What to Do When a Story Goes Blue?

December 5, 2024 by Harvey

In Today’s Journal

* Writem Gift Subscription
* What to Do When a Story Goes Blue?
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

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What to Do When a Story Goes Blue?

When you teach transparently, sometimes it becomes necessary to talk about topics or methods that some might find a little unsettling. This is one of those times.

Other than reporting my progress in The Numbers below, I very seldom talk about a work in progress. But my current novel poses a rather (ahem) unique situation.

You all know I write into the dark.

When you write into the dark, you assume a responsibility to the characters and the story for authenticity.

At its most basic that means I follow the characters around and write down everything they say and do in reaction to whatever stimuli and events occur in the story.

In all of my Blackwell Ops novels, there are two primary types of protagonists:

• the operative, who is usually also the primary protagonist and the POV character, and

• the contact, who is often a secondary protagonist.

When the operative’s job takes him or her out of his or her own regional setting (so when s/he has to fly to successfully complete the assignment), the contact in the target region provides whatever weapon the operative needs. S/he also often helps with local customs and other significant affairs.

Sometimes the operative and the contact are not physically attracted to each other. Or sometimes they are, but the attraction leads nowhere. In either of those cases, that’s fine. The story continues to unfold naturally and remains family friendly.

But sometimes, when the characters are physically attracted to each other and act on that attraction, the story—the authentic, what-really-happened story—naturally goes blue. And I don’t mean things turn morose or sad.

That presents a conundrum.

• As a reporter who prides himself on accuracy and authenticity, I’m a stickler for writing whatever actually happens in the story.

• But as the writer (the person who presents the story) I like to keep my Blackwell Ops stories relatively family friendly.

By relatively, I mean the novels contain a certain amount of violence. Duh. They’re crime thrillers about individual assassins in a worldwide network of assassins. So within the genre, that’s perfectly all right.

But displaying in a family friendly novel what I’ve come to call ‘blue tidbits’ is not all right.

Again, if you write into the dark (or aspire to), it’s important that you are prepared to write whatever comes. In other words, you have to be prepared to write the authentic story.

As they say in the courtroom oath, you should present ‘the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. Anything you intentionally omit (critical mind) will change the story as you continue to write.

So if you’re to write the authentic story, you don’t want to omit anything. But how you present it is up to you.

Presenting even only a few of the 32 (currently) Blackwell Ops novels as ‘adult only’ would disrupt the flow for those who enjoy the series but do not want to read graphic descriptions of sex scenes.

So to solve the conundrum, I came up with a workaround.

When a novel goes blue as I’m writing, I write in two genres at once: crime thriller and erotica.

If you remember, as I was writing Blackwell Ops 31: Jack Temple, I was also writing a novella, The Imp. That’s the one I decided to set aside until after the first of the year. (I set it aside because I hadn’t yet come up with the workaround.)

That novella consisted of the lead-ins and blue segments of BO-31.

But because I was writing that novella separately, the time it was taking me to separate the blue tidbits out and write the novella was detracting from my time writing the novel.

Now the same thing is happening with my current novel, Blackwell Ops 32.

So here’s the workaround:

• When the story turns blue in places, I keep writing, and I write everything.

• During my next cycling session, I go back and highlight the ‘blue’ text, and then continue the story.

• This enables me to stay in the flow and keep writing the story without altering it in any way. It also enables my daily word count to remain true and free of any repeated words. Of course, initially it also inflates the overall word count of the novel. (That inflation never appears in the numbers.)

• At the bottom of my reverse outline, I keep a running tally of the word count in the lead-ins and blue content that will appear later in the novelette or novella.

• At the end of each day, when I record my numbers, I subtract the total of that tally from the overall word count in the bottom left corner of the novel. So in the novel word count I don’t include the ‘repeated’ words (the lead-ins) or the blue segments that will be included later in the novelette or novella.

• Later, after the novel is finished and spell checked, I go back through the novel from the start. At the point where a lead-in moves into a blue segment, I write a brief, intriguing transition that is loaded with innuendo but is not overtly graphic (or is only slightly so) to pique the reader’s imagination. (Who knows? Maybe they’ll want to buy the companion novelette or novella too. Goes to personal taste.)

• Then, later, I copy/paste all the lead-ins to the blue sections and the blue sections into a separate document, Save-As the novelette or novella filename, then delete the highlighted blue sections from the original novel.

• Finally, I save the original document as the family-friendly Blackwell Ops novel and send it off to my first reader.

My workaround of continuing to write the novel and dealing with the lead-ins and blue tidbits in situ as I write and then collectively later enables me to stage the parts of a novelette or novella without interrupting the flow of the novel.

Like The Imp, the current novelette or novella will have a ‘words brought forward’ line that indicates the lead-ins I repeated from the novel (so the words won’t count twice).

Then I’ll report the blue tidbits for the rest of the word count of the novelette or novella since those words weren’t included in the word count of the novel.

I suspect most of you probably will never face this problem, but if you do, you might consider trying this workaround also. If you follow the steps above, it isn’t as difficult or confusing as I probably made it sound.

If you are faced with this same kind of issue in your writing, and especially if any of the above is confusing to you, feel free to email me (no public comments please) to ask any questions you like.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

Release Alert from Vin Zandri: Special limited-time low price. Get The Ex-Con!

Focusing Forward And the Kris & Dean Show is definitely on. Still time to jump in. Check out the details in this post.

Here’s another “CyberWeek” exclusive to check out: MasterWriter I’m only passing this along, neither endorsing nor recommending.

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………… 1220

Writing of Blackwell Ops 32: Jack Twist

Day 1…… 3528 words. To date…… 3528
Day 2…… 3136 words. To date…… 6664
Day 3…… 4540 words. To date…… 11204
Day 4…… 6376 words. To date…… 17598
Day 5…… 3196 words. To date…… 20794

Fiction for December………………… 17248
Fiction for 2024………………………. 945169
Nonfiction for December…………….. 5230
Nonfiction for 2024…………………… 367800
2024 consumable words…………….. 1,137,008

Average Fiction WPD (December)…. 4312

2024 Novels to Date…………………….. 17
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 1
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 31
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..… 101
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 268
Short story collections……………………. 29

Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.

Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.

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