The Week in Words - 12/2/24 - 12/8/24

Within the Liminal Space Exists Not Writing. And the movie Armageddon.

Output - Data

Stats Compendium

Total: 2,174 words (6 pages [1,224] + 950 typed)

Days Writing: 3/7 days (.429 WrPCT)

AWD: 725/day

Longest Day: 12/5/24 - 1,154 words (1 pages [204] + 950 typed

Output - Synthesis

I was told once that a big part of the writing process is not writing, and that this seemingly unproductive time is equally as mission critical as the stringing of words together.

I’ve held on to this heuristic for awhile but only recently had it reinforced. During an interview, Umberto Eco—the guy who wrote one of my favorite books Foucault’s Pendulum—talked about how he spends the first two years with an idea not writing.

I was puzzled when I first heard this: If you aren’t adding to a manuscript, how can you say you’re writing a novel? Yet parallel to this question unfolding within me, I saw all the character sketches and plot notes and worldbuilding, all the revisions and expansions and contractions, that I’d done during the first draft—in short, I totally understood how it’d be super beneficial to figure all that shit out beforehand. It woulda saved me a lot of time during the first draft when I was constantly going back 20 or 30 pages to adjust the pages to new backstory information.

But so like, I bring this up because Not Writing was the theme of the week. Rather than begrudge how busy and wiped out I was, I did my best to go easy on myself. I kept my notebook close in case any stray thoughts came about, but this time was truly about focusing on my life and letting little bursts of creativity pop and fizz throughout the day.

On Sunday, when I finally did have some time to put one word in front of the other until syntax and structure are formed, I chose to read back through the cycle instead. It needed to be edited more than I needed the forward march.

I read through the 36 pages of the cycle with a focus on any smoking Chekov guns—any calls without response in the action or dialogue—that I didn’t pay off.

In Avalanche, one of these I found came early in the cycle, as they tend to do. I mentioned that Coleman¹ had an ulcer and he was running out of medicine. But y’know what I did with this information? Zero. Zippidy. Zilch. Nada. I wrote it out and subsequently forgot about it entirely. Until I re-read what we had and saw this thematic sapling and knew I could do something with it. There is value and importance in having details, situations, dialogue, or action happen more than once in order to express character change or plot motion. A call can have multiple responses, so long as it’s a good enough question posed.

I’ve got a super cheeseball example of this: in the movie Armageddon, when Ben Affleck’s trying to push the drill while they’re in the training pool, the transmission breaks because of his hubris.

This is then paid off at the end of the movie when they’re on the rock and running out of time and Bruce Willis is all “I trust you, kid.”

Ben Affleck pushes the drill hard and this time, it works! The cast and character arcs are closed. The day is saved. Cue the Aerosmith and wedding photos.

Big, dumb, movie-ness of it aside, it’s a clear example of the call-and-response nature of character development.

From these edits and amendments and callbacks comes my least favorite part of the process: incorporating them. This always feels like the most technical step, and thereby the driest, but once I slog through this poke-a-poke of edits, I can finally move on to the “Boom” cycle.

Which is what I really wanna be doing. I’ve been curating notes and thoughts and ideas for it as we go through everything. This should allow the beat sheet to come together pretty easily. Then it becomes a matter of how to break the beats down into individual sequences and scenes, how to casually pass a couple years, how to develop characters as they grow with the city—“y’know, the simple things,” I said with a laugh.

Input

Data

Book: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Starting Page: 125

Ending Page: 141

Days Read: 1

Pages Read: 16

⥁⥀⥁

Book: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

Starting Page: 0

Ending Page: 27

Days Read: 2

Pages Read: 27

⥁⥀⥁

Book: Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss

Starting Page: 0

Ending Page: 41

Days Read: 1

Pages Read: 41

⥁⥀⥁

2/7 days (.286 rPCT) [Somehow worse than the 2024 White Sox by mere percentage points]

Combined Pages Read: 84

Combined Pages Per Day: 42

Synthesis

All that call-and-response stuff was serendipitously echoed in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, which was finally available at the library:

“We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A questions arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.” (Pg. 19)

To Saunders, all of plot and structure breaks down to call-and-response, question-and-answer. I’ll take it one step further and say that character, too, falls into this pattern. It may seem reductive, but I’ve always been told this exact thing: writing must create questions, with the answers given when they will embed the most shrapnel, or withheld when they will create the most wonder.

Following out this logic, there is also call-and-call, answer-and-call, or even answer-and-answer, though the latter winds up somewhere in the realm of boring as hell.

In the Armageddon example above, it would shake out like this:

1. Call-and-call: AJ fails both times, there is no character growth, the world ends, “this movie’s a fuckin’ bummer, man!”

2. Answer-and-call: AJ succeeds in the training pool, his character growth is in fact regression, he fails on the rock, the world ends because of his hubris, “this movie’s still a fuckin’ bummer, man!”

3. Answer-and-answer: AJ succeeds in both scenes, his character does not grow, the world is saved, “All that spectacle and somehow this movie’s fuckin’ boring, man!”

Our job as writers is to lay out all the possible outcomes and pick the one that will make the reader maintain interest through til they end when they put down your book and stare off for awhile.

Saunders meant A Swim in a Pond in the Rain as a sort of college course in amber, something that mimics how he teaches at Syracuse Its perspective on the craft is framed by short stories by Russian writers which is a brand new plane for me to view writing from.

On the fiction side, I crossed the halfway point with As I Lay Dying. I was really hoping to get the damn thing finished by year’s end but we’re certainly running out of time. But whatever, if I don’t get through all of it then I’ll wind up with the world’s most achievable New Year’s Resolution.

-30-

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Story to Check Out

Article to Read

1. Ralph Coleman is the 35 year old man which Williams brings in to establish and run New Judah and Levi’s foil. He has blond hair combed and greased into a harsh part, skin red-ruddy from the pollen, mustache trimmed, tailored gray suit blending into the clouds around, wingtipped shoes equipped for a bank. He is short, diminutive in stature. A hyper-rational opportunist who Williams met long ago when they both worked for Devereaux—they split from him when he decided to move his operations to Graceport. He wears pince-nez which his eyes are scrunched around. Refined—too refined—for frontier living. Can cut down a man with the simplest of words.