It seems that once you get one thing right (or wrong) in a story, there’s a domino effect of right (or wrong) answers to questions that appeared at the beginning or along the way. At least, that’s how I’m experiencing the fallout of my realization last week that I had the wrong ending and villain.
Over the weekend I took part in a 24-hour meditation marathon. Yesterday morning, from the depths of stillness and no-time I came back to my apartment at around 7.00am and after a short nap I began working on my story.
I discovered that a character I had thought was one of the bad guys is actually good. And that my wrong thinking was also the reason I could never pin down this character, get a visual of him or see his face. It was because his role was wrong and therefore everything I had connected him to was wrong. What this illumination of my wrong thinking revealed was the solution to so many questions I had not previously been able to answer. How my villain was able to find the realm of the Raven King, why the Sun Queen fell in love with the Raven King if he was a dark lord, and how my villain gained power. Most importantly, something I hadn’t been able to visualize until now—what the realms of the Sun Queen and the Raven King look like, and what kinds of people and creatures inhabit them—has begun to take shape in my imagination.
I’m a long way from fleshing any of this out—in fact, I haven’t yet begun to—but I’m a lot farther along than I was a week and a half ago; and all because I listened to my character who said I had the wrong ending and from there I discovered the right villain.
9th of December 2011
Mossycoat
I was reading the folktale Mossycoat on the subway the other day, as I travelled to and from the preview exhibition of Elizabeth Taylor’s vast collection of jewellery, clothes, etc., up for sale at Christie’s in New York, next week. I’ve read Mossycoat before but, reading it this time, I suddenly realized that I had been trying to force my characters into an ending they never wanted. When I wrote my journal yesterday, a very different ending began to reveal itself, and it made so much sense because it was true to the characters. The true villain began to emerge and that also made sense. Today, other elements I had got entirely wrong are beginning to correct themselves. I feel a sense of relief (and victory) even though I haven’t begun to write any of the narrative.
I understand now why J.K. Rowling said that writing the ending of her seven-book epic early on was her way of confirming that she would get there.
5th of December 2011
It’s been almost six months since I posted to this blog. So much has changed in my world of writing. The day after I wrote my last post, I did something that made me realize why my subconscious had such a hard time grasping plot the way so many craft books advocate crafting story. (Note that I used plot and story in the same sentence…I’ve since realized these two words are not interchangeable and therein lies my transformation to my relationship to writing fiction).
Over the summer I was quite ill with bronchitis and didn’t have the energy to read much or to write. I used what little energy I had on watching videos of J.K. Rowling on youtube.com. What struck me the most was her belief in her ability to tell a story and her belief in the story she says chose her, and that she chose to write. I realized that as much as I liked Miss Hourglass, I didn’t really believe in it, in the way JKR was speaking of belief. My story was a manufactured idea I had come up with to fit a class requirement.
I began asking myself why I had loved reading so much as a child, what excited me about books more than any other activity. It was the anticipation that every time I opened a book to start a new story, I believed with all my heart that no matter what happened to the hero or heroine, in the end, he or she would prevail. That hope and belief of good prevailing over evil sustained me through a childhood filled with uncertainty and a number of difficulties that many children are forced to endure but should never have to.
Out of my contemplation, another set of characters began to emerge. I kept Elizabeth in there for awhile but eventually sent her back to her own story. After that, my new characters began to speak up for themselves. Several months later, I am without classes and also without a writing coach. I’ve finally accepted that how I work as fiction writer is not any different to how I processed ideas as an article and non-fiction writer. And that no amount of trying to squeeze myself into the structures that craft books or classes offer is going to change the way I’m hardwired to write. Arthur C. Clarke sums up my process perfectly.
“When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time—20 years in the case of Imperial Earth, and 10 years in the case of the novel I’m presently working on. So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas. It’s amazing how the subconscious self works on these things. I don’t worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy.”
For the first time I know why I want to be a writer and not anything else. I no longer look outside myself for how to write (craft) my story. There are no more craft books or classes in my life. Just the daily routine of writing—free writing at this point—in my journal about anything and everything; exactly as I used to work when I wrote articles every day for a living. Above all, there’s an abiding conviction that everything I need to write the story I’m working on, is inherent within the idea that came to me; including (and especially) the structure it needs to be told.
P.S. I should say that without having decided that this was going to be my “year of magical writing,” and committing myself to making it such, I doubt very much I would have come full circle and found myself as writer. I needed the classes and my writing coach and the struggle with craft books whose process made no sense (because they are counterintuitive to how I work). I needed them all, to find myself. I’m not sure why, but it seems to be that this is how seeking and finding works: you go down many wrong alleyways and paths until you discover the truth of who you are as a writer was within you, all along.
7th of June 2011
A letter to my Coach
The title of this post is not as elegant as that of Ezra Pound’s poem, The River Merchant’s Wife: a letter. I chalk this up to the decline in literary notes in the 21st Century.
