Morrie's Meditations

Continuity

I'm probably 3/4 of the way through the first round of edits and synopsizing of Prophesied, and it's clear to me that although I outlined it in much more detail, I also allowed myself to do a lot of other random writing projects as I worked on it.  That's kind of my norm - I write 3 pages or 1000 words a day, one way or another - but there is often some number of other things that I'm working on as well.  Which leads to issues of continuity.  Twice in this read-through I've found relatively major continuity issues, wherein a character tells another character something for a second time, with neither remembering the first.  If that were intentional and some kind of mind-wipe plot device that I was planning on using strategically to mess with the reader's head, that'd be one thing.  However, it's not.  It's me thinking, "That's a cool reveal!" so hard that I do it twice.

Oops.

And the thing is, having looked at the most recent one, there really wasn't much getting in between the two reveals.  Other than a lot of fairly emotional stuff for Mack, which would tend to make him forgetful but not so much the other person involved.

One of the interesting things that I'm seeing, as I read back through my "notes" file on this (I keep a separate word document wherein I record what I'm currently thinking about the direction of the story, character reactions, plot elements, etc. - mainly brief, with comments about what happens next so that when I open the notes file I can look at it, go back to the manuscript, read the past couple of pages, and pick up where I left off) is that there was some amount of indecision for me on who would actually end up being the villain.  There were several days (in between the two "reveals" I mentioned above) where I mainly worked on ironing out the plot and character dynamics.  I was clearly working with my outline, but also working with a set of characters that had started surprising me, on occasion.  It didn't help that I again have two storylines going in this, though at least they're moving in the same direction (unlike in Penultimate, where they were going opposite directions).  And they're converging on something that should - I hope - make sense to both of them, given what they've seen, while also advancing both of them as human beings who relate to other human beings.

One of the things I'm not sure about is the level of action in Prophesied.  It feels like I've done a lot of setting things up in it, a lot more manipulating people and characters.  There have been good action scenes, but there's not been the same level of immersion in the game world that was present in the first two books.  I think that should be okay, because the book is very much a character-growth experience, but having it not center on anything that's happening in Mack's cities may be slightly risky - and Penumbral is also very "meta" in its focus.

Thankfully, book 5 will get back to the original vision, with the game taking center stage again.  It won't be the same stage, given how the characters will have changed by that point, but it will be center all the same.

I just need to finish synopsizing this, and maybe book 4, before I get into the outline for 5.

But I think I've already said that, haven't I?

Ranty characters

I think that one of the (unacknowledged) reasons that I blog is because if I don't, my characters get ranty.  They start off on a topic and then go on and on and on, which is kind of good but mainly not.  I say "kind of good" because it's important for characters to have opinions.  A character that has no opinions has, to me, no character.  There need to be beliefs and passions that help to define what the person is about.  Case in point:  Captain America's line in The Avengers about there only being one God, and He doesn't dress like that.  This is a belief that helps define what the character is about.

There's a difference, however, between a character believing in the Christian God, and a character demonstrating this belief by endlessly proselytizing and basically re-enacting the sermon on the mount over the course of 2-3 paragraphs in your manuscript.  Oh, sure - you could do that.  But why?  What does the reader not understand about Cap after, "There's only one God, and I'm pretty sure He doesn't dress like that" that you can capture in some drawn-out soliloquoy in which the character goes on and on about the topic?  You don't make people any more familiar with the character with a monologue, and characters are no different from people when it comes to listening to their opinions.  Most of the time, we don't want to hear it.

Seriously.  Think about the way we interact with one another.  When we start talking about strongly-held opinions or beliefs, there are two typical reactions.  The first is that whomever's opinion we are listening to is someone that we already agree with, so we nod and interject the appropriate form of "Amen" and engage in some fun mutual admiration stuff until we get bored.  The second is that we're being subjected to something we don't agree with, and really don't want to hear it, and start wishing life had a Fast Forward button.

We're interested in opinions.  We just like the Cliff Notes version, for the most part.  This is particularly true for characters, since they will (a) hold opinions we don't agree with, and are therefore wrong, (b) hold opinions we already agree with, but with which we cannot express agreement or get the positive regard we're used to getting when we agree with someone, or (c) hold opinions we don't give a damn about, in which case they're wasting space on the page.

