Writing process

ALSAP #1.5: Trista Pena

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I was all set to analyse you another love song today, in honour of Valentine’s Day, but I don’t feel like listening to that song today. In fact, I’m not listening to any of my Big Four. I’m writing to “Trista Pena” by the Gipsy Kings:


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It’s technically a love song – a lost love song. The lyrics aren’t much, honestly; the title translates to “Sad Pain”. That pretty much sums it up, but you can tell as much just by listening. I still have reasonably good Spanish when I concentrate, but the Gipsy Kings aren’t about the lyrics for me (well, except for the occasional really interesting nonsense[?] words they include, like “Ami Wa Wa”. Those tickle me unduly). Not so much about the rhythm or song structure either: they play a lot of rumba, and they’re awesome at it, but there’s not a lot of variability.

No, Gipsy Kings are all about energy and mood, to me. If you’re in the market for an intense and specific emotion – be it joy, fierceness, nostalgia, or weepy weepy sorrow – these are your lads.

And yeah, I’m writing to a plaintive one today. Hm. Is that a spoiler?

Happy Chocolate Day to you and yours!
 

All around the internets

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Anybody like book review blogs? Well, today’s your lucky day! Several of the reviewers I most admire from GoodReads have joined forces in two new group blogs, and I’d like to encourage you to check them out.

The Readventurer blog was originally a solo effort by Flannery, but she has recently been joined by Tatiana and Catie. These are three of the best-read, most judicious reviewers of my acquaintance, and I think this blog is really going to be something special with that many excellent brains behind it.

In the other corner, we’ve got the new, improved Cuddlebuggery Book Blog, where Kat and Stephanie have joined forces to fight evil and bring back the awesome. I anticipate a lively, irreverent take on YA literature over here. I know I’ll be checking both blogs often to see what’s new and happening.

On a slightly different subject: my author friend Elizabeth May just wrote an informative post on self-editing. If any of you are going through that process now (or will be in the near future, or might be in the distant maybe), it looks like she’s broken it down into helpful stages.

What I find interesting (‘cuz I’m weird like this) is where she says she used to hate the editing part of writing. My friend Phoebe North has expressed a similar distaste, and although both of them say that was in the past (which I don’t doubt), it does make me wonder: do writers tend to prefer either composing or revising? I suppose it makes sense that one would come more naturally than the other. I’ll tell you, though, I’m a reviser. I am so close to finishing the first draft of the sequel, and I can’t wait because it means I get to go back and make everything RIGHT.

(And no, I can’t just write it right the first time. I don’t really know why that is, although it might be fun to dig into sometime.)

How about you, if you write: would you rather have the endless open page ahead of you to fill, or are you more interested in the myriad obsessive minutiae of revision?

As they round the last curve…

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…into the home stretch, it’s Rachel coming up the outside, Slothful Sluggard stuck at the rail, he’s going nowhere, now Rachel’s still thundering up the outside into the straightaway, past Angsty Frets, past Infinite Indecision — whoa, he’s pulled up; is he hurt? — Thissuckssomuch still ahead by a neck entering the final furlong, but Rachel’s passing him too, she can see the finish post, folks, she’s like a cow to the milking barn, but Always Say Never is still ahead by a two lengths, a length, half a length, she can see the finish, it’s right there, quarter length behind, neck and neck, can she do it?

The end of this draft is in sight, friends. Still a ways to go, and don’t count out Thissuckssomuch yet. That horse is always breathing down my neck.

Where do you get your ideas?

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That question, more than any other, seems to be a bugbear for writers and other artists.

I find it embarrassing, myself. Not because it’s hard to answer, and not because the answer (from my brain) is so obvious and anticlimactic. It’s because I inevitably hear a question behind the question: why is it that you have good ideas and I don’t?

It can’t be true that the asker has no ideas, or really doesn’t know where ideas come from, right? Those aren’t possibilities I can entertain, and I am the queen of entertaining possibilities. The question, as asked, doesn’t make much sense.

