Before you write a book, do you heavily outline and plan it or do you sort of wing it and figure it out as you go along? by Kyle Phoenix

 

The Spherical Stages of the construction of a novel.

No, heavily outlined work, is generally an amateur writing design. Which isn’t a bad thing but after 30+ years of writing thousands of stories, over a hundred books, a screenplay I directed into a 2 hour film and countless work related projects plus thousands of articles/ blogs, reviews—-I “turn on the faucet” is the best way to explain my automaticity.

Automaticity is essentially knowing a thing on such a fundamental level that you can simply “do it”. Like walking—-at one point we all had to learn how to walk—-we watched others, did balancing acts, used objects to achieve balance and then kept trying it—-eventually standing and then walking and finally running. This is also mental in reading or math or thinking about things you know how to do mentally that had to be taught. Pretty much everything but your automatic bodily functions were taught t you and engrained so deeply that you can do it withiest thinking consciously.

I can write, near anything, without having to think about it.

To planning a short story or novel—-what I do is I sort of encompass the entirety of the idea.

I wrote a book Tranny—-about a transsexual character. My thought bubble was from my counseling students as an LGBTSGL Coordinator and several of them playing with sexuality, sex and gender presentation. The majority were Black/Latino and instead of being males they found it easier to be female—-even when they weren’t attractive enough to be in drag/trans. But it was easier, they garnered more positive sexual attention from men (technically those men are called skoliosexuals) because they were trying to distance themselves from being Black/Latino males who were NOT heterosexual. And to some degree, most being raised in single sex households that were female led, they identified and were mentored more by women and saw the (sexual attraction) privilege women to over men, especially as people of color. I’ll further this point to the weight of race and non-heterosexuality being a laborious burden to young men, men, older men—-it’s a twofer hard punch to the psyche, to one’s life, especially here in America, and people, young people do things to mitigate the impacts.

In the course of conceiving the idea for the novel and teaching, I met lots of trans folk and even got to watch some evolve and some not. I got to see, deeply personally, the trans identity—-and even got certified in counseling trans folk. I had a clear picture of the identity and its’ origin/manifestation.

My razor edge on the bubble idea—-the push I wanted to engage——was that culture/sex/sexuality question because it was a fascinating posit/question/conundrum.

That’s the totality of my “outline” mentally.

Now, the first time I’ve seen this expanded upon deeply was by Anders Ericsson, the expert on mastery (he is the “creator” of the posit of 10,000 hours leading to mastery—-which was popularized by Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers) in his own book Peak. Anders talked about how he actually wrote the book with a partner (Robert Pool) and that they did what he would call something similar to mental models/representations.

For me, it would look like this for Tranny:

1. What is transsexuality vs. transgenderism vs. homosexuality? (Foundational concept)
2. A Black male decides to transition. (Central character)
3. How do they know or not know about their sexuality/how and are they “confused”? (Question/conflict)

then from experience/expertise mentally outline the physical template of the book—-I make decisions:

1. I’ll write it in the 1st person. Why? It’s more immediate, more personal.
2. It will be short—-under 300 pages, there has to be an immediacy and intimacy and an intensity, to the book itself.
3. Physically it will be slightly larger font size (I experimented with using a font that looked like handwriting but it wasn’t clear enough)—-however I knew that it was a book that the constant/huge-personal “I-ness” suggested was a faux journal.
4. I physically experimented with the Header/Footer for my template and even tried to incorporate images and color—-but the size and colors were too price prohibitive—-to create interior pages that looked like a journal.
5. Chapters-how many? Now I’m having all of these thoughts/plans/mental representations in a smoosh===not in such a lined order, so I knew I would do about 10 chapters. I knew that limitation in the Word document would force me to maintain within a certain amount of pages—-there was no space or time to drone on. In this constructed mental form, I then know where I’m going to enter the story and exit—-approximately. By that, I have my opening line and further ideas to Chapter 1 and segmenting the chapters to points in Nicky K’s life—good, bad, men, money, work, all the areas a human, particularly, a trans person, has to navigate.
6. I also started looking for pictures for the cover. I played with one that was a gawky physical body in a dress, no head—-then I found a stock photo of a big head. But what I was looking for was something——off. It’s one of the ways trans folk who are trying to “pass” for female, generally—-get spooked. There is something off about their presentation—-so the cover pic had to have an odd quality to it that could be projected into the space of this person is presenting as female now but that wasn’t their sex of birth. (As an interesting aside from talking to so many trans folk—-Black and Latino trans people are spooked more often by their cultural kin and therefore gravitate into spaces with more White people. It seems that White people, less accustomed to seeing people of color often exhibit a sort of race blindness—-I can attest to this—-White people learn to blur us out unless we’re in a context they're interested in—-the advantage for a trans person of color is that focusing on them, White people tend to see what is presented to them.. I’ve seen it happen in person with a White man and trans person of color—-he couldn’t quite place what he was seeing of the person and asked lots of questions, eventually even hitting on had he seen her in a magazine or along 12th Avenue (the notorious NYC prostitution stroll—-but certain areas are trans heavy.) Which ironically said a lot about him too.)

