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Finding the Silver in Pain
Psychologists believe (and rightly so) that the vast majority of humans will go out of their way to avoid pain. Americans are notorious for our propensity to pop pills instead of just bearing the pain. Most of us have never known levels of pain beyond the occasional headache or broken bone or scraped knee.
Pain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As a reader, I’ve read shelves worth of books where the characters undergo immense amounts of pain and torture. I’ve noticed that some authors forego description of the actual sensations and just say “pain lanced through her” or “ripples of pain cascaded over him.”
I’m just about to finish Jacqueline Carey‘s Kushiel Trilogy, and her approach to pain has made me reconsider how I write this difficult human experience in my work. Her protagonist is an “anguissette,” a woman marked by their punishing god Kushiel and fated to always experience pain and pleasure as one. Yes, the books are NC-17 in parts — but if you are a reader who values the honesty of human emotion and stories that leave you wondering what’s real, take a chance on them.
First edition cover (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I got my first migraine in 8th grade. I remember sitting in class, trying to look at the white board, struggling to see the words there, having to look down at my dark-colored binder to give my eyes a respite. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I’ve seldom experienced the nausea that accompanies many people’s migraines, and mine often end after 10-15 hours, but in recent years, my migraines have taken a turn for the unbearable. What they lack in duration, they make up for in intensity.
I had one last night, and I struggled to finish the last four hours of my cocktail shift with the strange blurred aura around my vision and each oppressive light bearing down on me. I woke this morning with a pounding heart and shallow breath, not a little surprised that I had survived the night. Does that sound melodramatic?
I’ve always been someone to hurt myself a lot. I still have scars all over my legs from multitudinous skinned knees and run-ins with sharp objects. I’ve a scar on my thumb from mistaking the knuckle for a potato and removing my skin with the peeler instead of the tuber’s. I’ve had head wounds and broken bones, one bash on the skin that went down to the bone, and I’ve impaled my leg on a fence.
Beyond that, I’ve always suffered from severe menstrual cramps bad enough that they’ve caused me to lose consciousness. And there’s the migraines.
Last night, just driving home felt like torture. I almost never use the mirror flip on the rearview mirror to dim the lights behind me, but I used it last night and drove the 15 miles home with my left hand blocking out the reflection in my side mirror. I kept thinking, “Five more miles. Two more miles. One more mile. Three more turns, then home.” I came inside to only dim light and had to stand in the hallway to blearily tell Spouse I was going straight to bed.
I laid in darkness, first consumed by relief at the lack of light. But my migraines are not so forgiving.
When my kitten woke me up from a fitful sleep, pressure mounted in my head. My husband had come to bed and lay sleeping in the dark, but dawn had begun to light the sky and even the pastel dimness of the early blush of sun made me gulp with panic. I struggled to the hall closet in the dark, found a bottle of ibuprofen by touch alone, and counted out five into my shaking palm through waves of pressure that felt as though they preceded a nuclear bomb.
Laying in bed again, my heart gulped shallow beats against my chest. My head felt as though someone had taken an ice cream scoop to the inside of my skull and tried to fill the remaining cavern with too much air. I buried my face in my pillow to battle the blossoming dawn. And melodramatic though it might sound, I doubted my body’s ability to withstand the mounting pressure, ever-increasing and relentless.
I finally had to wake my husband. If I get a migraine during the day, he massages my head, helping to spur the blood flow in my neck muscles that have turned to concrete and the fissures in my skull that seem about to rend themselves with every passing breath. His fingers released the pressure in tiny spurts, careful and deft. My fluttering pulse began to strengthen. My panicked breathing subsided. And after a long while, I slept.
So today I woke, feeling shaky and abused. I couldn’t think of what to blog about. All I could think of was the ten hours of last night that the migraine claimed. I scarcely remember the last few hours at work, and the drive home exists only in flashes of bright light and cringing. Migraines, at least mine, create a phobia of light. Where every patch of glowing brightness makes me flinch away and I trade breath for darkness as I bury my head under pillows and blankets — even then there is a spotlight glaring behind my eyes, illuminating the inside of my head as if I’m staring at the sun with no eyelids to shield me, no way to blink, no way to scrunch them shut.