What I'm finding, as I do an initial read-through and edit on Prophesied (that would be the third Mack book - had I mentioned that before?) is that there are a number of places where a character - often Mack, but not always - has a strong opinion, and this strong opinion becomes disruptive to the flow of the story.  A quick sign that an opinion might be disruptive is if I've got a paragraph that takes up more than a full screen's worth of real estate.  (100% magnification in Word of Times New Roman 12-point font, with the ribbon at the top of the screen hidden.)  That's not a particularly long paragraph, probably 12 or so lines, but if I go on that long, there needs to be a reason.  A good reason.

What I'm seeing is that there are two kinds of character rants that pop up from time to time, which in my writing read a lot like mental constipation.  "Ooh, I'm not sure what to do, or I feel like things are moving too fast and I want to slow it down.  I know - I'll have a character pontificate or reflect on something!  Here, character - go crazy!" 

I don't get writer's block, like I've said, but that's because when I get blocked up I just let whatever's blocking me ... well, let's stop with that metaphor before it gets disgusting.

Character Rant 1.0:  "And I am telling you..."

John stared at Sarah across the black glass of the twenty-foot board room table.  "You don't get it, do you?  What you're doing.  You don't understand it at all."

Sarah shook her head.  "You're overreacting."

"Me?"  John laughed.  At least, the noise should have sounded like a laugh, if its mirth hadn't been stillborn.  "I don't think it's possible to overreact.  You're the one who had the direction of this company in her hands.  You're the one who chose to push the board to move our factories overseas.  You're the one who said that the best way to be responsive to our shareholders and our community was to make the products as inexpensively as possible, then re-invest back home."  He held up a hand, cutting off any objection she might make before she could so much as open her mouth.  "What you've done is what so many other companies have done.  You've given work not to the people here who need it, but to children.  That's right, Sarah.  Children in a third-world country, working for pennies a day, working until their hands bleed in unsanitary environments with no regulation of how long they are there and no hope of actually improving themselves through education.  They will work there until they die, if the people you signed contracts with have their way.  And for what?  A few million more dollars in our ledger.  Is it worth it?  Is any amount of money worth it?"

Character Rant 2.0:  Information Vomit

John couldn't understand why Sarah didn't see what she'd helped create.  Didn't she know that, since 1990, over two-million jobs had been sent overseas by American companies?  Hadn't she seen the statistics on unemployment, with its record highs for so many disadvantaged groups?  And how she remained unaware of the increasing state of what amounted to child slavery in many third-world and second-world countries, where children as young as seven or eight might find themselves working twelve-hour days and never learn to read anything more complicated than what they had to comprehend to do their menial jobs, he couldn't say.  He'd read the studies that came out of UCLA and the Wharton School, and had looked at the research on corporate social responsibility.  He'd tracked down pictures and videos of what those sweat-shops looked like, and read interviews with people like Yun-Kim Xi, the Chinese dissident whose early years in a sweat-shop turned her into a modern crusader for human rights.  Sarah didn't know what kind of industry she was contributing to - but John did.  The question was, what did he do about it?

---

Now, I made anything that looks vaguely like a "fact" in either of those examples up.  What's important isn't the facts, it's what these two scenarios represent.

In the first, what we've got is the author's sock puppet.  A character who holds a particularly strong belief - one that gets him or her on a roll that results in at least one stifling of a second character's attempt to interject - is often serving as a sock puppet through which the author inserts his or her opinions into the work.  This kind of thing is just not needed.  Characters need depth and complexity, but they don't need to be ranty assholes.  Once you start ranting you lose some of your readers and you bore others.  You also sound vaguely nuts.

In the second, the author is very proud of his research and wants to share it with everybody.  The problem is, people don't read fiction to get a dissertation on whatever topic the author spent twenty minutes googling before starting the scene.  (Some people read fiction for detailed research-y topics, and appreciate it when it's done well.  There's a place for such detail and presentation of information in historical fiction, but for the most part it doesn't work.)  Information can enhance storytelling, but when presented for its own sake, information can become a barrier to storytelling.

Your character cares about something?  Good.

Your character is a single-minded devotee of a topic, and incapable of talking or thinking about anything else?

Less good.

That's what I'm finding some of, in Prophesied.  Not a lot, but enough that I'm again doing a lot of cutting, which is the main thing that happens in first-round edits.  Overall impression so far is positive, and we'll see if that stays the case as I keep moving through.  At the very least, it's a fast read through the first third...

