Zero words written on the novel this week.

The little parts I was writing last week, based on the outlining I did, ran out of steam. Turns out a single day of outlining isn't enough for a section that's probably going to end up being 30,000 words!

So this week I hit pause on drafting. Instead, I've spent each day's writing time on outlining and research, trying to build a path forward.

Eh, that's not quite right, either...More like, I started out the week with an idea of the beats this part needs to hit. Character X needs to meet Character Y in Town Z. There's a Guild-sponsored dragon hunt, which both compete in. Something something something, they become friends.

Which is not a lot to go on! So this week I've been drilling into the "why" and "how" of things: Why is Character Y in Town Z? Why does anyone in the Town care about dragons? Why this Guild in particular? How does Character X find out about the competition? How do they meet Character Y?

That, in turn, has pushed me to do some more research into the history of the region, looking for answers about government structure, merchant shipping, relations between nobles and peasants, etc etc etc.

And it's working! I stumbled upon an historic event that fits exactly with my generational timeline, and explains why Character Y is in town (and why they might join in a dragon hunt). It's settled a lot of other questions I've had about the book -- like when precisely in history everything is taking place -- and even adds extra depth and drama to some later events.

So, am I ready to get back to drafting? Not yet. I've only got the first third or so of this section outlined so far. I need to work through the hunt itself, and its consequences, before I'll feel comfortable putting fingers to keys again.

Hopefully that'll be sometime next week. Wish me luck!

Steady progress on the novel this week, even though the plot of this section is getting away from me.

I had an outline for this part, I swear. But that outline’s nearly a year old now. The characters have shifted, both in my head and on the page.

As a result, they’re doing and saying things that are blowing holes in my outline large enough for the Ever Given to sail through. A single representative of a merchant guild has become an entire squabbling panel. An orderly interview morphed into an impromptu witch trial. Three characters that were supposed to be at cross-purposes are now joining up to hunt dragons on the sea (!).

I’ve managed to wing it, so far this week. But I’d like to have some time this weekend to rework my outline, and plot out the new sequence of events, given how much has changed.

I could keep winging it, I suppose. But experience has taught me that without an outline, or some kind of guide, this first draft will end up being even rougher than normal. And it's already going to be intimidating enough to revise a novel this long. I don't want to be creating more work for myself down the line.

So: an outline there will be, if not this weekend, then first thing next week. After all, you don't want to go sailing in search of Baltic dragons without a map!

I feel like I'm telling this story to myself, over and over again, with each outline. New details get filled in, new connections appear, with each telling.

And each day I get up and tell it to myself another time, adding more pieces.

I so much want to just write, just set the words down on the page and let them fall where they may.

But then I'll be plotting out the second third of the story, and I'll have an idea that ripples all the way back to the beginning. And it makes me glad I haven't started writing anything more than snippets of dialog just yet. Because all of those snippets will likely need to change.

This story...It's more complicated than other short stories I've written. Less straightforward.

It's a five-part structure. One part setup, followed by three parts flashbacks (taking place over years and across continents), followed by a climax. And it all needs to hang together like a coherent whole, present flowing to flashbacks and then returning to the present.

I'm not sure I can pull it off, to be honest. I'll have to do a good bit of research for each flashback, just to ground them in reality. Then there's the problem of each flashback needing to be its own story, complete with character arc, while feeding into the larger narrative.

It's like writing four stories at once, really, with them nested inside each other.

Will it all make sense, in the end? Will the flashbacks prove to be too long, and need culling? Will my framing device be so transparent that it's boring? Will the conclusion be a big enough payoff?

Who knows?

All I can do is tell myself the story, piece by piece, over and over again, until I can see it all clearly.

Intro

I met Tone Milazzo through the San Diego Writers Coffeehouse group hosted by Jonathan Maberry. I've known him for a couple of years now, and I still don't know how he has time for all of his projects.

When not running the podcast for a local publisher or play-testing his own Fate Core modules, Tone's preparing for grad school, scripting comics, and writing novels.