As a writer, I have to embrace these experiences. Maddening and frightening though they can be, they are gateways. My inability to escape them makes me vulnerable, but being forced to wade through them liberates me from using descriptions like “pain lanced through her.” If you read the description of my ten hour ordeal, you will see that I never once used the word pain.
As much as humans want to avoid it, pain is an essential human experience, and one that is as inevitable as the earth’s continual circling of the sun. It may be unpleasant, but in ways it is exquisite.
Writers, consider this challenge: next time you are writing of love, of pain, of death, of hope…do so without using those words. And readers, glut yourself on the wealth of description in books. Let your favorite characters be your avatars of experience. For better or for worse.
Related articles
- Kushiel’s Dart – Book Review (mycogds.wordpress.com)
- Migraines…are they weather related? (jenlynn401.wordpress.com)
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Realism and Urban Fantasy
Last night I wrapped up the second book of my trilogy and began on book three. While book two definitely posed some challenges and obstacles (hell, I stopped in the middle and wrote book one when I realized the story didn’t really start there), this last one is going to be the most involved in some ways.
For starters, my primary POV protagonist (though it will switch between Sarah and Anna as well) is a 400-year-old vampire. Her back story is fascinating to me as well as being integral to the progression of the series, so last night I wrote upwards of 3,000 words of historical fiction.
I already know some stuff about 17th century Poland — or more correctly, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that existed at the time. I know in 1655 the Swedes invaded (that’s when her home was burned to the ground and she ended up becoming a vampire), but other things I had to look up, like this dude:
Fabulous hat, sir.
Regardless of the fashion of the times, I want to create little forays into the past that pluck the reader out of the 21st century and punt them backwards, so they feel the grit, the reality of a life back then.
For my dear little Ewunia, she has a rough go of things. So there are a good number of things I need to look up and figure out. For instance:
What would have been the role of a widowed merchant’s only daughter? Would she have been educated at all? What sort of practical skills might she have, if any?
How exactly were women of the day treated? Would she have been on the cusp of being married to someone twice her age? Probably.
What would an invading army do with stray women? (I think I already know the answer to that — it hasn’t changed in five thousand years since the dawn of time.)
Muskets or arrows or bolts?
What would Ewunia have worn given her sex and social class? What did 17th century Poles eat?
In spite of the relatively short amount of time my book will spend in the 17th century, I need to go back there to hunt myself. I need to learn more about this world Ewunia is at the mercy of once her father is dead and her home burned to the ground. Because ultimately, I want readers to understand why she makes the choices she does, and her background will determine a lot of that. Not to mention the vampire who makes her one — he is very important to the story, and his development gives me some chills to think about. He’s a little bit like Anakin Skywalker, but with fangs and an old Swedish name instead.
Speaking of him, his name is the one I had to change, as was Ewunia’s, to protect the validity of their characters. They’re supposed to be centuries old, so his name wouldn’t be Damon. Plus, Ewunia begins to go by Elaine later, and I realized the Polish version of that is Elena (and not common)…Elena and Damon? Dammit, Vampire Diaries.
So yeah, they’re now Ewunia and Einarr, circa 1655. I like “Einarr.” It means one warrior, which suits him. And his chosen replacement name later will be nice and ironic.
I’ll probably have a wee bit more to say on this as I continue to write, gentle viewers. Until then, love your characters, love your story, and be true to it however you know best.
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The Wee Hours
Well, to me it is. I seldom see this side of noon excepting when I sneak up on it from behind, or if I have to be at work at 10. And even then, I repress any morning experiences for the first two hours — by then it’s afternoon, and all is right with the world.
Me.
I am not a morning person.