 

Killing Characters

I wrote a while back about abusing my characters, and how without some level of abuse, they really aren't all that interesting.  After all, if bad things never happened, there would be no conflict, and if there's no conflict, there's really not much story to be told.  Or, to be more blunt, no story anyone is going to be particularly interested in paying to read.  So you have to abuse characters, despite your fondness for them, or there's never going to be anything that happens that's particularly engaging for your readership.  Without loss there can be no gain, and all those horse-apples.

Christy's still reading Purgatorium, and sent me a text this afternoon to express shock that I'd killed one of the characters.  You know, the "I can't believe you did that!" kind of thing that authors hope for, but would really rather not be in arm's reach when the reader reaches that point.

Which got me thinking about why, when I've killed characters, I've made that choice, and what it is that I'm hoping to accomplish when it occurs.

There are a few times when it's not something I've planned, when things just start spiraling out of control and, all of a sudden, somebody's facing down a loaded gun and really doesn't have an easy way out of the situation.  And so, they die.  It's not something that happens often, because as much as I try to abuse my characters, I'm also invested in them, and having them randomly die off doesn't do much for my enjoyment of the story.  I get frustrated at "random" deaths in other authors' work, and would prefer not to create the same kind of experience for my readers.

And no, I'm not talking about George Martin.  By and large, I don't think the deaths that he's so well known for are particularly random.  The characters who die do so because it's what the story calls for at that point, and because their actions have inevitably led to a point where there is only one possible outcome.  It's regrettable to have a character who's so noble and so honorable that he can't see that being just a little less noble or honorable would keep him alive, but it sends a powerful message about the world in which he lives if his unwillingness to give up his ideals gets him dead.  (Feel free to disagree and point out that there was some amount of caving that he did, there at the end, and that it was the violation of his own ideals that ultimately sealed his fate.  I don't think you'd be wrong.)

Most of the time, if I introduce a character who's going to die, I more or less know it.  Some characters aren't even characters; they're furniture I use to populate the story, and their entire plot-purpose is to die so that the story moves forward.  I try to avoid that whenever possible, but I had a few of those in Penultimate, because you just can't devote significant world-resources to someone whose entire character arc ultimately devolves to, "Alive - dead."  I have other characters I need to build and develop, and some deaths are just needed so that my mains can have something to react to and grow from.

It sounds kind of harsh when I put it that way.  Which is weird, because it's only "harsh" if you think of characters as entities, rather than collections of symbols on a page that happen to meet with an unpleasant (symbolic) fate after not too terribly long.  But I do.  I think of characters as people, and I don't make the decision to kill them off lightly.

There has to, without a doubt, be some sort of compelling reason, something related to the story or the development of one of my protagonists, to justify a character dying.  I take it seriously, because, like I said, I invest in my characters.  If I'm asking my readers to care about these people, I have to care about them.  I have to give them personalities, interests, loves, passions, quirks - I have to make them as real as I can, in the context of the world I've created around them.  To do that, to put that much energy into someone, only to pull their plug?  It's hard.  If it's not hard for me to kill a character, I did a crappy job with the character.  Or it was a villain that I've been looking forward to killing off for a while, because my world will be a better place without them.  But that?  That's still an emotional reaction. That's still me caring about the fate of the character.

It's harder when it's characters I like.  I killed off a lot of characters in Penultimate (in part because I had too many...), and although there's a body count in Purgatorium as well, it's slightly less overt.  I didn't want the books to just be bloodbaths; I'm not interested in doing "gank of the week" kinds of fiction.  I put time and thought into populating my world, and am perhaps even more careful about de-populating it.

It has to be meaningful.  That's the real take-away.  Whatever version of reality we're talking about, death needs to matter.

 

Feedback

For someone who's as "feedback averse" as I am (I can't think of another reason that I keep not sending out my manuscripts, other than a fear of negative feedback), I find it remarkably easy to respond to feedback when I get it.  For example, last night Christy gave me some feedback on Purgatorium that I think she kind of didn't want to say out loud, because it wasn't the same kind of glowing, "I love your writing" feedback that she often gives me.  There was a scene, early on, that didn't work for her.  The writing style was stilted and awkward and, she finally said, a little over-written.

