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Writing Notes: Blue and Gray - Ch. 1 (spoiler warning)
6 years ago
Before I get into talking about writing, I want to talk about WHY I wrote Blue and Gray.
I spent many years working in journalism, both as a reporter and as an editor. You can probably see the echoes of that in my writing; I'm a lot better at writing about events and chronologies than I am writing about characters and emotions. Most of my experience with writing has been taking mountains of information, gleaning the important bits out and distilling it down into paragraphs and articles that are easy understood by as many people as possible. I'm good at that. While that's a useful skill to have for writing in general, its applications in writing fiction are limited. This novel then, more than anything, is me trying to unlearn a lot of the writing techniques that were hammered into my brain for so many years so that I can actually produce fiction at the level I aspire to be able to. I'm not there yet, and I know that, but I'm learning.
For a long time I HAVE aspired to write fiction, but I never took that first step. I was waiting for that one 'great idea' to produce a 'masterpiece', but of course that idea never came. That's not how it works for anything; the dude who runs around the block a few nights a week isn't going to be competing in the Olympics next summer. It's ridiculous. But that's how a lot of people view writing, I think. I know I did. But at some point I realized that my expectations were absurd and that if I was ever going to produce anything I had to just START WRITING. So I did.
To make sure I didn't get in the mindset of trying to produce that unicorn 'masterpiece' I decided to write something that I expressly knew would have absolutely no commercial value, but make it as good as I possibly could. I decided to write a story that I personally would want to read, not caring about if it had any chance of finding an audience or commercial success. Something so niche -- an erotic gay furry romance adventure novel in a meticulously researched historical setting -- that it was pretty much guaranteed that almost no one would read it. But if they did, IF they managed to find it and were into it, I wanted to give them the best goddamn erotic gay furry historical romance adventure novel on the fucking planet.
Getting into that mindset really allowed me to just do the damn thing. In a couple months I had a really solid and fully fleshed out outline for the entire novel. That was actually the hardest part. Saying 'I'm going to write a novel' feels daunting, but once I started writing it all flowed pretty easily. I set some easily achievable word count goals and one day I looked up and had 50,000 words on page and realized Jesus, this is really happening. I'm writing a novel. Maybe no one will ever read it, but I'm writing a fucking novel. And I'm proud of it.
Anyway, I've learned a lot about this process from writing Blue and Gray. That's most of what I am exploring with these writing notes: talking about what I did and why I did it, figuring out what worked, what didn't and why. It's all experience and knowledge I can use in the future.
I haven't looked past this book yet, but if I do continue on this path I think the next one WILL actually be something meant for commercial consumption. Or maybe I'll write another one like this one, just for fun with no other purpose, or maybe this will be the only long work I ever write. I don't know. That's a long way off, I haven't thought that far ahead yet. Let's just talk about this one. :]
- -
SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST FEW CHAPTERS OF THE BOOK.
My goal for the first chapter was to present the exposition in an efficient manner. For this, I settled on writing a series of short anecdotes about the childhood and teenage years of both of the main characters, Calvin Riley and Flynn Harrison. I tried to highlight some of their most distinctive personality traits through some of these interactions as well as set the stage for some of the events that would occur later in the book.
The first anecdote then is pretty obviously setting up what happens to Flynn in chapter 2. He doesn't want to shoot the wolf but forces outside his control are forcing him to do it. He misses and things fall to shit.
You also see some of the exact dialogue his father speaks in this section return in chapter 2. This is something I do throughout the book; exact lines of dialogue or slightly altered lines of narration are repeated between chapters, sometimes spread far apart, with completely different meanings or connotations associated with them, and often signaling the beginning or end of SOMETHING. A LARGE amount of dialogue from chapter 1 is given this treatment in later chapters. An example of this is in chapter 2: one of the first things Edward says to Flynn when he is introduced is "Come on, we've got to get out of here." He says this to try to convince Flynn to run to the river with him, but these words are revisited in chapter two -- these were the last words he spoke before he died while waiting for Flynn to catch up to him as they were running for safety.
