So this is a good time to tell you about my book I'm revising right now, Used Zombies.
What the heck, let's look at the writing process.
I've written ten books so far and have outlined dozens more and the process for each one has been different. I don't believe there's a right or wrong way to do it. But this is the way Used Zombies happened.
One fine Saturday, I was sitting in the gym lobby, cooling off after a workout. And I thought about a literary genre I'd heard about a few years ago, "zombie erotica."
(Now before you stop reading, I'm gonna reassure you right now that this story does not end with me writing a "zombie erotica" book.)
I looked into it and there's a built-in audience for this zombie sexytime genre. Which is sad. But I realized it would be funny to play with expectations and troll folks.
So a title popped in my head: PG Zombie Erotica.
I raced over to the public computer that the gym provides and sat down, opened up Internet Explorer (the only browser on their desktop), logged into the Google, and opened a new Google document. And I typed a bunch of nonsense about everyone but one guy in a town dropping dead, the one guy resurrecting them all, and using his zombies to make a zombie movie.
This nonsense formed the foundation of the story's world. And I kept most of it.
I was in the middle of writing two other books, so I set it aside, stewed over the milieu, and thought about where the people and the zombies would go from there. I realized with a title like PG Zombie Erotica, it needed to have some zombie romance. (TAME romance.) So I threw a light love angle in there.
I came up with a story for the human and the main zombie that spanned decades and was an epic saga of life and love and death. From multiple perspectives, with thoughts about business and slavery.
And it was only 4,000 words long.
I write short books, but not THAT short. (I'm writing for the short-attention-span crowd, so I keep my books between 20,000-30,000 words. I recently learned that technically makes them "novellas"- works that are 17,500-40,000 words long.) So it needed more material.
I thought about various zombie and horror comedy ideas I've had over the years and brained up some new ones. I'm all about just throwing the ideas out there, devil may care, everything must go, I'll come up with new ones later.
So I contemplated the Book of Exodus- like I do- and figured it would be fun to do a zombie variation on it. The second part of my book thus started as a direct rewrite of Exodus. With zombies. Then I changed it all around. And wrote an epic allegory about obedience and why bad things happen to good people and why God asks his people to do things that sometimes don't make sense and how things sometimes just don't make sense.
And that brought the word count up to 8,000 words.
I slammed myself across the walls and yanked all my hair out. Writing this book was literally harder than giving birth. LITERALLY. LITERALLY. LITERALLY. (Not really. It's opposite day today.)
Then I thought about this script I wrote years ago with some assistance from my BFF (who was my co-worker at the time) about a zombie outbreak in an office building. It had some ideas that were still original in the year 2016. But even so- it needed an extra twist. And hoo boy, did I throw an extra twist in there. It's a plot device I've never seen and I've seen EVERYTHING zombie-related.
And then I realized how it needed to end. And I did another profound, thoughtful take on religious ambiguity, life, the universe, and everything.
And that brought the word count up to 13,000 words.
I threw up my hands and wrote something else.
After finishing something else- a book on Eric Roberts- I sat back down with Used Zombies and realized it was actually kind of unique and maybe special. It had enough story and ideas for a 10-book series crammed into a very small space, structured as a trilogy of interconnected stories. But it was scatterbrained. I wanted it to be a novel, but I wrote it like a short story collection.
Trying to puzzle it out, I ran the problem by some writer friends, one of whom suggested throwing J.J. Abrams-esque "mystery boxes" in there to keep the momentum strong between stories and make them flow better. (I'm currently working on that.)
But the overarching problem is that the narrative voice is unclear. Who's telling this story, and why?
While mulling this over, I picked up Clifford Simak's City, a 50's sf book I've been meaning to get around to for a long while. This bizarre tale of mankind's evolution into Jupiter-dwelling aliens and dogs evolving to inherit the Earth was fascinating. But I also realized it had the same basic story and structure as Used Zombies- only with dogs in place of zombies. And I took note of how Simak held the story together- with a super-evolved dog acting as the narrator explaining and tying the stories together.
Eureka! My solution: One of the zombies that inherit the Earth is the one compiling the stories in Used Zombies. He's basically Moroni, if you get that reference. And he has a wry sense of humor and he's connected to all the stories, which end up being sort of a work of family history for him.
Adding the narration- plus adding a bit more character development- FINALLY brought the book up to publishable length.
But it still didn't work!
The book opened with the basic material I sat down and slammed out as PG Zombie Erotica- a title I'd long since abandoned in favor of Used Zombies- and it just wasn't very compelling as an introduction to the world. It dragged.
I puzzled it over by night as I continued to write a book about an evil gym by day. And then had another "Eureka!" moment.
I restructured the trilogy.
The middle part- the zombie riff on the Book of Exodus- is now the opening. And the origin story/ background on the world is now in the middle. Because once you've read the zombie religion stuff- which is pretty solid- you'll actually CARE about the background material.
And that's where it stands now. Still being tweaked and modified, but mostly done.
Part of me wishes I was a better writer. I don't quite have the tools yet to convey the emotion in certain long-spanning sections. But it all works well enough.
And I hope you enjoy it when I finally get around to publishing it! (I may have one...or two...or three more books out before this one hits.)
This is not how I write books, but it's how I wrote this one. Your mileage, it may vary.
-Phony McFakename
No comments:
Post a Comment