Archive for September, 2009

Writing Ahead

September 23rd, 2009

Back in my pantser days, I would start writing a story with only the foggiest idea of how it would end. I might start with an image, a character, a situation, whatever I found interesting. Then I’d see where it would lead. And sometimes it worked.

My current novel project started that way. I had the character of Beowulf, a red-haired Viking boy from an alternate world, in my mind, but other than the fact he was going to leave his island home in search of adventure I had little idea of what would happen. My first draft proceeded in fits and starts, and ultimately was abandoned for a few years while I kept thinking about the story. If it wasn’t meant to be, it would have stayed dead, but it stayed alive in my head and when I was ready to start again I worked on the plot before I returned to writing.

I eventually worked out a 1–10 outline with the major plot points, but still found myself meandering into plot eddies that I found personally interesting—but they weren’t driving the main plot forward. I found the best method for me (your mileage may vary) was writing present tense summaries of upcoming action in brackets in the manuscript. They might look something like this:

[On the third day of travel they play for coins at a rundown inn. The crowd is surly, but mellows as they work hard in their performance. Still, men in the audience pester Freya. Darl tells Beowulf to go outside and get a breath of air since he is getting angry. He will handle things inside. Beowulf, unarmed, goes outside. Two men recognize him from his performance and ask him where he is from. He shrugs and says he’s not sure; the road is the only home he’s known. They seem friendly enough, but he’s suspicious of their motives.]

They’re not all this detailed, but they have enough information to make writing out the actual scenes a writing task rather than a plotting task.

I can’t say that I’m an awesome plotter, someone who can map out a book perfectly with satisfying character arcs, conflict, etc. without requiring revision. But by separating the plotting into first an outline and then to crudely written descriptions, I can at least reduce the amount of simultaneous processing my brain is doing. First, I’m thinking pretty much purely about the story to come up with the best story I can without worrying about word choices, sentence structure, metaphors, etc. The story has to live and die by its essential details. Then when I write, I’m thinking just about capturing scenes on paper.

Now that I’m done with a first draft, I’m still playing with certain plot elements. Even with a story that was pretty well plotted out, I’m not so kick ass that everything works to my satisfaction. But I’m way better off than I would have been if I had kept writing without knowing where I was going.

2 comments »

Posted in Blog, Writers and Writing

Tags:

Of Goals and Word Counts

September 15th, 2009

We all need goals: make rent money, clean the kitchen, drag our butts out of bed. As a writer, I find myself in a quandary because the more quantifiable I make my goals vis-à-vis word count the more I find myself driven to gauge my writing by content rather than quality.

I have little interest in writing sprawling, 700-page novels. I really like shorter books. In fact, my first fear as a writer was that I could never write anything as long as a novel—I was a poet and short story writer in my college training and everything I’ve done in my professional life since has been shorter work. I have a love of story and language but not of the complicated plots required to sustain a really long novel.

That was one of the reasons (besides a true and abiding love for children and the literature that inspired me as a child) I wanted to write books for younger readers rather than just for adults. But I digress.

Writing to a daily word count encourages me to take my time with scenes, adding details that are not essential to the book’s main plot. It’s all stuff that I find interesting and helps flesh out the world and characters—and it endangers my 100,000 word count goal for the book.

To help this, I started giving myself goals such as finishing a scene or getting my characters to x place in the story by the end of the day rather than a strict word count target. I still try to hit a minimum of 1,000 words in a day, as novels do have word count parameters and one does not have the luxury of taking years to finish a book most of the time. But story goals help keep me focused on the heart of writing: the darn story.

I recently completed a #wordathon “contest” where I shared word (and page revision) counts with other writers. It was a wonderful exercise in motivation that helped me write 10,800 words in two and a half days, my largest output ever in that amount of time. In that case, it worked because I already had my scenes carefully plotted out and I just had to focus on the writing. The group project provided extra incentive to work hard.

But I’ve had other instances of days with good word counts where I’ll have to spend extra time in revisions tightening up scenes and dialog. The word count goals that seemed so impressive at the time ended up being ephemeral because I hadn’t set proper story goals.

