I don’t really believe in a God, but this evening something really fucking spooky happened — just casually looking up something small — but important — for the novel, I found a crucial conceit-defining plot point that would make any Beatles aficionado sit up and take notice. It was an eerie “ah-ha!” moment that made me look around to see if I wasn’t in like, the fucking Matrix or something.
I think some of it has to do with once you establish the core of one of your two “main” characters, then the rest takes care of itself. Or, put another way, I’m well on my way to having a “canon,” rather than simply a series of plot points created out of thin air for expediency sake.
But let me be absolutely clear — I have been here before many, many, many times. The next milestone is what happens when I push my Hero and Heroine into the “special world” of the second act. If the whole thing doesn’t collapse at that point, then, well, we’re rockin.
In a sense, this novel is what would happen if you poured Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity” into a Stieg Larsson novel that was having a Vulcan mind-meld with Network, Columbiana, Gone Girl, All The President’s Men, Fargo and maybe a little bit of Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood. But that’s simply some of the influences I see on my side as I develop the novel. Should anyone actually ever read this thing, that might not be as clear.
And, remember, I’m a pretty good storyteller, while generally my writing is generally derided as piss-poor for various reasons. I would temper your expectations until you actually held some semblance of the finished product in your hands and could make your own judgement.
The whole thing could collapse pretty easily. But, for the moment, I’m cautiously optimistic.
This weekend was a real struggle. But by Sunday evening I had managed to come out the other side and figure out some semblance of a game plan for the novel. There are still a few tactical — but existential — issues with the plot, but the characters are very strong as is the macro plot. There’s a lot of very interesting things I can hang on the plot.
One issue, of course, is I hate MAGA and the Trump Administration with a creative white hot rage and so, well, I can’t help that it’s pretty obvious who is floating around the plot like a super massive black hole — Donald John Fucking Trump. I don’t plan on ever mentioning his name, but given when the novel is very specifically set, there really isn’t anyone else “the president” could possible be. But this is meant to be a scenario, a modern political fairy tale along the lines of Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood.
But the crux of the solution I’ve come up with for the weaknesses of the plot is to simply flip the script at every opportunity. It’s working out reasonably well as of right now. It affords for the Heroine to have a huge amount of agency. She came up with a plan and she’s on the cusp of seeing it work out as the novel begins — then all hell breaks loose (as is necessary.)
A lot of my problems in development come from how much the benchmark in my mind keeps moving. That, and I keep finding massive plot holes or poorly thought out plot sequences that are so bad as to be existential and I spend a few days struggling with how to solve these issues as quickly as possible.
I have no idea if this is all just a massive waste of time or what. For once my obsessive personality is coming in handy.
Today’s big concept is something very obvious and simple: “plot” is a verb. This has been a major problem of mine since I starting developing, then writing, the developing again, this novel. In the past, I’ve thought up scenes that were static. They presented information, but had zero action or connection to other scenes.
Now, as I have repeatedly said in the past, I have no friends and no one likes me. I didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend to point out some massive problems with the universe I’d thought up and so I’ve repeatedly wasted months of my time by not seeing the obvious, only to abruptly have to re-calibrate the entire novel. I am functioning in a complete vacuum, with only seeing the occasional movie being any outside source to help me with this obsession.
But things are slowly beginning to bounce back. I have vowed to myself not to start writing again until I have some semblance of a complete scene summary that I can use as a guide to write the next draft of the novel. There’s a lot — a whole lot — going on with this novel right now. While it has a lot of layers (if you know me well enough and know how I think) it also has ZERO literary aspirations.
I’m graze-reading an essential book — at least for me — on scene and structure that I need to snort if this novel is to be any semblance of a success. Knowing how to develop both a scene and the plot that it would be a part of is crucial.
Having said all that, two things are really beginning to influence this novel, which I jokingly within my mind call a “political guilty pleasure for woke Park Slope moms.” This is not at all a real description, for no other reason than my background, personality and political views are maybe not Ken Bone bad, but they at least don’t easily fit the narrative that Blue Check Liberals are so fond of on Twitter. In fact, on an emotional level, this novel is essentially me running around naked to see if anyone notices what’s going on.
Two things are really at the forefront of my mind as I struggle to finish a second draft scene summary as quickly as possible so I can get back to writing — SNL and Pitchfork. SNL is important because it’s an organization that has a storied history and legacy that people love, love, love to hear about. I’ve only encountered one place in my life that was as intense about something creative that a team did together — in a sense — and so I’m leaning into that as the heart of this novel. It’s the thing that connects the whole universe together, at least from my point of view as the “prime mover.” It has to do with music, so maybe that might catch someone’s eye at some point when such attention is needed.
Meanwhile, I’m also interested in using the music Website Pitchfork as a cheat sheet for the musical aspect of this novel’s plot. I haven’t done it yet, but given what’s going on in the novel and when it’s set, it would make sense if I started to study Pitchfork to get some sense of what people who read it would think is “good” modern music. If I don’t do that, I really risk being bit too conspicuous about what I’m REALLY doing with this novel and that might be off putting. If I can hide behind updating the musical reference, that might help a lot.