His first book, Picking Up the Ghost, came out in 2011 from Chizine. A follow-up, The Faith Machine, will be out in May, from Running Wild Press.

Tone took some time out of his incredibly busy schedule to talk with me about his process, writing diverse characters, and how "Done is Beautiful."

Writing Process

To start, can you talk a bit about your writing process? When you're designing a novel or a short story, are you a pantser? Are you a plotter?

Definitely a plotter. And the outline for Picking up the Ghost, was something like 12 pages long, which I thought was a full outline. But I definitely, as I got to the middle, I needed to stop and do some more outlining. The story was coming to an end too soon.

When I outlined my second novel, The Faith Machine, it was 77 pages long. That's a page per scene. Now that's an outline.

77 pages, wow! What do you actually have in your outline?

It's a bullet point list: plot points, foreshadowing, and payoffs. Sometimes there's dialogue snippets in there, if something occurs to me at the time. It's mostly about where the characters are coming in, what changes, and where the characters are coming out at the end of the scene. Kind of like a method or function in computer programming.

Kurt Vonnegut said every scene should either move the plot forward or move the character forward. So it'll be either one of those two.

Ideally it's nice if you can do both in the scene, without jamming too much in there.

When I first started writing, I would put way too much stuff into a scene. Now I'm trying to keep it to one or two changes or insights per scene.

Other things in the outline...Sometimes it's pop-cultural references, like I've put something in the scene that's supposed to evoke something from another book, classic literature or something like that. In Picking up the Ghost there was a lot of occult symbolism. A lot of tarot card stuff. There are some scenes that are supposed to evoke the Major Arcana.

Do you ever get feedback on the outline?

It's mostly for me.

Though if there's an idea that I'm not sure will work, I'll try to compartmentalize that idea and pitch it to people. Ask them: "Do you think this thing is going to be okay?"

That's about it. I don't want anyone to look at my outline or my first draft. It's too messy.

Nobody?

Yeah, it's terrible. Especially the first draft for sure. The first draft of Picking up the Ghost, there was a sentence in there, "He stuck a stick in the spot. The stick was stuck."

Oh God.

Yeah. I think I wrote the first half and got distracted and then wrote the second half, forgetting that I wrote the first half.

When outlining, is there any particular technique you use for building your plots?

So Picking up the Ghost was definitely me trying to invert as much of the hero's journey as possible.

The typical interpretation of the hero's journey in fantasy is an orphan with a destiny, who finds a magic sword, and has a magical mentor. It's basically King Arthur, right? People are cop-opting King Arthur.

So I decided to take that list and make it a manifesto for the book. Instead of an orphan, the protagonist is dealing with family issues. Instead of being some sort of knight, he's a shaman. And he has mentors, but they're not trustworthy mentors.

I also wanted to make it American instead of European. So that's where his ethnicity comes in. Being biracial: African-American and white.

The African-American culture, my attitude is, that's the most American culture. Even like what most books think of as American, which would be like a rural white culture, that's traceable in a straight line right back to Europe.

Whereas African-Americans had their culture stripped from them by the slave trade. They had to rebuild themselves from the ground up on this soil.

The Faith Machine isn't YA. How did you build that one?

So for the second book, I wanted it to be Hollywood friendly. I looked at something called the Save the Cat outline for screenwriting. It's a 15-point plot, and that's the spine of that story.

It's the first time I used that, and I discovered that it's probably a little short to fill an entire novel. A movie is about a novella in length. Fortunately, because I had an ensemble cast, I had a bunch of b-plots that I could use to fill out the page count.

With all this time spent on the outline, what's your editing process like?

Go over it again and again until my eyes bleed, and it's never enough.

For The Faith Machine, because the outline has such a deep understanding of what the story is supposed to be, I didn't have to do quite the extensive rewriting that I used to, like I did on the Picking up the Ghost.

