Website: 5th anniversary

My blog has fallen by the wayside, but not me. I’ve been distracted by my retirement and the preparations for moving to the US at the end of June, but my days are full of writing. I will have so much to show when publication time finally rolls around.

It’s interesting that writing will no longer be a safe haven from work stresses, because yesterday, I retired from teaching. So if there is any stress now, it will be the writing itself. The bigger change, though, will be sitting and writing in America instead of Japan. I don’t know if I will continue to write books set in Japan. The next two I have on my plate will be set in the US. I expect there will also be a major change in quietude, going from a home with two sixty-five year olds to one with a pair of young kids. I am sure, though, that writing will continue. I enjoy it too much to drop it or even cut back much.

One activity that I enjoyed again this year was writing for National Novel Writing Month last November. I wrote 106,800 words, qualifying me for another yet NaNoWriMo win, but I didn’t finish the novel, the sixth novel in The Time Well series. It has since continued to grow. I fear I have a monster on my hands.

National Novel Writing Month 2021 III

I finished NaNoWriMo today with my biggest thirty-day word count ever: 120,000 words. The novel still has some holes in it and it needs plenty of massaging and patching to make all the pieces fit, but for a first draft, it’s in pretty good shape. As I suspected coming in, already having a world created and characters I know and like made this quick and fun. I am sorely tempted to leave it as it is for a few weeks and start on the next one (book four in my time travel series), then come back to this one and see how the whole arc is progressing.

National Novel Writing Month 2021 II

Today I passed 50,000 words in my latest novel, which is the arbitrary definition of winning set by NaNoWriMo. That makes four wins in four years straight. This year I did it in fifteen days, half of what NaNoWriMo allows. It’s not my fastest win, but it suits me just fine this time around.

National Novel Writing Month 2021

It’s my fourth November participating in NaNoWriMo. This year I am writing a sequel. It’s fun to already know the characters and the world they inhabit. This is book three in my time travel series, The Time Well. I originally envisioned it as a trilogy, but all the content I had conceived ended up in book one. Then, all kinds of other ideas flooded in and now I am thinking about five books. I certainly hope I will be able to keep the the story fresh and unpredictable for that long.

Another problem I have with the series is that I have grown to love these characters. Unfortunately, in writing several books, I will have created too many and not left enough by the wayside. Stephen King says to kill your darlings, and the fact that I don’t want to lose any of these dear characters convinces me that one (or more) needs to go. But which one(s) and how? I have some serious reflection ahead.

National Novel Writing Month 2020 III

National Novel Writing Month is done—and won—for the third straight year. The novel is 91,700 words, quite a bit more than my 75,000-word goal. But there are still places that need filling out and the novel is terribly disjointed. I need to read it through and do a major edit. I am also dissatisfied with the character of my protagonist. I wanted to make him less of the sort of nice guy that populate my other novels (all except The Man Terror Club), but what I have written is a patient, caring, though judgmental man. He is not as irascible and sarcastic on the outside as I had imagined him. Turning him into that less lovable character may take more than a single rewrite.

My two past NaNoWriMo novels have each required more extensive rewrites than I had thought they would need. I know this one needs a big rewrite, and it makes me wonder just what is in store for me and the characters I have created.

National Novel Writing Month 2020 II

I won National Novel Writing Month! In other words, today I passed 50,000 words in November. I was trying not to write at quite the breakneck speed I have the last two years. In 2018 I won in fifteen days. In 2019, twelve days. My goal this year was to slow down and win in twenty days, but I got carried away sometimes and ended up winning in seventeen days. That would suggest that I’ll end up surpassing my 75,000-word goal. That’s all right. I just want to get as close to a complete first draft as I can. I recognize, though, that it will need major work afterward, especially since my curmudgeon isn’t quite curmudgeonly enough. And I’m only about two thirds of the way through the story.

National Novel Writing Month 2020

It’s NaNoWriMo again, National Novel Writing Month 2020. This year’s novel does not have a final title yet, but the idea is to do something a little different.  Six of my novels have male protagonists, and they are quite similar: all are American expatriates living in Japan; all but one are middle-aged; all but one are educators (four professors and an English teacher); they are smart but not too confident otherwise; mental problems are not uncommon (three suffer from depression); all are soft spoken, with strong internal emotions but not effusive outsides; they are thinkers and internal dialogue is not uncommon; all are tall and trim; they are reasonably handsome; none are sexually aggressive or even adventuresome; and all are open to finding an attachment, someone to love. They are nice guys in difficult situations who end up being helped or even rescued by women.

I thought this year for NaNoWriMo it would be nice to stretch and write a character who is not as nice. So this protagonist is going to be a curmudgeon, or even irascible, at least to start. 

I also do not plan to win NaNoWriMo as quickly this year. My primary goal is still simply to win (write fifty thousand words), but I would like to make that happen over twenty days. If I write twenty-five hundred words a day, I can finish the month with a seventy-five-thousand-word novel. Even pounding out that many words in the month would make the novel shorter than any others I have written. 

It’s odd that I have written as much as I have and yet I still feel trepidation at the start of every project, wondering whether I can turn it into something worthwhile. Could that be a good thing, a little humility, perhaps? Or is it part of the reason my protagonists are as weak as they are?

