Uncharted territory

The prob­lem with doing some­thing that no one else has done before is that no one else has done it before, so you have no basis for com­par­i­son to tell if you’re doing it right.

As I said before, I’m tak­ing a break from the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles uni­verse and work­ing on Ghost Ronin, my nanotech-​superspy-​turned-​assassin-​with-​a-​heart-​of-​gold story. I hope to make it into a series over time, but we’ll see how this turns out first.

I had an inter­est­ing lit­tle struc­tural thing I was doing with GR, which has mutated on its own into a new — or very old — form. The novel, when it was a novel, was struc­tured as a playlist. Each chap­ter had a song that cap­tures the mood or theme or a spe­cific moment in that chap­ter. The chap­ter where the hero is iso­lated and alone is Green Day’s “Boule­vard of Bro­ken Dreams”, for exam­ple, and the chap­ter that intro­duces the FBI agent chas­ing the hero is “Just A Job To Do” by Gen­e­sis. It was a nice hook, and I thought it added some­thing to the story I hadn’t seen done very often. Sure, some of my favorite authors like Stephen King and Alan Moore are fond of includ­ing rel­e­vant song lyrics in their prose, but I didn’t recall any­one build­ing the whole story around rel­e­vant songs.

The more I work on it, though, the less it feels like a novel. I real­ized early on that I can include clips of each song — up to 20 sec­onds, accord­ing to a lawyer friend of mine — when I release the story as a ser­ial pod­cast. And struc­tur­ing it with pod­cast­ing in mind got me look­ing more closely at how I’d con­tainer­ized the plot in each track of the playlist. They’re not chap­ters in a novel. Chap­ters have more con­ti­nu­ity, flow more eas­ily into the next chap­ter. What I’m really look­ing at here is a series of 14 short sto­ries. Each is largely self-​contained, and should come to its own sat­is­fy­ing con­clu­sion, like each episode in a sea­son of a tele­vi­sion show.

Also, look­ing at how much story I really have in each track, some of them could eas­ily edge from short story into nov­el­ette, even novella ter­ri­tory. For instance, the first track, inspired by Rush’s “Bravado”, fol­lows an Army Ranger sniper team, a two-​man group of sniper and spot­ter. In this case, the two Rangers are best friends since child­hood and work together like broth­ers. Chris, the sniper, is down to earth and prac­ti­cal, and a mas­ter of any­thing with a trig­ger. Mike, the spot­ter, is more ath­let­i­cally gifted, but also has a rebel­lious, impul­sive streak that often gets him into trou­ble. The two are high in north­ern high­lands of Afghanistan, hunt­ing an al Qaida sniper team that is also hunt­ing them. Over the course of the track, hunters become hunted and back again until the enemy pins Mike and Chris into an ambush. Chris man­ages to escape with severe injuries, but only because Mike sac­ri­fices him­self to blow up the other team.

We find out in the next chapter/​track that Mike is only mostly dead, miss­ing both legs, an arm and half his face, and is recruited by a secre­tive defense con­trac­tor to be rebuilt into an oper­a­tive more for­mi­da­ble than a whole bat­tal­ion of Army Rangers. That’s not part of this story. This is a war story, two bud­dies on their own in enemy ter­ri­tory. And frankly, if I wanted to I could make a whole novel out of that, con­sid­er­ing the flash­backs I could put in from their child­hood and going through Ranger school together. I’m not look­ing for that kind of “decom­pres­sion” to use a comics term, but to really get to know Mike and Chris — while Mike is the pro­tag­o­nist of the series, the Ghost Ronin, Chris will be com­ing back into the story and play­ing a vital role later — we’re prob­a­bly look­ing at more than 10,000 words here.

This has two ram­i­fi­ca­tions that I’m try­ing to get my brain around, and I think they’re why I’ve found it so dif­fi­cult to get started on the actual writ­ing. The first is that if each track ends up being closer to 15,000 – 20,000 words, that pushes the whole 14 track story far out of novel ter­ri­tory. 280,000 words is way too long for a novel writ­ten by some­one not named Rowl­ing, Clancy or King. I could try to edit it down to pub­lish it as a novel, but I’m look­ing at the real pos­si­bil­ity that I’ll have to split this into a tril­ogy if I want to go commercial.

The other is that I don’t know how much to plot ahead of time. As I dis­cuss in an arti­cle I haven’t posted yet, three-​act struc­tures are not only the absolute foun­da­tion of human sto­ry­telling, they are also recur­sive struc­tures like frac­tals (yes, there is more math to writ­ing than word counts). A tril­ogy is three nov­els. A novel is three acts, the begin­ning, mid­dle and the end. But each of those acts also has a begin­ning, mid­dle and end. It’s tur­tles all the way down.

For rea­sons I’ll go into in that other arti­cle, I out­line novel-​length works so I can make sure I hit those act breaks solid, twist in all the right places. But that’s nov­els. Do I need to do that for a novella? I don’t out­line indi­vid­ual scenes. But there’s more struc­ture here.

If I out­line it in too much detail rel­a­tive to word­count, I freeze the story and feels mechan­i­cal, paint-​by-​numbers. If I just dive in and wing it, I have no idea if I can hit the com­pli­ca­tion, cli­max and wrap it up satisfactorily.

What’s a writer out of his nor­mal medium to do?