The unasked question, on the other hand, is awkward. It puts a chasm between me and the asker (Rachel = full of glorious ideas; asker = full of stupid ideas) and I feel pretty sure the asker didn’t quite mean to ask it. Is it rude to answer what was not explicitly asked? I usually make up some kind of funny answer that is also true: where don’t I get ideas? Ideas are like a fire hose to the face, and I wish I could turn it off sometimes.

Here’s what I’d rather say, though:

I don’t have good ideas, or at least, not any better than anyone else. What I have is a willingness to entertain ideas. I don’t dismiss them out of hand. I have them over for tea, and if we get along well enough, maybe dinner. The ones I really like end up staying over. And maybe I should cut that metaphor off right there; you get the idea. My “good” ideas are simply the ones that interest me most, just like my friends are the people I get along with best, rather than the best people.

I will entertain any idea, no matter how ugly. Sometimes the ugliest ones are the most fruitful; sometimes they’re ugly because they’re full of other ideas. Scary ones are harder to face, and I will sometimes put them off, but I’ve never yet regretted looking one in the eye. Insipid ones, boring ones, cliched and tedious ones – I get plenty of those. I’m happy to let them in because sometimes a more unusual idea is hiding underneath them.

I don’t marry my ideas. There are always, ALWAYS more; that is an article of faith for me. I let go of the ones that don’t grab me or I can’t use – and I get so many I’m not sure I even see them all – but what I never do is label them stupid or bad. You start putting those kinds of labels on ideas, and maybe the ideas will get the idea that your mind is an unsafe place to be. Why should they come around, if you’re going to be so mean to them? (and yet I bet some of them still do).

What I’m trying to say – in the most circuitous way possible – is that ideas invite more ideas. I think the really interesting ones only come around after you’ve shown a certain willingness to entertain the lesser ones. You can’t just dismiss the little ones; it’d be like dismissing a rock for being boring, when you could have built Chartres with enough rocks just like it.

It’s not a question of where I get ideas, but of how I treat ideas.

There’s probably more to it. Different minds probably generate different flavours of ideas. Some may be more suited to other purposes, like philosophy, or business,  or physics. But again, I  think the willingness to consider possibilities – even the ones that inner Grendel-voice would like to dismiss as stupid – would be a useful trait of mind in any field.

Before I go, let me just invoke the classic(al) example of a “stupid” idea. Have some Beethoven:

Duh-duh-duh-DUUUUHHHHNNN. That’s a musical idea. It’s pretty ludicrous, on the face of things. It seems barely an idea worth having. But old Ludwig, by golly, he invited it in. He talked to it and listened to what it had to tell him. He built a mighty edifice from that stupid stone.

O hypothetical asker! Talk to your stupid ideas. They’re as full of potential as any of mine.

Another oldie-but-goodie

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In honour of how grumpy I’ve been on and off for the last two months, here’s a comic strip I did for Strange Horizons, almost a decade ago:

For a writer, any time can be that time of the month

I need to add, however, that actual writer’s block is very rare for me these days. Maybe there is a cure, or maybe the same phenomenon takes different forms (the aforementioned cantankerousness, for example). Maybe it’s a matter of experience: I’m more likely to rip out pages and try something new if I get stuck, and I’m less likely to give up if the going gets tough (which it does, inevitably). I’ve got more stamina now.

My friend Phoebe North (who just got a book deal! Yay Phoebe!) recently did a question-and-answer post. One of the questions I posed her (besides the one that made her call me “evil”) was “What’s the one thing you really, really wish you had known before you began?”

Here’s my answer to that question: I wish I had truly understood how much stamina this was going to take. Maybe that would have deterred me, but I don’t think so. I’ve never been one to balk at a challenge. Having a realistic sense of the scope of the challenge, though? Would have saved me some grief.

Mark the date and time

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Today I finally fell in love with the sequel.

Ye gods that took a shockingly long time!

You’ve noticed me struggling (remember when I dropped 70 pages?). I like to bring my difficulties out into the light and examine them, partly because doing so can jostle new ideas loose, partly because I think it’s instructive for aspiring writers to see me struggle. Then you can say to yourself, Wow, if a chronic bumbler like that can write a novel and get published, maybe there’s hope for me after all!

