The first full revision of Moving on Nightfall is done! The last 30 pages were aaaaaagonizing. Onto the next revision, it has been a while since I saw the beginning of the book, (like several months) so I am comfortible with jumping back to the beginning and going from there. I’m sure it will go fine again, until maybe the end 40 or 30 pages.
Whew! That was quite a job! But another milestone accomplished 
In the beginning of Moving on Nightfall, the protagonist, Jenny, is revealed to be a homeless, transgendered, late-teens prostitute. While I didn’t need to do a lot of research to develop her character or her living situation, I did do some research to make sure that I could give the readers a firm grasp on the small details of her character, her current living situation on the street, as well as the factors that led her there. It was the little details that I wanted to make sure I knew well, so the reader wouldn’t have to stop and question whether something was accurate.
Jenny lives in a big city, so I did some research on queer youth in cities. One of the biggest cities with a very high percentage of GLBTQ homeless youth is New York City, and so several of my links led there.
75 Beds for 1,254 Kids: One third of NYC’s 3,800 homeless youths are LGBT
State of the City’s Homeless Youth Report 2003
Editorial Observer; Helping Them Make It Through the Night
A Life and Death on NYC Streets
There also are some articles on how these kids get to be on the street.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth: An epidemic of homelessness
Throwaway Teens - a 20/20 report on how some of these kids end up on the street.
And I also bookmarked some trans articles on homelessness and its side effects -
Making Change: The Cost of Being Transgender
It’s a trans world
Crossing to Safety: Transgender Health & Homelessness
Engaging Transgender Substance Users in Substance Use Treatment
And also, the book Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers by Cris Beam.
None of these will actually go into or give me my story. Rather, it’s like visiting a place to get the feel for it - it will help me to add that air of authenticity of something I already know, but want to make very clear.
Generally I don’t do a lot of research before I write a story or novel. I prefer to write with the flow and see how things go, and then research and clarify as needed. If there is something I question, or need to know to make the story work, of course I’ll look it up right then, but for me the story comes first, and then I background information as needed. (And I do check - I hate being called out as wrong on something that I write as a “fact” ;))
With Moving on Nightfall I am going to be experimenting with writing a series of flash fiction pieces that take place outside of the main narrative. One of my goals is to of course make my readers curious about the novel itself, but also to explore for myself a little more of my world and characters, push them in directions I might not have thought of, and in general mess around with them (always good).
So right now, I am working on crystallizing what Jenny’s “home” in the abandoned subway station looked like. I’m ignoring any “mole people” references, as the main book that talked about them has been greatly discredited. I have a lot of my own experiences and knowledge to draw on, but I want to explore the makeup of her shelter fully, so I’ve done some research to broaden my ideas. Granted, this is a very small part of the story, but it is the first important setting, it tells a lot about Jenny, and it sets up a lot of the story for the reader. Below are some of the best sites I found in my hunt.
Abandoned subway stations:
Three pages of beautiful shots from the (sadly no longer updated) NYC photolog Satan’s Laundry
The Ltvsquad has a lot of great pictures from years of subway exploring, but one of the best pages I found there for my research is the Sperm Whale / Snipers Alley story.
An extensive description with pictures of the abandoned parts of the NYC subway station.
Closed stations in the Paris subway system
Cincinnati’s Abandoned Subway
Closed Boston Stations
A couple of articles on homeless people and subways:
One about a group who lived under Manhattan in the early 1990’s
Another about how some homeless ride the lines all day
And a documentary that Will told me about last week - Dark Days. (there’s stills from the film here as well.)
Good stuff, and great background research.
I’m on the down stretch of the first major revision of Moving on Nightfall. I think the last 40 pages need to be expanded a bit, as when I got near to finishing my rough draft I just wanted to get it down. Plus, now that I know how it ends, I have to smooth out all of the continuity issues that exist because of my characters doing things other than what I had planned for them. Sometimes this is as small as changing a sentence, but I have also totally rewritten some scenes.
As a character, Jenny changes and grows quite a bit through the book. She’s tough and street-smart, and she knows how to survive, but at the same time she rolls with the punches and doesn’t always stand up for herself, instead focusing on survival. That is one of the things that change about her as the novel goes on, in that she thinks about what she wants, how to get it, and how to stand up for herself even when she’s scared. It’s always good when a character grows through the progression of a story. It is when they don’t change and/or grow as I write that I have to stop and re-evaluate what I am putting down. If the characters don’t change, when realistically they should be, I know I am heading down the wrong way and need to take a step back from my write and figure out where I went wrong.
I’ve known quite a few writers who feel like outlining their short story or novel is the best and more efferent way to get their writing done. Often they also like to do character sketches either before or during the writing process because they feel like this helps them to fully understand their protagonists and secondary characters. Many of writing books and websites also say the same thing, some even go so far as to say this is the way it “should” be done.
This method has never worked for me however. I’ve tried to start with an outline and character sketches, but one of two things always ends up happening. Either I already know the ending so it’s not as intriguing for me to write, and I have trouble getting from point A to point B, or more commonly, the characters do not do what I tell them to. Yes, my characters have minds of their own. And they don’t like it when I tell them they are supposed to act a certain way or do a specific thing. They end up coming to life, and I find that when I try to make them stick to what I have planned they end up coming out very flat, and not rounded as they should be.
Yes, my name is Val, and I hear voices when I write.
On the serious side, I rarely know what is going to happen further than a scene or two ahead in the piece I am working on. This does make for some odd kinks in the story sometimes, sometimes things I write won’t make sense in the context of the finished work, but I don’t edit as I write the rough draft; but that is where revising comes in.
For instance, the novel I am currently revising, working title Moving on Nightfall, started with an image. I have over my net travels read about people who live in abandoned subway stations, and one day I was trying to think of a story starter, and someone said something about subways, and said, That’s it! So I started with this image of an abandoned subway station, with some light coming is from a glassed-in panel in the ceiling, and a little nest made of discarded items. My protagonist is a girl named Jenny, and from the beginning I knew that while she was street smart, she had also been beaten on by life, and tended to retreat into herself when she didn’t know how to control what was going on around her. And there was another character who shared the station, a crazy old alcoholic vet named Sunny who sees himself as her protector. As I started to write it I learned about the characters as I got into it, and they grew more real and round. Jenny works as a prostitute, she does art, she’s a transsexual, and she still has a touch of naïvety about her. Sunny is big and gruff and obnoxious, but accepts Jenny for who she is, and heaven help anyone he catches messing with her.
While I started out with the story I had no idea where it was going to go. I was thinking it might have a fantasy twist, and it did turn out to be an urban fantasy. But while the main concept of the story stayed the same, many of the details of how it worked shifted several times throughout the writing of the novel. So on the revision, now that I completely understand how the story works, I am going back and editing details so the whole story works together, sometimes rewriting scenes.
I have a lot more to say on this, but I’ll start with this overview, and go further into details in other posts. I also plan on talking more about Moving on Nightfall.
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