Month: June 2014

Why are my peripheral characters so much easier to write?

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My writing over the last couple of weeks could not be more schizophrenic.  One day I’m on fire, the next day I’m frozen in ice.  First I’m barely able to type the words as quickly as they are coming to me, then you could sail ships through the gaps in between the words that come to me.

So, am I up or down?  Manic or Depressed?  Today, I’m up.  I’ve just written a scene which flowed from the reservoir of my brain like a rain-fed stream, full of (what I imagine must be) crackling dialogue, crisp, direct prose, and even the delicate flourish of metaphor coloring the pages.  Difficult to write good metaphors on the fly while I’m drafting, I’ve found.  Some days it just doesn’t happen, and I certainly don’t like to force it.  It bogs me down.  Those days I leave lots of notes to Future Me: FIND SOME BETTER COMPARISONS or THIS IS LIKE SOMETHING BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT YET, FIX IT.  None of those notes today or yesterday, though.

A good writing session, then.  But still one that leaves me a little flummoxed, because it’s a scene taking place entirely between secondary characters.  Not leading roles.  Not even supporting actors, really.  These are characters that only appear a couple of times in the book, and writing them is as easy as swinging a cat in my house and hitting a toddler toy (which is to say, it basically happens on its own without interference from me multiple times on the daily).  And it makes me fargoing ANGRY.  These guys are bit parts.  Icing on the cake.  Curlicues on the calligraphy.  They’re not, by any stretch of the imagination, the main players.  Sure, they have bearing on the main action of the story, but they are by their nature peripheral.  They’re not who I have spent my time with.  They’re not who my audience will spend their time with.  So why are they so goldfingered easy to write?

Maybe it’s because the stakes are low for these characters.  Well, not for the characters themselves — obviously they have their own concerns in the storyline as it pertains to them — but rather for myself as storyteller, my particular stakes in regard to these characters are low.  Low stakes means low pressure.  Low pressure means I can just let it happen, like an old guy squeezing out a few drops after a prostate exam.  I don’t have to worry about what repercussions their interaction will have on the plot, because I’ve already decided that, and they can’t affect the plot very much in their own right anyway… kind of like a fridge magnet stuck to the side of the space shuttle wouldn’t alter its trajectory too much (yeah, I know the space shuttles are defunct now, I’m just… jeez, okay?  Leave me alone.).  I can just set these guys alone in a room, wind them up like clockwork toys, and let them do what they do.

What’s frustrating is not that these peripheral characters have been so easy to write, these last few days.  The frustrating part is how much I’ve been struggling with my main cast lately.  It feels like, even on my good days, the strings of authorial intent are clearly visible tugging on their puppet-like hands and mouths.  On my bad days, it’s more like I’m shoving cardboard standees around a stage and taking still photographs, trying to make it look like it all fits together when it looks like a bad diorama from the third grade.  Hackneyed.  Forced.  Boring.  Awful!  You would think that my main characters would be the ones I’m in love with, the ones that spring fully-formed from my head like Venus and go out into the world creating wild plot devices and surprise twists.  And to be fair, they’ve done their share of that.  But I think I’m growing just a little bit weary of them.  I guess it’s not terribly surprising that I should do that; after all, I’ve been spending the better part of one thousand words a day, five days a week, with them for oh, going on four months now.  Still, my main characters should be the ones I love, right?  The ones I can’t wait to write for, the ones that just boil over when I put them on the page?

I’m just pontificating, here, but maybe I need to think of my main characters a little bit more in the way that I think about these bit parts; just step back off of them a little, loosen the reins, and allow them to do a bit of story-building on their own.  It feels like, as I get close to the end, I feel myself steering them more and more toward the ending I have in mind, which takes away their agency and, as a result, ends up being just really crappy storytelling.  Problem is, here at the end, there is very little story-building left to do, which means I’m going to have to go back and tear the engine out of this thing and let them do their story-building back in the middle where things started to go all squidgy, which is going to mean more rewriting and…

Hey, Future Me, are you reading this?  I’M SORRY.  I’M SO SORRY. But your job is getting bigger every day.  Good news is, the draft is almost finished, which means you get to start your job soon.  We’ve got your office all ready, and a case of bourbon to help you deal with it.  You’re going to need it.  Wait, where are you running off to?  Come back!  WE CAN’T HIRE SOMEBODY ELSE TO okay he’s gone.  Sharknado.  Anybody else feel like editing this first draft for me?  I just totally flaked on myself.  Or rather, my future self flaked on me.  Or rather rather, my future self will be flaking on me by the time I…

God, make it stop.  I’m at 95% now.  I can make it.  I might burst into flames as I cross the finish line, but I can make it.

