"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.
Recent Comments