And then I consider tone (I can only compare this to how when you’re making something you decide if it will be a sweet BBQ sauce, spicy hot with cayenne, a dry rub, etc.). I’m considering the texture, the way it will be received by the way I get into it, the story, the character, the other characters. The sound, the tune of the voices, the narrative, which one of my writing Voices will I use, which style?—-I’ve developed a few. Hard, soft, sharp, smart, dumb?

1. I knew the title Tranny for this idea, one because in the city and my workshops, so many of my charges-students used the word. And then in clubs and so on and so forth—-but I also, well educated, know the divide in the world between street-slang lingua and formalized language. I know this also because I own Dick Gregory’s Nigger book and know that Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians was originally titled Ten Little Niggers. But in the writing I knew that trans is subversive and I’m not so much of trying to explain being trans—-more of elucidate this character Nicky K’s experience and the huge conflicting questions and external conflicts.
2. I heard the first line of the novel ten years prior to its’ publication, sitting in the room of a transsexual, with two of her trans friends—-her explaining having her testicles removed, illegally: “I paid $500 to have my balls cut off.” (Baby, what else is there to say to open a novel, to lead the blurb? I held that line like a diamond in the back of my mind for years it was so raw, so treasure laden to unearthing a character.)
3. Following it being in the 1st person and “I paid $500 to have my balls cut off.” —- I knew it had to be motherfucking raw. I’m talking Donald Goines, Zane, Iceberg Slim raw. Which meant Nicky K had to tell you, me, the reader, the writer, a harsh unvarnished truth even in their own self-delusions. I figured if it was going to be cut off, the balls to the wall, had to be unapologetic. I knew that it had be somewhere between X-rated to NC 17—-graphic, advanced, sexually provocative, which meant that I had to really think about how descriptive I would be—-what would be the line? Would there be any lines?
4. In that studio apartment room near Times Square, the trans person, Valencia, explained sitting in that apartment staring at the pilot light of the oven with a bottle of Vicodin, contemplating suicide after the illegal, back alley testicle removal. She was actively warning the other two trans folk with me that they lacked the mental fortitude and resilience that she possessed to have testicles removed illegally—-they were all doing illegal silicone injections and black market hormones—-they should follow the steps—-psychiatric care, psychologists therapy, medical/hospital surgeries by board certified doctors. To Valencia's underhanded credited, she presented with deep narcissitic, malignant, mentality, which perhaps lent to her resilience. The others were extreme narcissists but more from their identities over time than what seemed to be almost a birthed trait from Valencia. (Yes, she was extremely odd.) But her scenario framed the first chapter—-what if Nicky K were in this studio, on that bed, clutching the pills, crotch piled high with bloody bandages, looking at the pilot light of the oven—-reviewing the irrevocable decision, the life circumstances, that had gotten her/him to this point?
5. I knew I wanted the final chapter to be experimental and contain a picture of glitter filled pill capsules. If Nicky K had 100 Vicodin at the beginning of the novel——what did each one of those represent? And if I listed each individual pill as a representation—-Body, Love, An ex boyfriend, family, work, breasts, women, men—-could the reader infer that I was implying Nicky K was measuring the pills out on the bed, assigning them labels. Was Nicky K taking these pills?