There was something I wasn’t saying, though, because it was deeply embarrassing to me: I did not love this book. However many interesting ideas I had, however much I talked to my characters and made them real, the work still left me cold. I knew why (no love) but I didn’t know how to fix it.

This sequel has been a bit like an arranged marriage for me. It’s politically important – people expect it, I’m under contract, I’m uniting feuding kingdoms, etc. – but I’ve had many days where “write on and think of England” was the only way I was making it through. I held my nose, followed my outline, and forged ahead for the good of the nation. Old ladies told me I would learn to love this book eventually, but I kept wondering when?

It turns out there was a tiny little scene at about page 65 that I’d decided was too difficult to write. I skipped it in the interest of forward progress. Yesterday, when all forward progress had once again ground to a halt, I went back to look at it. There seemed to be no other course of action left.

The scene was difficult indeed – harrowing and honest and exposed. I solved it inelegantly, but I solved it

Today I went back and solved it better.

All of a sudden we have ourselves a novel, a proper novel, built on love. And that is an unfathomable relief.

I battle the wiggles

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(That title will inevitably make some of you imagine me engaged in an epic struggle against these guys. In fact, it’s such an amusing image, I almost want to leave it at that — perhaps with an apology for putting that song in your head. It should only last month or two, until you happen to see a big red car somewhere.)

Back when I was in college, I read an essay by Daniel Pinkwater about his writing process. He used the “Butt in Chair” method: you park your butt in a chair and you don’t let yourself get up until a certain amount of time  has passed. You will get so bored, just sitting there, that eventually you’ll start writing just to break the tedium.

That essay was written before the internet. If you’re using a computer to write – and most of us are, anymore – there is always something else to do besides work, no matter how long you park your butt in that chair.

Here’s what I’m slowly learning to appreciate: it’s actually more useful to pry yourself out of the chair at regular intervals.

If I sit in front of the screen too long doing one thing, I get wiggly – both physically and mentally. I need to get up and move around, or I need to find something else to think about for a little while. Moving around easily turns into running errands and doing housework; thinking about something else becomes surfing the internet before I know it. Both these things equal “Rachel isn’t getting her work done.”

Writing is my job now. If I let myself be overtaken by wiggles, I don’t get my job done.

So here’s my current strategy: I schedule my wiggles. I work for 30-45 minutes, and then I wiggle for 5-15 minutes. I use a timer, so there’s no losing track. Acceptable wiggles include: exercise, housework, snack, quick e-mails.

It is possible that my day was breaking down into about this proportion of work to wiggling anyway (although possibly not, because the internet does occasionally sink its claws in me), but the other advantage is that I can easily and accurately keep track of how much time I’ve spent working. Word count isn’t always the best measure of a day, as I’ve discovered. It’s nice to have a tangible measure because there are plenty of days where I work very hard and feel like I’ve almost nothing to show for it by the end.

And there’s my timer! Wiggle time!

Listening to my inner Abdo

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(This post is a continuation of this and this and this.) (Also: sorry it’s taken me forever to put this up. It’s been a really rough week on the writing front, as other problems have brought themselves to my attention. But as I always say – and as my friend Arwen had to remind me that I always say – writing is never wasted.)

I have a head full of humans.

I feel I’ve known some of them forever. In rewriting Seraphina so many times over the course of eight years, it’s like I’m a director who’s been fortunate enough to keep working with the same actors. I know them all very well. I know what they’re capable of, and I know when they haven’t bothered showing up for work (looking at YOU in that section I just ripped out, Lucian Kiggs!).

They aren’t real people, of course. I understand that. But I think there is more to each of them than I’ve consciously put there. I think each one acts as a conduit for something my subconscious is working on – not always, but often, especially when I’m just getting to know them.

The subconscious is a slippery subject. I’m not a psychologist; I have no training in this area. All I have is my own experience and observations of my mind at work. I think of my subconscious as a deep-sea diver, plumbing my cold, unknowable unconscious and bringing up grotesque treasures in a bucket. The diver can’t talk, and the imagery she brings back doesn’t always make sense at first (although sometimes it makes shockingly clear sense). She’s always working, quietly and unseen. This is where strange connections and leaps of intuition happen. This is the part of my brain I’m talking about when I say, “Sometimes my brain is smarter than I am.”