I used to be sort of passive about it. “Yeah, I don’t like mornings, la dee dah…” and then I got a job where I regularly had to be at work by 7:30 and still could never sleep until 3 or later, and it stressed me out to the point that the mere sound of my alarm triggered a stream of expletives and near-panic attacks. Sleep. I value it. It’s one of the reasons I don’t have a “real” job right now.
But lo, it’s 9:41, and I’ve been awake for about an hour and a half. Strange miracle, but here we are, with the opportunity to blog today when I thought I wouldn’t have the time. Once I go to work in 45 minutes, I won’t be home till almost 11.
Gentle viewers! We are almost done with The 25! In fact, we are on…
22. Objectivity
The perils of subjectivity arise largely from overidentifying with a subject, narrator or character in a narrative, and making it (or him or her) the vehicle for a thematic point in which the author himself is overly invested. The antidote is at least as old as the New Testament, specifically Matthew 5:43–48, where Christ instructs his followers to love their enemies. If what I have to say seems old hat, therefore, I’ll be neither disappointed nor surprised.If you find yourself overidentifying with a topic or character, try to identify within the sympathetic subject, narrator or even oneself a trait or belief or habit that is repellent or inexcusable or just plain odd. In doing so, you’ll enhance the psychological or moral distance between yourself and the object of familiarity
or allegiance.Another possible strategy is to rewrite the scene or section from the point of view of someone other than the object of sympathy. This forced disconnect can achieve a similar effect.
—Corbett
I find it rather appropriate that this is today’s. In my frantic writing sprint (or spring, as Twitter would have it) last night before bed, I wrote a scene that bothered me immensely. The protagonist from my first book becomes….sort of an anti-hero if not a downright antagonist in the second. Basically, she starts acting like a massive twit. It drives me nuts, and I want to smack her. I found myself last night trying to put words in her mouth, make her more sympathetic in a scene where she is downright cruel. And I knew that as I was trying to do that, it wasn’t true to her behavior. She has a lot of reasons for acting the way she does — some of them more valid than others — but the bottom line is that she’ll get over it eventually, and until she does, I have to let her be a bitch. I find the whole concept exhausting. It’s like putting up with a temper tantrum because you know your child will eventually grow out of them.
It’s one reason I like different POVs in fiction. I love seeing a story told from different angles and getting inside different heads. I also enjoy a good first person POV, but there’s something to be said for different POVs. Sometimes a big story just needs to be told that way.
It all boils down to one little sentence, in my opinion: tell the truth. Listen to your story and your characters, and let them drive your story forward. If you want to give it a shot, find a scene in your story where things fall a little flat and subjective and rewrite it from the viewpoint of an antagonist, or even someone who just doesn’t like your main character very much. See what happens. If you’re NaNoing, just keep plugging along at your word count. 
Also me.
I was going to post a picture of a pretty morning to enhance the objectivity of this post, but then I changed my mind. Google gives mornings some damn good PR. So instead, I give you Garfield.
Happy Sunday!
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Unity
I worked on draft two for a while today and found myself frustrated. Not only is the first draft way too exposition heavy at the end, but it didn’t flow the way I wanted it to. A lot of that ties in with the previous post about pacing, which I think will be easily fixable, but some of it has to do with creating unity.
7. Unity
One method for creating a sense of unity in a piece of writing is the use of selective repetition. A detail or remark or even just a unique word mentioned early in your piece can be echoed later, creating a sense of wholeness through the reader’s recognition of the previous mention. That recognition also imbues the repeated element with a resonance, not unlike a coda in a musical composition. The reader enjoys a satisfying sense of progression, of having moved from one literary moment to another.Reread a piece you’re working on with an eye toward finding that element you could repeat in a subtle way, and then look for a place later in the piece where you could drop it in. If you’re unsure which one would be most affective, experiment by trying several. Ask yourself: If you had to cut all the details or images and retain only one, which one would you keep? That’s the one you want.