I wrote Eric Elfman (my writing coach) an email earlier today, in which I attempted to articulate the mindset in which I currently find myself, with Miss Hourglass (and her heavenly undoing):
Eric,
I’d love to talk but it also can wait. I don’t have writing to show you but I am struggling with structure. At the same time, I pulled a short piece of writing from my first free write session on May 27 when I began working with the idea of the angel as narrator, and I was inspired. I go back and forth between thinking at moments I can write a novel and total despair that I’ll never grasp the structure intuitively enough to actually be able to do it. It’s probably also related to the fact that I simply can’t see the whole story (plot) in my head right now and that discourages me. I feel so much of the time that I’m free writing, I’m searching for the story. Plus I write things and wonder: how can I get the logic to work so that it’s credible? And, then, I read a snippet like the one I pulled this morning, and I feel the whole gestalt of the story inside me, if only I could get at it through structure. It’s quite confusing, but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about and how this all goes inside a writer’s head!
I’m deeply inspired by Marcus Zusak’s experiment in The Book Thief, in which he uses Death as the narrator and at the same time segues into third person POV, omniscient and limited, without the conventional use of white space to denote a POV change.
Whether one believes God exists or not, in my attempt to construct a novel-length story, I am increasingly in awe of the Creative Principle that not only imagined a universe but is creating one. There’s simply so much to know and to learn and to figure out. I can hardly determine the inner conflict of one character; let alone imagine an entire universe. No wonder it’s taken fourteen billion years for human beings to emerge and develop as far as we have. Not to mention the evolution of matter and the expansion of time.
Yesterday, in my session with Eric Elfman, and partly through reading A Discovery of Witches, I began to embrace the enormity of world and character building required for my relatively simple (when compared to something like His Dark Materials) story. It’s one thing to come up with an interesting, even intriguing, idea. It’s entirely something else to bring it to fruition.
14th of April 2011
What do you hear?
Yes, yes. I’m supposed to be working on Miss Hourglass. But I keep thinking about The Seed Pearl, and Joshua and his natural gift with music that he remains unaware of even by the end of the story so that it retains a kind of purity that is untouched by the mind’s need to analyse and draw conclusions about how it works and why. And how his music heals and he doesn’t know that it does, he just plays. Flowers grow, people recover, minds open.
To Joshua, Hendrix music
from a certain perspective
is the same as Eric Whitacre’s.
Because he knows it’s so difficult, perhaps impossible, for the human mind to hold every layer of sound in its consciousness at the same time. And, yet, that is how Life is: multi-layered, multi-dimensional, the reason why multiverses and parallel times can co-exist. Why music can heal, why words can enlighten, why creation is, and can never die.
7th of April 2011
It don’t come easy
I read a blog post yesterday on “how to steal like an artist.” One of the big points in it is that there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9-14); that nothing is original. I felt cheated, reading this on a post that told me it was going to teach me how to steal like an artist. I assumed the writer meant, like a GREAT artist but I was wrong. He meant, like a mediocre artist, one who dresses up the classics with vampires, zombies and werewolves.
Picasso said, “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” He might have added, mediocre artists have rejected originality altogether and follow the path of least resistance, except I don’t think he gave two hoots about mediocrity.
I’m not sure where all this is leading except that I’ve been thinking about how difficult it is to be original and yet, when we have that initial spark of inspiration, inherent in it is the feeling of no limitation, that anything is possible, that everything is filled with a sense of wonder that has yet to give rise to the new. And that we have been called to create a world in which Originality can take form beyond the spark of its infinite potential.
5th of April 2011
A block of marble, a story, and me
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to construct a novel length story. I can see how naive I was six or seven years ago when I first set out to “paddle from Boston to London in a bathtub.” (Stephen King) The whole point of writing fiction is to make something magical happen, which is almost impossible while trying to navigate the Atlantic Sea in a tubular hollow of tin.
Right now, I feel like Michelangelo (without his talent) trying to determine how to carve David from an imperfect block of marble.
22nd of March 2011
In the Beginning is the End
I have seen the ending of The Seed Pearl or at least the denouement. And I think Gianna has resolved her impossible choice of either having to hand over the ultimate weapon of destruction OR to let best friend die.
The denouement emerged from having to answer Mary Buckham’s character templates in her Short Synopsis class that started last week and ends this Saturday. I love the fact that the story now ends with clear choices, and with the recognition that every action has consequences for which we, and not God, are responsible, no matter how things began.
20th of March 2011
The miracle of a structured mind
Working in Mary Buckham’s class on writing the short synopsis has been the catalyst for discovering Gianna’s emotional arc. I say it has been meaningful, thus far, because the class is still going and I have yet to complete a number of her templates. But Mary is, hands down for me, the best structural teacher I’ve met or read. She knows how to illuminate the essential points through each writer’s exercise until you see the same pattern emerging in every single writer regardless of concept, character, plot—all the things that make the story unique to an individual writer’s imagination.
For the first time ever (as far as I can recall), I actually “nailed” (Mary’s word) the emotional arc of a main character. I did it by studying her comments on the same template completed by other writers in the class. I noticed she raised the same two key questions: The emotional change at the end of the story must be present as an opposing value or belief at the beginning. The second thing was that every sentence must count in providing the reader with information specific to this story. Not vague generic ideas, concepts or emotions but specific beliefs and choices that apply only to this character in this story.
I often wonder how I ever managed to stage any theatre piece in my former life as a director, because I was clearly winging structure back then. But what I love about the human mind is that once it groks the structure of the task at hand, its ability, in this case to create a coherent arc of the character’s emotional journey, is nothing short of miraculous.
