The Wall

Sometimes I hear about writers who build themselves underground bunkers or some other form of isolation booth in which to work, and then sequester themselves there for months on end while they spin their feeble magic. And, when I consider these folks, my tendency is to scoff. Oh, I might start out by merely snickering or raising a sardonic eyebrow, but I usually end up shaking my head in a knowing fashion and dismissing them as wimps and weenies. This is probably motivated by jealousy.

For there are other times in which I truly envy them their ivory towers. Times like the last several days, times when, just because of real life, I get next to no work done. In fact, I hardly even think of working because there are obligations to attend to and crises to avoid.

Which is just a longwinded way of saying that I haven't gotten much done over the last few days. And it is a shame, because the chapters I'm rewriting now need less work to get them where they belong. I just haven't had the time or the concentration. I am, however, hoping to remedy that today and in the next couple of days.

Unless, of course, life intrudes.

Another Finished

One of the hardest jobs I have on this blog is coming up with new titles for each entry. I could probably get away without entering them, but I do enjoy the challenge.

Anyway.

I finished Chapter Seven yesterday afternoon and have begun Chapter Eight today. Chapter Seven was hard work, but I think it went well.

I'm closing in on 15,000 words, which might not seem like much unless you've had to type them.

And Signifying Nothing

Due to a variety of circumstances that I'm going to claim were beyond my control, I got no writing done yesterday. This has been a rare occurance as of late, but one that will happen inevitably eventually.

I'm already a paragraph in today, so there's been progress. All is not lost.

Journal

John Steinbeck kept a journal during the composition of The Grapes of Wrath, a journal which has since been published. Well, a few years back, I read it, and now that I am at work on my own small contribution to the decay of American literature, I had intended to use this space as a sort of modern equivelent to Steinbeck's log.

Unfortunately, that hasn't happened.

Steinbeck's journal was, if memory serves, filled with all sorts of juicy nuggets from his daily life and provided real insights into the process of compostion. It is a good and solid and useful thing. I'm glad I read, both as a writer and as a reader.

This blog, however, has tended to be little more than a record of word counts, showing little in the way of insight. And that's okay, I guess. I mean, it does give the curious some idea of how the work is progressing, and it is not only possible but likely that most people are not interested in the experience of composition itself. They have problems of their own and don't need me complaining about my quandry in choosing between "although" and "albeit."

It would feel a lot more literary if I had some profound observations, though.

In the meantime, I did have a decent weekend with the novel, producing consistently in the short bits of time I could allot to it. Chapter 7 in nearing its completion, probably only a day or two away.

G ive Us This Day Our Daily Word Count

Things are starting to speed up again. I wrote over 300 words yesterday, most of the worth keeping. I'm now over 13,000 total.

Work is progressing as well this morning.

Part of the current slowness has to do with research. Since Drayton is now getting to see the crime scene, I'm left having to figure out a lot of details, hoping to get all of them right. What needs to be noticed? Would the crime scene investigators still be there? And if so, where might they be in their investigation of the scene?

I've never been a good researcher. I get impatient and bored. I want my answer quickly gotten and easily interpreted. It's so much easier to just make stuff up.

Unfortunately, I also want the book to be at least vaguely plausible. Just another character flaw, I guess. Which I wouldn't mind if this hadn't so many siblings.

A Small Step Forward

Yesterday's yield was a paltry 162 words for a total of 269 in Chapter 7. They were good words, though, and got me unstuck at last. I'm closing in on a total of 13,000 for the entire draft.

There's a very good chance that the entire story won't reach the magic number of 50,000, but it should come close. I would guess something over 40,000 at this point. Of course, I don't really know, and I'm not going to add filler just to pad it out. I want something publishable, but, more importantly, I want something good.

Yesterday

Yesterday's progress was measured with a big, round zero. Not a word, not a syllable. (And, believe me, there are days when a syllable would be appreciated.)

Things are going better today, but just barely. And the monster named Prior Commitments is waiting to kill my progress at any time.

