Morrie's Meditations

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.