The thing that she didn't know, because I have yet to tell her (and she doesn't read this blog, so I don't have to worry about her finding out before she gets to the end of the book) is that the scene she had a problem with was at least one draft less polished than most of what she's reading, and written probably three years later from much of the remainder of the text.  It's one of those scenes that I added in as I went back through on the first editing pass and thought to myself, "This needs something else added to the narrative in order to weave everything together."  I looked back at it, and everything she said was accurate.  The style and tone didn't fit well with everything that came before and after (well, immediately after - I've not gone to look at the other scenes I added, but because they're all first draft-ish as well, they may suffer from the same problem), I had descriptions that bordered on goofy (and, to me, read very "juvenile"), and the characters appearing in the scenes were more sketches done with an extremely crude hand than they were meaningful additions to the story.

And the over-writing was pretty plain, looking back at it.  My prose had something of a purplish tint to it, which was exacerbated by my desire to create a sense of dread with the characters in the scene.  Unfortunately, all I did was create a sense of ham-handed mood-building; some of the phrases I included were, frankly, dreadful, and deserved to die in a fire, and the POV character had no reaction to anything.  So I gave him a reaction, which was a sense of those around him being a little ridiculous.  Which, as written, they were.  Villains who take themselves too seriously become cartoon-y, and as much as I appreciate cartoons and as appropriate as some level of cartoon-ishness is when you're talking about video games, it set the wrong tone.

And it took me somewhere in the neighborhood of ten minutes to look at the text and make the changes that were needed.

When I get feedback - useful, actionable feedback, that makes sense to me - I don't have a problem with it.  If something doesn't work, being told, "This doesn't work," can cause me to step back and re-evaluate what I've done.  I think some of that comes from the level of detailed feedback my dad gave me on papers going all the way back to junior high and high school, where I'd get these sheets of white paper with marks all over them.  A lot of the marks were just things to change, but I'm sure that some of them required some cognitive effort, re-thinking my assumptions about how I was writing the piece and what needed to be going on in any given paragraph.

Feedback shouldn't be something that petrifies us.  It shouldn't be something that we dread, because when it's done right, feedback is designed to help us learn and to make us better at what we do.  That's one of the things that I find myself doing a lot of, too - giving feedback on writing.  Some of it is in the style of my dad.  Hell, as far as it goes, I'm sure most of it is in the style of my dad, since I know that as I read student papers I'm thinking both about the mechanics of the writing and about the logical flow, and am trying to help the student see where both things can be improved.  When I'm reviewing articles for journals, I'm doing some of the same things, but am tending to think at a somewhat higher level because I assume (usually correctly, but perhaps not always) that the person who submitted the manuscript may have a little more sophistication to their thinking - or at least, more practice in thinking about their writing - than the average student.

I try to figure out, sometimes, how it is that I can "hear" some feedback so easily.  Not that it's a great feeling to have your wife tell you that something you gave her to read is over-written, but as soon as she started in with the feedback and mentioned the specific scene, my mind started going to what could be done to fix it.  Some of the fixes were easy and mechanical - taking out phrases or clauses that really didn't add to the storytelling and that kind of felt as if I'd pounded my literary thumb with a literary sledge-hammer - and some of them were the kind of organic fixes that only become apparent as you start to see the story as a whole, and what might be missing from it.  The tone of the villains didn't fit with the tone of the protagonists.  The story can't be half-humorous/half-cynical told from one POV, and deathly serious from another.  Those two stories don't easily coexist in a shared world-space.  There has to be a sense of cynical humor to the villains as well, if they're to be consistent with the tone of Mack's universe.

Which is something of a revelation for me.  There's an extent to which "voice" is something that I've viewed in a limited way, despite knowing better, and have felt comfortable with POV switches that changed voice on some level but retained the underlying "flavor" of the manuscript as a whole.  I hadn't really been cognizant of that latter, though, until now.

Fascinating.  I learned something new about my writing. 

Ain't feedback wonderful?

Writer's Block

My last entry may have sounded a little like I was suffering from writer's block.  That's not the case.  I've never suffered from writer's block.  One way or another, I find something to write about.  I may occasionally suffer from IDEA block, but that's different.  Not having an idea is not the same thing as not knowing what to say and staring at a blank screen or a blank sheet of paper.  I've never been one to stare at a blank screen/sheet of paper.  I have an almost compulsive need to fill it up with words, and have been doing so for well on twenty years.