When I wrote out the first draft of a scene, it was a scene I'd been thinking about for over a year, so I knew how it is going to play out.

And even when it got to editorial, I had two editors, one that I paid for and then one from the publisher. And the one that I paid for, it was mostly grammar and little details.

The one from the publisher, he lived on the East coast, and he had some thoughts about the opening scene. On The Faith Machine there's two characters who are in charge of the team traveling around the East coast, activating all the agents in person. But the order that they activated in was not a good commute. So stuff moved around just because I didn't realize that this place and that are more than a day's drive away. Minor stuff like that.

Picking Up the Ghost

In the acknowledgements of Picking Up the Ghost, you mentioned that it was a five year process to get the book together. Can you talk a bit about that?

I think for that one I found a publisher fairly quickly. I think the process of finding a publisher was under a year. Which was stellar compared to The Faith Machine.

The biggest chunk of time came when I had the book finished, and I workshopped it with three of my friends. None of them liked the second half of the book. So I had to rewrite the entire second half.

I had taken Cinque (the main character - ed.) into what I call the Halfway World. So it still looked like St. Jude (Cinque's home town - ed.), but there was nobody else there with him.

And what I'd done was, I didn't realize that they liked the supporting cast so much, and I took all them away.

How long did that take you to rewrite?

That was about probably about another year.

A lot of revising by myself. Some moments where I just wasn't writing for a few months at a time. Distractions, like World of Warcraft.

Most people's first book usually takes a few years though, from what I hear. Even Jonathan Maberry says he took three years to write his first book.

Working on the same book for five years, how do you keep yourself going?

It's the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy.

How's that?

The sunk cost fallacy is the attitude of, we've put this much time and effort and money into a project, so we have to see it through. That's a fallacy, because maybe this isn't worth finishing and to throw more money and time and effort into that pit is not worthwhile.

Whereas in a novel, if you've written 70,000 words, then you only need 20,000 to finish. If you don't finish it, then you literally have wasted all that time.

And I think that's where the sunk cost fallacy is not a fallacy. Because books take so long to write. And nobody's going to read a book that's 95% done.

An artist I knew said something they taught in art school is: Done is beautiful.

I take that as a mantra. Think about all your favorite pieces of art, what do they have in common?

They're all finished.

Exactly.

Why set Picking Up the Ghost in a town along the Mississippi?

So, I knew I wanted the protagonist to be African-American. And then I picked a location. I wanted it to be a living ghost town.

It was going to be Detroit. We all hear these stories about urban decay in Detroit, right? Which would have been a good choice, except a friend of mine turned me on to East St. Louis.

He showed me a book about East St. Louis's history. And it's like the Detroit situation, but far, far worse. It was literally a company town and the local government was in service of either the metallurgy companies or the mining companies, I forget which.

And then when the industry was done with it, it abandoned the place. Everybody who had money left. And there were people left who didn't have money, didn't have the resources to leave.

Consequently, it was the descendants of the African-American workers who had come to work the low-end jobs in the factories and production that are still there.

So did you actually go to East St. Louis? What sort of research did you do?

When I was in the Marine Corps I got to meet people from that part of the country, so I got some perspective there. I also found a great urban decay exploration website where the guy spent a lot of time in East St Louis.

The main place where all the magic happens, the meat packing plant, it's based on an Armour Meatpacking Plant on a hill outside of East St Louis. And it's still there. You can see pictures of it. So I was able to lift all that.

I read a few books about the education system in Middle America, its decline, and stuff like that. They had a lot of stuff about that city.

And that's also part of the reason I fictionalized it. I called it St. Jude instead of East St. Louis. That gave me a little bit of freedom to make up stuff. Whereas if I use a city from the real world, I'll never stop doing research on that city.

Why St Jude?

St. Jude is the Patriot Saint of lost causes. Good name for a dying town.

Did you have any concerns, as a person who presents as white, writing not just a protagonist who's African-American, but a novel where most of your characters are African or African-American?