To this point—-I still haven’t written a thing—-this is all still mental, nothing written down, but I have started a digital file folder for the cover pictures I’m considering and the master MS Word template. I tend to handwrite 80% of my work first so there are pads of each chapter generally. 1 fifty page legal pad generally types up to 30+ pages so I know by pad count how many pads to get to my ideal page count.

(All of the above is in a mental egg-bubble, Anders in Peak, being one of the first places I’ve seen it so accurately described——so that when I get to the page/writing I can flow out (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s writing in his amazing book Flow of how certain actions and creativity take place.) 20, 30, 50 pages at a time because I literally know the chords, music, notes, arrangement—-I’m just filling in some lyrics, tightening some of the transitions, adding a bridge).

Tranny came out in maybe a dozen writing sessions, across several states, and I completed it a few hours after my mother died. Ironically in the editing, I showed some pages to a friend and their sister, who is trans (possibly), mentioned a term said to her by a man—-a “Kabuki nigger”—-I damn near pissed on myself, stopping the (editorial) presses, going back and finding a delicious space for that slur in the book. It resonated so fundamentally with Nicky K’s self insights and attacks.

I generally write for a handful of hours at a time, so I would call it one of my fastest Draft #1 to Draft #12 and then edits, projects ever—-call it 15 sessions—-which is about 60 to 100 hours in total. It took less time, by a third to a fifth, than other novels because it was so obsessively focused on one character and it was a stream of consciousness, relating of experiences and ideas——the main other characters being other trans folk, along the spectrum, in a therapy group—-to give breadth of experience. At the end is a glossary/explanatory framework that I generally teach, but I thought someone might pick this up and need to have a clear picture of this for themselves or someone else. Ironically, it’s like my 4th highest selling book.

A (Spherical) Process

To backwards design tracking to how I construct a protect—-most of them happen in the above way—-what tends to get me to constructions beyond simply mental representation constructions are when it’s a larger project (more characters, more pages, research needed) or some sort of collaborative effort where I have to gather data from other people/places.

I mostly though have chunks of the work mentally “worked out” and then I simply write down those chunks—-which is why in examining my process, the process is not linear, it’s spherical.

Stage 1:

By “spherical” I mean the 5 Stage process above. First a global idea—-transsexuality/sexuality/race/conflict—-that’s the first Stage.

Stage 2:

is finding a locality, a central workable point in that—-individual identity in regards to race and sexuality and how that is eased or complicated by homosexuality vs. transsexuality.

Stage 3:

Is comprised of all of the individual segments that comprise race, sexuality, identity more acutely identified in either scenes or perspectives or characters. Each one of those segments are scenes that I’m sewing into a cohesive narrative.

Stage 4:

Is laying the pattern-segments against/onto the Stage 1/2 goals or foundation. I know I want a character to go through this, I know that the character has to represent these things as it will be first person, so I need the character to have:

• a beginning point—-discovery of this state of being, and then
• a conflict point—-why aren’t they happy with this state of being?, and then
• a final end point—-what challenges this happiness and can it be overcome?

In Beginner writer lessons/classes/books it is often simplistically reduced to the conflict point being resolved in the final end point. But for different works, for varying reasons, I often decide no, I’m going to leave this open ended.

Another novel Stay With Me—-I had some back and forth editorial discussions with how I was going to end the novel—-Kirk is awaiting his husbands return from China with two adopted babies and discussing with his therapist how all of love is faith based and there are no guarantees except that it will end in divorce, death, separation.

I thought that was an excellent faith based ending so that like life, the story is without resolution—-as so many other characters in this exploration of five different parallel relationship multiverses—-both ended, resolved and were left, unresolved. It was also the first novel where so much (600+ pages) had moved/evolved these characters, that I wanted sort an ending where we thought we knew a possible ending, a happy ending, and it was not guaranteed—-much like the therapy session. Then it was pointed out to me that there was an undercurrent story to the book in all of this multiverse jumping that I could snag to several other books (S, Hush and the forthcoming Myriad)

which would be connective tissue and still a treat for the reader, if I extended a bit farther, and then put in a chapter from the forthcoming Myriad series. I liked the linking in direct and circumspect ways so I did it. Creating spherical novels.