I'm actually a little worried I've overused this technique throughout the book to the point that it'll be seen as lazy rather than intentional, but who knows. You tell me!
A few of the larger themes/motifs of the book are also introduced in chapter 1, chiefly rivers, the moon, and traps/snares. There's a few more but those are probably the biggies.
Couple other things I needed to establish in this chapter too. One, both Calvin and Flynn needed to be unambiguously gay, that had to be set up early. Two, they needed VERY little incentive to try to return home once the events start rolling in chapters 2 and 3, especially Flynn. If there is are compelling reasons for them to look back we have a problem in the narrative. Probably a little lazy, but this is why both of them have mothers who are dead, no siblings, Calvin's father is dead and Flynn's father is an absolute unmitigated asshole. It's the best I could think of!
Couple other things I could probably go over but I think they're best left for the notes in later chapters, calling back to this rather than listing them all out, since like I said a shit ton of stuff throughout the book calls back to things in the first chapter and I don't want to put out TOO many spoilers here.
Last thing, I mentioned that the historical stuff in this book is meticulously researched, and I meant it. Again, that goes back to my background in journalism; research is fun to me, and trying to fit pieces of the plot into real historical events, places, etc. is like a fun little puzzle game. So for instance, the Pine Grove Iron Works is a real place in Cumberland County that was used in the 1840s and 1850s for iron smelting -- you can still visit the ruins of it. Applejack was a regional specialty in Pennsylvania during this time period, and the song "Lorena" is real, as are the lyrics, and it was very popular in real life at the time. The text of the conscription letter Edward received is the actual text from a real one with the dates, locations and names changed.
Point is, if at all possible I tried to make everything as historically accurate as I could throughout the novel unless I absolutely couldn't due to hard plot constraints, which does happen a couple times later in the book unfortunately. But honestly, to me this is big fun. I'm a dork like that. :]
That's all for now!
I spent many years working in journalism, both as a reporter and as an editor. You can probably see the echoes of that in my writing; I'm a lot better at writing about events and chronologies than I am writing about characters and emotions. Most of my experience with writing has been taking mountains of information, gleaning the important bits out and distilling it down into paragraphs and articles that are easy understood by as many people as possible. I'm good at that. While that's a useful skill to have for writing in general, its applications in writing fiction are limited. This novel then, more than anything, is me trying to unlearn a lot of the writing techniques that were hammered into my brain for so many years so that I can actually produce fiction at the level I aspire to be able to. I'm not there yet, and I know that, but I'm learning.
For a long time I HAVE aspired to write fiction, but I never took that first step. I was waiting for that one 'great idea' to produce a 'masterpiece', but of course that idea never came. That's not how it works for anything; the dude who runs around the block a few nights a week isn't going to be competing in the Olympics next summer. It's ridiculous. But that's how a lot of people view writing, I think. I know I did. But at some point I realized that my expectations were absurd and that if I was ever going to produce anything I had to just START WRITING. So I did.
To make sure I didn't get in the mindset of trying to produce that unicorn 'masterpiece' I decided to write something that I expressly knew would have absolutely no commercial value, but make it as good as I possibly could. I decided to write a story that I personally would want to read, not caring about if it had any chance of finding an audience or commercial success. Something so niche -- an erotic gay furry romance adventure novel in a meticulously researched historical setting -- that it was pretty much guaranteed that almost no one would read it. But if they did, IF they managed to find it and were into it, I wanted to give them the best goddamn erotic gay furry historical romance adventure novel on the fucking planet.
