Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Email to a Student

Tactical Writing is the ability to write a Chapter Sized work. It might be an essay, a vignette, a chapter or a short story. A human brain can juggle that sized requirement. You have demonstrated that you can write Tactically. When a writer tries to go beyond that, say write a novel thinking they can simply expand their Tactical skills... the brain hick-ups. it's too much trying to write a novel by simply expanding what was successful at the tactical level. A chapter has say 5,000 words and a Novel has say 90,000 words... you can juggle 5K but not 90K words. It is like a computer that has Random Access Memory (RAM). When you exceed the RAM limit you need to go to Best Buy and purchase some more. The problem is that there is no Best Buy for a human brain You are only born with so much. Thus in writing a novel the process has to be broken down into workable chunks under the chapter threshold.

Operational Writing is the ability to string Chapters together. This is a writing skill that requires you to clean out your mental RAM and look at another aspect of writing. You can't write tactically and operationally at the same time... not enough space. To acquire an operational writing skill you, like i said, you have to empty your mind and make it stretch from beginning to end of your novel, thinking in outline form about how all the chapters are going to fit together, a small synopsis of each with transitions, where some of the key components (FACT) are going to go and how the layers are going to fly in at one part and lift out at another.

Those who don't understand the importance of operational writing cope after a fashion by what I call "The Box Car Technique" which is to write one chapter, finish with that and then write the next one they think is in the next logical sequence. This works after a fashion because when a writer finishes with one boxcar (chapter) they clear their minds and go onto the next. These writers are called "Pantzers" and I don't have space here to talk about all the problems this method can lead to. In a nutshell the result often results in a sagging middle, a story that is one dimensional and chapters that lack integration. It's like pushing a noodle.

Another problem with the Pantzer approach is that RAM is consumed writing a "Boxcar" and even if it is saved and the next Boxcar is started fresh, a bit of RAM is still necessary to recall what the last one was about. As the chain of Boxcars grows longer there is more and more of a parasitic drain until around Chapter 20 there is as much devoted to remembering as their is to processing a new Boxcar. For that reason an outline is a much better approach than butting chapters end to end in a linear fashion. Compounding the problem is that a layered approach to writing a novel is all but impossible.

I realized, after a couple of years, what was happening and last term rewrote the class giving stress to Operational Writing. This term I decided to really hammer it. I describe it as learning to wear another hat. It is like being a beat cop and cross training to become a Detective. To be a street cop you wear the street hat and to be a Detective you wear a Detective Cap. As a writer you don't have the luxury of hiring two "Yous." You have to do them both yourself.

The Lessons explain how you learn the basic principles of Operational Writing. It is a skill a Tactical writer simply has to face and somehow try to learn.

The purpose of the first three vignettes has little to do with plot or story line. They have everything to do with character development. They showed a way, using a three vignette approach to develop your Central Character in a manner that would dovetail into the first three chapters of your book. It was intended to teach the student how to quickly give birth to an interesting character by showing them in placid waters, sucked into a quick moving current and swept over the falls. Story line and plot began after Chapter 3 once the basic character thread was in place. This approach turned out to also be a pretty good model for developing all the main characters in the novel and not just the CC. Using just the Template was not working, but the three vignettes were.

The reason a student often has difficulty at first is thinking too much about plot and not enough about character. Better that a beginning author start with only a fuzzy idea of one of your main characters and follow the workshop model. Students who do this breeze through the class. I learned plenty this term and have already begun to integrate the lesson's learned. Next term everybody will start out with just the amorphus character to begin with.

The idea for layering came from two sources.... looking at how most novels are written and seeing how most of my students were trying to write them. I was seeing good tactical writers who didn't seem to have a clue about operational writing.

So this is where we are today.... some of the frustration is my fault for being too dumb to figure all this out earlier and some of it can be attributed to assumptions made by students of the best way to do developmental work on their novels. Like I said, next term I'll apply a host of lessons learned.

percy bob