Over the Wall

I don't have any big insight on how it feels to have finished this book, except that I am divided strongly between the desire to kick back and chillax for a while and the desire to get going on another project. KUFC is meant to be the first book in a series, and in theory I could get to plotting the next one. In theory. I could also revisit the Greenland book, which has a premise I really believe in and an execution that kinda reeks, and see if rewriting it from scratch is going to be as nightmarish as it seems from this vantage point. Or I could go back to my idea about Marilyn Monroe, a book which exists only in research and a general plan at this time, and try to outline it. Or I could write any of a handful of short stories or essays I have ideas for. And I have this completely insane idea for a Wikipedia/Choose Your Own Adventure book that could use some development, although I feel like I need to wait until I'm a much better writer to do that one.

Or I could just do nothing. Yesterday, when I was finished with money-work, I watched Erin Brockovich and Prometheus, neither of which I'd seen. [Thumbs medium-up on the first (enjoyable, engaging, but no great timeless art), thumbs down + raspberry on the second. Prometheus earned ire of a rare sort from a few of my friends when it came out, and I was curious about what made people so mad. I'm not sure it's worth getting pissed off about, except that it looked a hell of a lot better in its first ten minutes or so (once we get into space, I mean) than it delivered upon in the following two hours. I thought it was more of the same frustrating go-nowhere toss-money-at-it bullshit from Ridley Scott that we've been seeing for decades now, but this is not a popular opinion.] It was nice not to have any other demands on my time, to be able to spend four hours with movies without guilt. I kind of want to roll around in that for a while, rather than getting my saddle back on right away. Yes, I reversed that on purpose. 

I haven't been reading much in the past couple of weeks. Now that I have the time again, all I seem to want to do is crossword puzzles. Oh, well. That'll cycle out too, as my interests always do. 

In case you missed it on Facebook, this article on Slate about novelist Amanda McKittrick Ros is...unmissable. She is potentially the worst novelist of all time, and her existence and reactions to criticism of her work brings up a number of questions for me about the role of confidence vs. the role of self-doubt when  making art. Despite how bad I feel laughing at someone who took herself so very seriously (people may be laughing at me, and my presumption at being a novelist, after all), I can't help it. Her syntax is hysterical. She reminds me precisely of Alpha, the Doberman from Pixar's Up. "You too shall have much rewardings from Master for the toil factor you wage." Her poetry, as quoted on her Wikipedia page, is evidently just as amusing:

Holy Moses! Take a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer.

I downloaded one of her books from Gutenberg and I look forward to tackling it as soon as the crosswords get old.

I couldn't sleep on Sunday night after finishing the book, and one of the things I did in my insomnia was make an iTunes playlist of all the music that either fit the mood of the book, is specifically mentioned in the book, or I played on repeat while writing the book. I kind of love the mix and wish I could send it out as a supplement along with the draft if/when I send it to friends. This is one of those mood songs. A little slow jazz for Wednesday. 

Let Not the Swamp Consume You

I managed another 1,000 words on KUFC (for those of you just joining us, it stands for Kickass Urban Fantasy Chick) yesterday, in between work. I also wrote several pages of notes. I set down all the different plots in the book and explained their shape from beginning to end; although they all overlap each other and I consider them all part of the same thing, it helped to have them all drawn out. I'm now up over 20,000 words in the main text, which means I am officially past the beginning and into the middle.

The Great Swampy Middle (or GSM) knows no fear, no mercy, no regret. It doesn't come after you. It darned well knows that you're going to come to it. It knows that you're going to be charging along, sending up the spinning plates, ripping out the strong character introductions, planting cool bits into your story for the future, and generally feeling high on life. And just then, as you get all that fun opening-story stuff done, it pounces. And suddenly, you're staring at a blank word processor screen trying to figure out how to get your story through the next paragraph.

And it laughs at you. It laughs and dances on the ashes of your enthusiasm. It knows full well that you are going to be its bitch from now until you somehow finish the book or else give up in despair and slit your wrists with the edge of one of those index cards you're using to try to figure out the rest of the plot. It rejoices and dances around a primal bonfire, howling its glee at the uncaring stars.

Yes, Jim Butcher, thank you for the extremely accurate depiction of what lies ahead.

Back in 2006, Butcher offered terrific advice on his LiveJournal about how to avoid the GSM. I read it yesterday (thanks to Matt) and decided to take it to heart. I got the sense that the mini-arc was something he used in Storm Front, and I remember feeling like the structure of that book was a little wonky. (Also, after you read it: I always thought that the LoTR plot actually divided, with no set of character goals more important than the other. Hence, Frodo/Sam Ring Quest is equal in weight to Aragorn & Co. proceeding eventually to the Battle of the Hornburg. Although the retrieval of Merry and Pippin is supposedly a mini-arc, none of the rest of their quest would have happened if they hadn't gone that way and had to end up in Rohan, so I have a hard time seeing it as a mini-arc.) So I decided not to go with that. Instead I'm planning a Big Middle, which will be an emotional peak for my MC and possibly a hell of a scrap as well. Later on we'll have the big dramatic choice of the climax.