One of the important things that I learned, early on, was that you don't get better at writing by worrying about writing.  You don't obsess over finding the perfect idea; you find something that works, and go with it, and see what you learn from the experience.  When it comes time to up your game, though, to figure out how to create a coherent story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending, you can't just (unless you're super-human...) follow that oh-so-helpful bit of advice that you'll hear from time to time, which goes, "The story will take care of itself."

Because, most of the time, it won't.  The story will only take care of itself to the extent to which you are able to take care of your story.  Feed it and shelter it and nurture it and all will be well.  Toss it out into the wild with the wolves and the coyotes (you need to hear that last as "ky-otes" rather than "ka-yo-tees" in order to catch the proper inflection in what I'm saying here) and it'll frequently get eaten up.

Idea block is when I sit around trying to come up with ways to make the story work.  How is it different from writer's block?

I'm glad you asked.  The simple answer is that you resolve idea block by writing.  If you're writing, you (by definition) don't have writer's block, so any psychological impingement that goes along with the feeling of, "Dear God, there's nothing on my screen!" goes away immediately.  There's something on your screen.  Those shapes?  They're letters.  They form words.  Which string together into sentences and paragraphs in which you try to hammer out what it is that needs to happen, for your story to make sense.  Write enough of them down (and we're not talking the million monkeys with the million typewriters version of "enough") and you'll find the logical trail that leads you to the solution you need.  It may take a couple of days, but that's a couple of days you'll be writing.  Not blocked.  Just working on ideas.

That's my personal way of dealing with writer's block.  Deny that it exists, ignore the possibility that I could freeze up and completely lose all my lovely, lovely, words, and put characters together on my screen.

So far, so good.

And, oh yes - I found the ending for the current story in just that fashion last night.  Now I just need a title...

Structure and Process

I've written a lot lately about process; that's because I'm still trying to discover, after twenty years of writing almost every day (missed one a week and a half ago, and am still kicking myself...), the "right" process for me.  I know this is almost totally unrealistic.  There may not be a "right" process that works the same for every story, because once you have a process that's always the same it becomes a formula, and formulaic writing isn't something that sells well.  (Ignore, please, the "Xanth" books.  I try very hard to do so.  Anthony started phoning those in probably twenty titles ago, drawing heavily on ideas from his readers and creating these little nuggety manuscripts that advance very little in the way of "plot" while increasing in price just like everything else in the modern marketplace.  I was, once upon a time, a huge Piers Anthony fan.  My disillusionment has nothing to do with his penchant for sending the same copy-paste response to every fan who writes him asking for advice on writing.  It has everything to do with the fact that he's content to tell the same story over and over, writing lowest common denominator fiction.)  I've written from formulas before, so I know how it goes - and I even got paid a nominal amount to do so.  The people who like the formula will continue to ingest your work, but they will eventually realize that you're doing the same thing over and over.  I stopped before anyone confronted me about it, because it bothered me enough that I couldn't in good conscience keep producing content from such an artistically empty place.

Anyway, I reflect on process because I need, with each story, to find one that works.  I think that the general process of, "Outline, write, re-write" is fine.  Anything beyond that is superstitious hokum that a writer might use to comfort him- or herself when the writing gets difficult.

And it always does.

I'm in the outlining phase for a new book, which doesn't have a title at the moment.  I am very much enamored of the ideas in it, have something of a crush on my lead (I may need to make her older to keep from feeling creepy as I write it, since she doesn't meet the "half plus seven" standard - of course, age differences are only important in actual relationships, so me having a crush on a 19-year-old blue-haired protagonist probably isn't going to get me in too much trouble with my wife, especially since she knows I've never actually dated a younger woman, much less one half my age), and have fleshed out multiple characters (some very "macro" as characters go) and their relationships to one another.

The structure, however, is challenging me.

See, I'm good at beginnings.  I've started a LOT of stories.  I've finished proportionally fewer, but that's because in a lot of cases I just put my head down and pushed through the difficult parts.  Sometimes that works fine, and you learn the story by discovery.  Sometimes, it gets you to a conclusion where no matter how you look at it, the things the characters do in that last scene don't make a lick of sense, and you're stuck with twists and turns that feel like they're present just for the sake of being twisty and turny.

Not that I've done that in the past ten years, of course.

I'm actually - usually - pretty good at endings, because for me to be interested in a story I have to have some sense of how it's going to end up.  With the Mack books, I've had a vision of the final confrontation in each book.  Then it became a matter of "How do I get there."  And that, friends, is where things often emerge to trip me up.

