Day 5 Down

Well, Day 5 of NaNoWriMo has come and gone, and I'm on track with my word count. So far I've written 8,670 words, about a hundred more than where I need to be by now.

It's a good thing I got myself ahead on days 1 and 2...I knew that I wouldn't get anything written on Election Day (Nov 4), and I surely didn't. Too busy voting and celebrating!

The writing has been a real difficult slog so far, with only a few isolated moments where things started to pick up and I felt a breeze at my back.

To be fair, the first scene I'm writing is perhaps one of the hardest...a lot of exposition, a lot of introducing characters and their agendas, explaining the politics of the time. I'm sure during the editing phase I'll find ways to make this whole sequence more interesting. But for my first draft, this first scene is comparable to that first big hill on a roller coaster ride. You ride a roller coaster for all the thrills and chills, but the first thing you do when the thing starts moving is to rattle and bump your way up this long, steep climb. But once you get to the top, woo doggie, hold onto your hat!

I think this first draft is like that, a long climb up in scene 1, and after that, hold on, we got some exciting twists and turns, all at high speed! At least I hope it turns out that way. Thank god this is just a first draft, and it's ok if it's really bad. :-)

One Day Down!

Well, my first day of NaNoWriMo has come and gone, and I have passed the first test...getting started with the first words of my novel, and surpassing the day's writing quota!

Today I wrote 2,738 words, about 1,000 more than the minimum daily requirement. I want to try to write more than the minimum on the weekends, because I (theoretically) have more time to write on the weekends, and because I know there will be days in November when it will be very difficult if not impossible to write (election day, Thanksgiving, etc.), so I want to have extra words in the bank for those days.

I'm very relieved to have finally started. I spent a couple months this year researching for this book, and I was feeling a lot of anxiety about being ready and knowing enough to be able to tell the story well enough to be readable (unlike Hitler's own book, Mein Kampf, which is reputed to have sections that *are* unreadably bad, and not just because of the despicable philosophy he held!).

I had developed a pretty solid outline for the whole book, but I was feeling a lot of anxiety about the beginning, because I wasn't sure how to start the book. The story really centers around events that occur within the span of a week, but it requires a lot of setup for the reader to understand and appreciate the significance and the emotional impact of that particular week. There are a lot of characters, and a lot of competing agendas that lead to the events of that week, and I couldn't figure out how to stitch together the various historical events leading up to the Night of Long Knives that would convey all of that with the cohesion and efficiency one usually finds in a novel.

A few days ago, I managed to devise a scene that I felt would accomplish this, and when I came up with it and sketched it out, I felt a huge relief, a sudden calm that made me feel more ready than I realized up to that point I was. But still, actually sitting down today and beginning to WRITE the scene feels really good and reassuring. Not only do I have a scene to start with, but it's appearing on the page, my book is started, and I'm on my way.

I'm so glad I did so much prep work, because I feel like I will have very little trouble over the next 30 days figuring out "what happens next." Virtually my entire plot is laid out, and every day I sit down I can just grind it out, so the challenge for me in writing this novel will be giving the scenes the texture and authenticity that will make them fascinating for the reader. While I don't think what I've put to paper so far is anywhere near perfect, at least I've started, and I'm continually reminding myself that the sole challenge of the next 30 days is quantity, never quality (that's for December). So I'm feeling ok about what I have so far; it's not awesome, but it's not bad either. As I say, I've started, and that's the important thing.

This scene I devised is one of only two scenes in the entire book outline that are completely fictional; everything else is a historically recorded event. My book starts out with Hitler and the top Nazi leadership at the opera house, where one of Hitler's favorite operas, Tristan und Isolde, from one of Hitler's favorite composers (Richard Wagner) is being performed (it really was a Hitler favorite).