Again, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m operating in a complete vacuum. This novel’s problems are MY problems. It’s just I’ve gotten better as a storyteller and so I’m growing a little bit more confident that at a minimum I won’t embarrass myself. The great irony is I do have a few very, very, very tenious connections to showbiz…but none of these people take my seriously and think of me as just a dreamer loser. So if I have any type of success with this novel, these people might have a few eyepopping surprises down the road.
I’m being really delusional on that one as of right now, though.
It could be that at the end of this process I still suck and I have to self publish. At least I will have gone through the entire process and can say I’ve written a “real” novel on my own terms.
Maybe I’ll write a screenplay next if that happens.
Let me start off by saying I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m essentially working in a vacuum as I develop this novel. And I write a lot of blog posts when I’m trying to distract myself from the novel problem of the moment. So, take a lot of what I write with a grain of salt relative to your personal expectations of my ability to actually make what I can articulate a reality.
But, I would note in passing that I’m kind of obsessed with the type of music I point out in this novel. So much so, that the argument could be made that if you like good music — or, at least the type of pop rock music that I like as a middle aged white man in a flyover state — this novel is shaping up to be something of a Ready: Player One for you.
At the core of this novel is how several very important characters love “good” music that fits a very wide spectrum of “pop rock.” But, this is a novel we’re talking about, not a movie. So, the actual implementation of this concept will likely be far more limited than I would like. There are plenty of people who won’t know any number of the songs I reference. But, who knows.
All I know is, I need to hurry the fuck up. If I don’t get back to writing soon, I may not be able to sell it a finished product for no other reason than I’m going to be rotting in the American Killing fields in some weaponized ICE camp.
Or, maybe I’ll escape to Canada and publish the novel there.
I am — by nature — a generalist. I know a little bit about a wide spectrum of things. So, I am often fascinated by people who know a lot about one thing. I also find the passion that things like Saturday Night Live can generate very intriguing. There’s only been one time in my life when I felt that much passion for a group of people and that was in Seoul. With that in mind, I’m at least trying to lean into that experience as the cornerstone of the novel I’m developing.
It’s a prime example of “write what you know” in action. But there’s a fine balance between writing about a fictionalized version of a place that you love and writing a lot of verbiage that many people in your potential readership will find tedious, at best. But I think if I really go into what makes the place special and how it has come to change the lives of the people connected to it and the community around it, then I think potential readers will enjoy it once they get into it.
One thing I have to really think about it establishing that such a place actually believable exists in the first place where I am determined to put in in my universe. My hope is that if I write about the place with a lot of obvious love that that will come across on the page and people will get into it. Or, put another way, I don’t care. This novel is for me and fuck you you don’t like it. Wink.
The universe I’ve created is very detailed and well thought out. Extremely so. Like, we’re talking Star Wars levels of backstory on the interaction between characters. But that comes more from how personal the story is than anything else. In a way, the plot of this novel is me running around emotionally naked. That is, of course, if you understand the inspiration for the people and places I’m writing about.
One fun part of all of this is having a vast amount of information that I have to explain to the reader in a simple, cogent fashion that makes the premise of the novel believable, even though, in a sense, it follows some of the conventions of science fiction. You might call the novel a “political science fiction novel.” I have referred to it as a “political fairy tale guilty pleasure for woke Park Slope moms” in the past. But I’m not a woman and don’t pretend to know anything more about women than any other man. I’m not an “ally,” but I am good-natured and empathetic. I try not to get too wrapped up in how you might suggest I have a vested interest in the patriarchy given that I am a member of it. Meh. I generally believe the more agency and happiness women have on a personal level the better off society is. If that makes me some sort of feminist “ally,” so be it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like T&A and won’t try to chat a woman up with sex on my mind if she’s hot.
I have numerous political views that don’t fit the narrative advocated by Blue Check Liberals on Twitter. Fuck that and fuck them. I’m my own person and I know what I believe. But I am generally compassionate and empathetic — or at least try to be.
I have no idea what I’m doing. Not only that, I have absolutely no one to talk to about what I’m doing. So, the learning curve has been brutal. Every so often, there’s a major re-calibration of the novel. Sometimes it’s existential and I get nervous that the whole thing is a fool’s errand. Then, there are days like today when I’m stoked.
The last 48 hours I’ve been weighing different character names over and over and over and over and over again. I think, finally, I’m just about where I need to be. Almost. Then, also today, it really hit home how important theme as well as cause and effect are. This definitely sometimes gives me the feeling that I’m running in circles and, yet, I also sensed a major improvement in the specifics of the story.
As long as I’m moving forward, I’m happy. The better my canon & scene summary are, the quicker I can actually write the next draft. It’s just what I’m seeing is how poorly thought out the original idea was. Also, my personal editor is growing more brutal in my mind every day that slows things down some.
By pretty much every metric a “normal” person would use on me, I’m a delusional weirdo currently living one of the more rural corners of a purple fly over state. That’s my reality.