The idea: The Keeper

The Keeper is another idea I had years ago. I was watching a superhero movie on television and wondered what would happen if a regular person started acting like a superhero—not believing he had superpowers, just intervening to stop crime. But what do you do with the criminals once you stop them? The idea bounced around in my head for a long time. I made notes on it at various times and even made some abortive attempts to start in the summer of 2014 and the spring of 2016. But the story, although interesting to me, had problems. I tried to set it in America, but I realized I did not know the vernacular of an inner city (the south side of Chicago, where I lived nearly forty years ago). Then I thought about setting it in a small town out west (Springerville, AZ, my wife’s hometown), but the setting would not have had enough crime to drive the story.

As with many of my ideas, it sat and waited. I considered it for National Novel Writing Month in November 2018, but went with a new idea instead, Vision More Glorious. I made more detailed notes for The Keeper the next spring, though, and was ready to write when NaNoWriMo rolled around again in November 2019. The first draft took only thirty days.

The novel bears little resemblance to the superhero idea that I began with. A foreigner living in Tokyo becomes depressed but does not want his daughters to have to live with the pain of their father’s suicide. So he decides to get himself murdered. That’s not a simple thing to do in Tokyo.

The Keeper has been through a major revision and two rounds of editing by my wife and me. It is six months away from being ready to give to readers to get some feedback before sending it out for a professional edit. I hope to go to market with it in two to three years. It could happen faster if there were not so many other projects ahead of it in line.

The idea: Vision More Glorious

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I’ve participated in each of the last two years’ typing marathons. In the lead up to the first, I was concerned about having a story inspiring enough that I could tap out half a novel in thirty days. But then I started musing on the role of psychoactive medications in my life, how they affect my mood and even my perceptions, the whole way I view the world. I wondered what would happen if a medication could not only alter the way I think, but the actual way I physically see everything around me.

Vision More Glorious follows a young English teacher in Tokyo who takes part in a drug trial for a new antidepressant. To his amazement, it quickly alters the range of light he is able to see, giving him a wonderful, though almost useless, superpower. After the tale of faithless love I told in Kintsugi, I wanted to write a sweeter, more hopeful love story. I found this one, though, wrapping itself up at about the fifty-thousand-word point. There wasn’t enough to it. So I added a drug company as a complication. That got me to ninety-five thousand words that were not entirely internally consistent. So I did a significant rewrite after NaNoWriMo to fix things. That included writing whole new scenes and weaving details together so they made a whole story. I’ve done a lot of editing even since then, but Vision More Glorious is now ready to give to a few readers for feedback before I send it to an editor.

Plotting or pantsing?

There is a long-running debate on whether “plotting” or “pantsing” is the better way to write. When “plotting” (or “planning”), you fully develop the outline of the story before you tell it. “Pantsing” (or “flying by the seat of your pants”) is starting the telling without preconceptions and letting the story take shape as it flows out. 

The advantage of plotting is that you know the end from the beginning. Your writing is more directed, less haphazard. You can add foreshadowing and build in clever details that work seamlessly. The danger, though, is that the story can feel contrived, wooden, or forced as always knowing exactly where you’re going can make you ignore interesting creative avenues.

Pantsing gives your imagination free rein to go wherever the story moves you. Creating can feel more powerful and rewarding. But a pantser can wander, lose direction, and even end up stuck in a corner with nowhere to go. Imagine being 50,000 words into a project and then realizing it doesn’t work. 

As an example, I was over halfway into my 2018 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) novel when I realized it was turning into a simple love story, and I wanted something more complex. So I kept what I had, but added a thriller element. The problem was the new part of the story did not fit what I had written so far. I was pantsing the thriller element as well, and it started getting too fantastic. So I toned it down as I moved towards the novel’s conclusion, but again, the toned down section did not mesh with what came before. The novel ended up needing a significant rewrite, which I did months after NaNoWriMo ended. For this year’s NaNoWriMo novel, I did basic plotting but had some significant events only roughly in mind, and it came together as I pantsed almost all of it.

Is plotting more necessary for some topics than for others? Probably. If I wanted to write about time travel, with a story that loops back on itself, it would be easy to write myself into a dead end. But such a story might have all the more need for the creativity and spontaneity that comes from not having the story all worked out in advance. 

It’s impossible to know in advance which approach will lead to a better outcome. I think it’s more a matter of personal taste. There are as many versions of plotting and pantsing as there are writers, and most people end up somewhere in between the two poles. I suspect many of the greatest pantsers are mental plotters. They may not have written down where they expect to go, but set ideas end up influencing the direction the story takes as it develops on the page. I also suspect the greatest plotters can write with a spontaneity that belies the fact that the story’s basic structure was worked out beforehand.

I am a confirmed “in-betweener,” but my process is much more pantsing than plotting. I want to see where the story is headed, but I enjoy the twists that appear in my pure flow of imagination as the story streams out line by line. As exciting as a plot twist may be for the reader, I doubt it can match the excitement for the writer as something never imagined appears on the page. It’s exhilarating!

Is pantsing just lazy? No, I think it’s simply hard for me to get my mind far enough into a story that I can anticipate every emotion, thought, and action of my characters without writing it.

So how far can pantsing go? I have pantsed six novels. Could it also work for a trilogy of novels? I am considering writing a longer work. I think I should plot enough to define the major twists. I would also decide on the breakpoints in the story at the end of the first and second novels in the three-novel series and the final ending. I would want the three novels to work together as a whole, and I worry I can’t pants a trilogy, so long and complex. At the same time, I’m sure once I start writing, the story will evolve. I don’t want to plot intricately only to throw it away. 

The proof, though, will be in the writing. I guess this makes 2020 the year of biting off more than I might be able to chew.