good thoughts on endings

The ending of a story is inextricably tied up with the rest of it. It flows from what precedes it, but it also shapes and reshapes everything that precedes it. The ending of a story can tell us what the story means — it can give meaning to all that precedes it.

If you’re already familiar with The Sixth Sense and Casablanca — or if you don’t mind having their endings spoiled for you — you might want to check out Slacktivist’s post on endings. Normally I read his journal for his ongoing dissection of the Left Behind books (as an evangelical Christian himself, he finds the books not just bad with respect to plot, character, pacing, and prose, but morally and theologically abhorrent). You can see a bit of that peeking through where he talks about the Book of Revelation as an ending, but mostly this post is about narrative, the job an ending is supposed to do, and what happens if you replace it with another ending.

Good thoughts, says I. And it reminds me of one of the challenges inherent in playing RPGs with an eye toward the aesthetics of plot and character. Unless you script everything that happens and leave nothing to chance — and sometimes even if you do — you will occasionally find yourself in a position where some event doesn’t fit, where the story takes a turn that you would not have put in, or would have revised back out again, if this were a story you’re writing. But RPGs don’t allow for revision; every gaming group I know tries to avoid redlining unless there is absolutely no other choice. So sometimes what you end up with is a fascinating exercise in interpretation: how can you view and/or explain those events in such a fashion as to arrive at a meaningful ending? How can you use an ending to resolve conflicts or disappointments lingering from before?

Endings matter a lot to me. I’ve said before, I don’t mind seeing/making characters suffer and fail and lose what matters to them — in fact, I often enjoy it; yes, writers are sadistic — so long as the suffering and failure and loss mean something. They have to contribute to a larger picture, whether that picture belongs to the character in question, or other people on whose behalf they have gone through hell. But random, meaningless suffering, or suffering whose purpose is to show you there is no meaning . . . no. I’ll do gymanstics of perspective to avoid that, to arrive at an ending that gives a different shape to what has gone before.

How about you all? What are your thoughts on endings? If you’re a writer, do you know them when you set out (which probably makes arriving at meaningfulness easier), or do you have to create them as you go along? If you’re a gamer, how do you feel about retiring/killing off characters, or ending games? How about the alternate endings Slacktivist talks about, where a different resolution gets tacked on?

an update on the labors of Hercules

The inbox for my personal e-mail account is down to 11 messages.

The inbox for my writing e-mail is down to 10.

We’ll continue, for the moment, to pretend my academic e-mail account doesn’t exist.

It’s progress. But I think I’ve made as much progress as I can stomach for today. Having done the work of the virtuous, now I’m going to go let my brain die for a while.

World Fantasy?

If anybody knows someone who is going to World Fantasy in the fall and needs someone to share a room with, please let me know; I’m having a remarkable amount of trouble finding roommates.

remixing scenes

I can tell I’m getting better as a writer, not because the best that I’m producing is any better — it may be, but I can’t judge that — but because I can spot and fix flaws that would have confounded me much worse a few years ago.

There are certain pivotal scenes in this novel that I suspect I will keep revisiting from now until they pry the book out of my fingers. They’re finicky, delicate little things, that need to convey fragments of information in an order and density and context that will let me tease out the strands of backstory at appropriate times, and as such it looks like they’re going to need continual tweaking. Today was a day of tweaking, as I ricocheted around several scenes toward the end of Act Three, cutting out a sentence here, sticking in a sentence there, changing the interpretation put on certain things, re-ordering the conversations and polishing the seams where bits got cut out and pasted in. I’m not done, and I know it; there are bits still marked with square brackets, reminding me of the places that will need further tweaking when other bits of the story get settled.

It used to be that once I got something on the page, if it wasn’t carved in stone, it was at least carved in clay and waiting to be fired. I’m sure I’m a better writer than I was when I first finished a novel, but perhaps more importantly, I think I’m a better reviser. I’m much more capable now of cutting a scene out, putting a new scene in, or remixing existing scenes to serve different purposes. I still think I’ve got a lot of room to grow on that front, but it’s obscurely satisfying to be able to fix stuff in such a fashion, even if it doesn’t technically move me any closer to the end of the book.

So I got all that in order, then did today’s writing, because I needed to make sure the fixes I’d thought of would work when put into the text, so the next bit of finicky backstory work will (hopefully) not need the same kind of changing later.

Even though it’s dumb, I may write again later tonight. I’m standing on the edge of a backstory precipice; I’m finally getting to talk about Suspiria. For a character who was one of the driving reasons I wanted to write this book, she sure doesn’t have much of a visible presence in the story, and it makes her few appearances all the more important. I’m not sure I want to leave this one for tomorrow, even if it means I’m unnecessarily squandering one of the days I have to figure out what I do after I talk about her. (The rest of Act Four is still muddy in my head.)

And somewhere in my life, I need to find the time to write the Gog-and-Magog and Onyx Hall flashbacks, and the one about the Queen of Scots that I’ll be arriving at soon, and also the Tiresias scenes. (The good news is, if I get all those done, I’ll hit 90K by the end of the month no problem; probably 95K, even.)

We haven’t yet crested the top of the hill, i.e. the transition to Act Five. But when we get there, it may well be a downhill sprint all the way.

Authorial sadism: nekkid Lune! Also, Suspiria.

LBR quota: Love, in a variety of odd ways.

70K

Last night was a triumph of sheer bloody-mindedness over, well, everything else.

You see, I didn’t get started writing until after 3 a.m. And I couldn’t sleep in today. And I had been watching horror movies since 11 that morning. And when I reached eleven hundred and some-odd words — a good total for the day, regardless — I made myself go just a little bit further, so I could retire for my insufficient night’s sleep knowing that I had crossed the 70K threshold.

So yeah. 70045 words on Midnight Never Come.

Act Four is giving me hives. This is the part of the book where, if I were still a little baby writer, somebody would probably sit the main characters down and Explain Everything they need to know to deal with the rest of the plot. But I’m not a little baby writer, and so I have to try to complicate it: interrupt the flow of information by throwing in threats and interpersonal conflicts and awkward moments and assassination attempts and misunderstandings and people forgetting to mention things and leaping to the wrong conclusions. (Which is why a part of the book I could have disposed of in a few thousand overly straightforward words will instead eat an entire act.)

My difficulties arise from figuring out who knows what, when they learned it, what will spark them into mentioning it, what conclusions they have drawn about it, and how I can juggle all of this together into a story that leads the main characters to where they need to go.

My thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions on how to write the crazy Tiresias scenes. I have a variety of plans in mind, some of which do involve staying up all night — more than I have been already, that is — and hopefully that will work out well.

Mush onward, to 80 and then 90K.

Authorial sadism: First Deven complains that I don’t give him any answers; then he complains about the answers I give him. Ungrateful bastard. (Though I will admit I tried to make “I did not have to” the most painful five words I’ve inflicted on him yet.)

LBR quota: I found a way to kill another character. Aren’t you proud of me?

edit help?

A kind reader just gave me a heads-up about an error on Wikipedia. (I know, shock, gasp, etc.) It seems that some helpful soul decided to add a link to the page on Doppelganger. Unfortunately, the link in question leads to the page for Moya Brennan, aka Máire Brennan, the lead singer of Clannad.

If any of you are or know someone with the capacity to fix this, could you? ‘Cause as neat as it would be to be an Irish singer, I’m not, and I can’t seem to edit the opening paragraph of the article to remove the link, nor do I know how to stop the redirect from assuming I’m Máire instead of Marie.

release date (or at least month)

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but word on the street (i.e. a phone call with my editor) is that Midnight Never Come will be out in June of next year.

To you all, that’s nearly a year away. To me, that’s just around the corner. It’s amazing how an entire year can telescope down to nothingness when someone lays out for you just what needs to happen when to get that more distant event to occur on time.

grargh

Sometimes, to write 1082 words, one must first delete 363.

That revelation just wasn’t working there. It was one too many. From my perspective, there’s now a glaring question of why certain characters didn’t bring up a certain topic at a certain time, but hopefully I can distract readers from that temporary omission with some flourishes on a different front. The information will show up later; just not now.

It sucks that my net progress for the day is less than 1K, though. I know it happens sometimes, but it still sucks. (Especially when I deleted two hundred and change a week or so ago.) Things like this make my end-of-month goal just a little bit harder to achieve.

Edit: Oh, hell. I really am a bloody-minded OCD Virgo fanatic. 412 more puts me at 1494 for the night, and 1131 net.

And since I’m adding that, I might as well add these.

Authorial sadism: giving somebody a ride in the sixteenth century means sharing a saddle with them. i.e. getting very cozy.

LBR quota: it’s always more fun when the pain is caused by love.

How can I go crazy?

Okay, I know I’m crazy already. But I’m crazy in a “oh crap I’m trying to do way too much this summer and I’m going to snap” kind of way, which is not the way I need.

So — because I’m amused to see what responses I will get — I will throw this open to you, the great LJ mind.

Tiresias, a seer in Midnight Never Come, lost his mind years ago, through spending waaaaaaay too much time living in a faerie palace. He can’t tell his prophetic visions from the things around him from the stuff he’s just making up, and he’s lost any sense of when events are taking place; the few parts of the book written from his point of view will not have dates attached to them as everything else does, and do not take place in the order they’re presented. His is a very particularly dream-like madness.

. . . but I have a hard time remembering my dreams, and don’t do dream-like writing well. So I ask you, oh great LJ mind: what methods would you recommend for getting myself into the proper state of mind to write this book’s Tiresias scenes? How can I make myself go the right kind of crazy, or at least play it on TV the page?

e-mail

I can’t decide which Herculean labor is the right metaphor for the battle I’ve been waging for several days now, against the backlog in all of my major e-mail accounts.

Candidate A: Cerberus. There are three accounts, after all, so it’s kind of like dealing with a three-headed monster.

Candidate B: the Hydra. Because every time I think I’ve made progress toward defeating one of the accounts, it sprouts new heads/new e-mails to attack me again.

Candidate C: the Augean Stables. Shoveling endless mounds of shit, and feeling like I’ll never be done.

This post brought to you by the forty or so e-mails I dealt with yesterday, and the fact that today’s schedule has prevented me from dealing with any more, which just ensures that tomorrow’s battle will be harder.

If it’s only a few days late, it counts as on time, right?

Er, maybe not.

Anyway, June’s book recommendation is now up on my website: Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.

Also, if you’re one of the people signed up for my e-mail newsletter, could you confirm that you’ve actually been receiving it? I don’t need everybody to report in, but I realized I’m taking it on faith that the system’s working as advertised, and I’d like to know they’ve been going out properly. (There should be a new one hitting your box some time today.)

Finit Act Three. (ish.)

We’ll call that the end of Act Three. It doesn’t have any flashbacks in it, and it should, but I don’t yet know what one of them is going to be, and the other will either be the coronation scene I have already written, or the scene that takes place after the execution of the Queen of Scots; I need to write Act Four before I’ll know which scene goes there and which one goes here.

I mentioned before that now’s when the backstory starts coming out. That’s a cool thing, from my point of view — the backstory is easily half of why I wanted to write this novel — but the corollary difficulty is that this chunk of the novel, the end of Act Three and probably a goodly chunk of Act Four, threatens to be very exposition-heavy. Which is undesirable at any time, but particularly in the middle of a book. (The only worse place to put it is the end.) So I need to find ways to convey that information without letting it slow the story down.

Having characters come near to stabbing each other in the middle of the exposition is one way to do it. But I mustn’t overuse that trick.

So this is why Act Four is something of a gaping void in my head. Not because I don’t have anything with which to fill it — I’ve got easily half a dozen major revelations that need to occur — but because I haven’t yet figured out how to make those revelations happen in exciting ways, with enough other stuff going around and between them. Act Five will be a cakewalk by comparison, as it will probably only have one Terrible Revelation (assuming it isn’t used to end Act Four), followed by a lot of stuff blowing up.

And somewhere in there, I need to go rewrite half of Act One, the Deven half. I can leave that segment in 1588, but what I’m doing with him there just Doesn’t Work. On the bright side, changing it means I’ll probably get to stick in a scene I had given up on having in the novel, namely, a chase across the roofs of Hampton Court Palace.

Anyway. Time to re-read Act Three and hope it doesn’t suck, then maybe noodle around a bit with how to start Act Four.

Three-fifths of the way done.

Authorial sadism: making Lune be herself during that conversation.

LBR tally: Rhetoric just stuck a knife between Love’s ribs, which I suppose counts as Blood, too.

yay water!

Yesterday I went swimming for the first time this summer. I was in London when the pool here at my complex opened, and then I was busy, and then it was closed, and then I was busy, and then it was closed . . . but we went and swam for about half an hour or so last night, and it was glorious.

A few observations, in no particular order:

1) If you need goggles, get thee to a specialty store or look online and get yourself some Barracudas. To quote the jargon from the website I turned up, they’re a positive-pressure seal instead of a negative-pressure one, i.e. they don’t operate by glomming onto your face with suction, which makes them much more comfortable than Speedo’s product. The frame is molded to fit the eye orbit more closely, and the foam on mine has held up for over a decade; only now are they starting to leak a bit, leading me to decide that it’s time to get some new ones.

2) My form on various strokes has undoubtedly degenerated, but a lot of it came back very quickly. (Though it did take me most of that half-hour to remember I was doing the wrong breast-stroke kick. Oh well; now that I’m not competing, I’ll go back to the one that doesn’t make my hips and knees hurt.) I think I can still justifiably call myself a strong swimmer.

3) I can still do fly!!! In fact, despite the loss of form, I probably swim butterfly better now than I did when I was fourteen, on account of having some actual upper body muscle. I may consider adding a once-weekly swim session to my exercise routine, because if you want gorgeous shoulders and back, ain’t nothin’ like swimming fly to give it to you. And I like swimming a lot better than running, even on an elliptical.

4) Did I mention I love the water?

5) I think I made almost this exact post (minus the commentary on Barracudas) a couple of years ago, after another long hiatus of not swimming. But most of you weren’t reading this journal then, so I can pretend it counts as new content, right?

Swimming good. I just wish I didn’t have to go to so much work to keep my hair from becoming chlorine-damaged. Otherwise I’d be in the water every day, like I was when I was nine.

turning point

I shouldn’t have stayed up this late, but I couldn’t stop in the middle of either of those scenes.

I’ve passed the halfway point in the novel. It came just shy of 60K — I’m at 60,210 right now — which might or might not be precisely half the wordcount; I think not. It’s probably about three-quarters of the way through Act Three. But it’s the point at which the novel pivots, at which it stops moving away from the beginning and starts moving toward the end.

Things went boom, as one might expect.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. Technically I wrote the crucial moment a month ago, on my way back from London, but it wasn’t real until it went into the novel. Now all the stuff that created this situation will start to come out. Now the depth of backstory — the reason I’m writing this novel — will become apparent.

Now my characters are scroooooowed.

It seems the right place to leave them for tonight.

Authorial sadism: All of it, of course. But the “forgive me” lines are the ones that hurt the most.

LBR quota: Love led to blood. As it so often does.

Totally random gripe, but you know what? I’m not actually a fan of the way the web is getting more multimedia. (This gripe brought to you by the Onion, which has too much video and audio content these days for my taste. I miss when it was mostly text.)

Why does this irritate me? Because 95% of the time I’m at the computer, I’m listening to music. My own music. If a website loads up some song (MySpace, I’m looking at you) or I click on an innocuous-looking link and find a video starting to play, I have to go pause my music — or, as I more often do, just back up to the previous page and go find something else that won’t interrupt me. Also, I can read text at my own pace, whereas a video makes me go at its pace — and when it’s seven minutes long, I generally decide I don’t care enough about whatever it is, and I go do something else.

Which is not to say I never want to watch videos. I just want to know that’s what’s coming. A lot of people these days put a (pdf) warning when a link leads to an Adobe file, since many of us dislike having Adobe launch out of nowhere, and don’t always remember to check the url we’re being pointed at before we click on it. I’d love to see a similar thing for videos, so I don’t get ambushed by them. Then I can decide whether I want to go watch a video right now or not. Also? Don’t just link saying “This is awesome” or some such. If you do that to a webpage, I can skim the content briefly and decide whether it’s something that interests me. If I don’t know what a video’s about, I’m not going to sit around and wait to find out, then decide whether I, too, think it’s awesome. (It usually isn’t anyway.)

I also don’t follow any video podcasting on blogs. I’d follow audio podcasting if I could be bothered to put it on my iPod (and video too, maybe, if I had an iPod that supported it), but not watching or listening on my computer. Again with the wanting to move at my own pace thing. And being able to skim over the stuff that doesn’t interest me.

In the grand scheme of things, this is not an epic problem; I’m far more concerned with writing my novel and catching up on my e-mail and what our legislators will do about the White House thumbing its nose at them. But it’s a minor irritant, and I thought y’all might like a post that isn’t about MNC.

So warn folks when you’re linking to a video, and give some sense of what the video is. Or Angry Kitten will come after you.

bloody heck.

When I don’t know a fact for this novel, I can make it up, within the limits of what I do know. So, for example, I don’t actually know which palace Elizabeth was living in during April 1590. But I know St. James’ was a royal palace, and that various other palaces were usually occupied in the summer or autumn or winter, so I can put her in St. James’ that spring and be content.

My problem is that, once I learn a fact, I can’t make myself ignore it.

The solution to this ought to be for me to stop researching. If I hadn’t dug through my books for more detailed information on Elizabeth’s coronation procession, I never would have found a reference to a text which some kind soul (hah) put online which lets me know exactly the route she took, and therefore I wouldn’t know she never went near Candlewick Street, and therefore the flashback scene I had in mind that requires her to be there during her coronation procession would be just fine and dandy in my mind.

But now I know. And I can’t make myself ignore her real processional route just because I want her to pass by a certain significant half-buried rock on Candlewick Street.

<grumble mutter hmpf>

Okay, fine. I’ll work this differently. But my life really would be easier if I could either stop researching, or ignore what I read. (But then what would be the point of reading it?)