One of my over-goals in writing, in each novel, is that it be different in some way—-in the sex, sexuality, gender of the main character (s), and/or, in that it be sci-fi, magical realism, straight thriller, horror, drama, first person, third person, experimental, mixed forms, news articles as meta-fiction, and/or, that I do something experimental with the form, the format, of the book itself with design, layout, graphics. I, Kyle, must be challenged. Tranny’s challenge was first person, inside the mind of a trans person who is confused and build her perceptions and world on what is a disfiguring day, that potentially ends in death.

Stage 5:

is the summation of all of the above elements, both fleshed out and connected across space and writing space-time. I may not write, rewriting or edit in chronological sequence—-Chapter 1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.

Chapter 10 I wrote after Chapter 1, then I re-did 7,8,9 after I’d completed 1 to 6 because I needed to get to Nicky K sitting in the City Center auditorium—-where I've been many times—-watching the Alvin Ailey dancers perform and seeing bodies move—-male, female, athletic, pronounced and supremely comfortable. people of color centered in, enjoying and expressing their bodies in such a direct, spectacularized way—-much like a trans presentation to the world——to someone who is not comfortable in their body, who has been accepted and rejected and rejected and accepted and questioned, to the point of a form of madness—-so that the reader understands they’ve read through to Chapter 9——and that the next chapter—-chronologically (upended to when you the reader entered—-you truly entered the novel at the decision from Chapter 9, so that the movement to Chapter 10 is logical and you have all of the information to understand it—-because you now understand and have experienced a spherical sequencing of Nicky K’s reality—-you know completely how and now, in and out of time, when Nicky K got to the decision that led to Chapter 1) would be Chapter 1 and Chapter 1 is a call and response

(In music, call and response is a succession of two distinct phrases usually written in different parts of the music, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or in response to the first. This can take form as commentary to a statement, an answer to a question or repetition of a phrase following or slightly overlapping the initial speaker(s). It corresponds to the call and response pattern in human communication and is found as a basic element of musical form, such as verse-chorus form, in many traditions. ——Wikipedia)

so that when you turn to Chapter 10—-you, the reader understand glittery pills and 100 “Reasons”. And then the reader decides (response), because they now see into and across and through the novel.

(Yes, I’m consciously playing with the form of how you receive and perceive the text itself in your mind. Yeah, that’s when you’re really writing at a higher level—-when you understand how to manipulate unwritten text/responses.)

I would offer that the pedantic writer/writing comes from following the cliché linear design, especially when trying to envelop a reader into a character-world.

Almost like a physical globe one should be able to hold a book—-in it’s written form—-as the writer and see how every portion—-or space connects across the novel to the next—-this character to that, that one to that idea, that idea to that outcome.

To me, at this point in my writer “career”, it would be a form of limiting to think of a work as directly linear-chronological because I’m constructing it as large patches of connectable real estate—-like assembling a bookshelf or a musical piece or a gourmet dinner.

The Inevitable Change

It never is at it is imagined into the ending that I first conceived. I think this is because in a novel there are more time gaps of writing. I might get to a conclusion, an end, but it’s never how I thought I would get there or what I thought the end would be. It’s always different. I didn’t know Chapter 10 of Tranny until writing Chapter 1 and the clutching of that bottle of Vicodin—-and I was like: this is the ending, the conclusion, the choice, the precipice. BUT how do I design it so that I have an ending in mind, you, the reader, have one too——and we’re BOTH right?

There’s my Writing Construction Challenge raising like a slumbering phoenix—-how you gonna make this different, make it dance, make it unique, Kyle?

Then I discover that and I have these two buttresses that allow me to play in the center. I get to play with a character living or dying, pro or con, yes or no, maybe, maybe not——and I’m not going to answer what I think happens or I know, doesn’t happen.

Or even what became of Valencia, in real life, a decade ago, because we’re now in Fiction Land.

