Transcribing scenes from a fantasy novel (The week in writing, July 14-20)

Monday:

Going into this, I remembered and anticipated Joe Abercrombie's writing as dialogue heavy. But in typing it all out, I'm surprised at just how much dialogue there is. It can feel as though the entire story is conveyed through dialogue, with physical descriptions and inner thoughts as set dressing. (That comment, of course, undersells the effect of Abercrombie's non-dialogue writing, but my point stands.)

It's interesting in part because screenplays don't allow scenes packed with this much dialogue – the scenes themselves become too long. And yet, on my first read of this trilogy, I distinctly remember thinking it would make great TV! It's possible that thought is still true, and it's just that my novel-reading expectations allow for a slower unfolding of events. All the core seeds of good scenic drama are planted in these fields somewhere. It makes me excited to go over the transcriptions and start cutting, to find out how these scenes might be honed down. But I'll give myself at least another day or two of transcription, partially to focus on the habit I outlined for this week, and partially to sink deeper into the story before I make decisions about what's most important.

Tuesday (Morning):

Today's schedule did not go according to plan, and it was entirely down to my poor personal time management. I was out late last night, helping some former colleagues film their collection of short musicals, and then I chatted at the bar afterward. I slept in, woke up leisurely, went slowly about my business, ignored the fact that I needed to fit in a long training run (I'm in the lead-up to a marathon) before I headed back to Hollywood in the afternoon.

So at the exact point in time that I'm writing this, I'm unsure how to accomplish my hour of adaptation, other than doing it when I get home late in the evening. That might be what happens. But it's clear I need to be making these decisions ahead of time with better mental math. And it would also be wise for me to start (restart) prioritizing my writing as the first thing I do in the morning. Possibly before breakfast.

Tuesday (Evening):

I did manage to squeeze in some writing time, mostly because I got an unexpected window in the middle of the day, and not because I worked up the energy to write in the middle of the night, when I finally got home.

I waffle between frustration with and acceptance of my inability to do anything at the end of the day. Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote of her schedule, "After 8:00pm – I tend to be very stupid and we won't talk about this."

Me too. Anyway, I got 35 minutes on the stopwatch before I had to leave, and I resolved to make up the time tomorrow morning. Is that within the rules of this experiment? I don't know, because I didn't outline that ahead of time. It probably isn't in the spirit of what I planned, but here we are. For the time that I'm in the chair with my fingers moving, the writing itself is still fine.

Wednesday & Thursday:

Wednesday wasn't great. I wrote for thirty minutes, got up to make some coffee, and thought, "I'll pick it back up in five minutes."

I didn't. I could dissect the reasons why, but I'll summarize and say it involved a lot of distraction, false promises, and bad self-talk. I'm actually writing this part of the reflection on Thursday.

This is one of my core struggles right now. I'm more consistent than when I first began writing, but I still don't feel I'm consistent enough. And I know it's not about my schedule; it's about my attention and my emotions. Tricky things to work around. Part of me wants to say, "I'll just get cracking earlier in the morning, and I won't let myself up until I'm done," but I know that's not a practical solution. It's a false answer to my predicament. What I need is a proposal along the lines of, "When I feel like X, I will do Y."

Thursday was better, but still not great. I found myself restless, getting up for a lot of breaks. I didn't meet my quota until the afternoon. But I did meet it.

I decided to review some of the scenes I'd transcribed and take notes on what I found most important in them, jotting down thoughts on cutting the scenes to feel more like a fast-paced screenplay (fast-paced when compared to novels). I didn't make the cuts yet – I just did the notes and went back to transcribing. I do wonder if there's some sort of natural limit on my attention span, where, after twenty or thirty minutes, my brain wants to start thinking about something else. If that's true, maybe there are other ways I can harness it? Plan how I'll shift my writing when my attention breaks? I'll make it through the rest of this week with transcribing, noting, and cutting, but I'll consider the question of attention more deeply in my review on Saturday.