On YA Lit: Should Adults Be Embarrassed to Read It?

Pavowski4 Comments

There’s apparently been a bit of a stir lately over this article on Slate condemning adult consumers of Young Adult Literature.  To condense, the author over there, one Ruth Graham, feels (rather strongly) that YA lit is strictly for YAs and if you’re not a YA then you shouldn’t be reading YA lit.

Okay, that’s perhaps an intentional oversimplification, but the argument is simple.  As an author, you must know your audience.  (An interesting comment for me to make given my schizophrenia lately over exactly who my audience for AI might be.)  And an author writing for young adults presumably makes different choices in their stories than an author writing for adults, whether it’s simplifying plots and making characters’ choices more transparent, using saucier or more elevated language, or even the entire subject matter of the story.  So the author is writing for a specific group of people (though that group might itself be incredibly diverse).

Let’s just take that on its face.  Say you’re an accomplished author, and you write your book about robot-fighting tree-farmers in post-carbon-emissions formerly-known-as-America.  (Don’t steal that, it’s MINE.)  But you write it specifically from the point of view of, and full of the lingo of, and bulging with references to, let’s say, south Floridian retirees.  Why would you make such a choice?  This is the strange and wonderful land of Hypothetica, just keep your hands and feet inside the chopper.Read More »

Why the World Cup is Awesome, Even if You Don’t Know Anything About Soccer

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I imagine that I am not all that much unlike many other Americans at the moment in that I know very little about soccer (sorry, football) and yet at the moment I’m trying to pretend that I’m obsessed with it.  Except I’m not so much pretending as I am actually becoming actually fascinated and interested and a little bit mouth-foamy over it.

Seriously, I cannot pull myself away from the games.  If the USA is playing, I’m watching.  This is deeply and personally important even though I’ve never particularly cared about soccer (sorry, football) in my life.  (Also, full disclosure, I coached middle school soccer for a year and yes, I am probably more invested in these games than I was in those.  Something about watching from the air-conditioning from my home instead of the sweltering heat of the sideline, not seeing my team (yes, actually my team that I actually coached) get trounced 6-1 just makes it more enjoyable.)  But if I happen to catch another game on, I’ll watch that, too.  My wife gets frustrated — “you never watch soccer, you never talk about soccer, what is this all of a sudden??” — and I find myself saying things which might be true, like “well since USA won their game, they might meet the winner of this match down the line, and I want to know what they’re up against.”  Because, naturally, team USA needs me, the average schlub, to know what their potential opposition might try to pull so that they can hopefully stop it.

There is something infectious about it, though, soccer (sorry, football).  It’s one of the strangest and most natural sports I’ve seen.  Strange because the pacing of it is off the wall.  Seriously, televised bowling has better pacing.  Ping-pong is more predictable.  Soccer (sorry, football) is twenty minutes of dinking a ball around a field that really is just too big for anything that isn’t motorized followed by ten seconds of frenetic, heart-pounding mouth-foaming blood-boiling couch-stomping action.  But it’s incredibly natural because it simply flows like melted butter across piping hot pancakes.  Nobody has to be told what to do.  Things don’t have to be explained, reviewed, argued, discussed.  The game just happens and continues to happen until a goal is scored or until somebody gets their knee dislocated, but even then they only stop for maybe five minutes.  True story: I was at a football game — college football game, mind you, not the World Anything — and a player was injured.  Okay, injured player, that’s bad news, but the action was stopped for thirty minutes while a parade of coaches, trainers, officials, and I think even the player’s scholarship official ran on and off the field seeing to this kid.  Thirty minutes!  The soccer (sorry, football) game (sorry, match) is half over by that time!

