Nonsequitur Life

Two thousand one hundred words.

Give or take.

Writing about writing.

Story Code Name: Wicked

Also known as: The Wicked White Monstrosity

Fun fact: The story was code named Wicked well before the band within was named Wicked White.

Fun fact #2: Bob suggested the name Wicked White for the band without knowing the story’s code name was Wicked.

Premise: After Hallie’s life goes off the rails, she upends things further and moves to the other side of the country to live with her two best friends. She begrudgingly agrees to take a job as personal assistant to an up-and-coming rock band of eighteen-year-olds called Wicked White. The story follows her through a decade-plus of life with (and without) the band, the relationships she builds with the boys, and all of the drama, trauma, upheaval, and minutiae that goes with it.

I’ve been working on this thing since December 2019.

It’s currently sitting at 223 pages and 94-some-odd-thousand words.

It is, at best, half done.

I just finished reading all the way through this thing for the first time. (And by just, I mean as I started writing this post. Who knows how long it has actually been by the time I hit publish.) I’ve read it in fits and starts out of order countless times, but never just straight through. It took me several days to get through reading the whole thing because I can only handle my own bullshit for so long before I need a break. Also, as with reading any book, my attention span is only good for a dozen pages or so before I need to look at something else for half an hour or more. It’s fun inside my head.

And by fun I mean…what were we talking about?*

Anyway.

I kept the editing to a minimum as I read so I wouldn’t get too far sidetracked in the process, but I couldn’t prevent myself from editing altogether because typos need to be fixed on the spot before I forget them, and then somehow miss them the next six times I read the same thing. And I’m sure I missed plenty of others in the process anyway.

I have thoughts and feelings about the whole thing, most of which I expected, but there are some things I didn’t expect at all. I probably should have taken notes as I read, because now that I’m trying to document these vitally important points of interest, most of them are gone.

In equally shocking news, water is wet.

…) There are far more chunks of narrative than I remember writing. (Though still not very much at all compared to dialogue.) It is mostly clunky and cumbersome because straight narrative is a major weak point in my writing. I can write dialogue for days, but narrative is a beast I am not adept at wrangling.

…) Hallie’s best friend Richie is mentioned plenty of times in conversation, but he only shows up in one actual scene and even then, it’s really only pointed out that he’s there. He doesn’t have any dialogue or much action. Doesn’t exactly showcase his ride-or-die status in her life.

…) For as close as she’s supposed to be with all four boys in the band, the focus is 75% Ryan, 20% Benji, and 5% Stephen and Adam combined. This is, to a degree, in line with certain parts of the story, but it doesn’t match up with what the overall relationship is intended to be between each of them. I have to figure out how to flesh out each of those relationships to properly showcase their individual importance to her without feeling like I’m just creating unnecessary filler.

…) Hallie and Emery’s relationship is, at its core, very brother/sister. They have a long history behind them, which speaks to the complete lack of professionalism in their boss/subordinate relationship. There is plenty of evidence in their interactions of the latter, but not so much the former. Telling him he’s fucking cracked when he suggests she take the job with the band or threatening to castrate him when he claims he’s going to film her singing a seven-minute power ballad doesn’t really spell respect for your superiors, but it does suggest there is a level of comfort most don’t have in their work environment. But I don’t think it really showcases how familial they’re supposed to be. Or maybe it does. I don’t know. I just know it’s lacking in a lot of places.

…) This story has far more drama and conflict than any other thing I’ve written. (Probably combined.) The plot actually calls for it, but it is kind of uncharted territory for me. I like to avoid unnecessary drama and conflict in my real life like the plague. (I would rather contract the plague than deal with bullshit drama.) That often translates to my writing as well. But this story is a different beast and thus, is testing my abilities to create believable conflict. It’s certainly not well written at this point, but I did find myself getting annoyed and pissed off during some of the more intense moments and I suppose that’s a good thing in terms of being on the right track with what I’m trying to convey between these characters.

…) Most scenes are not connected to the ones that appear on either side of them in the document. They do not flow one into the next. I do not write in straight chronological order. Meaning, I write scenes as they come to me, not in the order they should happen in the timeline.** The scenes are placed in proper order, but that means I am constantly jumping around in the document, trying to put things piecemeal where they belong.*** The current method of operating works in getting scenes out of my head and onto the page before I forget them, but it also highlights just how many gaping chasms there are in the timeline and how much I need to fill in to connect all the dots.