—Heffron
While some of the exposition is important, it doesn’t have to be an info-dump like it is in the story so far. For now, there are perhaps four or five main events that occur after the main climax of the novel. I’ll summarize them here:
1. Sarah’s impressions of Scotland (this is description, but it ties into a few different things.)
2. Sarah and Cam’s Moderately Bad Decision
3. Sarah’s dream
4. Meeting Mariusz and seeing Anna for the first time
5. The Awakening of three more seers
6. (Oops, I lied!) In Which Sarah and Cam Have a Conversation With a Tree
Somehow in the first draft those things take up approximately fifty pages. Not necessary. So far I cut out about 10% of that, but a lot more needs to come out. Every single one of those things creates a flow between books one and two so that the reader can pick up the second book and feel connected to the story in spite of the fact that the protagonist will be Anna instead of Sarah for most of the second book (with the exception of a few chapters). The seer thing will most likely land itself at the end of the book, and be referenced in an epilogue. What is frustrating at the moment is the structure. I like a lot of the writing — as writing, not as part of the story. There’s some beautiful description and some quirky funny bits, but they’re not really useful to the story, and thus need to be relegated to the bin of scrapped verbosity.
I like the very end a lot. I think it does a great job of setting up book two whilst wrapping up book one. It’s just a bit in the middle of the end that irritates me. It’s like having a bramble stuck in between my shirt and my bra, right between my shoulder blades. How annoying.
I don’t think I’ll get draft two done before the honeymoon, more’s the pity, but we are getting there. Slow and steady. The other applicable bit about unity is that I need to add some things that bring the first book back to the beginning a little. Tickle the reader’s memory so that he or she feels the continuity. There are a lot of good ways to do that, so I don’t think it will be a problem. That could go in the polishing draft; we’ll see.
I have a lot of food for thought. I wish I could just go poof and make it perfect, but what would be the fun in that? Come on.
Vale la pena, no?
EDIT NOTE: No idea why, but apparently this never got published. That’s why I was so confused as to why I couldn’t find my post on unity when I went onto the next part of The 25. Silly me. It was still a draft. I think it is still relevant, so here you go. A little Easter egg in October. Like a Halloween egg. Just not thrown at someone’s house.
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Sex, Vulgarity, and Violence (Part Two)
Yesterday’s post focused on the first of the Big Three, but it ran away with me all the way to 1,308 words, so I figured at that point that it might behoove me to split the monster into two parts. Like 2/3 of a Hydra.
I’ve already typed out some diatribe on vulgarity in writing, but I’ll reiterate the main point here. People swear. Fairly often and in public. They swear when they drop their puppy onto the floor (hopefully by accident). They swear when they hit their funny bone. They swear at the guy who just swerved into their lane. When they bite their tongues. When their team fumbles a hike. When they’re trying to make a point. When they’re happy. When they’re upset. When they’re elated. I could go on and on, but the point here, people, is that people swear all the fucking time. I’m not saying litter your novel with expletives, nor am I saying that it’s particularly attractive to drop f-bombs every time you don’t feel like picking up that spoon that fell on the floor. However, if you’re going to leave them out, please-oh-please-oh-please do not substitute them with some ridiculous word that no one would ever say without having a gun to their head (probably not even then).
Example:
“You think you can just do that to me and get away with it, witch?” Big Tommy screamed in impotent rage, knuckles white where he grasped the revolver against his leg.
Susie’s veneer of calm refused to waver as she stared at her husband. “Dang it, Tommy. I’d put that thing down before you shoot your pee-pee off.” Not that she’d be broken up about it — he liked it more than she did, though after what she’d seen last night she knew she was in the minority in this town.
“You fricking cat! Don’t tell me what to do!” The gun went off with a sharp report, and Tommy shrieked.
Susie stepped over Big Tommy’s spreading pool of blood as he writhed on the floor. “Hush now. You’re going to wake the neighbors.” With a flicker of disdain, her foot made contact with his head. Tommy’s howls cut off as his eyes rolled back.