It’s a hard-working part of my brain, but it doesn’t have much access to language in the usual sense. It has to make do with symbols. I make a study of my own symbols and try to work out what I mean. It sounds ridiculous, but I find it really fun.

So whenever one of these humans in my head starts acting up, I can usually be sure there’s something my non-verbal brain is trying to get across. This was the case with Abdo, who was mad at me for most of October.

Continue reading →

Second thoughts on NaNoWriMo

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So! At it eleven days now, I’ve got more than 16K words written. This has been an interesting experiment, and I can’t deny it’s great to be as far into the book as I now am.

But.

This is not the way I write. I can only go so far forward before I have to go back and make things better. I get unhappy, otherwise. I start dragging my feet. The book is on to the next thing, but my brain is all I’m not done back there.

I see the point of turning off the “internal editor” if it’s a cruel obstructionist who tells you everything you do is no good, but I don’t really have one of those.

For me, it’s more the case that I just don’t work in a straight line. I layer. When I write a scene, the previous scene suddenly looks different to me, so I have to go back and put another layer of meaning or characterization over it, which in turn enables me to sketch out a subsequent scene, which teaches me something I didn’t understand about the beginning, which reminds me of something I meant to do over here…

And round and round, building everything up slowly. It’s like those Renaissance paintings where they layered on glazes of almost transparent colour, building up subtle gradations. It takes a lot of patience, but it’s my process.

I am going to take a few days off — completely off — and let my poor brain bounce After that, my “NaNo” may in fact consist of something slightly different than the rules. I shall take the emphasis off word-count, maybe spend a week doing a comb-over of what’s already there, and then proceed in my own way.

I’ll keep the emphasis on progress, but remind myself gently that in my process, progress can occur in a variety of directions.

For your amusement while I’m offline, here’s William Shatner, being way too William Shatner for words:


 

As boring as I want to be

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So. Last time I said I had been particularly moved by that post at Seeking Avalon. I’d already read Elizabeth Bear’s “Writing the Other” post, and I’d read meta-posts about the whole RaceFail scenario, so I thought I knew what to expect from Avalon’s Willow. I expected strong words and anger; I expected to see Bear taken to task for being smug and patronizing.

I didn’t expect to see Willow’s broken heart laid out so clearly.

Her list is just relentless. Time and again, a Character of Colour is set up and knocked down, is subordinate to a white character, is furniture to decorate a scene with, is an exotic sideshow. I’m not familiar with all the examples she gave – there are big gaps in my SF/F knowledge – but I am a diehard Trekkie, so I knew this one:

It’s about Geordi being blind. It’s about Worf being, time and time again, a tragic mulatto. It’s about holding on to Benjamin & Jake Sisko with finger nails and eye teeth.

This made me think. About The Worf Effect. About Worf Is Always Wrong (not a TV Trope, just something I’d noticed: any time there’s a brainstorming session, Worf’s suggested solution is rejected). About Geordi Never Gets Any (again, just something I noticed: as a fellow nerd, I felt for him). And I thought about the number of times Troi is nothing but Cleavage On the Bridge (love me, love my invented trope names), or The Empath (most ineffectual power evar!), and how much it sucks when all the characters who are ostensibly like you are set dressing or ineffectual noodle people.

Extrapolate from there how much more it sucks to see this around you in all media all the time.

But the thing that REALLY struck me was her mention of Ben and Jake Sisko. I have a deep fondness for those two (for all of DS9, really, which is head and shoulders above any other Trek, IMO). What a realistic and moving relationship they had! I confess that they made me cry more than once. Now that I’m a parent myself it strikes me as even more poignant: Ben’s transparent affection for (and occasional exasperation with) his son, Jake pushing him away and clinging to him by turns, the whole dance of learning to differentiate yourselves and yet still stay friends. They’re the best father-son pair I’ve ever seen depicted on TV. (I qualify this by saying I’ve watched less TV than most people, but STILL. They were just lovely.)