…) Because this story covers a solid decade (and more) I have things sectioned off by years.**** (I even put bookmarks in my Word document so I could easily jump to a given year.) The first seven years are pretty heavily packed with scenes. Then there is a dramatic drop off in happenings. Year 11 is just a header with nothing under it, and Year 12 picks up and fills up to mostly finish out the story.***** There is so much happening, then a heavy dead space, and then a whole lot at once again. I have some plot points I haven’t written yet that belong in that dead space, but it’s still pretty sparse by comparison, so I have to figure out what the hell to do with it other than possibly a time jump. (Which I’m really not sold on at this point.)

…) This thing is so bloody long (and only half done at best) I might have to get creative in its handling. The smart thing would be to cut out a shitton of unnecessary filler, but even then, I think there is still A LOT of story to be told. (At least in the way I want to tell it.) But I am heavily leaning into the possibility of cutting it up into volumes. Either split it up into individual years, or possibly pack three or four years into a volume (because 12 volumes would be excessive) and make a pseudo series out of it. If I want that to work though, I think I would probably need to shift gears and start approaching it with that plan in mind before I start filling in some of the blanks. I would need to start rounding things out to complete volumes not chapters. There could easily be cliffhangers from one volume to the next, but it would still need more of an ending than you would get in the average chapter. There’s still a lot to figure out on that one.

…) I have made a number of significant changes in certain areas of the plot since I started writing this thing more than four years ago. Those changes are not always accurately reflected in scenes that were written in the beginning versus later on. There are several scenes that don’t quite make sense in context anymore and I need to rewrite (or remove) them to fit the changes. There are also some scenes that need to be moved to a different place in the timeline because I either put them in the wrong place to begin with (see: writing out of order), or other changes in the story warrant some scenes to happen at a different point in time. This all puts a blinding spotlight on the need to actually fill out some sort of tangible timeline so I know when things are supposed to happen in relation to everything else, and what all I’m still missing and haven’t even written yet. I just still haven’t figured out a format to use that will actually work for my demented brain.

…) This story has tested me in ways no other project in my arsenal ever has. I have a difficult time articulating what it is about this thing that has my brain twisting in ways few things have ever accomplished. There is really not much about it I haven’t written in some form a thousand different times. There are themes in there that I’ve been writing since HIGH SCHOOL. It’s full of characters (names) that I have been reusing time and again for more than a decade. Not so long ago I rediscovered a story I wrote (started, beat to death, and never finished) more than twenty years ago that has a very similar overarching premise. What is it about this specific combination of reused pieces that feels so special? I don’t have an answer to that yet. But I’ll cling to it until it disintegrates into a pile of dust.

…) Overall the writing is…not the worst. There are things I actually really like. There are things that are mediocre but could be fixed. There are things that are just bad and need to be deleted. I have always had a love/hate relationship with my writing. It is extremely difficult to look at it through an objective lens. It is an absolute mess, and it needs work, but I can’t complain too much at this point, because it’s pushing six figures in word count and that, in and of itself, is a fucking accomplishment I feel good about.

…) None of this addresses all of the problems with repetition (so many repeated phrases/actions/whathaveyou oh ye gods), grammar, sentence structure, and all of the technical malarkey of writing. But that shit does not matter (to me) until there is an actual finished draft to behold. And then that’s what editors are for. And that’s not anything I need to worry about anytime soon. Or ever, if we’re being at all realistic. Yes, I feel like this monstrosity has the potential to get finished in some far off time, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to want to publish it if or when that happens. As always, we’ll burn that bridge when we get there.

…) We also won’t discuss the…three…other alternate paths for these characters that SOMEBODY seems to think are a good idea to explore. That’s a different analysis for a different day.

* ADHD jokes, I have them. Only they’re not actually funny. And ADHD is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a fucking super power. *ahem* Anyway.

** This has not always been the case. I used to write straight chronological order and when I’d get stuck on a scene, I’d quit altogether. Also if I had an idea for a scene later down the line I wouldn’t write it down anywhere, thus forgetting it by the time it would finally come up in the story.

*** This has also not always been the case. When I stopped writing straight through, I would write things down in the document in whatever order they came to me and it would just be utter chaos. It was like someone put each scene on an index card then threw them up in the air, stacked them back in a pile, and called it a day.

**** We’ve already discussed the fact that I do not use chapter markers, because I wouldn’t know a complete chapter if it bit me in the ass.

***** I’m still not entirely clear on where exactly this thing should end, so we might get into another year before it wraps up.

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Heart of a Girl The Killers