As she pulled open the red front door, Susie looked back once. “And for the record, I never boinked him.”
That little scene demonstrates some rather absurd dialogue. Whoever these people are, we know a few things. One, they have a gun. Two, emotions are clearly running high — Tommy is incensed. Three, Susie isn’t really fazed by Tommy shooting himself in the crotch or by the screaming and blood that follows. Four, something is keeping Tommy from aiming the gun at Susie instead of pressing it against his leg (which really isn’t the smartest move). While I don’t know who these two characters are, they volunteered for this little role-playing object lesson, so I couldn’t really begrudge them the spotlight, right? They have potty mouths. Something tremendous has transpired in their lives that has brought them here, to this grisly place, and I can’t really think of any good, convincing reason for those two people to edit their language. Here’s what they’re really saying:
“You think you can just do that to me and get away with it, bitch?” Big Tommy screamed in impotent rage, knuckles white where he grasped the revolver against his leg.
Susie’s veneer of calm refused to waver as she stared at her husband. “Godammit, Tommy. I’d put that thing down before you shoot your fucking cock off.” Not that she’d be broken up about it — he liked it more than she did, though after what she’d seen last night she knew she was in the minority in this town.
“You fucking cunt! Don’t tell me what to do!” The gun went off with a sharp report, and Tommy shrieked.
Susie stepped over Big Tommy’s spreading pool of blood as he writhed on the floor. “Hush now. You’re going to wake the neighbors.” With a flicker of disdain, her foot made contact with his head. Tommy’s howls cut off as his eyes rolled back.
As she pulled open the red front door, Susie looked back once. “And for the record, I never fucked him.”
Which scene seems more convincing? I can’t think of the last time I heard an actual human being call someone a witch when they meant bitch. As for the c-word and the multiple f-bombs, people say those words when they’re hacked off. And Tommy and Susie are in a very intense scenario. (They’re certainly not sitting around eating scones and tea, that’s for sure.)
The issue of vulgarity for me is tied up with honesty. Be honest about how people speak when they’re upset or ecstatic. Not everyone swears all the time, and your characters don’t have to — but if you’re writing a scene like that where people are calling names and shooting genitals, expect someone to use stronger language than “Oh, drat.” If you are dead set on avoiding R-rated language, there are ways around it that don’t make your characters sound like the Westboro Baptist Church’s idea of how normal people talk.
Let’s get messy! When I was a kid, I adored horror books. I read as many Fear Street books as I could get my paws on. I did read Goosebumps, but I mostly stuck to the more adult Fear Street even as a little second and third grader, because they were scarier. Better. They gave me delicious chills and surprisingly few nightmares. R.L. Stine was never afraid to get graphic. There is a bit of imagery that I recall from those books which has never left my mind. It’s the image of rotting purple flesh. It stuck there, and it made its putrid little place with all the other frightening, disgusting, creepy things I read as a child.
If you write horror or urban fantasy or any of the speculative fiction genres, chances are they’re going to get violent. You know your story best, so you can decide how graphic you want to get, but if your tale consists of vampires, there better be blood. If you write sci-fi and your characters shoot guns that fire bursts of heat, I expect at some point to smell sizzling flesh or feel arm hairs curl in on themselves from a blast that came too close.
If you’re writing about corpses, walking or not, we should smell the rot. See the decay. Writing is four dimensional — it’s not show and tell, it’s all show. They call it telling a story, but really you’re building a world so someone can experience the story. Anyone can say that the corpse was gross. But…
The corpse’s flesh had decomposed, sagging off yellow bones to melt into the concrete below. The detective gagged at the stench, which tickled his nose, a puff of sweetness mixed with acid death. Black blood in a large dried pool cracked at the edges, and the body’s fingers were tight claws against the floor.
“Any ID on the guy?” The detective didn’t want to get close enough to look for a wallet.