The best words are the ones that stay on the page—and in the reader’s mind. Even a small number of them is better than a large number of forgettable words written to satisfy a daily word count.

No comments »

Posted in Blog, Writers and Writing

Tags:

Healthcare Not Warfare?

September 4th, 2009

The healthcare system in America is a mess. Profit has taken what used to be a system based on General Practitioners (GPs; remember a time when there was such a thing as a family doctor?) and turned it into a bloated conglomeration of for-profit health insurers who have every motive to charge you high fees to enter their program and zero incentive to actually pay for your care, specialist doctors who can make more money by performing expensive procedures than they can actually keeping you healthy, pharmaceutical giants who take government money to perform research and then sell overpriced, heavily advertised pills to a brainwashed public, and revolving door government watchdog agencies who are fully in the pocket of the industries they are supposed to be regulating. It’s not pretty.

Now President Obama’s watered down, corporate-friendly ‘health insurance reform’ (remember when it started as healthcare reform?) won’t do anything to fix this. In fact, it will most likely create more profit for insurers by mandating that everyone must buy health insurance, thus increasing the pool of suckers, er, customers for their overpriced products. And yet, a sizable minority is up in arms over the so-called Obamacare plan, goaded on by what appears to be a coordinated campaign and talking points coming from right wing think tanks. But in the absence of clear information and logical thinking, any shouting can fill the vacuum of public debate. To get one’s point across, simply shout louder.

There is no more clear evidence than the following video clip:

When you peel back the facade of the protesters’ arguments (aside from the lovely street theatre of the Billionaires for Wealthcare folks who are the true heroes of this clip) it seems they are constructed from talking points fed to a populace fired by thinly veiled racism, which is in itself fed by poor economic conditions that cause people to want to lash out against someone, anyone as the cause of their problems. Americans know something is very wrong with our country; most of us just have no idea why things went wrong. (Here’s a hint: deregulating the finance industry and giving corporations more rights than people had something to do it.)

The answers the healthcare problems are actually fairly simple. A properly administered single payer plan is proven to be the most efficient solution to controlling medical costs. Our current system is burdened with both the need for profit (as opposed to effective medical treatment) and high administrative costs. As of 2003, the overhead for medical care was estimated at 31% of all costs.

DemocracyNow! has been doing a good job of covering this issue. Here’s Doctor Michael Rachlis speaking on DN!

That is, that if you have a single-payer system, like Canada has—and virtually every other wealthy country, as well, has some variation of either a national health system like the UK or, more commonly, a national health insurance program like France and the Nordic countries, etc.—that if you have a single-payer system, when you don’t have to have thousands of actuaries to set premiums or thousands of lawyers in your country to deny care, there’s huge savings on administration, both within the insurance system but also in doctors’ offices.

A recent report in the US said over six percent of all doctors’ revenues are spent on billing and reconciliation. The Massachusetts General Hospital has more people working in their billings and reconciliation department than we have at the Ontario Health Insurance Plan head office to administer health insurance for 13 million people. So, all through the system, there is increased administration.

And so, Canada spends ten percent of its gross domestic product of our national economy now on healthcare. You folks are spending 16 percent. Half of the difference is due to the increased administration of insurance, and the other half is due to the fact that a single-payer system can negotiate much lower prices than multiple payers in your system. And so, about half of the rest of the difference is due to higher prices.

In fact, Canadians get more of some services than Americans. We get fewer of some high-tech services, but even in the high-tech end, like for lung transplants, Toronto is an international center. We do more lung transplant surgery per capita than the US.

So, the first couple of lessons would be that single payer or a national health insurance program is going to be cheaper, because it will have lower administrative overhead and, secondly, because we’ll have lower prices. And then, that, too, that a national health insurance program, or single payer, also means that everybody is covered.

Seems fairly clear, no? And I haven’t even gotten into the ridiculous nature of spending hundreds of billions (we are into the trillions now) on unprovoked foreign wars that are causing misery while only putting the US in greater danger by giving millions of people greater reason to dislike the policies of the US. I’ll take love over war any day, and good medical care counts as a form of love to me.

No comments »

Posted in Blog

Tags: