I’ll go crazy posting “Thank you!” responses to everybody who congratulated me on the ring, so I’ll do the lame thing and say “thank you!” here instead. I am very pleased by my new sparkly, and am glad other people like it, too.
Now we just have the rest of the wedding to plan, ne?
This has been brewing in my head since Scalzi posted his “advice to young writers” thing a while back, wherein the first two points were 1) your writing is crap and 2) that’s okay, we all started out as crap and got better. (Insert, of course, a brouhaha from people who never read past the “your writing is crap” line to see what he meant by that, and how it wasn’t half so offensive as they assumed.)
I had an apostrophe (I think you mean an epiphany, Swan) epiphany after reading through Scalzi’s advice and the responses to it.
If I hand you a paintbrush and tell you to paint the tree outside my office window, odds are you will suddenly feel awkward and clueless and utterly inadequate to the task. Even the physical experience of using a paintbrush isn’t that familiar to most of you, and it would take a lot of practice to get to the point where you could do anything good with it.
If I sit you down at the piano and tell you to play me a piece of music, all of a sudden you realize you have ten fingers, and now you’re asking them to behave independently and simultaneously in a way that is not at all like typing on a keyboard. And again, you would need practice before you could play much more than “Chopsticks.”
If I put you in front of a computer and tell you to write me a story, suddenly everybody thinks they can do it.
I think it’s easy for aspiring writers to assume they can do this because, after all, isn’t it stuff you do every day anyway? We all know how to hold a pen or a pencil and use it to form letters. Most of us, these days, know how to type. And we all use the English language. Isn’t that what writing is?
Yes, but.
There’s an undiscovered world inside that “but.” My epiphany was that I think a great many people fail to perceive the degree of craft that goes into telling a story. They see words on the page, but they don’t see the skills that are required to decide which word will be more effective, how to structure a sentence so it’s grammatical but doesn’t sound like every other sentence you’ve put down, how to get a paragraph to flow so the impact arrives at the right moment, how to build suspense and then resolution into a plot, how to reveal character through telling details instead of just telling, how to create images in the readers’ minds that will stay with them long after the book is closed.
Not everybody, of course. Some people look at a book and say, “I could never do that.” Some people start trying and immediately realize the difference between what they’re doing and what Admired Writer X did. But I’ve seen a lot of writers who, at least when they start out, seem to think there isn’t a learning curve with writing, just like there is with anything else.
Or maybe they just think their learning curve all happened in elementary school.
A common truism among writers goes something like this: you’ve got a million words of crap in you, and what you’ve got to do is write them. Only then can you get to the good words. What this translates to in non-literal terms is, writing takes practice, just like everything else does. One might as well say you’ve got a million notes of crap in you, and once you’ve played them all you can start being a good pianist. Etc. The point is, few if any of us get to skip the practice stage, and if it looks like someone has, they probably just did their practice out of sight. Me? I wrote my million words of crap when I was a teenager, because I already knew I wanted to be a writer. Someone who makes that decision at the age of forty just has a later start, is all.
But it has to be mindful practice. It has to be critical. Banging out dozens of short stories, each one replicating the mistakes of its predecessors, won’t do you any good, any more than banging out notes on the piano without concern for what they sound like will make you a better pianist.
The practice is necessary because, until you reach the point where you have the basics down, you’re going to have a hard time getting to the finer aspects. To continue with the piano analogy — because it’s one I have personal experience with — so long as you’re having to think consciously that a note printed on that line is a D, and you need to stretch your hand X far to form a sixth, and this is where middle C is, issues like interpretation and expression are Right Out. Likewise, you need enough unconscious familiarity with word choice and the formation of sentences and the punctuation of dialogue that your brain can devote itself to higher thoughts. It doesn’t mean you’ll never pause to think about those more basic issues, but they won’t be eating all your attention anymore.
You know how to use the English language, yes. But do you know how to use it well? Do you know what to do with it?