“Thomas Bolchek. Alias Big Tommy. Married, but the wife was found down at the lake with a kitchen knife between her ribs two days ago. This guy’s been dead a lot longer.” The uniform’s eyes looked ready to join Big Tommy’s corpse on the floor, along with the contents of his stomach.
“Get some air, kid.”
Description doesn’t have a stomach as weak as that green little uniformed officer in the paragraph above. Description doesn’t shy away from gore and decay. Like sex and vulgarity, you as the writer have control over the role violence and graphic death play in your story. You know your story, and you know your audience — so be true to what you’re showing them, and they won’t be able to put your book down. The point is to not be afraid to say what you need to say. Never censor your book before it hits the shelves; there are plenty of people out there who will do that job for you, and you can just ignore them when they do, or send them a severed chicken’s foot in a box to let them know what you think of their opinion.
So have fun. Get messy. Get naughty. Tell the truth about your characters and your story and watch it come to life. (Or die a gruesome death, whichever you’re going for.)
I wish you monsters.
Story, where you at?
This is having to do with setting. It also has to do with two little birds and one big stone. I stumbled across a blog today, in which the author wrote about worries she had about the setting of her piece being boring. She said that her characters go from home to school to home to school to a picnic, and she feared that it was getting repetitive. Since I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about setting myself, I pounced on it. So here we are!
That’s the first birdie. The second birdie is that my response to her conundrum ties in very well with the second tip on the list (the 25), which is precision. I’ll quote it here:
2. Precision
In the study of traditional Chinese painting, the term hua long dian jing speaks to the need for precision. It translates roughly to mean, “Dot the dragon’s eye, and it comes to life.” In other words, your subject remains inert until you add the precise detail that brings it, in the reader’s mind, to life. Often when we finish a draft, we feel the piece somehow isn’t working. Our writing group says they found it dull in places, or just “didn’t get it.” The culprit is often a lack of precision—the key, specific details that bring the world of the piece alive.Develop the habit of dedicating time to reviewing your work with precision in mind. How would that scene change if you add a sweet tang of honeysuckle to the breeze? How might this character change if you fasten the top button of his shirt? Henry James told us that writers are people “on whom nothing is lost.” The key to successfully creating or conveying worlds for our readers is painstakingly observing those worlds, and then scribbling down the precise details that tell the story.
—Jack Heffron
Setting is much the same as any aspect of your story. It’s the responsibility of the writer to bring all aspects to life in a way that is memorable, intriguing, and that ultimately immerses the reader in the story so that he or she keeps flipping those pages until his or her fingers are covered in paper cuts — and then begs for more. (Okay, that got a little bit BDSM, sorry.)
The key to bringing anything to life enough to jump off the page like Frankenstein’s monster is picking those details, those little things that add texture without distracting. Enrich without detracting. It’s all about precision, just as Jack Heffron says. (I can’t see his name without thinking of Zack Efron, and it’s giving me a wiggins.)
Plenty of books have a limited number of settings. If you think about it, most of the Harry Potter books had exactly two: the Dursleys’ house in Little Whinging and Hogwarts. If you ponder that for a moment, you’ll find that JK Rowling did a phenomenal job in picking details that make her settings memorable. I can’t think of the Dursleys’ without picturing the parade of photos of an overweight Dudley, Harry’s cupboard under the stairs, and an entire bedroom filled with the broken and discarded toys of a disgustingly spoiled child. With a few exceptions, her books take place in one of those two places up until about book five when the house at Grimmauld Place is introduced.
The apartment I share with my fiance has a queen-sized bed for a couch. That’s the only thing I am going to tell you about it for the present. Some people have a sofa bed, but we have a bed sofa. Never mind that it’s because we can’t afford to buy a couch; it’s a quirky little detail that definitely helps you picture the place. I could spend my whole story here, focusing on the internal conflicts of a soon-to-be-married couple, and as long as I showed you some of those funny little details, the setting would transform from being a formless white-walled anyapartment into one with a bed for a couch. If I then told you that we have two little sinister plastic skulls that sit under our 32″ flatscreen, that adds to your picture. They even have a story — I decorated my high school classroom with them when I taught special ed in inner city D.C. for a year, and I told my kids they were the heads of former students who pissed me off. (“Aw, Miss, you be messin’ wit us.” “Find out for yourselves.”) Now it’s an apartment with a bed for a couch and two sinister plastic skulls that grin at each other as if they’re singing a duet — they’re all that’s left of their barbershop quartet.