I should mention, also, that I’m watching most of the games on Univision, and if you’re not watching the games on Univision, you’re missing out.  Okay, the real reason I’m watching on Univision is because I don’t have cable and ESPN has a stranglehold on the broadcast rights, so I’m boned otherwise.  But seriously, watch the games on Univision.  Or at least flip over now and then.  I don’t understand a word of what’s being said, and I don’t pretend to.  It just sounds like a couple of guys — I picture that guy, “The Most Interesting Man in the World” from the beer commercials — and another guy in a mariachi hat for some reason — discussing what might as well be politics over cigars in some dive bar, and then all of a sudden one of them is jumping on the bar, throwing his headset across the room, and shouting GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL and so am I, thrashing around my living room like some mariachi marionette.  (Seriously, how awesome is that little turn of phrase: mariachi marionette.  I don’t care, I’m kudos-ing myself for that one.)

As an endurance athlete…

Okay, sorry.  I had to pick myself up off the floor from the laughing fit that calling myself an “endurance athlete” induced.  As a practitioner of an endurance sport, let’s say, I have tremendous admiration for the soccer players (sorry, footballers).  You can’t watch these guys trot back and forth across that field (sorry, pitch) which might as well be a well-manicured airstrip without having a sense of the tremendous training and physical prowess they possess.  The kind of endurance that, well, let’s just say my wife would have a worse laughing fit than I just had if I compared their endurance to mine.  The kind of physical prowess that… god, you get the idea; let’s just move on, okay?  Jeez.

A thing occurs to me in watching these games, though, which is that I think I know why soccer (sorry, football) hasn’t taken off with American audiences (outside of the World Cup of course).  It’s the flow.  There are no stoppages, no timeouts, no ten-minute breaks to warm up a new pitcher.  We Americans are spoiled by the ever-present commercial break in which we go to the bathroom, grab another beer, serve up some bean dip, flip to another station to check the other game… whatever you do during the commercial break, you can’t do it when you’re watching soccer (sorry, football).  Because you never know when the sharknado is going to break loose and you’re going to have to throw a chair through a window because team USA just gave up the win with less than a minute left in stoppage time even though they had the victory completely locked up, I mean SERIOUSLY, did we just forget to play DEFENSE there at the end or WHAT!??

Er, I got sidetracked.  So yeah.  It’s not that American audiences can’t handle soccer (sorry, football).  It’s that the game itself doesn’t lend itself to standards of American advertising, which keeps it off the air because there are more profitable things the networks can air.  (If you thought networks were in the business of providing content to their audiencess, you were sorely mistaken.  Networks are in the business of providing audiences to their advertisers.)

But we’re a bright people.  Certainly one of us can come up with a way to stick some commercial breaks into the middle of a soccer game (sorry, match).  Mandatory three-minute water break when a new player comes on the field (sorry, pitch).  Mandatory review with commercial break every time the ball goes out of bounds.  Ten-minute explanation with graphics and holograms anytime offsides is called (seriously, if you can explain offsides in a single sentence that makes sense, you deserve a mariachi marionette).

So?  Get to it.  I’m back to watching some FOOTBALL.

Bound Howler

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Chuck’s challenge this week:  Subgenres.

This one’s a bit longer than most, but I think it’s worth it.  That in mind, I won’t beleaguer you with a drawn out explanation, I’ll just let the story speak for itself.

 

 

Bound Howler

*****

Trina threw down an armload of ropes and a sturdy length of chain on Ark’s counter, drawing a hearty laugh from the proprietor.  He leaned his smudged elbows on the smudged oak and leered at her.

“And what on earth are y’doin with all that, then?”  His eyes traced a long slow route down her blouse and her skirt before arriving, much too late, back up at her face.  She wasn’t the prettiest girl in the village by any stretch, but she wasn’t the ugliest, either.  He’d certainly had worse.

“Not sure if that’s any of your concern, Mister Ark.”  She, on the other hand, stared fixedly into his eyes, she had no use for the rest of him.

Ark spat.  “My supplies, my concern.”

Trina sighed and leaned in toward him across the countertop.  Again, his eyes strayed south; she wasn’t above using what wiles she had to her advantage.  “Storm last night.  Spooked my horses.  They broke their gate and scattered all over MacLaren’s land.  I need to secure the gate,” she nodded at the chain, “and throw together some bridles til I can have proper ones made,” she nodded at the rope.