These patches happen, though, and it is most important to just muddle through them.

After all, tomorrow is another day, as is Thursday.

So Little, So Little

I began Chapter 7 over the weekend. I wrote a paragraph, hated it, brooded over it, hated it some more, came up with a bright idea, tinkered a bit with Chapter 6 to pave the way for this alleged bright idea, and rewrote the paragraph. I stand at 107 words for all the effort.

And now, I'm stumped.

I wouldn't mind a good 1000-word day, but I'm not counting on it. Right now, all I can do is leave Chapter 7 up all day and look at it periodically and hope the sentence occurs to me. It's always that next sentence that's the problem.

Undone by Research

I just found out this morning that the headquarters for the Providence Police is no longer where it was when I left Rhode Island back in 1983. As a result, I've had to go back and rewrite the opening section of Chapter Six pretty thoroughly.

Damn research.

Chapter Six

Chapter Six was completed in about two days, and I think is much improved over the previous version. The ghost of the Sitcom always hangs over my shoulder, and I've been working hard to exorcise its presence from this draft.

If I keep up work at this pace, I'll be done sometime in July. I'm not countin on it, but it is comforting at this point.

Update

After writing the previous post, I couldn't quite live with myself. The idea that Drayton needed to work out of his apartment and not have a separate office just gnawed at me like a child on a jawbeaker. So I went and did it. I revised chapter one so that it took place in his home office and rewrote a small bit of dialogue in Chapter Six to reflect the change.

At least now I'll be able to sleep and look myself in the mirror.

Chapter Five

Chapter Five is a revision of what had been the last two-thirds of Chapter Four in the previous version. In this scene, Drayton meets an attorney, Morris Hepplewhite, who gives him a mysterious message from the now deceased William Briarbrook.

In the previous version, Hepplewhite was waiting for Drayton at his office, but I changed it to have him waiting for Drayton outside Drayton's apartment. This connected it more directly to the previous scene, and I just liked the idea of it being in a less formal setting. I even toyed with the idea of doing away with Drayton having an office at all, but didn't want to go back and do that much rewriting. Laziness, too, is a creative force.

Just for the record, I got the name Morris Hepplewhite from Ernie Kovacs, either stealing it outright or making a variation on a theme, I forget which.

I significantly chaged Briarbrook's letter from beyond the grave, turning it from a collection of zany ravings into a kind of simple code. Take that, Dan Brown!

The entire chapter took about five days to write.

Chapters 1-4

I started revising the NaNoWriMo version last fall. I had learned a lot about writing, writing a novel, and writing in Drayton's voice during the first version. The work on the first ten chapters improved steadily from chapter-to-chapter until it was really achieving a particular sound and feel. I had been helped along in this by an Internet friend, Robert, who kept telling me which parts he liked, which sentences hit the mark, and so gave me clues like breadcrumbs on a storybook road.

A great deal of writing is listening.

I proceeded in fits and starts as time and inspiration allowed, and by February I had reworked the first three chapters and a portion of Chapter Four. I had rewritten pretty ruthlessly and changed a lot, taking out hard, unnecessary, jokey jokes, and allowing the humor come through more naturally. I had to learn to let Drayton talk and to let the story tell itself.

Things were creeping along, however there remained on big impediment: The Radio Show.

Concurrantly with writing the novel, I have been developing a radio show. By February 2006, I had completed 11 out of 13 projected scripts, and had begun work on number 12. Switching back-and-forth from Drayton to radio scripts was proving difficult and both projects suffered. And so, I made the decision to concentrate on finishing the scripts and to put Drayton aside for the time being.

After three-and-a-half months of working on the scripts and a couple of other things that came up, I was able to get back to work on Chapter Four about a week ago.

I found it going in a direction I had not anticipated. Instead of covering the same ground as the origninal Chapter Four, I found that I was expanding on just one portion of it: the portion in which Drayton finds out that his client has been killed and following up on that info.