See, for all that people say, "I just need to find the right idea so that I can start writing," finding an idea?  It's easy.  Ideas are all around us.  You just have to look at the world, then take a step sideways and look at it again.  The new angle will offer you story possibilities.

It may not sound like much, when I say it that way, but that's really as difficult as it generally is for me to come up with story ideas.  I've spent my life stepping sideways and wondering what the world is like, or what it could be like, or what a world where a few critical things were different would be like.  I've got more ideas than I've ever pursued, or probably could ever pursue.

I don't say that to brag, or to make it sound like writing is easy.  After all, if having ideas were all it took to become a successful novelist, I'd clearly already be there.  And I'm not.

That's because, once you've got the idea, you have to start to do the work.  You meet your characters.  You find their home.  You learn the rules of the world they live in.  You discover what drives them.  You isolate a key conflict.  You decide how the character will be changed by the conflict.  You think about those key moments in the character's development that will shape the structure of your story, and lead you to a place where - if you have any hope of commercial success - your character triumphs.  (Alternately, you could write the story of failure and hope that you can attract a sufficiently "emo" group of readers that people don't notice.  Or you could write a story where the protagonist fails at everything that matters to her and only stays alive because she's useful to other people, and make millions.  I think I may be one of very few people who possess that particular view of that particular property, though.  Other than the ending of the third book, I'll definitely admit that the story was well-written and compelling.  I just don't think it means what the rest of the world thinks it means.)

Anyway, to do all those things, you have to understand more than the beginning and the end of the story.  You have to "get" the middle.  You have to have a sense of how the story progresses, to move from the introduction of your protagonist, to the climax and resolution of her arc.

That's where the hard work is.  That's where I am now, on the current project.

I think, though, that when I get stuck on the middle, it's because part of me is dissatisfied with the ending.  I need to go and work more on the ending, then.

Huh.  That's not the conclusion I expected to reach.  It's the right one, though.

Purgatorium, round 2

Last night I finished the first round of editing additions to Purgatorium, and am more convinced than ever that if I start to write a manuscript without some kind of outline already prepared ever again, I should just be shot.

That was a LOT more work than I feel like it needed to be.  It's good material, and I feel like it fleshed out well, but it (a) lacks some of the storytelling complexity of Penultimate and (b) kind of meandered to get to its ultimate conclusion, based on me not knowing much other than what that conclusion would be at a very broad level.  It may still have too many characters, but I like the way that Mack grew over the course of the story, and am hopeful that, as I start the third book's editing, I'll continue to see meaningful thematic growth for him.

Being shorter than Penultimate by over a hundred ms pages doesn't bother me.  It may be that it started out at the perfect length, and I made it too long by my additions as I went back through the initial edits and said, "How can this be made to flow more smoothly?"  I tried a little bit of a different perspective with one of the (infrequent) POV characters, which I think is going to be more consistent with how people experience games like the one Mack built, but we'll see.

Realistically, I probably need to go back through and do one more editing pass before I give it to my first-reader, just to make sure I don't have anything ridiculous (like a character's backstory changing part-way through the book; caught one of those on the "add material now!" pass) and that I'm not totally embarrassed about where things end up.  Which I don't think I will be.

The thing with the various incarnations of fantasy fiction that I've read, over the course of my life, is that they all end up with some kind of climactic battle.  Good and evil have to throw down.  The scope of the battle is ill-defined and variable across the genre.  Sometimes you get Tolkien-esque battlefields on which thousands of grunting, sweating, bleeding warriors fight to survive.  Sometimes you get smaller battles, even one-on-one, where the hero has to face down some arch-enemy or other.  But there's always a fight, or at least, that's how it always feels.  Probably because, when you're dealing with classic "swords and sorcery," a fight/battle is about the most appropriate climax you can have.

Having spent much of my early twenties writing a truly bad fantasy series (no one ever read it to tell me it was truly bad; looking back, I didn't need them to do so), one of the things I worry about is writing the same story over and over.  Some authors can do that and get away with it.  Some authors can do that and use somebody else's story rather than their own, and still get away with it.