Friday:

Monday went exactly according to plan, and my engagement with the week's experiment got steadily more messy after that. As Jim Carrey's Grinch would say, "That's what these tests are for!"

I did not write on Friday. I intended to. I got up and thought about sitting down to write, first thing, like the piece of paper I taped on the wall said I should. But I'd also slept later than intended, and, since my wife was out of town, I'd neglected basic necessities like keeping breakfast or coffee on hand. I was hungry, and I convinced myself I would write as soon as I got back. But time got away from me, I had an appointment across town, and yada yada, it suddenly became evening and I didn't feel like writing anymore. I played video games and watched TV. (Good, inspiring TV – I watched the first episode of HBO's adaptation of Angels in America, I watched the pilot of Hacks, and I started season 7 of The West Wing. Like I said, my wife wasn't home.)

Despite that, I did get some thinking done. I spent a lot of time in the car, and I noted some ideas for several pending projects I have in different stages of development. Sometimes I flood my brain with too much content – podcasts, audiobooks, TV, YouTube – but it's nice to let my brain sit in default mode for a while. Meandering often leads to ideas, and I know I should do it more than I tend to. Perhaps I'll forgo the earbuds during my run on Saturday.

Sometimes I think writers had it easier in the nineties or the seventies or the eighteenth century, when YouTube wasn't constantly available as a source of distraction. But they had to work on typewriters or pen and paper, so I'll call it a wash.

Saturday:

I got up and looked at that note on the wall again, thought about it, and ignored it.

When I wake up in the morning, I always feels so tired. I don't know how people like Ernest Hemingway or Michael Cunningham do it. Writers who claim they roll out of bed and get straight to typing, the ~ dreams ~ still fresh in their mind. I tend to feel like my weird-ass dreams wouldn't make for great narratives. And I tend to feel like forcing myself to do absolutely anything before I've sat on the couch with coffee would be akin to torture.

There are moments when words like "dainty," "whiny," "bitch," come to mind as descriptors for myself. But I'll set those concerns aside, since I don't feel like they've ever actually helped me do anything.

This morning, I did wake up on time and I did sit down to write after I had that coffee. I valiantly continued the adaptation experiment, and I even had some fun with it. I rewrote the first scene in more of a screenplay style and tried to incorporate my own sense of voice using Abercrombie's characters. It was useful, overall. Here are some of my takeaways.

• If you're thinking about the story as a screenplay, then Abercrombie overwrites his dialogue. Obviously, he's doing a novel, and I enjoy this book so I'd say it works. But as I transcribed, I definitely noticed he was using characters as mouthpieces to revisit and remind the reader about a lot of expository elements. He's unafraid of lines that serve more as filler and flavor than as substantive advancement of theme or plot. But that's not automatically a bad quality. Pace and information function differently in long novels than they do in tight scripts.
• While I'm very fond of large, political, action-heavy fantasies, the good ones still boil down to the bones of their characters. That's the question that dogs me in my writing thus far – how do I create good characters? Outline them? Make them up in the middle of writing? I'm sure the answer is yes on both fronts, but it still comes slowly and with much labor for me. I just know how to recognize when I've written a bad one.
• My attention naturally breaks anywhere between twenty and forty minutes into writing. I usually get at least twenty minutes – I guess I'm grateful for that much – before my fingers feel a spontaneous impulse to stop. Now, this doesn't mean I'm done writing. It means I've hit a bump in the road. I've found that if I can ride out this bump, I'm usually good for quite a bit more. If I manage to get back in the flow, I'll double my time at the keyboard. Triple it, sometimes, but that's only if I make it through another bump after twenty or forty minutes.
• I wish my sense of attention and flow lasted longer, because there are many days when I find it genuinely difficult to get over that bump. I get up to make more coffee, I turn on a YouTube video, I start reading an article in The New Yorker. Life just starts happening. The day carries on and I never make it back to my writing desk. How do I consistently ride out that bump? Some people might suggest the solution is as simple as, "Sit there and do nothing until you're writing again," but I've tried telling myself that and it hasn't consistently worked. Any solution that starts with, "Just tell yourself..." has not historically been an effective one for me. I don't know if I have a good alternative, but I'll keep thinking about it.
• I might be able to embrace and use these natural breaks in attention to switch to a different writing-related task. I'll try to incorporate that into next week's experiment.