Most of the new Chapter four concerns Drayton's trip to a restaurant called Dinky Donuts for coffee, donuts, and a newspaper. Other than in the announcement of Briarbrook's death, the plot was not moved forward at all.

It turned out to be a tiny, little chapter, but necessary, I think. After consulting with my editorial consultant, Robber G., I rewrote the first portion--the part I had done last February--and was done with it. The rest of the old Chapter four was destined to become the new Chapter Five.

How I Got Here

The first seed of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy was planted back around 1978 or 1979. My best friend from high school had gone into the Army and was home on leave. During one of my visits at his parents' house, he showed me a science fiction story he was writing about an intergalactic detective. Inspired, I sat down and wrote the beginnings of a parody of it.

That went nowhere simply because I don't personally care for science fiction. (Please, no letters of condemnation. I don't care if anybody else likes it. As far as I am concerned, drink the cup dry! Just don't try to force it on me. Okay?)

A year or two later, I took a course as part of my benighted college career called "Film as Literature." The second movie the professor ran was "The Big Sleep" (the first had been "A Night at the Opera") and he had us read the novel as well so that we could make note of the differences. I wasn't expecting to like the book, but, by the bottom of the first page, I was smitten. I now had two new friends, Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe.

My interest in writing a detective parody revived, and since it seemed like Chandler had most likely gotten the name Marlowe from Christopher Marlowe, I decided that a nice, small joke would be to use the name of another of Shakespeare's contemporaries for my detective's name. There is a legend that Shakespeare died after having gotten drunk with Ben Jonson and a Warwickshire poet named Michael Drayton. Although it is likely that this story is at least an exaggeration since we know that Drayton was a teetotaler, I decided to pinch the name. It just sounded right.

After another year or so went by without a word being committed to paper, I happened across an old book that was being sold outside the tiny Gothic library in Kingston, Rhode Island. It was an edition of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that had been originally printed around 1900. Inside the front cover was a handwritten inscription, "Jesse Bertha Gibbs, 1904." It occurred to me that such a volume might be used as the hook in a mystery. (This notion has since been split, like the atom, and is used as a plot device in two Drayton stories.)

Years passed and I did nothing with the idea. In the mid-80s, while I was living in the Washington, DC area, I took a flier at writing the story as a novel, but got nowhere. The writing was poor, flat, and unconvincing. The idea went back on the back burner.

By the early '90s, I had resettled in Atlanta (having first lived there for two years in the '80s). I had, at some time, come up with the idea of turning Drayton into a teleplay for a TV movie and worked on this project studiously. I produced a pretty good version of it by sometime in 1992 and set about marketing it. One agent in the Atlanta area really liked it and wanted to represent me on it. However, she wanted me to make changes to it that I thought would hurt the script overall, such as removing all references to drinking and changing mild oaths such as "God!" to "Gosh!"

After being rejected by an agent in Savannah who was more interested in a script someone else had sent him concerning a mystery-solving team of grandfather and grandchildren and having a local attorney-cum-agent lose the manuscript I gave him, I got caught up in other projects and left the teleplay to molder in a drawer.

When I found out about National Novel Writing Month in the fall of 2004, I thought that turning Drayton into a novel might be a good way to participate. And now it's all this.

Reborn

A while back, I participated in something called National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo to those who are too lazy to type out entire words.

Anyway.

I decided at the time to blog the composition of my novel, Michael Drayton, Detective Guy,as an experiment in public writing. As the month wore on I posted each chapter in the bits and pieces in which I wrote them and eventually accumulated almost 20,000 words of manuscript in 10 chapters. (I went a bit past the one-month deadline in doing so.)

I hit a wall on it then, though, and put it aside for a year or more.

Earlier this year, I decided to start revising the chapters I have as a way of getting a running start on it again. Unfortunately, other writing commitments got in the way, and I have only started seriously revising it in the last week.

It is my intention to use this blog as a journal recording the evolution and progress of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy.

Tomorrow: the Evolution of the idea.