(Lack of) Direction

Confession: I always sound more sure of myself than I actually am. That's even true when I sound unsure.

Reading:

• "Pa's Darling," by Louis Auchincloss

Writing:

• Untitled Dark Fantasy Project

Revising:

• "Cora and the Sea"

Have you ever noticed that people in stories always seem to know what's going on, what to do next? I never feel like that. I think there's a tendency to let the narrative sweep the characters in a story along, and since the writer knows what's going to happen, the characters often don't worry either. There's never any long periods of time where the characters are wandering around doing nothing. The answers always come at just the right moment to move the story along.

Part of that is because the writer must keep the attention of the reader. After all, no one wants to read people sitting around doing nothing. Is there a way to do both, though?

I think J.K. Rowling managed it in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In fact, Harry feeling lost and without direction was a major plot point in the first half of the book, yet it was still an enjoyable read. I think that's because things kept happening during that time, even if they did not serve the ends of the characters.

And that's the key, I think. I have to remember that my characters have desires of their own. Sometimes they are in accord with the plot, sometimes not. And the latter case is often the most interesting.

Publication Status:

• Submitted: 2
• Accepted: 1
• Rejected: 1
  

50th Post Extravaganza

Confession: Yeah, I didn't do any writing this morning. Or exercising.

Reading:

• Someplace to be Flying, by Charles de Lint
• Dark Force Rising, by Timothy Zahn

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Cora and the Sea"

This is my fiftieth blog post. And you know what? It's working.

Never before have I thought about writing for such a long period together. I've always reached the low point in the sine wave, and abandoned it until I hit the next upswing. That's not to say that I've accomplished a lot over the last few weeks, but at the same time, I haven't been entirely unproductive, either.

I feel like I need to learn more about the craft of devising plots, and to do that, I want to go in-depth into a book with a very intricate plot. Maybe intricate symbolism as well, something that I can really sink my teeth into.

I have a couple of possibilities. The first is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Another is Harry Potter. Both are books for which it is clear that a plan existed from the very beginning, and it was carried through to the end. I think I like the writing style of Strange a little better, although the plot in Harry Potter is more intricate, the characters more varied in a way. Of course, there's nothing to say I can't do both, eventually.

So here's the plan. Instead of blogging about Strange, I'm going to do a wiki of it. It will start with a chapter by chapter analysis, but that will also begin to include information on the characters and personalities of the characters. I want to see how and why I build up a certain image of them in my mind, and how that arcs through the story. There's no better way to do that than a wiki.

Of course, it's a big project. I'll have to work on it gradually, and set a schedule so I keep working on it. But that is a task for another day.

World Building and Plot

Confession: I'm always the first to show up at parties.

Reading:

• Someplace to be Flying, by Charles de Lint

Listening:

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Cora and the Sea"

As soon as I finish "Ferian Fetlock," I'm going to go back to Dairhenien's Library for a while. The status at the top of my posts won't say "Writing," since I won't be writing. It will say "Developing." I'm still in the world building and plotting phase.

I go back and forth between these two activities when working on this novel/series. The world building is the fantasy equivalent of research, and it is both easier and more difficult in its way. Whenever I want to figure out what the culture of given place is like, I make it up. What could be simpler? But the tough part is making sure that the details I create are internally consistent with the world I've created... and I have to be certain that any unusual details can be communicated through the story without needless exposition. If a world concept distracts from the story, it has to go. All must serve the story.

When I get tired of world building, I work on plot. I have a general arc for the series, and pretty decent idea of the first book, but there's no depth. I usually work on plot until I get stuck, then do some world building to move forward until I get bored, then go back to plot.

By the way, you can see from the status header of my post that I'm now listening to the audiobook version of Harry Potter book 7. Honestly, I listened through book 6 just recently too, but didn't think to mention it. I'll make sure that status is included from now on, since listening to an audiobook is as legitimate a way of experiencing a story as reading.

As long as they're unabridged.

How should it have ended?

Confession: I love learning languages, but I'm often too embarrassed to try to use them.

Reading:

• Someplace to be Flying, by Charles de Lint

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Dolly Hobbles"

I finished reading The Van late last night, and I was left with a profound feeling of sadness. It wasn't just that the book was over, although I always tend to feel a little let down after finishing a book I enjoy. The longer the series, the stronger the feeling. In fact, it takes a particularly satisfying ending to avoid that sensation. The most recent time that has happened was with Harry Potter.