#KylePhoenix

#TheKylePhoenix

What is your step by step process for writing a book? by Kyle Phoenix

 

I was a TA in Buffalo and worked for Raymond Federman, the great experimental writer. Somewhere in the years working for him, I absorbed his credo of 12 Drafts of a manuscript before it’s ready for publication.

Draft 1 is a mess. Usually handwritten. I hand write about 80% of my work. This is just the basics. Who, what, where. How, why and when happen in Draft 2.

Draft 2 is How, why and when it happened—-this can also be handwritten. Even a continuation of Draft 1. These two drafts are me trying to capture the lightning thoughts about what this project could be.

Draft 3 is the look of the Digital template. The text, the Font size, the header, the footer, the book itself. Everyone is different in that some books scream from Day one that they probably won’t go over 300 typed pages. Some say they will. So this is where I interject the Business, Design and Marketing of the book. Will the paper be plain white? Ivory stock? Cream colored?

Draft 4 is usually where I start typing, where it makes it to the digital. It’s still a mess. This is just the hard typing of what I have written down. It’s most of the story, maybe 75–90%.

Draft 5—-I’m playing with the cover itself. Sometimes this happens all through Drafts 1–4 where I’m just throwing something together in PowerPoint, Photoshop, searching on an image or two. Sometimes there will be both a Paperback and EBook edition so I have to consider if the same cover will work with production considerations and restrictions or do I have a little wiggle room for a fresh image that was maybe choice # 2.

Draft 6 is generally where I send off for the first edit. It’s rough because I’m going to wait before I tackle what comes back. This will probably lose about 25% of it’s content or get rearranged in the edit/reading.

Draft 7—blends with Draft 6 in that I’m holding a copy, a rough proof copy and I’m trying to “hear” it as a thing that stands on it’s own. As it;s own entity. Sometimes I’ll read something and it will just creak rather than scream. Or I’ll be reading something and it will be impenetrable and I’ll realize the characters aren’t telling me the truth. I have to go sit down, go wait, maybe even go talk to them. One character in a novel, Puzzle, she didn’t tell me she had a second daughter. When she did, when she was unveiled, I understood why she was hidden and why the first one was crazy, what had driven the first one crazy. Then I understood the mother better. But they didn’t all talk to me clearly at first.

Draft 8 is where the characters trust me enough and we all sit down with a pen to that proof copy and go line by line, scene by scene, page by page and agree or disagree as to what is happening, what really happened, what should happen. The characters take a form of spiritual ownership and presence complete in this draft.

Draft 9 is an amalgamation of all of us, me, the characters, the editorial process and it usually is too much, doesn’t make sense, is a cacophony. But everyone’s thoughts are here, everyone has said their bit. Now we have to decide what “works” to tell the story. Usually this falls into whether a scene is relevant and moves the story. Each page must move you to the next. I’m usually reading my own work and others with an eye towards the first 50 pages, will those first pages captivate me as a reader, you as a reader because even if the end, the back end is sensational, those first 50 have to draw you in.

Draft 10 is looking at the balance, the pieces, the climaxes, the denouement , has the point been made, the question answered, the story told, the truth revealed, the lie maintained. Whatever the Purpose, the Destiny of the work is itself, I have to have it by now. Not always do I have it in the beginning but I must feel it, see it, know it now or it’s just pages and folks yakking and walking around.

Draft 11 is the first day of school for my baby. And I drive them to the outside of town and leave them and tell them, I’ve driven you a thousand times up and down this road. Now you must walk this road by yourself, to earn your premiere. That means that I’m just going to read you as a book, I might even wait some time to not have you so fresh in my mind but when I read you—-Final Proof, Final Cover, you must be a book.

Draft 12 has passed that process or we’ve had to go back and forth in editing to get that walking process right, where it reads as a book. Where I’ve sewn up as many flaws as possible. Where I can encapsulate the book in one sentence—-usually I can’t do so until about Draft 9—-which is why I hate this question because I don’t know what the book is about yet. It[‘s about a pound and half, about 400 pages, about wrapped in the color red, about people, folk, doing shit, it’s about the size of a brick, it’s about nothing, it’s about the heaviest densest coaster I own.

Draft 12 is the answer to that question.

That’s what Federman taught me.