Before I switch gears to next week's experiment, I'd like to talk about a book that I've found inspiring and comforting this week. It's called The Work of Art by Adam Moss, and it consists of over forty interviews with artists in different mediums, writers, painters, directors, musicians, all talking in depth about their process. One takeaway I have is that many, many great artists feel like they don't know what they're doing when they're in the thick of it. They fear they lack the skill or vision required to pull it off. They feel unsure of their perspective. They fear sinking dozens or hundreds of hours into something that just... doesn't work.

I fear those things too, all the time. All the time. But those artists have persistence. They manage to separate at least part of their sense of self from their sense of the project. They say some version of, "Alright, here's this thing I'm trying. And even though I've poured all my energy into it, it's possible it's not good. And that's okay, because I'll keep trying."

I don't know if that feels deep to you, but it's deep to me. I can't guarantee I have any hidden well of vision or talent, but I can guarantee that I'll dust myself off and try again.

Really, this week wasn't as bad as I'm tempted to think it was. There were actually two experiments going on the whole time. There was the stated goal, spending an hour a day on a practice adaptation of The Trouble with Peace, and then there was the goal of experimenting in the first place. I logged reflections throughout the week, I paid attention to my attention, and I reflected on my process. I'll set a new, different goal for next week. All of that is a different sort of success.

So let's keep plugging.

Next Week:

I'm going to format this like an actual scientific hypothesis. Or at least, I'll do what I remember from my ninth grade science lab notebooks.

Hypothesis:

• If I take a momentary break anytime I experience attentional drift, and if I take that break without introducing any new focus on my creative attention, then I can return to the desk in five or ten minutes and resume writing without issue.

How I'll test that:

• I'm going to plan short breaks roughly every twenty to thirty minutes, and I'm going to choose mundane activities that I can do on autopilot. Examples include making coffee, putting shoes on, brushing my teeth, shaving. Let's just run with those four things, and if I find I need more, I'll think of more to add during the week. At my first break, after twenty-five-ish minutes (whenever I feel that moment of attentional drift), I'll make a second cup of coffee. No earbuds or phone. While I'm waiting on the coffee to finish brewing so I can pour it in the cup, I'll put my shoes on. Then I'll take the coffee to my desk and resume writing. After another twenty-five-ish minutes, at the second attentional drift, I'll brush my teeth and shave, then sit back down for more writing. At the third attentional drift, I'll be done for the morning. The experiment will be about managing my effort and attention, so while I'm sitting down, I can write whatever I feel like writing.

The null hypothesis (how I'll know it's not working):

• If I take a momentary break, and I complete the prescribed mundane activity without a source of distraction (earbuds or phone), and yet I do not return to my desk to write.

It's possible, in trying to force myself to do an hour of transcription for multiple days last week, I was overambitious. (That word "bitch" enters my mind again.) But I'm thinking about a quote from George Saunders's interview in The Work of Art: "The one thing I’m pretty good at is being really honest with myself about my moment-to-moment excitement."

I don't think artists or writers always need to be excited about what they're working on, but motivation is a big, big part of this game. How else am I ever going to make it across hundreds of pages to some narrative finish line without fistfuls upon fistfuls of motivation? Since I still don't feel like I have anything figured out, and since I'm not sure which of my existing projects, if any, will really achieve any level of success, I'm just going to try paying attention to my attention.

Am I excited? Am I motivated? What can I do to change that?

I'll return with more thoughts next week. Good luck to me.