What we do isn’t half so easy as it looks.
This post will get buried in the deluge of Pottermania tomorrow, but I’ll never hear the end of it if I don’t put it up soon.
Folks, I’m getting married.
That’s been true for a year and five months now, but at last, two months before the wedding, I have the traditional proof. Ain’t it pretty? ^_^
The central stone is courtesy of Apollo Diamond, a company run by family friends of kniedzw, my soon-to-be better half. Djimon Hounsou’s son was not harmed in the making of this engagement ring.
80K on the nose. It’s a meaningless benchmark, when you get down to it — the lower limit of what one can generally sell as adult fantasy, but not the lower limit of my contract — but it’s a nice round number, and the point at which I start feeling like the book will end sometime soon.
Where by “soon” I mean “in another thirty thousand words or so.”
I can see from here to the end of Act Four. Most of Act Five has fallen into place in my head, except for a few things involving Deven. I’m chugging up the last long slope of the rollercoaster; once we crest the top of that hill, it’s going to be a downhill charge from here to the end.
Probably. I’ve been known to be wrong before. But it doesn’t feel like I’ll be wrong.
I’m in the middle of the second incredibly delicate conversation with Elizabeth. At least this time it’s a conversation with Elizabeth, instead of a conversation at Elizabeth like the last one was, damned canny close-mouthed queen that she is. The rest of Act Four will go something like this: oh crap, I think we were wrong; a tricky conversation with a personified natural landmark; oh holy shit were we wrong. Then on to Act Five, and Blowing Stuff Up. (feyangel, you may consider that an unintended tribute to BSU Pyrotechnics.)
I just wish I could figure out that one last piece of Act Five.
Authorial sadism: We’re in the part of the book where I lose track of it all. But aside from what I did to Suspiria, I think my favorite is probably the bit where Deven and Lune realize how different their two Courts are. Or, y’know, having to talk at Elizabeth, instead of with her.
LBR quota: We’re never without all three these days, but rhetoric was at the top of today’s menu, with the other two as side dishes.
Quoth Mrissa, on her own work: “Any minute now the last third of this novel is going to hunker down and make breakfast out of most of my grey matter.”
Quoth me, in response: “You know, that perfectly encapsulates the current state of my life.”
I go to sleep, and I’m thinking of this book. I wake up, and I’m thinking of this book. Leave me unattended for five minutes, and where does my brain go? I can only break out of it by scheduling other things: there’s X-Files watching on Sunday; I’m going to go do that. (But if there’s a crazy person in the episode, my hindbrain is taking notes for Tiresias.) There’s D&D on Tuesday; I need to remember to switch gears. (And it’s a good thing Lessa’s so easy a character for me to play, or that wouldn’t work.) HP7’s coming out soon; I’ll be spending most of Saturday reading it. (If it takes me too long, will I quit so I can get my writing done, or just pull [another] all-nighter?)
The last time I remember a book eating my head so thoroughly, it was the first one I’d ever written. It was (and is) an urban fantasy set in Canada (no, I don’t know why; that’s where the book wanted to be), and during the home stretch, kniedzw would look at me periodically and say, “you’re in Canada, aren’t you?” Now it isn’t Canada; it’s the sixteenth century. It feels like my brain has taken up permanent residence in the story, and is only coming out occasionally to visit the twenty-first century, rather than the other way around.
I’ve got a theory for what the similarity means, and I hope it’s true. Writing that first novel was a watershed for me. I consider it my transition from apprentice to journeyman work; I’d acquired all the basic skills, the last one being the ability to finish what I started, and after that I was qualified to earn a day’s wages as a writer (though it took me some time to actually do so). I’m not going to claim MNC is my transition from journeyman to master — that shift is yet in my future — but I think, I hope, this is another watershed for me, another transition to a higher level of skill. It feels like it, when I’m not wallowing in Standard Writerly Self-Doubt, but it’s hard to judge how sharp and white and straight its teeth are when it’s lunching on my brain. (Oh yes, it’s getting not just breakfast, but lunch and dinner out of me.) It’s the best explanation I can think of for why none of the six novels I wrote in between, including Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch, ate my head this badly.
