get the fixes back into GoogleDoc.

One more note: My typing speed has gone way up since Nov. 1. Unfortunately, so has my error rate. I'm going to have to spellcheck the whole thing at some point-- and then I'm going to have to proofread it...

New POV

Now writing from Mafileo's viewpoint. "Viewpoint" makes more sense in reference to her than in reference to Nitsur: she's the visual one. I kept the recap of the temple scene to a summary.

Have to figure out where to work in a chapter about her childhood & training that parallels Nitsur's. Probably I'll follow the same structure: write a good-sized chapter about their escape and early travels, then break for her flashback, then back to the main story line.

Words continue to accumulate. Insh'allah I'll break 25,000 today: half way there and only Nov. 13 out of 30.

Working title

Drumheart.

I'm almost at the end of Nitsur's piece. Finish up the temple scene today, insh'allah: then there'll be some editing to do overall, but that'll wait until after NaNoWriMo. Start Mafileo's part, probably beginning with a reprise of the temple scene from her POV and then going back to her childhood and training.

Nitsur's piece is roughly a third of the novel, maybe a little more. I'm guessing it'll come to 33,000 - 34,000 words. That suggests a finished draft length of between 90 and 100,000 words. Wow.

Update: Finished the temple scene. Nitsur's section is now complete (unedited). He comes in at almost 34,000 words.

The Burning of the Brain

These are the books I've been wrapping my head around, in no particular order:

K. M. Endicott, An Analysis of Malay Magic
Robert Nelson, Finnish Magic
James Chambers, The Devil's Horsemen
Niels Mulder, Mysticism in Java: Ideology in Indonesia
John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility
William Seabrook, The Magic Island
Zora Neal Hurston, Tell My Horse
Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Alice M. Terada, The Magic Crocodile and other folktales from Indonesia
Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe
Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java
Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas

No wonder my head hurts.

Add: Joseph Campbell, especially Primitive Mythology and Oriental Mythology. I'm not sold on all of Campbell's theories, for a lot of reasons, but if you read his books as fiction, he tells a good story. And they're full of great stuff to rip off.

Numbers: I have already written about 12,430 words in this story. I feel like I've barely begun to scratch the surface, and yet I'm almost 1/4 of the way to the 50,000-word NaNoWriMo goal. I'm beginning to think 50,000 is a pretty slight novel. It's clear that mine will be considerably longer than that when it's finished insh'allah.

So... it might be reasonable for me to aim for 50,000 total words by the end of the month, realizing that represents neither a complete novel nor the output of a month's work. By then I should be able to tell approximately how long I expect the finished product to be.

One of the things this exercise is meant to accomplish has to be getting people into production mode. To meet the word count, you really have to just get the words out there: you can't be doing all the self-editing and backing and filling that people do that slows down the writing process. So, accept that there will be a lot of revising and editing to do on the body of work that NaNoWriMo produces.

At the same time, I'm realizing it really doesn't take that long to write 1667 words (the necessary daily average to meet the 50,000 in 30 days goal). If the material's there.

Stuff to do

Stuff to work on:
--languages, especially Kesseten and Wonei. I'm not going to Tolkien-like lengths, here, I'm really more interested in the mindsets behind the language, and enough personal and place names and other bits of vocabulary to give the reader a sense of the language.
--Woneiyal religion and art style
--sketch out the minor characters
--create a map of the Delta region

Update: I've made a good deal of progress on the first point. Names are accumulating and I've think I've developed an "ear" for both Ta'arane and Kesseten. Woneiyal is harder, but that's the nature of the language. Now the question is whether the "ear" I've developed translates into the hearing of the reader. Also have to figure out how to create diacriticals in OpenOffice word processor-- it shouldn't be too difficult. (NB: when posting excerpts, I'll have to create the HTML by hand. Bother.)

I've sketched out several minor characters, but there are more to come.

I need to try and find a nice map-making freeware.

I need to locate some good models for Woneiyal culture.

Plan

So, to clarify what I'm up to:

I plan insh'allah to spend October developing more background. Will try to post regularly-- daily, if work allows. I see where the big gaps are, and I'm going to try to fill them in. I don't expect to do much actual writing this month, but of course if a great scene occurs to me I'll try to capture it.

November will be devoted to actual writing, and will probably be a much quieter month as far as this blog goes. I may post excerpts, but certainly not daily.

What's my goal for November? Well, I don't think the 50,000 words is realistic for a first-timer and someone who's also working 40 hours a week, plus there will be other commitments during the month. I also really have no idea how long the finished novel is likely to be. So I'm going to try to get as far as I can in a month of steady writing, and then see what I have to show for it. It'd be great to have a complete rough draft. More likely I'll have a draft of the first half or so, but that's still a good start.

Getting Started

Welcome to Outside Over There.

I created this blog back in January, when I was getting ready to switch Knocking From Inside to the "new" Blogger, and wanted to be sure I could do everything with the new version that I'd been doing with the old version. At the time, I had no idea what further use I would make of it.

Now I think I'm going to use it chronicle an attempt, insh'allah a successful attempt, to write a novel. If successful, you can expect to see my efforts to find a publisher, etc, here.