Ark’s eyes fell on the bandage just above her left elbow; she’d tried to conceal it with her sleeve.  “What happened there?”

She yanked her sleeve back down, covering the dressing.  “Snagged it on a nasty tree branch.  Chasing after the horses.”

His eyes began creeping down her body again.  “So, how do you plan to –”

“I’ve got coin, you lout.”

Transaction completed, she rushed home.  The darkening sky was all the sign that the village needed to begin closing up early; it was already a full moon, and likely to storm again besides.  Storefronts were being closed up and bolted shut, horses tied a little more securely in their stables, children hurried inside over their whines of protest.  As she crested the little hill before her squat stone house, Trina paused next to the perfectly intact stable door; all her horses were completely undisturbed.  She shifted the ropes and chain on her shoulder and moved on toward her house as the first drops of rain began to fall.Read More »

Why I Like “Like”

Pavowski10 Comments

This post is part of SoCS:http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-2114/

Trying something a bit different here, a non-fiction based prompt from another blog.  The topic?  Write about the word “like”.

Well, there’s a lot to like about “like”.  The straightforwardest (yep) and simplest is the fact that “like” is used to build similes, which are like the connective tissue holding the loose clunky bits of your prose to the solid, enduring ideas that everybody’s familiar with.  Similes are just those little bits of language where you say “this thing over here is like that other thing over there.”  They can be as simple or as complex as the situation demands, but they are infinitely adaptable and always appropriate.  In fact, I’m going to step out on a ledge here and say that the simile is perhaps the most important literary technique out there.

Why?  Because it creates inroads.  Pointing out that two essentially unlike things actually ARE alike, that they do share characteristics — whether their similarities are immediately apparent to the casual observer or not — is one of, if not the, most effective way to make the most opaque of subject matter clear to your reader.

Example?  Let’s say I took creative writing instead of calculus in college.  (This is true.)  Therefore I’m not particularly familiar with arcs and curves and the best method for calculating trajectories or … okay, I’m probably making my point perfectly about not knowing anything about calculus.  Let me try again.  Physics.  As the saying goes, I know a little about physics, enough to get me into trouble.  Say I’m trying to explain a concept in physics to somebody who knows nothing about physics.  Somebody who, for example, might prefer to watch Titanic again rather than branch out and watch something new and exciting, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.  Just hypothetically speaking.  This is not a real person.  But this person’s perception of gravity, let’s say, might be that it makes objects fall down.  In a highly specific way, that’s accurate: here on Earth, gravity makes things fall down.  As far as capital “G” Gravity goes, however, that’s a horrifically simplified view.

Sharknado, I’m meandering off-point.  Let me return to the simile.  Right.  A simile allows me to explain to this person whose thinking is a bit myopic that gravity, capital “G” Gravity as it exists in the Universe, not just on Earth, is a bit like the attraction between Jack and Rose in Titanic.  Once they affect each other, they forever feel one another’s pull.  When they are close, they are nearly inseparable, but even when they are apart, each one is aware of the other’s presence, and is always trying to find a way to get back together.  Now, it’s not a perfect description of gravity by any imaginable stretch, but it’s allowed me to (hopefully) shift the way that this particular person thinks about gravity by tapping into what they know about something else.

So, similes are awesome.  They allow me to paint pictures in your head by saying for example that “the blood pooling around the dead man smelled like so many old, grimy copper pennies” or that “the colors of her eyes were blue like the bluest blue sky; endless, perfect, infinite” or, in a favorite quote of mine from Douglas Adams, that the alien ships “hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don’t.”  Each one lets you see one thing in another way, lets you consider my experience and my retelling of a thing, which then colors your interpretation of that thing in a way that’s perhaps different than the way you already thought about it.

Damn, that feels circular.  What I’m trying to say is that “like” is like a vicegrip — a simple tool with a thousand different applications.  “Like” is like water — you find it everywhere, always adapting, always flowing, always enriching.  “Like” is like salt: sure, you could eat without it, but would you really want to?

This has been an exercise in language analysis.  Those don’t tend to read well here on the blarg.  That’s okay, I’ve got a humdinger of a flash fiction coming in my next post.