Or at least it’s the explanation I like best.
So if I’m staring off into space, or I don’t answer e-mails, or seem otherwise to be Not Quite Here, you’ll know why. I’m in Canada the sixteenth century. And since I probably have another thirty thousand words to go, I won’t be coming back any time soon.
Point A: I have stubbornly refused to miss a day of writing since the beginning of June.
Point B: It is a long-standing principle of mine that the day is not over until the sun has risen or I have slept.
Point C: Check the time-stamp on this post.
If A, and B, but C, then . . . I’m a bloody idiot, is what.
As the presence of the word “Aquarian” in the title might suggest, this book ranges from fuzzy-headed neopagan pablum, to fairly well-researched archaeological and folkloric history, to a random dissection of a William Blake poem, depending on which article you’re reading.
The middle category is, of course, the one that was the most useful to me. There isn’t a terrible amount in here that was utterly new, but it helped reinforce some stuff I already knew, and offered a vareity of tidbits (like the London Stone, or the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow, or a reminder of the existence of Walbrook) that I’m smuggling into the novel where I can. I wish the article on “London Leys and Lines” had been more useful to me, though. Alas, it failed to present me with the kind of sacred/mystical geography I was hoping for.
The other thing of use in here is the bibliographies attached to (most of) the articles. If I ever write that London novel that’s in my head (which, given the research it would require, I don’t even want to think about right now), I’ll have some good leads on books to pick up.
I feel bad for having not read this entire book, but it’s no reflection on the quality; I just conceded defeat on getting through the entire thing in one day, and quit once I’d passed into the stuff that will be happening after Midnight Never Come is over.
The moronic thing is, I had to read this book to find out whether I needed to read this book. Less cryptically, I was trying to decide once and for all whether or not Kit Marlowe is going to be a character in MNC. There are vague reasons to put him in, and vague reasons not to, so I decided I’d read a biography of him and see if any historical felicities offered themselves for use. (A rather large amount of this novel is built on such foundations.) As it turns out, no such felicities were to be found, at least not ones that are compelling enough to shoehorn themselves into MNC. Marlowe was mostly involved with Burghley, not Walsingham, and his involvement with the other Walsingham (i.e. Sir Thomas, not Sir Francis) mostly grew up after the point at which I’m writing.
So Kit is likely to be Sir Gay-Atheist-Spy Not Appearing In This Book. Having said that, I do quite like Riggs’ work, and if I don’t end up reading the remainder, it’ll be because I’m getting bloody sick of the sixteenth century, not because I didn’t like the biography.
The big selling point of this book, to me, is that it grounds itself thoroughly in the historical and cultural context of the period. Which is making a virtue of necessity: Riggs points out in the prologue that we know precious few facts about Marlowe’s adult life, and the documents relating to him are either written by him in the voice of another (i.e. plays and poems and translations), or else written about him by other people; he left behind precisely one “first-person utterance” (as Riggs terms it). You can’t get at Marlowe directly; you have to reconstruct him from oblique evidence. To quote Riggs again, “All the evidence about his mutinous cast of mind sits at one remove from his own voice [. . .] He is an irretrievably textual being.”
Which means this book approaches the “gay atheist spy” trifecta by contextualizing the indirect evidence in more concrete facts about the period. Take the notion of Marlowe as a homosexual: Riggs denies that the term as we understand it today would fit Marlowe, since “homosexuality” as such did not exist in the Elizabethan mind. Sodomy was a behavior, not an identity, and was linked with other behaviors like heresy and treason. But given the social context in which Marlowe lived during a goodly chunk of his life; the way that his education promoted homosocial behavior, intimate male bonding, and sharing a bed with other men; and the kinds of classical texts to which he was exposed during that education, there are basically two options for his sexual behavior: either he was celibate, or he was a sodomite. There simply weren’t any women in his vicinity for him to do anything with. And sodomy certainly did happen.