When I started writing it, it was before this sort of increased awareness of appropriation. So I wasn't aware it was even a thing. I knew who Vanilla Ice was, but I didn't connect that to writing fiction.

And as I said before, I wanted to write an American story, and I think of African-Americans as having the most American culture. Then there's the fact that the town St Jude is based on (East St. Louis - ed) is something like 98% African-American. To put white people in that book would just be weird.

When I write about any kind of marginalized group, I'm not making a statement, other than I'm presenting people with these traits in roles that they've normally not had.

For example, in both books (Picking Up the Ghost and The Faith Machine), all my protagonists have mental disorders.

Cinque is schizophrenic, and then all the characters in The Faith Machine, except for Park, have mental disorders too.

So I'm not making a statement about mental disorder at all. I am taking this trait, which is normally relegated to villains or antiheroes or supporting characters, and assigning them to the protagonists. That's it.

So you, along with a lot of authors, recently went through getting the rights to your book back from ChiZine. Are you going to put Picking Up the Ghost yourself, or focus on The Faith Machine for now?

The eBook is up. I've already written a short story that bridges the two novels. I'm going to put that at the end of an ebook edition of Picking up the Ghost, and sell it for a buck.

And then if somebody gets to the end and they like it, there's a link to where they can buy The Faith Machine.

It's going to be a loss-leader. I figure that's the best use I have for it right now.

Did you get anything back from ChiZine, like the final manuscript or --?

No, they hold onto the formatting and stuff like that. And they also hold onto the cover. So I've had to make my own cover.

And I have to get my own ISBN number if I want to return to print, even print-on-demand.

When do you think you'll have that ready?

The Faith Machine comes out in May, so hopefully before that. A friend of mine volunteered to do the cover for it, so whenever he finishes.

For now, you can find Picking Up the Ghost on Kindle

The novel keeps changing.

I’m trying to pull all the threads from the workbook together, so I know what edits I need to make. I’ve been using the outline template from the workbook, which has been surprisingly helpful.

But as I do so, I keep having more ideas, better ideas, that ripple out and change the book. One of my characters has gone from being a Senator, to a corporate auditor, to a DOJ Investigator. The key scene between my protagonist and one of the secondary characters that makes him switch sides, which was weakly motivated before, now has the solid footing of a quid pro quo exchange (tied to one of the protagonists' plot layers).

Once again, I’m glad I’m taking the time to do this work. I was skeptical of the workbook’s outline at first, but in going through the process, I’m learning a lot about my story and my characters. Some of its seeing how much I really do know about the world, and some of its seeing those connections that I didn’t before.

So it looks like I’ll be lucky to finish the outline by the end of this month. But it’ll be a damn good outline, once it’s done.

This week I’ve started outlining a children’s book my wife and I came up with last month.

Which means I’m back to not knowing what I’m doing, as I’ve never written a children’s book before.

So I’m looking up average word counts, learning about vocabulary levels for the age group we’re targeting, and trying to wrap my head around thinking in terms of pages instead of chapters.

But hey, at least kid’s books are short, right?

Here we go again.

Outline’s not quite done. I keep bouncing back and forth between the plot and the characters, each change rippling out and making me re-arrange chapters and scenes.

It feels harder this time, and I can’t tell if that’s because it’s such a different book, or because I’m simply afraid of not being able to write a second novel, or because the idea’s not as good as I think it is.

The only thing I can do is keep plugging away at it, pushing the outline around until I have enough of a plot shape to start writing. I tell myself that all it takes is time, and I should be patient, but that doesn’t change the fact that my last outline took me two weeks while this one is a month and counting.

Maybe I should just dive in and start writing, outline be damned? Maybe what worked for the last book isn’t going to work for this one.

It might come to that. In any case, I’m setting a deadline for myself of July 1st. Outline or no, I’m going to start writing the first scene on or before then.