Details. Precision. If I never told you anything else about this apartment, you’d know you were in for a quirky story. Those skulls might be a source of conflict — they might talk to the wife-to-be (or sing), but the husband-to-be doesn’t hear them and thinks his fiancee is nuts. (I’ve diverged from reality a bit. They don’t talk to me; this is for the sake of illustrating a point.) (Or do they?)
If instead of the skulls, I told you that we have a talking John Lennon doll complete with round-lens sunglasses and a jean jacket who perches on our turntable, eyeballing the room and occasionally letting out, “All I’m saying is to give peace a chance,” you would have a whole different picture of this setting. Depending on what tone you’re going for, choose details to fit it. Precision means finding the right details. If you’re writing a quirky story as an allegory for the sometimes awkward phase of settling in as an almost-married couple who might be a little crazy (maybe in spite of the talking skulls it’s the husband-to-be who’s nuts?), the skulls fit. If you’re writing about a couple starving musicians trying to make a life for themselves, go with John Lennon. The bed-sofa can make its home in either.
The point of all this is that it doesn’t matter how Joe Schmoe your setting seems to you as long as you can bring it to life to your reader. Even a run of the mill apartment like ours has its quirks. Apart from the bed-sofa, the skulls, and John Lennon, there is an intrepid stream of ants coming from god knows where. I was sick yesterday, and John brought me a Domino’s cup of OJ at 7 a.m., and by the time I got home from work at midnight, it was crawling in ants. Crawling. Ugh. That’s the setting of my home life. Just that is enough to give you all some pretty vivid imagery.
Happy world building!
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Go With the Flow
In the spirit of the 25 Ways to Improve Your Writing (henceforth to be referred to as “the 25″ for the sake of brevity), I’m going to go for it. The structure of these posts will probably consist of me rambling on a bit about how a certain tip relates to my revision process. So here’s the first one!
1. Flow
A piece of writing is a living thing. Our goal should be to serve it and do what it wants, to be its instrument. The flow of words from our mind to the page is impeded in two main ways—if we try to make the story do something that it doesn’t want to do, or if something in us isn’t ready to face the full implications of the work’s theme and emotions.
I’m going to diverge a bit from the implications of writers’ block that exist in this tip, because that’s not something that I’m dealing with during this rewrite. The flow of the text and the flow of narration are entwined in my view. I agree wholeheartedly that when I am having trouble, it’s usually because I’m forcing it, but for the purpose of relating this wisdom to the second draft of my novel, I’m going to talk about the narrative flow.
One of the overarching themes in my story that I noticed glimmering through both books and know it will continue into the third is a sense of connectivity, a belief that the earth connects us all and links everything together. People, places, everything. Magic is the essence of nature, the elements — the responsive and breathing energies that my supernatural characters tap into. One of the big turning points in the first book is when my protagonist visits a reservation after being called there in one of her visions. This challenges the long-held beliefs of the supernaturals that magic is confined to their people — one character in particular has an issue believing that humans (Muggles, if you will) have access to it. It’s a theme that will be explored much more in the later books.
What I am having a few issues with is streamlining the little field trips my character takes with the narrative flow. They need to feel integral to the reader, not gratuitous. I think the best way to convey that sense of immediacy and necessity is to focus on bringing the scenes to life, using language that can be repeated as a sort of key throughout that clues the reader in to that connectedness. I think for the most part it achieves that already, but there are a few rough spots that should come out in the polishing phase after this second draft is done.