As far as atheism goes, I was floored by the detailed discussion of Elizabethan higher education. Its purpose was to turn out good little leaders of the Church of England, but its design . . . well, let’s just say I’m surprised more of the men who went through it didn’t end up Catholics, Puritans, or atheists. Teaching young men to defend and attack arguments as a logical exercise, without any particular concern for the truth of the argument, nor any particular intent to arrive at a conclusion, seems a pretty good way to guarantee they end up casting a cynical eye on the things you then tell them to believe.
This book deserved better attention than I was able to give it, but I was conducting a high-speed reading with a specific purpose. In particular, I would like to come back to it some day when I’m more familiar with Marlowe’s writings: I started really skimming a ways into the detailed discussion of Tamburlaine, even though it was less a lit-crit analysis of the text and more a survey of how it fit into the political and theatrical scene of the 1580s. Then I read the Faustus chapter, skipped ahead to his death, and quit.
I don’t think Kit will be in this novel, except very, very peripherally. Which is a pity. But I’m not going to cram him in just for the sake of the Marlowe fangirls, even if I am one myself.
Having written and pasted in the Gog and Magog scene, I figured out why I like writing these flashbacks so much.
Up until I was about eighteen or so — nearly nineteen — I wrote stories non-linearly, starting with the scenes that excited me the most. This ended up not being an effective strategy for me, for reasons I’ve documented elsewhere. These days I write mostly from the beginning to the end, so that the material that comes between the big set-pieces and watershed character moments won’t utterly suck.
These flashbacks, though? They’re all the fun of my old method, with none of the downside. I don’t need connective tissue, with them. I don’t need them to grow organically out of the scenes that come before them in the text. They’re snapshots of important stuff happening, presented with all the drama and spectacle I can cram in, and then the minute the excitement’s over I’m gone, back to 1590 and the main narrative. I can sink fleets, murder giants, generally Blow Shit Up, and then bounce off without fretting the details of what happens immediately afterward.
I get to write my shiny flashy candy-bar scenes whenever they come clear in my head.
No wonder I’m having so much fun with them.
If you, like me, are excited by the prospect of the upcoming Beowulf movie — if Neil Gaiman’s description of it as “blood and mead and madness” sounds about right to you — then you might want to check out the clips from the score that are available online. (YouTube clips, alas — not audio files. Oh well.)
Three notes into the first clip, I thought, “this sounds old-style.” And it lived up to that expectation. I don’t mean it as an insult; I mean that I immediately thought of Lawrence of Arabia and similar kinds of movies. Mind you, I love a lot of more modern scores, but this one has a grandiosity that’s really appealing. If the clips are representative of the whole thing, I will certainly be buying this one.
And in the meantime, I can look forward to the movie.
(Non-gratuitous icon post, btw. I’ve been meaning to get me a horn icon for a while.)
God only knows how much attention, if any, they pay to people phoning their offices, but it takes about two minutes and probably can’t hurt. If your senator is on this list:
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT)
Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE)
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE)
Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN)
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID)
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME)
Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN)
Sen. George Voinavich (R-OH)
Sen. John Sununu (R-NH)
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR)
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Then think about giving them a call. There’s a vote coming up that could restore habeas corpus, and those are apparently the people who haven’t yet announced a position on the matter. Phone numbers that should work:
1(800)828 – 0498
1(800)459 – 1887
1(800)614 – 2803
1(866)340 – 9281
1(866)338 – 1015
1(877)851 – 6437
Just ask for your senator’s office. I told some nice young man on Lugar’s staff why I was calling, gave him my name and phone number, and that was that.
I spent most of the morning wrestling with the IRS website.
Don’t you wish you could have such an exciting life?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