I very much want these stories to be distinct, which is why I try to pay attention to what's changing for Mack and how he's growing as a character.  Then I try to pick one or two other characters who are either already prominent or could be made prominent, and give them interesting arcs as well.  I don't always understand the big "thematic" development points for them until I'm done (I couldn't articulate the core nature of Mack's change in Purgatorium until I was most of the way through this most recent editorial pass), but thankfully, there's always something meaningful that's changing for my protagonists.

Now I get to start thinking about how well book three fits in with the other two.  I hope to heck that it doesn't prove to be as challenging as I start moving through it as book two did!

Processing

"Processing" is one of those words that the clinicians with whom I work use a lot, and which is wonderfully descriptive for what I'm working through with Purgatorium.  When clinical psychologists talk about processing, the meaning I take away from it is the act of seeking out meaning, both personal and meta-personal, in what they or their clients have experienced.  It's mainly a client thing, or a trainee thing; we want people "processing" what they've discovered, to take it to a deeper level.  At least, that's how it always feels to me, the non-clinician listening to the folks who help others work through difficult problems.

In art, there's a lot of talk about "process," which I think is related to the idea of "processing."  If processing is really about a search for meaning, then one's process describes the way that we find and/or create meaning in our creative works.  When the process is clear, the meaning is clear; when the process is muddy, so goes the whole can of potatoes.

This blog entry isn't about muddiness, though.  It's more about the way that I'm trying to process all the elements of Purgatorium and pull them together into a coherent whole.  I know the meaning, I think; I just need to make sure that every scene contributes to the overall meaning and the gestalt of the narrative.

Or something like that.

Anyway, I was just looking through my three active documents - the current version of the Purgatorium manuscript, the way-too-detailed synopsis, and the five(ish) page outline - and trying to think through what all needs to happen to make the story flow properly, and to fit with the stories that come both before it and after it.  There's Mack's arc, which I mainly get.  There's the arc involving Mack's nephew, which I'm comfortable with but am not sure that I've not created inconsistencies within as I've added more text.  (Remember when this was a 420-page ms?  We're up closer to 470 now...)  There's an arc involving a small group of players, who primarily serve to give a different perspective on the action but ultimately are not as involved in the action as my secondary protag was in Penultimate.  There's a sub-arc with Mack and another character that now builds much more organically than it did (it was one of those "happy accident" moments that occur in writing sometimes, when a character is introduced based on plot necessity, then refuses to leave when the party is over and settles into a role you hadn't planned on filling), and there's an arc involving the antagonists.  Though I'm not completely convinced that gets to be called an "arc" of its own, overlapping as it does with the small group of players in terms of scene structure.

The bitch of it is, I thought I was creating something LESS complicated than Penultimate when I was writing this one, but because I failed to plan and outline, I ended up with, in some respects, way more going on.  And to capture it all, to rein it all in and produce one coherent work, takes a damned lot of time and energy.

I'm processing, then, how to make it all come together.  It's like I'm visualizing a beginning and an ending, and each is more or less a single point.  From the beginning, though, multiple threads reach out, interacting with other threads, overlapping, twisting and cavorting and creating these near-Gordian monstrosities that have to (somehow) make their way to the single point that is the final conflict and resolution.  If you're trying to imagine it as a spider's web, you're not far wrong.  Just feed the spider some LSD before you set it to spinning and you might even come kind of close to the complexity I feel like I've created.

It's so funny that, if I look back through this blog, I'll find myself saying that the editing and synopsizing process was much more straight-forward than I'd anticipated with Penultimate, and I might be able to do all four books by the end of the year.  HAH!  I guess I showed me, didn't I?  It's February now, and I'm still working on book two of four, still trying to get all the pieces wedged into place without it feeling like I'm "wedging" anything.

If I were to process my sense of frustration, I'd probably conclude that what I'm experiencing is ultimately a good thing.  I've had some real breakthroughs in terms of understanding what it is that my main character is learning over the course of the story, and how he's changing.  I've done some hard eye-balling of the story and its structure, and asked important questions about the nature of the conflict and whether the material all moves the story forward properly.  Doing "the work" (with apologies to Crowley, whose influence I'm sure is not enough to ever satisfy the Beast himself, but I think is certainly present) is making me a better writer.  Even when I'm not generating new text, I'm understanding the existing text in ways that I hadn't, previously.  I'm seeing what needs to happen to it, in a much larger-scale version of what I saw in that sophomore-year essay that took an honorable mention in some random AHA essay contest, and which I like to imagine could have been read by Isaac Asimov in the months before his death. 