But there was a bit more than that. The Van ended on a sad note. I'll go more into the story itself later, but so much was left open. A friendship was damaged and not yet healed. The motivation one character had to continue was gone. It was an ending filled with destruction, not creation; with loss rather than gain.

Oh, it was well written. That's part of why it hurt so much, because I related to those characters. And for a comic novel to have such a sad ending, well, I just wished the series had gone on, that's all. The previous two had ended on a happy note.

But perhaps that has to do more with the main characters of those novels. In The Commitments and The Snapper, the main characters were Jimmy Jr. and Sharon, young people whose lives were ahead of them. The Van focused on their father, Jimmy Sr., and his was at an end.

Not that he was about to die. But he had been laid off his job, and the book dealt with his depression and purposelessness in the face of forced retirement and poverty. He faced his own inadequacies and did not conquer them. He faced his own humanity and flinched.

By the end, perhaps, he had learned from his mistakes, but to what purpose? Where did he have yet to go?

I don't know, and perhaps Doyle didn't either, else he might have continued the story. We always assume that characters stay the same when their story is done, that they continue on with their same momentum perpetually until the window opens and we see them once more. If they were real people, that wouldn't be true, and there's no reason it has to be true with fiction, either. The thought that sometime down the road, Jimmy Sr. finds a purpose... well, that's the ending I want.

But it wasn't the one I got.

Sci-fi versus Fantasy

Confession: I have to be very careful not to read special significance into coincidences. I think I'm just predisposed to find meaning in randomness.

Reading:

• The Van, by Roddy Doyle

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising

• "Dolly Hobbles"

I've never been a big fan of utter realism in fiction. What's the point of reading about reality? There's enough of that in real life to go around. But my tastes have shifted from a love for science fiction to a love for fantasy.

I wouldn't say there was ever a point that I disliked fantasy. The Hobbit was one of my early favorites, although I started The Lord of the Rings too early to really get into it properly until much later. But there wasn't a great deal of good fantasy stories for my age range available in the 80s and early 90s. The age of Harry Potter had not yet begun.

No, this was the age of Star Trek. Thanks to Reading Rainbow, I found out that LeVar Burton was in another show too, and that looked pretty cool. So from 1987 until my sophomore year in college, I was a dedicated Trekkie. At one point, I had over 200 of the Star Trek novels, as well as every single episode on tape, recorded off of television. My greatest literary achievement of high school, the fifteen part epic entitled The Happy Wars Saga was heavily based on the Starfleet system outline in Star Trek. Essentially, it was a universe in which I and a few of my friends were happy to play.

By the time I got to college, that fervor started to wane. I can still remember when I stopped reading Star Trek fiction. It was in Wal-Mart when I saw a certain paperback--a Star Trek/X-Men crossover. My illusions were shattered.

Ten years later, I read that book. It sucked, but not as bad as I was afraid of. It still read like Mary Jane fan fiction.

I had an immediate outlet, though. This was 1998, and Star Wars fervor had begun, first with the release of the Special Editions, and soon with the advent of the first prequel. I'm going to go on record right now to say that The Phantom Menace is my favorite Star Wars movie. (That's right, fuckers. That's not even a confession, because I don't feel guilty about it.)

But Star Wars is often held up as somewhere between sci-fi and fantasy, and I always related more to the Jedi than to droids or bounty hunters or X-wing pilots. And there was more.

Without the monthly influx of two or three Star Trek novels, my reading output went elsewhere. It found Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, and revisited old favorites like Anne McCaffrey's Pern series and the venerable Lord of the Rings. Then I discovered Terry Pratchett, and he displaced Douglas Adams in my mind as the king of humorous speculative fiction.

Wherefore this change? I think it's because science fiction is all about dehumanization, and fantasy is all about being human. And between the two, I know which I'd rather fantasize about. I never really read much sci-fi outside of the Star Trek universe, and when you think about it, that show was never really about the technology either, only where it could take you.

I love stories about honor, and by the time you get to the post-apocalyptic worlds of science fiction, honor no longer exists... or if it does, it's in a story like Dune that is as much fantasy as Star Wars.