How many drafts did you write of your first book? by Kyle Phoenix

Professor Raymond Federman, who I TAed for and was one of my handful of intense mentors (for years, I went to/stayed in Buffalo to work with him and others) recommended that my novels were not novels until I had done 12 drafts.

While he was alive, I was working on what would eventually become Escapades I: A Collection of Stories. Initially it was about 20 short stories that I workshopped in his classes while I was his TA/student. There was also a 125 page long story/novella, The World Today that became the novel Hush. He had me send it to a publisher, Professor Sukenick in Boulder who ran a publishing concern and he said the novella should be broken out into a novel and printed the short stories.

I then came back to the 125 pages and it’s now blossomed into 600 pages, in it’s 11th Draft.

I’m in the middle to Final Draft of a novel Hush.

1. 1st Draft. In its’ first incarnation it was just an ensemble love story. I was really excited to try my hand at a gay love story with a large cast. I wanted to create a story where lots of people live in this building and are interconnected. That was initially about 75 pages—handwritten.
2. 2nd Draft. Typed up with edits, it grows to 125 pages. A novella. A story, yes, with characters and a structure/plot of sorts. It was kind of about childhood and sexuality and abuse and closetedness. Kinda. Sorta. There was also a murderer theme. I wanted to incorporate that there were all kinds of people in this building—-good, bad, mystical, etc.. Typed up to about 75+ pages.
3. 3rd Draft. Then I had to clean up because I had to submit it with these other short stories. Closetedness in the main character was an interesting point. Shift the focus to the closeted character. I wanted him to be confronted with love in this building he’s forced to stay in. A Love Triangle and a Class struggle about a man having to deal with working and existing beyond how money has allowed him to hide and play.
4. 4th Draft. The rejection of the manuscript and then the manuscript was subdivided and the suggestion that the typed 125 pages—-how do I expand that into a full novel?
5. 5th Draft. There was a spiritual element, a 4th element to the tale itself, so I wrote this meta-fiction piece in the middle. I had started to think about all of the intricate reality pieces and magic and such that brought all of these people together and I thought, what if I just wrote a magical, conscious, magical-spiritual reality? By this point it’s about 300 pages as I’m teasing out a fuller, deeper story.
6. 6th Draft. Now I have Distinct Realities and an end point. An ending. I ended it. I knew where I wanted to end it. Who dies, why. Still 300+ pages.

Here’s where I split into two separate novels Hush and Stay then began writing and revising them simultaneously.