Because, when you look at a text enough, you stop seeing the words, and you start seeing the overall story that gets told.  Then you can go back to the words, and look between them, and start to imagine what it is that you need to do in order to make the story the best that it can be.  Sometimes, things just click.

When you process.

Variety

Despite some amount of moaning about not enjoying academic writing as much as fiction writing, I really do tend to be pretty varied in what I write, and what I write about.  This is good, because it lets me practice in different styles, lets me work on a variety of voices, and keeps me from going totally nuts by virtue of either (a) repeatedly disconnecting myself from reality or (b) never disconnecting myself from reality.

I've tried to decide on a few occasions what it is that writing actually does for me, whether it's meditation or therapy or catharsis (not much different from therapy, depending...) or something else entirely.  I think there's such a thing as "the need to create," but I don't know whether that describes what I do.  I enjoy putting words down in orders they haven't been tried previously (though, if Google's any indication, you have to put a goodly number of words in a particular order in order to come up with something novel - thankfully, the novel is by definition novel based on the sheer number of words required for its creation and the near-mathematical impossibility of creating a non-novel novel using even the most relatively limited vocabulary the form would allow).  And I like parentheticals, because they capture the essential non-linearity of human thought processes, which tend to be jumbled messes of a variety of decisions and conundrums with which we're dealing at a particular point in time, in addition to all the random bullstuff that happens to float in and out of our consciousnesses.

Not sure that last word really needed to be pluralized.  Well, except that it had a plural pronoun in front of it, didn't it?  Still doesn't look right.

One of the things I feel like the variety of writing "voices" I have helps me do is to capture some of that non-linearity.  Conversations - internal or external - don't flow like a river.  They flow like jell-o dropped through the blades of a helicopter at 500 feet, scattering and fragmenting and often splatting down to finish in places where they're neither wanted or needed.

You ever notice how some metaphors start out promising, then go nowhere good?

Yeah.  Me too.

Academic Writing

For a variety of reasons, I don't enjoy academic writing as much as I do fiction writing.  Part of it is the feeling that I'm being constrained, which is not incorrect.  I am.  I have to be able to support what I say.  I have to think about arguments and counter-arguments and the way that rejection can affect more than just my ego.  Or, how it could, back before I got tenure.  I appreciate good academic writing, and can provide what I believe is high-quality guidance on how to do it - but it's not a form of writing that I find particular joy in.  I mean, I just spent 3 hours cranking out maybe 500 words, because I get so easily distracted when I'm doing something I don't love.  (And because it's a team-written project, and because I don't have the other team member's parts yet, and because I am not completely sure that I want to say the things that the paper says because part of me is a big pansy.  But whatever.)

What's weird is, I've not initiated a lot of academic writing projects over the past 2-3 years.  The two that I have initiated, as first-author, have both been somewhat critical of my chosen field.  The last got published, and I received informal feedback from one of my grad school professors that it was a very interesting paper, so that was a nice feeling.  This one... well, it kind of has the potential to either piss people off, or get me offered the chance to edit the kind of book I think our field needs to be publishing more of.  Because there are some weaknesses that I'm observing in my chosen domain, and I'm at the point in my career where I am starting to get comfortable pointing them out.

It's so political, though.  My co-author and I have been gathering a little bit of data to support our arguments, and I can already see how some of them will be received.  Or, I can imagine some reactions, which involve the charge that I'm out of touch with the field, don't understand the way our science functions, or simply don't read the research literature broadly enough to know that what I'm saying is wrong.

I don't think I'm out of touch with anything, though.  I do understand how our science functions, and how the scientific enterprise in general functions, and I happen to believe that so long as we find ourselves beholden to private or public sources of funding to conduct our research, we may be compromised, and that so long as we train people toward a narrow "pinnacle" of achievement, we run the risk of creating very narrow experts who lack the potential to see how the science of psychology can be a single integrative discipline rather than a group of separate disciplines whose members use the same words to mean different things.  And I may not be as widely-read as some of my colleagues, but I read enough to know where the boundaries of our science are, relative to where they ought to be.  And the fact that there exists a difference means that I probably do need to finish this damned paper.

Three weeks.  Shouldn't be too bad.  And the worst case is probably that it gets rejected.  If it gets in, any conversation that it might generate is exactly the kind of conversation I think we need to be having.

It's still not "fun" writing, though.