The Works of Nick Hayden

Last Sunday, Natasha and I biked around the lake near our house, kids in tow. One section of path went beneath tall trees, with little foliage below. The sun shone through the leaves above. In an instant I missed my old walks through my parents’ woods. So later that day, when we went over to my parents’, as we usually do Sunday evenings, I grabbed a walking stick, my faithful dog, and headed out.

I took many walks in these woods as I grew up.  I’m convinced, in my biased way, that those 60 acres are the most beautiful in Indiana. With hills and trees, canyon and creek, I could walk those woods for hours.

I traveled along my old route, to a place we call the Grand Canyon. It was nearly five o’clock and golden light shimmered through the leaves overhead. I stopped. My normal state is to keep walking, to keep moving. I don’t sit idle well. But I stopped and I soaked it in and I prayed.

Beauty lifts the soul. Is it possible to look on beauty and not thank God, not worship him and long to know him more? We are blind enough that it is possible.

I do not walk in those woods often enough.

For me as a writer, I think it should be more important to be beautiful than to be concise; more necessary to look up than to barrel through plot points, to dwell and dawdle in the places of depth instead of worrying if the reader might get impatient . Hopefully, someday, when people look back at my work, they do not say simply, “That was clever,” or “That was exciting,” but “That was beautiful” and “That was true.”

Because the truest things are the most beautiful, if only we would present them with the glory they deserve and not with the industrial efficiency of a world that gathers knowledge as an attic gathers dust.

In the first part, I focused on how and why I read such monstrous books. Now I want to touch briefly about their effect on my writing.

I think my early attempts at novels, especially Trouble on the Horizon, were unconsciously guided by the large plots, numerous characters, and wide world of The Wheel of Time, which deeply affected me in middle and high school.

Londo–now there’s a great character arc.

Throw in the discovery of Babylon 5, a five-season TV space opera with a definite beginning, middle, and end (which was basically unheard of back in the 90s), and you have a young artist soaked in stories that span years and cultures and multiple intertwined themes.

Fast forward 15 years or so, and now you find a somewhat older artist not quite sure he can pull off such an epic and not completely convinced he wants to.

I was a little sad after I finished The Way of Kings because I didn’t know if I had it in me to create such a BIG BOOK. I tried to figure out what had changed. I think, in some ways, it’s not so much that I’ve changed but I’ve discovered the kind of writer I am. Let me break it down:

• Time – Okay, this is something that has changed. My time is limited and writing half-a-million word books is a bit daunting.
• Too Many Ideas – Though connected to the time issue above, this is also a choice. I don’t want to spend a decade on one story, at least not now. Honestly, as anyone who’s followed the long, slow progress of Strin & Fred knows, I tend to move from idea to idea faster than I should.
• World-building – I’ve discovered I’m not a world builder, not in the extensive sense required by long fantasy epics. The Unremarkable Squire has a thumbnail  history and a map, but I don’t have a world bible explaining the culture or even a good sense of what differentiates the 40 nations of the Isle. The two big worlds I worked on in high school were created with partners who had a good eye for such things; I tended to be the guy who helped form the worlds into drama.
• Focus on the Personal – This is something I’ve discovered by looking over my past work. I don’t write characters who are in the middle of world-changing events. I write characters who are on the fringe. I mean, The Unremarkable Squire is largely a story of a young man who tries not to be in the middle of the action, and the “big” story is actually somewhat tangential, or at best parallel, to Obed’s, though they obviously intersect at the end.
  Then in Children of the Wells there’s a earth-shaking cataclysm and what do I do? Focus with laser intensity on two survivors in a way that does almost nothing to address the central issue of why the cataclysm happened or how it affects the power structures of the world. Is it good drama? I think so. But it also avoids the large-scale picture. The same tends to happen in Strin & Fred. Despite the big events happening, the main thrust of the stories deal with more personal character issues. I gravitate toward individual stories against a big backdrop.
  Not, epic plots do this as well, but they also center on the vital players in the drama, with the knowledge that they are vital, and that tends to be secondary to my normal way of thinking. I don’t necessarily care if my characters are movers and shakers, and sometimes I think I like them not to be.
• One Size Does Not Fit All – A few years ago, when I dedicated myself to writing flash fiction, I discovered in a new way how well different sizes of stories fit different ideas. In my mind, I tend to have several categories–the flash fiction (<1k words), the short story (2-5k), the long short story (~10k), the novella (20-30k), the novel (60-100k+), and the series. Most times, I can tell you before I start how much room an idea needs. And I like them all for different reasons.

Now, I do have some “epic” stories in my mind, things like Twilight Dawn and 100 Letters, but if I ever tackle them, I think they’ll end up in a style quite different than the epic fantasies I fell in love with, just as Strin & Fred is not quite your average fantasy series. They’re likely to be more literary or more episodic or more, well, I don’t know yet. 

