What's in a book? Garbage.
My attempts at reading and being read.
Recently I picked up reading again as a hobby. My interest in games has waned over the past few months, so in a slump I desired some cultural osmosis somehow and landed on books. I stumbled my way through my local library, and I ended up with Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut, On Writing by Stephen King, and The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. I finished Armageddon in Retrospect in a sitting, utterly compelled by the short vignettes, compartmentalized stories and essays. The book has jovial and stupid moments set during the calm of WW2, like prisoners of war fantasizing about the first meal they're going to eat when the war ends. It has stories of innocence where a child is raised during the war while his adopted guardian attempts to placate him with the life after the war. It also has stories of the Dresden bombings and how Vonnegut as a POW had to wade through literal viscera to retrieve bodies because humans were mauled by collapsing buildings and broken pipelines, before eventually giving up on exhuming bodies and just setting entire ruins of buildings to the pyre. His quote about the military after this harrowing moment in history still poises relevance especially during the time we're watching a literal genocide unfold over social media with the conflict in Gaza:
“It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children... ...Death became so commonplace that we could joke about our dismal burdens and cast them about like so much garbage.”
It was from a man who said he didn't want to live long enough to see the three most powerful people in the world named Bush, Dick, and Colin. Even in his 80s he condemned war and was a humanist.
Progress on the other two books has been steady, but slower. I also wanted some lighter more breezy reading, so I started the Spice and Wolf light novels as a good entry point, especially for something less grotesque than war. Reading books again has been cathartic. But most importantly it was all a ploy, Dohoho.
As made apparent by On Writing being in my bookbag, I wanted to be a better writer. I was talking to my editor about my novella, a rag of a short story that I already knew wasn't very good, but the practice was more about committing to writing a certain amount in a block of time, and it succeeded in that aspect. Was it good? No. As gently as my editor could put it, he told me to do something else. Not in a “you're not cut out for this” sort of way, to be clear. But in a way where he correctly observed that I don't read enough, and if I want to grow as a writer, I need to read and understand what other writers do. So I picked up a Stephen King book about writing, and I'm picking up a Kurt Vonnegut book about writing. And I'm getting out of my wheelhouse reading YA fiction again, which frankly rules. YA novels are so broad of a net to cast for good literature that's easy to understand, and I'm all about that. I picked up Lolita and War And Peace and went “I can't cope with this wordy bullshit right now” before putting them back down again. Herman Melville is probably rolling in his grave.
Another way I could learn is by dissecting how I wrote the first book. The first book is in editing hell, but the meat and bones of it are there. Just shy of 450 pages and 100k words, a lot of work went into it. It used to be more until I cut a bunch of shit to re-purpose for the second book, a 350-page rag of 77k words. And now I'm working on a third book that I'm about a third to halfway done with. It's a lot of writing. And most of it isn't very good! I write a lot and I've been writing a long time, but I'm still an inexperienced writer. Barring college, I have not had my work put through the meat-grinder and distilled into a fine edible paste in well over 15 years. So my editor and his wife cracked their knuckles, and effectively got me caught up on literal decades of criticism. I jest of course, but it's refreshing to see people just not mindlessly congratulate me for writing a book and are giving me actual feedback on what I'm doing wrong. It's what I've yearned for, for many years that I felt like I stagnated.
So, how did the book get started? Well, read this and get back to me. I can wait, it's like three minutes of reading. ...Done? ...What do you mean you didn't read it? ...Fine, I guess I have to do everything myself. The book is two parallel stories told at the same time. The main driving force and heart of the book is about a girl named Remilia, and how her life unfolds in the small town she grew up in. Things get dark quickly, and surreal to boot. Originally the book was about her going to a summer boarding school for delinquents and how her yearning for friends and love progressively became more toxic and self-sabotaging as the book went on. Somewhere a NaNoWriMo draft of this exists on one of my harddrives. Then it just shifted to a regular school, but the darkness stayed and arguably got even more grotesque. A part of me wondered why I couldn't write something that's straightforward and funny, saccharine even. But the darkness kept creeping in whenever I wrote about her life.
Then I realized it was me creeping into the book. A lot of her youth was framed as a “what if?” to my own childhood. This was kind of sobering in a writing process that started off as a dark comedy. Things progressively got less funnier as more of me crept into the book. A part of me resented Remilia, so I decided to test her mettle. The book in the current iteration is that facet of her narrative, to see what she was made of. But as I saw myself in Remilia more and more, more of myself just kept on creeping into the book. Eventually the book wasn't about her anymore, it was about me and using her as a tool to placate my own turbulent childhood. So the book became about both. Yes it gets weird and meta. The novel is about her troubled youth and how that shaped her into a person designed to help the author confront his demons in the present. So it's a hybrid of narrative fiction and memoir. It's Semi-autobiographical fiction.
Frankly, a big part of the book started with the scraps of Remilia's original narrative and me lifting a bunch of old short stories from the content mines, IE my old incel blog. A lot of stuff had to be rewritten to adjust for modern sensibilities, and frankly I was a terrible fucking writer then anyway so it worked out. But in a lot of cases, my writing style and organizational skills are... peculiar.
I got some stories that are the bones of the narrative that I want. So I wrote the ending early, shrugged my shoulders, and went “Okay, so how the Hell do I end up there?” It's like planning a traveling trip, just picking a destination, and going “I hope I'm driving the right way” with no preparation beforehand. So the first order of business is stitching these parts together so that they make sense. I'm creating a Frankenstein's monster of a book, basically. For some narratives, it's as simple as just locking them in piece like legos. But it's never that simple in most cases. A lot of this book was effectively unwritten, so I realized that I needed to fill in gaps. It's apparent when a story is a “gap filler” in the book, it's jarring but it's there. It's like getting a new knee or shoulder blade. And then with those gap fillers, I build around them as if I'm cultivating mass and I fill out narrative blocks with meat and sinew.
Other narratives in the book I grew organically. I had a gap filler, and then I just wrote it unconcerned of where I want the narrative to end up; it's just how Remilia or the author would act in the moment, and how their actions would have endpoints or consequences that would stick with the narrative. It was like a flower blossoming forth. And then with these blossoms, I would reshape the gap fillers in retrospect. This includes reshaping even the ending that I put a bulletpoint in at the beginning of the process, but the vision stays true even if I rewrite it.
After cultivating mass long enough, a good book gets edited down. A marble sculpture gets shaped by chiseling things down, by shedding mass. The original edit of this book was 320 pages, marvelously incomplete when I have not began to shape it into what I want. So I kept adding more layers and eventually the book ballooned to 400, 500, even more pages. Then I decided I needed to narrow my vision of this book. I cut out tangents, unrelated stories to the narrative, one-offs, etc. And now the book sits comfortably at 445 pages after shedding some weight. But that fat is good for something, so I held onto it. I often don't cull writing because I don't like it; I do it because it doesn't fit the narrative I'm trying to tell so I'll re-purpose it elsewhere. The cut fat became the novella and the second book, lovingly cultivated through the same pain-in-the-ass process I used for the first book.
The third book is the anomaly, where I'm writing it linearly from the beginning and seeing how the characters' actions shape where the book ends up. It's my attempt at organic storytelling. I still have a rough idea of where I want the narrative to end up, but the choices made to get there haven't been made yet, and the outcome of the emotional cusp of the book is still in the balance. It's what I've learned from writing the first two books.
But all of this ignores the actual craft. I told you my process, but that's the structure of my creative process and ignores the actual mechanical craft of telling a good story. So that's why I'm reading books, to see what good writers do and maybe I can ape some shit from far more talented people than me. But that's cultural osmosis for you.