As I was thinking about Ben and Jake Sisko, my subconscious mind (which is sometimes smarter than I am) suddenly dredged up a story a friend had told me. When Canada first legalized same-sex marriage, my friend and her partner came up from Seattle to get married here. They approached the marriage licence clerk with a certain amount of trepidation, bracing themselves for the funny look or the intrusive question or the exaggerated show of support, but none of that materialized.

The clerk yawned; he thought they were boring. And my friend was struck by how wonderful it was to bore someone.

My subconscious is like a cat, leaving things like this on my doorstep without explaining why. In this case, I think I know why. Ben and Jake Sisko are, in many ways, a very ordinary father and son. The fact that such an ordinary pair should be so extraordinary among the characters in Willow’s list is… well, it’s heartbreaking. Not being exotic, not being stared at, not being an ambassador for “your people” all the time, being as boring as you want to be — these are luxuries.

Hold that thought a moment, because there’s one more strand I have to tease out before I braid everything back together. I turn back to Avalon’s Willow:

It’s about the fact that you and writers like you don’t have to think about this stuff. That you have the ready made excuse that it all‘serves the story’ and that said character was written intelligently and as a well rounded individual with wants and needs of his own; with plots even.

This got me thinking, too, and not just “about this stuff” (and my privileged ability to stop thinking about it, if I wanted to). It was the phrase “serves the story” that got my attention.

(I have written and rewritten this part about twenty times now, trying to counterbalance feeling with tact, and I’m having a devil of a time. I’m just going to have to say it as plainly as possible and ask everyone’s forgiveness after.)

I believe that there are as many ways to make art as there are artists, that there is no one right way to do it. As much as I may dislike certain books (I throw out Twilight as my standard example), I will defend them as art.

That said, I think the claim that something – anything – had to be present in a book because it “serves the story” is kind of a bullshit excuse. First of all, everything in a finished story serves the story; that’s so obvious it doesn’t need saying. What’s not obvious, however, is that until the story is finished – and by finished, I mean out in print, where it can no longer be tinkered with – anything can still be changed. Especially plot.

The unhealthy relationship in the published novel Twilight serves the story, sure. If it weren’t there, Twilight wouldn’t be Twilight. Twilight’ would be some other story. Maybe a better story, maybe not, but different.

To defend a problematic part of a novel by saying it “serves the story” is to imply that there was only one story that could have been told, and it’s this one, Twilight as-is, not Twilight’. It implies inevitability.

Nothing is inevitable. Plot is not some juggernaut, chugging along, running people over, unsteerable and unstoppable. That is a bossy, bullying plot, to my mind. It turns characters into pawns, civilizations into stage-dressing, emotions into devices. It says things can only happen one way. It is a knee-jerk reactive plot.

I say again: it can be reactive and still be art. Clearly (hi, Twilight!) it can sell well too. For my own part, I’m not a big fan of my own jerking knee. I’ve seen the harm it can do. I believe I can do better than that.

The key, I think, is to keep asking questions (I know I have the privilege to stop, but I like asking questions. If I’m not asking these specific questions, I’m asking other questions. It’s what I do). The inevitable will insist that it can’t be questioned; it’s going to happen whether you like it or not. Asking questions is the way to poke it in the eye.

Nothing is inevitable in fiction. Everything can be questioned, everything changed.

It’s all well and good to have imaginary fist-fights in my head where I hash out my own theories of art and inevitability, but theories are no good to me if I don’t put them to work. I’m an experimentalist at heart, not a theorist (which is why I’m worried that I’ve laid this all out inadequately). “Ask questions of your plots!” I announce, ex cathedra, but the point really is that I have begun asking questions of my work-in-progress. Different questions than usual, I mean. Questions pertaining to privilege and fairness and – because we’ve been in Porphyry for about 90 pages now – race.

The very first question was: who gets to be boring?

OK! *gasp!* That’s more than plenty for today! Tune in next time (or the time after; I think I have to catch my breath, here) when I actively apply all this thinking to what I’m doing! I’ll probably talk about art some more! Consider yourself warned.