Thanks to the good advice from L.D. Parker in the comments, I resolved last week’s plotting dilemma by deciding to interweave the narrative from the trigger character and protagonist’s point of views. I’ll start with the initial “hook” scene I have in mind for the first chapter, then do an intro chapter with the protag, then alternate back and forth throughout the book.

I tell myself that even if it doesn’t work the way I want it to, I can go back and do whatever I need to fix it (probably drop the trigger character and focus solely on the protag), so long as I make it through the first draft.

With that problem solved, I finally started writing up the outline, character sketches, etc for the new book in Scrivener. This means taking all the notes I’ve jotted down – some handwritten, some typed up in Evernote, some dictated into my phone – and bringing them together in one place, and imposing some sort of order on them.

It’s the last step before I actually start writing, and it gives me a visual indication of holes in the plot, of weak points in the story that’s developing. For example, I can already see that I’m going to need a lot more background for my protag than I have worked out so far, simply because the number of their scenes aren’t balanced against the trigger character.

With luck, I’ll have the initial plan written up and into Scrivener by the end of next week, and then I’ll be ready to plunge back into the blank page and start swimming toward the finish line.

Had a minor hiccup in outlining the new book while I was traveling: I decided to change the main character. Thought for a few days there I’d have to split the books off, and use the previous set of characters for the plot I had been working on while thinking up a different plot for the new protagonist.

Thankfully my split-brain didn’t last long; I realized I could rework the old plot for the new characters, and keep everything I liked about both.

So now I’m laying out the narrative for the new book. I’ve got the antagonist’s motives and moves down, and the same for what I’m thinking of as the “trigger character,” the one that starts things moving.

Having some trouble deciding when and how to bring in my protagonist though. I’ve got several different routes to take, some of which use the initial scene I want to have and some that don’t. The problem (at the moment) is that the routes that don’t use that scene make more sense than the ones that do.

So do I let go of this little darling scene of mine? Or do I brainstorm until I can find a way to keep it and have a protag intro that makes sense?

I’ve decided to stick with the plan of working on the new novel first, and then going back to edit the last one.

That means I need to get cracking on a serious outline for the new book. Got some travel coming up next week, which should give me some dedicated time to start hashing that out. I’ve got the three main characters already and the basic plot, so it’ll be a matter of working out the beats of the story as well as taking a first stab at how it will end. That ending will probably be completely different by the time its written, but I need a star to steer by if I’m going to get in the boat.

With luck — and work, let’s not forget time-in-chair — I’ll have the outline done in two weeks, so I can start writing in earnest by June 1st. That’ll give me six months of runway to be finished before the end of the year.

Let’s hope it’s enough.

Even while outlining the new novel, I keep wanting to go back to the old.

Especially now that I’ve gotten some reader feedback. Makes me think maybe my time would be better spent editing and polishing the novel I’ve got, rather than writing a new one.

Or perhaps I should switch to outlining and writing the sequel to the last novel? That’d be easier: I’ve already got the characters and the world in place, and some history established. I should be able to get off and running on that book faster than the first, right?

It’s hard for me to tell whether this is my normal flightiness or a sensible course correction.

For now, I’m going to stick with the plan: outline and write a new book with completely different characters, then come back to the first novel and edit it into shape. With that done, I’ll be able to alternate periods of new writing with periods of editing, and hopefully get into a rhythm that’ll sustain me all the way to publication.

The presentation’s done, the conference is over. I can start turning my attention back to writing.

But writing what? The book I’m outlining now is near-future science fiction, something that’s usually difficult to pin down. It’ll almost certainly be thought of as a prediction of what’s to come, instead of what it really is: an excuse to indulge some of my programming daydreams without moving too far away from the known and familiar.

So how do I balance the whimsy I want to put in there and the reality-grounding I know it’ll need? How do I gel a coherent story out of all the ideas bubbling around in my head for such a setting?

There’s no way to know except to write it, to set something down and then work with it until it reaches the shape I want. So I’m outlining, sketching characters and situations out, building up the scaffolding I’ll need before starting to write in earnest.

Here we go again.