1. 7th Draft. In Stay, the female, the woman that a closeted guy has a relationship with, she is slapped by the man he has an affair with. That was sort of her “identity” besides being the first one cheated on, later his wife. I made her aware of the affair slowly on one level and then completely within the spiritual-magical portion. The spiritual-magical portion gave me access to her anger. The other story form, the other reality, gave me access to her anger and awareness. And then I started applying Dr. Harville Hendrix’s Imago theory (that essentially our parents/caregivers teach us how to love; so we “look” for those traits in romantic partners; it’s unconscious and we’re as adults trying to adjust our behavior to meet people with those attractive traits but not react to them as we did to our parents/caregivers.) The Imago Theory opened a good can of characterization worms for Woman# 1, Man # 2 and Woman # 2 (Man 1’s wife) because it gave me an in to their personalities being similar to be attractive to Man# 1. Man # 1’s suicidal-dead mother and overbearing, grief stricken father. That gave me an in to depression, sexual abuse, identities of his girlfriend, male lover and wife which opened up dimensions to the characters.
2. 7th Draft of Hush. I had my complete novel and send it back to the publisher and the Marketing Editor does a full work up on it. He points out that several areas need enhancing, one in particular, with such a large and broad cast, he can’t tell who the protagonist is. We understand who the protagonist should be but in the reading it’s not clear to a basic reader. I then have to go back to Hush and incorporate a hundred handwritten pages about Steven the protagonist to make him the “star”. I write the 100 pages in a purple notebook, longhand first, then type it up. Of course these means I have to work on connections and other characters to support this infusion. 300+ pages becomes 450+
3. 8th Draft of Stay. I had a paragraph, a sort of poem that I’d written and won an award for years ago that listed a woman going from child to an older woman and the victories and disappointments. It’s 32 lines and her sections of reality 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1—-her arc—-I divided the lines up 8 lines and then just riffed paragraphs off the line, some are a few lines, a few paragraphs but the lines themselves gave me entrance into her, Woman 1, her life, her reality. I was worried about not capturing the woman fully in this love triangle. Sometimes I’ll rummage through old pieces, pieces that were strong for a character—-a woman—-and incorporate them. These poem lines give me jump off points for good paragraphs about the woman and the jump offs give me fuller, juicier chapters and more importantly insights into this character. I originally had her as this object that her boyfriend was either the victim of or lying about. Then she was a victim of this lovers spat/vengeance. Then she was this mystical virago. But why? I realized I was writing yes, distinct realities in differing chapters but that all of the pieces had to make sense to the reader. You read her in 4–5 realities and should be able to agree that she’s the same person, slightly different choices, but still the same person.
4. 8th Draft of Hush. Steven is clearly my protagonist and I’ve infused his shady past with some more clarity. Why is he mixed races and how does he feel about that? What were his parents like? Why does he only have this building to his name? What happened? Why is he such a mess? Then I bounce other characters off of these answers.
5. 9th Draft of Stay. I know now that there are maybe another 10–20 pages where I have a few more scenes of Man # 1 and Man # 2 and then the last 50 pages needs to be a little more in-depth, there’s some elements of what occurs when everything is good and healthy and the person has lived a dysfunctional life, had dysfunctional parents and suddenly everything is good and normal. I wanted to pierce that.
6. 9th Draft of Hush. Luckily I’ve always had the construct, from beginning to end of the whole thing, like a container. That makes it easier to inflate characters and scenes because I know where the whole thing is going, it’s ultimate parameters.

10th Draft. Stay & Hush. Right now I’m hovering between 550/650 pages as my last, Final Drafts then I’ll be able to go through and cut entire scenes, pages. Generally I have my first Proof copies with cover drafts and I go through with two different colored pens. One for layout issues—-widows and orphans, bad fonts, overlaps, etc.. And another for typos and content adjustments—-if such and such was in the kitchen at the beginning of the scene, where were they at the end? Continuity. Content. Clarification. I’ve talked before about making outline Index cards scene by scene—-I did both for Stay & Hush, which make them unique, I haven’t done that for shorter novels (S, Tranny, Puzzle, Sanction, etc.) Possibly because they were shorter, under 400 pages each, I didn’t need to control so many moving parts. But it’s a great exercise because it allows you, as the writer, to dissect the book in a new way. Each section is generally its own card.

11th Draft. Stay There’s a section about a Man# 2 as a child and he meets another child on the beach. Perhaps it’s Man # 1 or Man # 3 but only he has the memory of this little boy. I have a few pages of this inner mystery. And I have some thoughts about a few other interactions between adults and their family so that I create distinct both identities and realities in the chapters. I want the reader to be able to go from one reality to another but still recognize the people. I also felt that the mystical/sci-fi element of the book was too starkly separated by the chapter delineation. I realized I was being too subtle, that instead I needed the book itself to open up for the reader about things the characters might not be able to readily connect.

11th Draft. Hush. Ironically I finished it at my godmother’s house who was Professor Carlene Hatcher Polite’s godmother. She was another professor I TAed for years prior and had read 2 iterations of Hush and pointedly liked the character Mother Moon. In her liking I got the inspiration to cross contaminate my own work by a few dollops of Mother Moon into Stay, though Hush is really where she’s grounded. I did this because I had this mystical element running through and I wanted to keep it normal to my own little multiverse. She may or may not briefly appear in S: A Novel and definitely does so in Myriad, a 12 book series I’m working on. But when I hooked in Mother Moon to Stay from Hush and S, she re hooks back into Myriad and more importantly, a couple of characters from Stay and Myriad meet and I work out why this cross contamination of aware characters is occurring. Which was nice, and also why I merged discussing the Drafts of Hush & Stay.