And I guess I’m okay with that. In any case, it’s the only way I know how to write.

After many ages, I finally finished reading The Way of Kings.

If you don’t know, The Way of Kings is a 1000-page fantasy novel by Brandon Sanderson, the first in what is expected to be a 10-book series of giant novels.

I should mention that my favorite series of books is The Wheel of Time, a 14-book series of 500+ page novels.

I should perhaps also add that I also immensely enjoy tomes by Dostoevsky. And the whale of a book, Moby-Dick.

There is something appealing about a thick volume, a sense of mystery and a promise of grand themes and plots. The best ones pay off these expectations. There is a depth of character, a complexity of world, a raising of stakes that can only happen if you have lots of room. Modern culture drools over well-written multi-season TV series. Well, big books and long series were doing that first.

There are at least two problems, however, with massive stories. First, a long book may just be, well, long. I mean, how many books really need 300K words? My guess is not as many as get published. More pages does not equate to good writing. There are short stories that contain more punch, beauty, and truth than plenty of mediocre novels. See Ray Bradbury, for instance.

Second, and more pertinent to me currently, is that I don’t often have the time to invest in such a book, not like I used to. The Way of Kings took me a long time to finish. Les Miserables took me years, reading on and off. Some of it is I don’t feel I have the right to set aside such large chunks of time to read like I used to. Besides being, like, a dad, I try to write and work around the house and spend time with my wife. I think I read slower than some people. Not tremendously slow, but steady.

So in recent years I’ve gravitated toward smaller novels. (Hence the Ray Bradbury reference above.) There’s certainly a lot to discover here, more than I think I expected when I was younger. Thin volumes jump out to me in the bookstore, now. I’ve  become more skeptical of giant fantasy series.

But finishing The Way of Kings reminded me of why I grew up reading these series. You can’t get 100 pages of payoff and climax in a normal-sized book. Will I read the sequel? Almost certainly. Right now?

Well…I don’t know. I saw The Wizard of Earthsea on a shelf somewhere. It’s calling my name. And at a slim 200-pages or so, it won’t take months to finish.

As I’m approaching the end of a major portion of my rough draft, I’ve been reflecting on the single-minded focus I’ve had during this stage of writing. For the last few months, I’ve written next to nothing but Strin & Fred, which has been a change for me. Over the past years I’ve been writing lots of flash fictions, some novellas, a handful of short stories, always moving to a new idea.

I’ve purposely forced myself not to dabble in other projects during this time. This, of course, has made me more efficient. But it has also made me less unsatisfied, I think. When there are ten ideas fighting for my attention, it’s harder to be fully invested in the one I’m working on–and an idea in the head is always more fun, more epic, and more emotional than the one on paper.

I recently listened to a podcast about War and Peace and Tolstoy. Tolstoy, apparently, believed that less personal freedom provided greater personal happiness. He meant this primarily in the area of marriage, where choosing one spouse and committing to raising a family, while cutting off many other opportunities, afforded greater pleasure than a frenzy of self-fulfillment. G. K. Chesteron, in Orthodoxy (go read it), said something similar, if I remind right.

Today’s culture is all about providing choices, the more the better–websites, channels, books, ways to pay, ways to spend, etc. But with all these choice, it’s harder and harder to choose just one, because we’re afraid we might choose wrong or we might miss out on something fun or important. After all, YOLO, y’all!

I have this ridiculous dream of buying the entire Penguin collection on Amazon, but in reality, spending time and really reading and enjoying two, three, or a half dozen books I enjoy is worth way more than the desire to somehow grok  the history of literature.

Making a choice, and thereby deciding against the innumerable other options presented to us, is not only necessary, it’s essential to truly living, maturing, and enjoying. I don’t need to do everything–or even ten things. I just need to do one or two things well, finish those, and start on something else.

My guess is that the specialist is much more satisfied than the dabbler.

Steve Jurvetson via Compfight

Something I’ve taken to doing the last couple years is jotting down story ideas in a pocket notebook (and also online) when an insight or scene hits me. In high school and college, I tended to fixate on Big Ideas because my focus was largely on novels. What I enjoy about my current collection of ideas is that they come in all shapes and sizes.

First with my flash fiction collection, then with my binge reading of Ray Bradbury and writing several novella-sized pieces (a la Children of the Wells), I’ve come to appreciate and understand the way different size stories can communicate an idea.

Because, here’s the thing: You can get a novel out of almost any decent idea. And you can transfer the seed of many of those same ideas into a flash fiction.

For instance, in my “Story Idea” file comes this (probably Bradbury-inspired) tidbit: Tattoos that dictate your future – permanent giving over of your personality – irrevocable?