Getting into that mindset really allowed me to just do the damn thing. In a couple months I had a really solid and fully fleshed out outline for the entire novel. That was actually the hardest part. Saying 'I'm going to write a novel' feels daunting, but once I started writing it all flowed pretty easily. I set some easily achievable word count goals and one day I looked up and had 50,000 words on page and realized Jesus, this is really happening. I'm writing a novel. Maybe no one will ever read it, but I'm writing a fucking novel. And I'm proud of it.
Anyway, I've learned a lot about this process from writing Blue and Gray. That's most of what I am exploring with these writing notes: talking about what I did and why I did it, figuring out what worked, what didn't and why. It's all experience and knowledge I can use in the future.
I haven't looked past this book yet, but if I do continue on this path I think the next one WILL actually be something meant for commercial consumption. Or maybe I'll write another one like this one, just for fun with no other purpose, or maybe this will be the only long work I ever write. I don't know. That's a long way off, I haven't thought that far ahead yet. Let's just talk about this one. :]
- -
SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST FEW CHAPTERS OF THE BOOK.
My goal for the first chapter was to present the exposition in an efficient manner. For this, I settled on writing a series of short anecdotes about the childhood and teenage years of both of the main characters, Calvin Riley and Flynn Harrison. I tried to highlight some of their most distinctive personality traits through some of these interactions as well as set the stage for some of the events that would occur later in the book.
The first anecdote then is pretty obviously setting up what happens to Flynn in chapter 2. He doesn't want to shoot the wolf but forces outside his control are forcing him to do it. He misses and things fall to shit.
You also see some of the exact dialogue his father speaks in this section return in chapter 2. This is something I do throughout the book; exact lines of dialogue or slightly altered lines of narration are repeated between chapters, sometimes spread far apart, with completely different meanings or connotations associated with them, and often signaling the beginning or end of SOMETHING. A LARGE amount of dialogue from chapter 1 is given this treatment in later chapters. An example of this is in chapter 2: one of the first things Edward says to Flynn when he is introduced is "Come on, we've got to get out of here." He says this to try to convince Flynn to run to the river with him, but these words are revisited in chapter two -- these were the last words he spoke before he died while waiting for Flynn to catch up to him as they were running for safety.
I'm actually a little worried I've overused this technique throughout the book to the point that it'll be seen as lazy rather than intentional, but who knows. You tell me!
A few of the larger themes/motifs of the book are also introduced in chapter 1, chiefly rivers, the moon, and traps/snares. There's a few more but those are probably the biggies.
Couple other things I needed to establish in this chapter too. One, both Calvin and Flynn needed to be unambiguously gay, that had to be set up early. Two, they needed VERY little incentive to try to return home once the events start rolling in chapters 2 and 3, especially Flynn. If there is are compelling reasons for them to look back we have a problem in the narrative. Probably a little lazy, but this is why both of them have mothers who are dead, no siblings, Calvin's father is dead and Flynn's father is an absolute unmitigated asshole. It's the best I could think of!
Couple other things I could probably go over but I think they're best left for the notes in later chapters, calling back to this rather than listing them all out, since like I said a shit ton of stuff throughout the book calls back to things in the first chapter and I don't want to put out TOO many spoilers here.
Last thing, I mentioned that the historical stuff in this book is meticulously researched, and I meant it. Again, that goes back to my background in journalism; research is fun to me, and trying to fit pieces of the plot into real historical events, places, etc. is like a fun little puzzle game. So for instance, the Pine Grove Iron Works is a real place in Cumberland County that was used in the 1840s and 1850s for iron smelting -- you can still visit the ruins of it. Applejack was a regional specialty in Pennsylvania during this time period, and the song "Lorena" is real, as are the lyrics, and it was very popular in real life at the time. The text of the conscription letter Edward received is the actual text from a real one with the dates, locations and names changed.
Point is, if at all possible I tried to make everything as historically accurate as I could throughout the novel unless I absolutely couldn't due to hard plot constraints, which does happen a couple times later in the book unfortunately. But honestly, to me this is big fun. I'm a dork like that. :]
That's all for now!
