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