So, as I proceed, keep in mind that I am well aware that I am probably just imagining things. It could all just be me jumping to huge conclusions. I’m using pretty prosaic datapoints and then weaving something out of the ordinary from them.
Anyway, I’ve been contacting a few well-known women the last few days for various reasons connected — and not connected — to the novel I’m developing. Jodi Kantor of the NYT gave me a polite one-line sentence email indicating that I wasn’t worth her time. That’s fair. I am going to exact my revenge, however, by doing everything in my power to have a character who’s professional life is greatly inspired by hers fall in love with a proxy me. Take that, successful investigative journalist!
Then someone obviously using a burner account on Instagram contacted me out of the blue tonight. Given that 99.99999999% of the time anyone who contacts me out of the blue on Instagram is either a troll or absolutely, completely insane, I blocked the account without even thinking about it. No point in wasting my time by engaging the person, whomever they may be.
But the event lingered in my mind. I have an extremely over-active imagination and I started to muse that it might be someone famous who wanted to talk to me, but just not via their official account. The rest of this bit of the post is more about me weighing what famous woman thinks about when contacting someone like me than any notion that that is at all what was going on.
I guess if you were a famous woman intrigued by a weirdo like me and you wanted to contact me you would check out my Instagram and then maybe setup a burner account simply to chat for a moment? Why they wouldn’t be willing say hey with their real account eludes me. But I don’t think that’s what happened. It was probably just my usual insane people trying to bother me. Shrug.
It’s extremely amusing the paradox I find myself in. On one hand, I simply need the opportunity to gauge how well I’ve managed to reverse-engineer the life of modern women by, like, talking to a modern woman (I have no friends of any sort) and, yet, the very type of person who could help me out in that regard is the absolute least likely to help me in any way without getting some money as part of the event. And that’s before they do their due diligence and instantly see that to their eyes, I’m just another bonkers Internet weirdo. (Ugh.)
So, all I got is simply Twitter, YouTube and my own capacity for empathy. That’s it. There’s not a notable professional woman on the planet who will help me at all, for any reason, to produce better female character in the novel. Just by asking, I come off as a kook looking to flirt with them or something.
Shrug. This is why we can’t have nice things. And, really, the issue is more about things I can’t control at this point. I’m old. Didn’t go to a good enough university. I don’t live in NYC or LA. I have very strong political views that can unexpectedly not fit the media narrative you find smashed into your head on Twitter. As such, in a way, even if I end up writing the novel I hope to write, I’m pretty much just always going to be a more woke version of Ken Bone in the end.
With the complaints of outspoken Hollywood feminists like Olivia Wilde and Jessica Chastain ringing in my mind, I find myself trying to construct a romantic partner for my Hero who is strong enough and complex enough that I feel she will be noticed by women who may read the novel.
I’m getting kind of desperate. I know what her name is and what she looks like. But figuring out her personality is proving to be really, really tough. In my desperation, I am turning to someone who has enough of a public footprint that I can use her as inspiration. (Who? Not tellin.) I only do this because, what else am I going to do? I know the woman’s musical tastes and her age, so that goes a long ways towards using her as the foundation of the character, at least in that side of her life.
One element of the character — her professionalism and career drive — is proving to be the hardest to construct because I would need to hang out with the woman who is inspiring that side of her and, well, I’m just a middle-aged loser in a fly over state. So, I’m going to have to some reverse engineering. For this side of her life, I’m really studying Jodi Kantor. She’s a little older than I need the character to be, however, so it’s not an exact fit. But I think if I look at the social media footprint of women like her on Twitter, then that will help a lot.
One thing that’s proving to be a real pain to figure out is, of all things, how my two romantic leads deal with Thanksgiving. Ugh. So difficult. But every problem is an opportunity in disguise.
I’m enjoying developing my novel a great deal. But there are times when I wince at how much a movie wants to pop out of it like an alien xenomorph. A lot of the scenes are very visual and require you know songs for them to make the most sense. And, yet, given that I can only use song titles for IP reasons, I have to pick songs whose titles sum up what the songs are about as well as their mood.
Most of these songs, of course, are so well known that even the most clueless reader has at least vaguely heard of them. One thing I know is I really have to explain why my heroine would listen to the music she listens to. The average young person today listens to a very specific type of music that a lot of older people such as myself simply have never heard.
Luckily, however, the novel is set in the immediate past AND I’ve managed to come up with a reasonable explanation for why my heroine would listen to the type of music I need her to listen to. But the issue of how people will know in real terms how a song I want in their mind would play in the context of the scene is something that eats away at me. It would be solved very easily if I was writing a screenplay. But I don’t want to do that right now. I want to write a novel. I just am a very music-oriented person and I’ve structured the entire novel from the ground up so that pop rock music that I know a lot about is a crucial aspect of its universe.
But anyway. I going to try to flesh out my scene summary as much as I can this weekend. I’m shooting for no later than sometime in January to start writing in earnest again. I have a lot of momentum and love the characters, plot, and universe. I just have to live up to my own pretty brutal expectations. Even then, I’m a lot better storyteller than writer.
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