It’s getting so close. It’s unbelievable to me to see this coming together and to feel so confident about it. I think it’s a good, salable novel that would appeal to a lot of people. I even think the timing is okay — if I can get it published, it would hit shelves a couple years down the road, which would be post Twilight and enough post that I could catch my target audience — which is the urban fantasy lovers and Twilight fans who have grown up a little. There’s still a lot to do before the query stage officially begins, but it’s coming. By November, I want to be ready. That gives me six weeks to get this thing all prettied up with bows in its hair and a minimal amount of blood spatter.
Wish me luck!
Lazy Sunday
I haven’t made much progress on Elemental in the past few days, gentle viewers. The main reason is that I haven’t been sleeping well, which is one of the big reasons why I am glad to be finding a new job in one short month. One of the unfortunate side effects is that I start to experience a sort of episode that is rather similar to narcolepsy. I pass out the second I get home. There is occasional drool accompanied by memory loss. And needless to say, productivity suffers.
That said, there are only four weeks left of school. And then life starts back up. I’m ever so excited about that.
My goal is to finish the first draft of Elemental by the time I go to Scotland, which gives me about a month and a half to do so. From there, it’s onto the revision process for Primeval. I’m not sure yet, but this process may involve a title change. We shall see. What I’m really excited about is getting to spend some time developing some finer points of the writing craft in Scotland. There are a couple of exercises I like to do for description. The cool thing is that you can practice them without even using a pen and paper. When I would take the mini-bus in Poland to perfect the art of disguising myself as a sardine, I would use the cramped hour and a half from Krakow to Oswiecim to observe the people around me, to pick out the few details that set them apart from everyone else and describe them in my head with as much clarity as I could manage. This helped me with two things: painting what I saw with words and forging an image into my mind for later recollection. I still like to do this with interesting people or places.
I still recall this old man who sat in front of me on one of the trips in which I was lucky enough to survive the Great Seat Scramble and find a place to store my bum for the journey. His face was rugged like old, soft leather, with folds of deep wrinkles that fanned out around his eyes. His brows were peppered cresting waves flowing onto his forehead. Beneath them, clear marble blue was obscured by wire-rimmed spectacles whose lenses were thicker than chunks of ice mined from a frozen lake. His lips, folded inward, hinted at a smile. Tufts of hair protruded from underneath a crisp red baseball cap several sizes too big. As I watched him, he stared out the window at the blur of green Polish fields.
Alba gu brath…
Hello, world!
No, I mean it. In a shocking feat of bravery, this American is venturing beyond her borders this summer, proving that there are a chosen few of us who do have a passport and do realize that there is something else out there. Whoa. Yeah, I know, I probably just blew your mind.
In all seriousness and without any attempt at disguising my native cynicism, my country wouldn’t have such a bad name when it came to their approach to other countries if it weren’t based in reality. Less than 18% of us even own a passport. How sad. There’s a big wide world out there, and it’s really quite lovely.
So, where am I headed, you ask? Well, it’s back to the motherland for me! Scotland, to be specific. I’m taking a much needed (though ill-afforded) 10 day adventure to clear my head and refocus on following my bliss. It couldn’t come at a better time. I found a relatively cheap flight — I say relatively because dear lord, when did airfare taxes start doubling the cost of a ticket? It wasn’t quite double, but close. The taxes were a full 60-70% of my ticket cost. That’s pretty outrageous.
Anyway, it’s been almost three and a half years since I’ve been back to bonnie Scotland, and it’s high time that got fixed. So I’m off while I have a wee bit of free time. It’ll also give me a chance to fine-tune some of the Scotland descriptions in my novels. I don’t think they’re bad now, but refreshing my own memory can’t hurt. maybe I’ll even find some new ones. I do have a sneaking suspicion that I know where all of the big plot to-do’s are going to come to a head, and this trip will give me a chance to explore it and record the necessary impressions I get of the place. I have two options for it, so we’ll see which one wins out, shall we? I cannot wait.