You will see, as I go along, excerpts of text; probably more than that, you'll see my ruminations about the writing process, about particular problems I'm trying to solve, maybe things like character sketches, stuff like that. I'm not going to post the whole thing here.

Why Outside Over There?

Outside Over There is the title of a wonderful fairy tale by Maurice Sendak. It's obviously not going to be the title of the novel. The novel doesn't really have a title, even a working title, yet. The idea for it goes back to the summer of 1990, when I was a grad student at UC Santa Cruz, living in Davis and working on my grad advisor's research project in the Sacramento area. I wrote a short story then called On The Levee, which has been extensively revised (the latest draft, with Steve Perry's help, in 2005).

Meanwhile, I was studying drumming and martial art and converting to Sufism, and all kinds of other things-- We're talking seventeen years of my life, here. On The Levee now stands as a short sequel to this as-yet unwritten novel, taking place probably some 200 years later.

What's triggered me to work on it again? Well, for one thing, National Novel Writing Month is coming up in November. The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days. I don't know if that's realistic, especially given the Thanksgiving holiday, traveling, family stuff etc, but it sounds like fun to try.

For another thing... it just seems like time.

What is this novel about?

It's about communication. It's about the utter, desperate importance of communication to people trying to survive, and to the humanness of people in general. As such, it's about language and speech. There are three cultures in collision; their relationships are such that they have not developed a pidgin or trade tongue. The characters have to learn each other's languages, and thereby absorb something of each other's world-views. In addition both of the main characters undergo periods of traumatic muteness or near-muteness, in which they become temporarily less than human.

Problem #1: How to create believable and coherent language fragments for three imaginary languages.

Problem #2: How to write effective dialogue between characters not fluent in each other's languages.

Besides language in its conventional sense, there are several other important modes of communication at work. The Woneiyal have a form of drumspeech that carries across distance, through thick forest and over difficult terrain. The Ta'arane have a pictorial (can't really call it written) language. The Kesset are more numerate than the other two; they also don't have anything you could call a written language yet; I see them possibly developing something like cuneiform eventually. They also have a heliograph/smoke signal code.

The novel is also about the discovery of a new kind of magic, a new way of working on the world. This magic arises from the synergy of at least two out of the three cultures. No one culture alone would have been likely to have stumbled across it.

Problem #3: Fantasy readers expect to see magic. How can I hold the interest of such readers, given that the magic isn't going to start happening until probably about halfway through?

Places and People

The setting is the semi-arid tropics. The action takes place in and around the valley of a very large river (think Ganges, Yangtze, Mississippi). The river is flanked by forested hills, giving way rapidly to mountains, on the northwest. On the southeast, there's a gallery forest and then a gradually rising grassland plain, the low-lying parts of which are subject to flooding, which ends abruptly in a steep escarpment (think Rift Valley). Further east, there are high, dry steppes. The river ends in a massive, multi-channeled delta that blends into the ocean on one side and into the surrounding grasslands on the other. (Think the Nile delta.)

The Woneiyal live in the foothills. Of the three peoples, they have the least material culture. They hunt and grow food, mostly root crops; they also gather considerable amounts of food in the forest. They tend to live in small villages set fairly far apart. They have never had a centralized form of government.

The Ta'arane live on the plains below the escarpment. In the past, the Ta'arane did a lot of engineering; they built flood control and irrigation projects all along the course of the river and built cities at the foot of the escarpment. They used streams falling down the escarpment as sources of hydropower for mills and the like, had municipal sewers, baths and fountains, and all kinds of other good stuff. They grew linen and hemp and kept animals.

The Woneiyal and the Ta'arane had trade relations along the line of the river (bronze tools, ceramics, and fiber goods from the Ta'arane; forest products including skins of wild animals, fruit, feathers, medicinal herbs from the Woneiyal). They got along OK but kept pretty much to themselves.

The Kesset were originally a tribe of horse nomads from the eastern steppes, where their kin still live. A couple hundred years ago, they came down over the escarpment and took the Ta'arane cities. The Ta'arane had been badly reduced by a plague; also, their bronze weapons and armor were at a serious disadvantage compared to the iron equipment fielded by the Kesset. The rest was history.

Now the Kesset live in the cities and raid the surrounding countryside for Ta'arane slaves. The Ta'arane are depopulated; much of their farmland has been converted to pasture for the Kesseten herds. The waterworks have fallen into disrepair. The Woneiyal haven't been affected much... yet.

The Kesset are facing a crisis of their own. The world has entered a long-term drying trend, which is not severe yet in the valley (strong, reliable monsoons carry a lot of moisture, which is trapped by the high ground on both sides), but is putting terrible pressure on the eastern steppe tribes. Lately the Kesset have suffered attacks from a tribe or confederation of tribes whom the Kesset disparagingly call the Locust People; they are, in fact, distantly related to the ancestors of the Kesset.

Will the citified Kesset be able to withstand the ravages of their savage cousins? Will the Ta'arane take advantage of their oppressors' weakness to throw off the yoke of slavery and restore the cities of the plain? Will the Woneiyal decide once and for all that the folks across the river are just plain crazy?

Insh'allah we will all find out one of these days...