Between Drafts 11 and 12 are generally several iterations—-I do about 4 separate runs to include layout changes, cover choices, I then have people go over it, tel me what they like and not, get feedback. There will always be an error, an imperfection, no matter how many editors and edits it goes through. Always. It’s the universe. It’s the printer. It’s the ink. It’s the store. It’s me. It’s the editor. There’s also a small mistake. But going through 4 iterations of Draft 11 means that you not only narrow it down to sometimes just 1 or 2 but that the reader generally can’t find it.

12th Draft. There generally comes a point in a novel where it is a completed story/idea. And that Drafts becomes what gets copy edited, what goes through consistency edit, marketing edit, etc..

This is the last piece, the final product. The Cover is generally the final choice, the back cover synopsis works, the picture is good, the copy logo (more publishing insanity—-in order to be sold in major book retailers an ISBN has to appear on the back cover AND a company logo on the back cover AND a company logo on the lower bottom spine AND a company logo/stamp on the top of the spine. The spine has to be a certain amount of space so that it can be read on a store shelf—-this is generally about 140 pages plus covers, soft or hard.)

Draft 12 is often about all of those things. I’ve gone back and forth on Proofs half a dozen times because a cover pic smudges or is out of focus or isn’t over the bleed.

Or the table of contents! Another bastard and a half. When you edit it might shift a page, a page shift mean the whole bowl of jelly might shift.

Both Stay & Hush I had to re paginate in the TOC for Stay and in the Chapter Headers for Hush. also in Hush there are several forms of writing that occur from different historical points as well as different points in time—-so I experimented with color and black & white in trying to achieve some special effects.

Crossovers

Stay’s challenge was that I had to have chapter header 1.1, 1.2….., 2.1…, 3.1, 4.1, 4.4 up through iterations of four 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and then 2, 3,4 with yes four sub-reality chapters, coalesce it all into the final 5, 5.1, 5.2.5.3, 5.4 chapters, conclusions of those reality choices, different from each other, and then finally into 5.5.

Then inserted sections specifically concerning sex and love from one, two, three, four people’s perspectives, Un, Deux, Trois, Quartre—-in French coinciding with the amount of people sometimes in the sex.

Then a 0.0 1, 0.0 2, 0.0 3, 0.0 4 chapters outside of “reality” so that a spiritual war/fantasy can occur, but germane and finally The Crossroads—-where a chapter from the Myriad series crosses into Stay as the last chapter to explain something that occurred. To further complicate or deeply elucidate this for a Transmedia class at UNSW University of North Southern Wales I took—-my final project was using this novel and incorporating several presentational forms for readings and marketing and finally to the book itself so that eventually eBook editions will be expanded with images and videos and the 0.0 surreal chapters will be graphically rendered. It’s timely and expensive but a nice long term enhancing project.

And last but not least, because a lot of mental health issues are touched on, a brief info section for readers at the end.

All of those Chapters have to work in the TOC as well as in the reading are unified but slightly different in perspective or choice, without being to grossly obvious about reality shifting. A lot of tone matching.

Why all this meshuggas?

Eh, it’s fun to mess with your own formats and constructs and time and multiple characters.

Federman would’ve appreciated the experimentation of it.

But here’s what I’ll tell you about it as a book, two books that have a threaded relationship to each other and several others. Doing 12 Drafts of each one, carefully, methodically from pads to typing, to binders, to index cards, to Proof copies—-they are well done.

I would offer that Federman’s insight and instruction to so many drafts was that between one’ self, editors, printers, readers getting involved, even a wholesale failure creatively will still be well presented and a good read. He used to joke about different writing things I’d done as a noble attempt but a failure and that the work was to keep failing, over and over and over again. Finally he called a piece my personal Great American Novel…and that’s when he recommended it to Sukenick to publish.

I’ve started to do more writing about writing and incorporate it into the books web page release as well as podcasts and videos. A book has become so much more than what I envisioned before I met him and Carlene Hatcher Polite and others. So much more. He would’ve appreciated Stay, I know for some of the content and for the playing in French, Paris and French characters (including him as Professor Letterman—-a play on the translation of his name.) that I’ve done there.

I turn now to the dozen other novels and non-fiction books on my production slate.

We shall see how many times they fail before they fly, non?

#KylePhoenix

#TheKylePhoenixShow