Tinkering

I've been thinking of a comment I made in a writing workshop once, trying to describe what my creative process feels like. The image I came up with was of driving a car at 70 miles per hour down a half-built highway while installing the steering wheel, with the chassis more or less solid (you think) but no seats yet - there's a plan for them, and you even have a sketch of the seat covering, but you haven't gotten around to building them - and only a few body panels, several of those borrowed from old cars or new ones that were never quite finished. But there's a damn good radio, and the music is rockin, and you have a road map, kind of, even if you're not sure whether or not some new detours have been added since you last looked at it.

If I remember right, one of the workshop participants thought about it for a bit and said, "Remind me, if I ever need a ride home from your house, to take a taxi."

This, I provide to set the context for what my work has been like for the past week or two.

I honestly think my wife is more or less completely bewildered by what I mean when I say I've been "working on my book." I try to flesh out the details for her and give her a better picture of what I've been doing on any given work day - "I did some updating of my outline and moved around a few scenes," say, or "I did some research to get a better understanding of what the folk traditions of medieval Asia Minor would have been like," or something of that sort. Or, at my best, "I banged out 2,500 words on a new chapter, and got most of it onto the page before I had to go pick up the kids from school." She's come to understand, I think, that that last is code for "I had a very productive day," because quantitative scales are easier to work with and she's been around long enough now to develop a rough understanding of the kind of productivity range that I work within. She knows that if I say I wrote 600 words, I was struggling and tongue-tied and battling my own mind just to get anything done at all; and that if I managed 4,000, or 4,500, or (on one memorable occasion) even 6,000, it was an epic day and I'm flying high, and hated to see my time run out, and probably wound up collapsing onto the couch to take a nap and recover.

But overall I'd have to say that the behind-the-scenes aspects of this "job" that I've thrown myself into so much lately are pretty much a mystery to her. Probably to just about everyone else around me as well.

Honestly, it's still a process that feels messy and improvised even to me. But I'll just have to live with it. Lacking the kind of life that would let me sit down at a desk at a regular time every day and plow ahead for six or eight or ten uninterrupted hours, and then pick up where I left off the next day neatly and cleanly, I simply have to manage the best I can. So I write a little, structure a little, research a little, and just keep trying to keep it all hanging together somehow.

Most recently, I've been working on the technical underpinnings that hold all this information in a form and structure that I can work with. I use a wonderful little program called Scrivener to do most of my writing. It's designed especially for creative people who work with complex documents - poets, journalists, novelists, academics, screenwriters and so on - and provides a wide range of tools to make the creative process simpler, more flexible, and less messy than it would be with traditional word processors. I love it, and it's made my life a great deal less complicated. Above and beyond all the nifty mechanical gadgets that it provides, the best aspect of it is that it makes structuring (and restructuring) a complex document such as a novel far simpler than it would be with a program such as Word or Pages. It also contains tools that make research and notes and source materials easy to capture and access, as well as features that simplify the process of formatting and compiling a manuscript for editing, submission, or even publication on e-readers or the web.

All in all, a great tool. Of course, my process isn't that clean or simple. I wind up capturing a lot of my images and ideas on 4x6" cards, or sticky notes, or scratch paper. Sometimes I'll be grabbed by a scene concept when my laptop isn't handy, and I'll have to scrawl out whatever I can in whatever notebook is most handy before I lose it, and trust that I'll figure out how to get it into the electronic manuscript eventually. I've got source materials referenced neatly on note cards, others that are bookmarked on my shelves, and others that are no more than a vague scrawl reminding me to go look at page x of book y.

You see where my image of the half-built car barreling down the highway comes from...

So, much of my work the past couple weeks has been focused on slowing the actual writing down long enough to solidify the structural and technical underpinnings. This means making sure my references are cleanly noted down in my filing system. Taking my latest outline from 4x6" cards and getting it into Scrivener, and then bringing over the existing drafts and synopses and notes from my manuscript-in-progress to make sure my work to date is put to good use while still reflecting my latest concept of how it will all fit together. Looking through the hurried scribbles I made while listening to 12 Byzantine Rulers or Matthew Herbst's Byzantine history lectures in the car and following up on the basic research to flesh out the ideas they inspired. Finding details on places and architecture and clothing and language to let me bring settings and scenes to life. Making sure I've crossed-referenced dates and source materials to make the underpinnings of each element of the book solid.

To be honest, it's dull, difficult work - hard to stay inspired while plugging along on this stuff. But it's critical, not only to make sure I'm being faithful to the history (or what's known of it) but also to keep my creative process running smoothly. Here and there I manage to get a little bit of actual writing done, just to keep myself motivated. It reassures me that the book itself is moving forward, even while I spend most of my time tinkering with the chassis and the wiring harness. And I tell myself that once I plow through this grunt work, I'll be cut loose to charge ahead with the more inspiring work, where I can hear the trees swaying in the wind and see the light shining on my characters' hair and feel grit and dirt under my fingernails, across a gulf of thirteen centuries.

Soon, David. Soon.