Ah yes...the book.

January of this year I wrote an outline for a novel. In February I started writing. By the time school rolled around in June, I had a rough draft. I put the draft aside for a couple of months and began rewriting in August. My goal is to have the second draft done by the time the Christmas break ends, January 4th.

What's it about? Vaulting ambition, police brutality, unrequited love, biker gangs, systemic unfairness, drug culture, crime in the city, masculinity in the 21st century, political indifference to a rotting social structure, and cinematic Shakespeare adaptions. But mostly it's about cops.

In 2008 I wrote the first and second drafts of a novel which wasn't very good. It was undisciplined. I was feeling my way. This time I started with a clear idea of what I wanted to do. It has taken me longer than I'd anticipated, but I'm on track, and I'm pleased with the results.

I know very clearly what I want to write--character-driven crime stories that are realistic and speak to larger issues. I'm not interested in post-modernism, structuralism, or didactic political tracts. Once I realized that, things got a whole lot easier.

Every spare moment is spent writing. I've given up the drums, I've given up video games, and I've given up a lot of reading time, in order to better serve this. Now that I'm near the end of the semester, I have to spend more time on my school research papers, and my PhD apps. But the book is foremost in my mind, and I'm beginning to outline the next one.

I'm not trumpeting myself as a success, but for years I was bogged down in the academic hoopla surrounding writing. I believed outlines made you stiff, that writing before you're thirty-five meant your work would be jejeune and fatuous, that alcohol is necessary, that you had to start in short stories and work up to a novel, etc. Those are all fear-based ideas. The truth is deceptively simple: you find what you like to read and write that as well as you can.

It cost me a year of writing to learn that--the novel I aborted in 2008 was self-conscious, trying to impress, embarrassed about what it truly was--a crime story. Fear kills creativity. Being a shy person, whose bombastic assholishness only comes out from behind the safety of the computer, I let fear convince me of some pretty monstrous untruths.

I once watched an interview of Robert Frost, who said the most profound thing about writing: "You have to start on insufficient knowledge. And you have to have that kind of courage." I hope you see why that's so momentous.

The first draft of this book needed a serious overhaul. There was a flashback structure which I've removed, paring it down to one longer flashback a la the cave scene in Frankenstein. I had to clear up some character motivations, rid myself of a few coincidences, and fix a general lack of description and over-reliance on dialogue. These are real problems, but they're surmountable because I know what needs to be done to fix them. I even have a few things I want to fix for the third draft.

I write this because, if you've asked me about writing lately, I probably haven't given a very detailed account of my progress. I can't guarantee that I'll make my January 4th deadline, but I have faith.

This is another monster post with very little humour in it, and rather than come up with some bullshit comedic twist, I'll just apologize for that now, and end with a few of the books which helped me out.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield--I heard about this book from a graphic novel called The Nightly News. It addresses creative slumps, and how to change your approach to art to get the most out of it.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway--A perennial favourite because he shares some gossip about other famous people he knew, but he also describes being in your twenties, broke, and writing stories, and how he worked through his depressions by starting with a simple declarative sentence.

Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman--A personable screenwriter and novelist's take on the movie business, screenwriting, and writing in general.

On Writing by Stephen King--Probably the best book on its subject.

On Writing by George Higgins--Another classic, unlike any writing book ever written.

The Paris Review Interviews series, for obvious reasons.

Three Uses of the Knife by David Mamet--Brilliant breakdown of drama from a master.

Story by Robert McKee--A very in-depth scriptwriting book.

Poetics by Aristotle--Still relevant a few thousand years on.

How Fiction Works by James Wood--Slightly academic but well-written and insightful.

but more than any of these, what I come back to again and again are the works by David Milch:

The Idea of the Writer website, True Blue and Deadwood: Stories From the Black Hills. It sounds strange to reference a tv writer, but Milch was a Yale professor before tv, and he's incredibly insightful about the writing process, character development, and storytelling structure. His lectures ramble, but that's part of the fun--seeing how he connects Coleridge to Beckett to his hatred of Law and Order to a poem by Robert Penn Warren to Conrad's Nostromo. Inspirational, far-reaching, yet practical.