It's late January 1934, one year after Hitler has been made chancellor of Germany, and Minister without Portfolio Hermann Goehring has arranged an anniversary celebration and banquet in Hitler's honor. During the opera, I key in on some of the major characters and reveal their inner thoughts and a little biography to introduce and distinguish them. That's as far as I've gotten today, but here's what will happen next.

During intermission, the various "factions" will break off to gossip among themselves, so the reader can start to distinguish the various agendas within Hitler's inner circle and how they are in conflict. After the opera concludes, Goehring has arranged for a sumptuous banquet in honor of the Fuhrer in a special room in the opera house. While Hitler takes a moment to "work the rope line" with the press and the upper crust of society (remember, Hitler was ultimately a politician), the Nazi leaders make their way to the banquet room and start to mingle with each other while they wait, so now we get to see how they interact with each other outside of the Fuhrer's presence, despite (and perhaps because of) their competing agendas. Then the Fuhrer arrives, and each of the principals get to make a little speech and toast to the Fuhrer in honor of him, where the principals reveal more dimensions of their "central problems," but more subtly. Then Hitler will make a speech, showing how he tends to deal with such things, and his penchant for promising something for everybody and letting them fight things out among themselves.

That's basically it. I think the scene will probably be too long, and will probably need to be cut and/or re-worked when I edit it, but for now it will work for a first draft, and it will also help me solidify my own footing before I head further into the drama of my novel.

I admit, I have to find my own sea legs with this story, and I give myself permission to do that in the first draft. As they say, "We can fix it in the remix."

I've Figured Out My Main Plot And Subplots

After researching the history of the Night of the Long Knives, I documented all the main events in a chronological timeline. Then I put each event on a 3x5 index card as a potential scene, so I have this stack of "scene cards." But it's full of gaps, some weeks and months long, and taken together, the scene cards make the story still feel very skeletal and woefully insufficient.

I've been going through my scene cards to think about how to fill in the gaps, and how to weave the various events and characters together into a tight story. Tonight I spent some time going through the cards, and wanted to share with you some progress I feel really good about.

After reviewing and absorbing these cards for the third or fourth time, thinking about filling gaps, I started to get a sense of my main plot and my subplots. The Night of the Long Knives has so many fascinating stories to it, and so many competing agendas among so many institutions and figures, that I was feeling a bit overwhelmed about how to tell it all, and how to bring a sense of focus to the story, how to bring some deliberate, literary direction and a cohesive "story arc". Now I think I've got it, and I feel both excited and relieved, having experienced yet another moment of reassurance on this journey of moments that I might just be able to pull this off.

So here it is.

My Main Plot: This is the story of how Adolf Hitler kills his long-time friend, and beheads a significant organ of his own party, in order to win the political favor of the main power bases in Germany and thereby remove his last obstacle to claiming complete power in Germany.

I think this is a surprisingly interesting and chilling tale, because while we tend to think of Hitler as an all-powerful dictator who's already executed 6 million Jews, this story is about him in earlier days, as a politician still fighting on tenuous ground to realize his ambitions, and unlike 6 million Jews, which is very hard to get your mind around, this story shows his violence and evil in a very personal way, where we see how he is willing to sell out his own longest (if not best) friend, with hesitation but not remorse, in order to win the favor of others and achieve his ambitions. To see him do that, and to see him at the end of the book achieving complete dictatorial power in Germany as a result, I think that's a really disturbing thing to watch.

So with that as the primary story, my main subplots become more clear:

- Ernst Rohm (SA chief) – The story of how a crude and politically careless ex-soldier invites the fatal wrath of his friend and leader by overestimating himself, underestimating others, and repeatedly putting himself on the wrong side of life-and-death political struggles in a chaotic Germany.

- Generals von Fritsch, von Blomberg and von Reichenau – The story of how the leadership of a severely crippled military service politically outmaneuvers a much larger force, an accomplishment that enables it later to fully rearm and to regain its primacy across Germany and -- for a time -- across all of Europe.

- Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich (SS leaders) – How a devious pair of men, motivated by their raw ambition for power, obtained their self-serving objectives by carefully orchestrating a ruthless act of mass murder, and by making it convenient for their political master to support and authorize them to do so.

I admit, this story is still a pretty broad canvas, but the story feels much more manageable with this specific, cohesive structure in place. It helps me know what to emphasize, and what is minor.

Anyway, I'm feeling great about this development, and thought it worth mentioning on my blog.

NaNoWriMo 2008, Here I Come!

It's been a long time since I posted to this blog.

But I thought it worth mentioning that I am gearing up for National Novel Writing Month for this 2008, or NaNoWriMo as we like to call it, the annual November challenge to write a 50,000-word piece of original fiction in 30 days.

I've done NaNoWriMo twice before. My first effort resulted in a sci-fi book called Asteroid Burn, which I self-published on Lulu.com, and the second effort was a book called The Double Yellow Line, which never made it past the first draft.

This year, on my third outing, I'll be writing a book tentatively titled The Night of the Long Knives, a novelization of Adolf Hitler's brutal 3-day purge of the famous Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party's brown-shirted storm-troopers. I've been researching the topic for a couple months, and while I still feel a little shaky, there's no doubt that I know more now about Nazi history than I've ever known, and certainly more than any of my friends do. Which means that aside from some historians whose books I've read, I'm the most qualified person I know to write this story. At least, that's what I keep telling myself, whenever I think about writing the book and my knees start to knock!

I can't say I'll be blogging much about it -- I'll be burning all my energy on the manuscript! -- but whatever I do post will be available here at my writing blog, The Cordless Quill.

Wish me luck!

Introducing The "Novels By Topic" Wiki

My interests are cyclical...for a while I'll be into World War II history, then I'll get into Far East religion, then crime thrillers, and so on. When I get in a certain mode, I've always wished there was an easy way to identify all the good novels about a certain topic, place or even person. Now there is such a place.

I've created the "Novels By Topic" wiki, where I'm maintaining such a list. You can add to the list yourself! Visit the site, and add your favorite novels in the right topics (and add a topic if you need to). This way the list will grow and be of use to more people faster.

Drop by the wiki today at http://novelsbytopic.wikidot.com/

My Tom Clancy Rant

I just finished reading Tom Clancy's 750-page tome, Without Remorse. Given the sheer size of the volume, and Clancy's interesting but not quite captivating writing style, finishing it is somewhat of an achievement for me.

I don't know about you, but there are some things about Clancy's writing style that irritate me to no end, and which strike me as just sloppy or careless:

- He repeatedly does this thing where he doesn't bother to identify the character he's writing about until the end of the paragraph or, at its extreme, for even an entire page or more. I find it irritating because I have to put what I'm reading in a mental holding pattern until I finally get to the character's name, so that I can put the whole thing into a meaningful context. He writes entire thoughts, conversations and actions that belong to no identifiable person(s) or place(s). It makes for some confusing reading, and forces me to go back and re-read paragraphs often. When the book is already 700 pages of mediocre writing, that's a lot to ask of a reader. And Clancy doesn't just do this for a paragraph or for a few pages; some of his books contain villians that remain unidentified for literally chapters upon chapters; you can read nearly half the book and not know who the bad guy is, where he is, or what his motivation is. I wonder if anyone else has this problem with his writing. It sounds like a clever and sophisticated technique in theory -- identify the character at the end rather than the beginning -- but I just don't think it works in the real world. Maybe Clancy likes to mimic in his writing the real-life shadowy nature of villians by not clearly identifying them (though he does it with heroes too), but I just find the tactic irritating.

- Another irritating thing Clancy does is the way he handles character names, introducing them first by one name, then referring to them later by another. Clancy doesn't just come out and say the guy's name is Dan Murray; Somebody says, "Hi, Dan." Dan says and does some things, and then he is later referred to as Murray. The reader has to put the two together, sometimes across multiple pages, just to figure out the guy's full name.

- Put these two problems together, and it's no wonder I never really understood who the villians were in Without Remorse, which was really frustrating to me. In fact, the bad guys' shenanigans was "the boring storyline" for me. You know how a novel will have a few different storylines going at one time, and one is really interesting, while another is really lame? The best books happen when all the storylines are captivating, and equally so. That certainly doesn't happen here in Without Remorse, and I've never seen it in a Clancy novel, come to think of it. There's just a certain arrogance or sloppiness to these points of style of his that mar an otherwise quality story, and detract from my enjoyment of reading it.

- Generally, I think Clancy takes too long to tell a story...his style is just not captivating enough to me to justify 500-700 pages, and the stories he tells could be told much more succinctly. Brian Haig and Lee Child are welcome to write a 700-page novel anytime they like, and I will send them a Thank You card when they do. Clancy just doesn't write well enough for me to be able to enjoy his verbosity.

I do find it interesting that Clancy is reportedly an English Lit major, and a former independent insurance business owner, with no clear professional ties to the military (poor eyesight apparently precluded such a career). Knowing this enabled me to appreciate a layer of his writing that I didn't notice before, such as his occasional use of Latin in the manuscript, as well as numerous literary and cultural references, from Shakespeare to Victorian architecture. I could really see the English Lit influence in his writing that I'd never noticed before.

Knowing this about him also helps me imagine how he does his research and does the craft of writing. It also helps me appreciate his achievement in becoming a bestselling author many times over (no small feat), a multi-millionaire writer (a really no small feat!), and licenser of movies, video games, and a number of spinoff novel series that have created hundreds of millions of dollars for him (which is a heckuva a lot more than I can say, so..."all due credit"). He's not some fighter jock who got lucky on the writing circuit, he's an ordinary, working author from day one, like many of us. Good for you, Tom!

And all this success with mediocre writing! Wow, if he can do it...

Seriously though, I am going to try reading another Clancy novel, Red Rabbit, so I'll probably end up adding some more irritants to this short list. I do love Clancy's subject matter, I just wish he was a more captivating writer.

What do you think?

Letter To The Editor

A little nonfiction writing for you...

Today I wrote (and sent) a letter to the editor of the New York Times. It's posted on my soapbox if you want to read it.

MayNoWriMo...of sorts

Several enterprising individuals have taken on the May writing challenge, May Novel Writing Month (MayNoWriMo). I opted out, but I haven't quit writing. I've been working on a nonfiction book on decisionmaking and how to make and use effective decisions to craft a satisfying and fulfilling life. I'm doing it quite informally, mostly just brainstorming on the same sheets of paper with a moderately sensible order to the content. I want to get everything I have to say about it down on paper first, then I'll work on editing it and preparing it for publication. It's been a really fun process, inciting me to observe in great detail about how I make decisions and what's underlying the process I engage in. I've learned a lot about myself, and have learned a lot about quality decisionmaking! (Never let the lack of academic credentials get in the way of a good opinion!)

Although I've had the idea for a while of writing a book like this, I was only recently compelled to actually start it when I realized that I was totally unprepared to teach my son as he grows up how to make decisions effectively to create the life he wants to live. I do not want to be caught flat-footed on that one! So that inspired me to actually start putting my ideas and experiences to paper. So far I've written just over 10,000 words, which is about 20 single-spaced pages.

The most powerful benefit of this process so far has been my active and conscious reclaiming of my own decisionmaking power: really my ability to be the deliberate architect of my dreams and life. Not only that, I'm gaining confidence in my ability to teach my son the same lessons. Hopefully by the time I finish the book (which I expect to be quite short), I'll have some wisdom of true value to share. And closer to the heart, I will leave to my son after my death a precious gift -- my very own words on ways he can use his personal power of choice to create an utterly fulfilling life for himself.

Now that's a good use for a dad. ;-)