Could you build a whole YA novel out of this? Almost certainly. Do I want to? Not right now. But I would like to write a story about it someday. Flash fiction? Maybe–but probably a tad longer, to give it space.

There’s a lot of freedom in throwing down these ideas in one place, especially when I’m preoccupied with Strin & Fred. First, it keeps me from getting distracted from what I’m working on right now, which is always a temptation. Second, it gives me something to look forward to and dream about. And, third, it gratifies the spark of creation that wants to write something down when it has some insight it wants to capture, while allowing it to settle among dozens of other ideas to see if it still remains interesting later.

Sometimes the ideas are really vague. Take this one for example: Deut. 20:5-9 – Enjoying wife/wine instead of war

This isn’t a story yet. It’s just the seed of some possible emotion/conflict. It doesn’t demand to be written, but it’s there to remind me I once had the idea and that, just maybe, it might be worth harvesting at some point, perhaps in conjunction with some other idea.

So, you can expect some of these in the future, hopefully. Or, if you’re curious, you can check out two that have already been written. See:

• “Behind the Curtain”  – (A Private Work of Art – great artist makes a piece no one can see – sells it (why?) – provision: buyer can’t ever look at it – is it a hoax or real?)
• “Above” – (Man in bunker – paranoid – cut off from world – opens door, sees beautiful landscape, untouched — “Lies, lies!”)

Life’s busy, what with my job and my kids and my running the youth group and chores around the house, so when I sit down to write in the evening, sometimes my mind is a bit tired.

So when I’m working on a big project like Strin & Fred, getting in a rhythm has been a big help. I have a routine, and I have a thread of plot to follow. I trust that my creativity holds intact as I launch into each session of writing, and past experience has told me it usually does. You don’t have to feel creative to be creative, and honestly, when I feel that euphoric “Don’t I have the most wonderful idea!” emotion is usually when I least want to sit down and do the boring work of actually writing.

But, there’s a lot to be said for free time in creativity–and I’m not very good at allowing myself free time, as in a substantial chunk of time when I’m not doing anything in particular. Not oh-I-have-a-half-hour-let’s-squeeze-in-some-writing-or-reading time but actual sitting-on-the-front-porch-daydreaming sort of time.

I was reminded of this on Father’s Day, when I had a nice chunk of time in the evening to take a walk, just me and my iPod, no dog to accompany me, no clock ticking for my return, just the warm weather and the path along Bixler and Phazon Punch playing repeatedly in my ears.

I sometimes think my most creative time, in terms of ideas, came in high school and early college, but that’s when I had to travel 40 minutes in a car, twice a day, with just my 6-CD disc changer. The mind wanders. Ideas collide. Experiences breathe and unexamined thoughts come up to twirl in the mist.

If I were a full-time writer, I’d do a lot of walking. And maybe driving, if gas wasn’t so expensive.

Anyway, some problems and quandries I was having with the upcoming chapters of Strin & Fred worked themselves out that evening. Now I just need to get the words down on paper.

And do some more wandering, ASAP.

As I dig deeper into Book 3 of Strin & Fred, I thought I’d explain how I go about creating this particular story.

Trouble on the Horizon started by throwing two characters into a situation they didn’t understand. I didn’t really understand it either, but I had fun figuring it out. There was no plan. I have no firm recollection about how far I planned ahead, but most of first book was made up on the spot. Ananya was even introduced by a guest writer in the original version.

I do remember that by the time I wrote the story of Lila and Rutsu, I had a vague outline in my head not just for the end of that book, but for the series.

Skip ahead 10 years. What do I know now, with The Remnant of Dreams  finished and probably half of Book 3 complete?

Not as much as you’d probably guess (or hope).

Here’s the thing. Strin and Fred has always been created in the moment of writing, and even when the story grew, became more complex, I wanted to keep it that way, for better or worse. Every time I begin a new chapter I ask myself: Who is the most intriguing character at this moment? Where is the emotional center of this scene? How do move this character a step closer to the end goal?

I do have end goals. I know, in big picture terms, how certain plotlines end, or at least where major turning points are. But if you asked me to write the last chapter, I couldn’t. I’m following a thread in the dark, with a sense of which way the exit is, but without know what twists or turns I’ll have to take to get there.

There are major events in book 3 I’ve had in my head for a long, long time. And there are scenes and journeys I didn’t discover until last night.

Case in point: A week or two ago, I got this fabulous idea. I sketched out a key word outline. Yes! That’s how this next section will go…. Within two pages, my characters had said, “Good idea. But how about this instead?”

This fluidity, I think, is a hallmark of Strin and Fred. It’s one of the reasons I get stuck, too. I worry that I’ll get my characters mired in a swamp; but I also have a innate desire to make sure my characters are always making transitions, moving forward emotionally even if they’re stuck physically.

In general, I think it works. But sometimes I’m not so sure.

That’s what editing is for.