The GSM is what happened to me to a very great extent on the Greenland book and to a lesser extent on the time book.* In both of those, I knew what I wanted to happen in the end, but only very vaguely, and I didn't exactly know how to fill up the 50,000 words or so of the middle in order to get to the end and write through what would happen. Stephen King had reassured me that writing with an outline wasn't necessary for all writers, so I thought my instincts would lead me through to the end. SADLY, NO! I still think that outlining to the last detail isn't necessarily a hot idea for everybody, but having more than a vague idea of what will happen is, I suspect, better.

So that's what I'm doing. I know what's ahead, more than vaguely, even if I'm not sure how each chapter will be worked up. I hope this is a sufficient happy medium and not just me lazily coming to the realization that outlines are necessary for me.

Last night I saw Pulp Fiction in the theater, thanks to Fathom Events, and it was pretty cool. There were trailers shown before the movie "hand-picked by Tarantino from his private collection" - one for a 70's movie with John Cassevetes, Britt Ekland, and a very worked-up Peter Falk called Machine Gun McCain; one for Scarface; and one for a Hong Kong movie with a much younger Chow-Yun Fat (Chow-Young Fat?) called The Killer that I kind of want to see. Trailers were also shown for all of Tarantino's other movies, and my favorite of his (and one of my favorites of all movies) is Kill Bill, the first part of which I failed to see in the theater. So that was cool.

Pulp Fiction itself was a fun thing. That movie is new to me every time I see it, despite knowing chunks of it really well, and Matt and I talked afterward about how nothing else has really been made that resembles it, even 18 years later. (Except Tarantino's own movies.) Unfortunately we were sitting on the same aisle as a group of guys who enjoyed reciting lines along with (and sometimes prior to) the characters. Oh well. It was still worth going. There were a couple of younger folks sitting upwards of us who'd cosplayed as Vincent and Mia for the occasion. I could say an awful lot more about Tarantino here, but again, not the point of this blog.

Opera again tomorrow. December's punishing opera schedule will lead to a lighter January and ever more culture in my brain, so I'm soldiering on. Sallying forth. Pushing forward. Happy Friday.

*The time book = the [non-]horror book. I am tired of writing that punctuation over and over, so henceforth it is the time book.

Good Thoughts / The Necessity of Because

A dear friend of mine is having a serious crisis right now, and I'm worrying my face off about it. Please do me a favor and close your eyes and think good thoughts for my friend, even for a split second, if that's the time you have to spare. This person really, really deserves good thoughts and good things and has had far too much of the opposite.

It feels weird of me to say that and then go and have a normal post below, but I wrote the bulk of this post before any excrement hit any spinning blades, so here you are.

I got another one of those amazingly good pieces of feedback the other day. This time, my miracle reader reminded me that only the wrong kind of stories occur with "ant writing", i.e.: this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. No, stories are supposed to have events that result from one another. Things that happen should lead to other things happening, which interact with other things to create new things happening. With the things and the happening. "Because" is the key connector.

I knew this in an instinctual way, but no one had ever pointed out to me before that it's lazy writing to build a story any other way. I thought it over and realized that many times in the past, I had done this all wrong. Mostly because I was following my desire for the piece to come out exactly like I imagined it. I imagine a girl in a box, and that's where she is for the 2,500 words of the story, explaining her situation. There's no because, there just is.

And it dawned on me rather quickly where this came from. Two major sources that informed my storytelling in exactly the wrong way.

One was John Ford. Ford was a director of mostly Western films during much of the 20th century. Name a famous Western made before about 1965, and the odds are that Ford directed it. Ford's first talkie Western and one of his best-known films was Stagecoach, from the magic year of 1939. Stagecoach is good. It sets forth archetypes on which Westerns would depend for decades to come, but still makes them feel rather fresh and complex. Hooker w/ heart o' gold, quiet & reluctant hero, John Wayne, etc.

The climax of the film involves a chase, specifically a chase of the titular stagecoach by a gang of Apaches. Lovely long tracking shots as everyone rides hell-bent for leather. Years ago, I read on the IMDB that someone had asked Ford why the Apaches didn't just shoot the horses that were pulling the stagecoach. That would have stopped the coach for sure. Apparently, Ford answered, "Because that would have been the end of the movie."

But wait! The cavalry always rides in to help!
Hey, Injuns, let's just sit and wait for them, and then we can all go home!

From this I learned that you can cheat on obvious plot holes if you make the story compelling enough. (Well, obvious to some people. I never would have thought about shooting the horses, but now, of course, every Western I see I'm yelling at the Indians to do the same thing. They never do.) I learned that the creators of fiction sometimes see those plot holes and just don't care,* because they're telling the story that they want to tell, and the movie isn't over until they've said exactly what they want to say.

The second source was The Simpsons, the episode "Lisa's Sax":

Homer: And that, my children, is the story of Bart's first day of school.
Bart: Very nice.
Homer: Yeah.
Lisa: Yeah. Except you were supposed to be telling the story of how I got my saxophone!
[snip]
Lisa: Mom, can you tell me the story of how I got my saxophone without having it turn into a story about Bart?
Marge: Sure, honey. Bart had just completed his first day of school, and Bart...
Lisa: Moooom!
Bart: Hey, she's just giving the public what it wants. Bart by the barrelful!
Marge: Sorry, Lisa, it's just how the story goes.

It's just how the story goes became a mantra I repeated to myself as I built stories. She decides to put the found pieces of a mannequin together because that's how the story goes. He decides he wants to bring her back to her homeland because that's how the story goes. He breaks his ankle and stays behind because that's how the story goes.

Wow, was this ever shoddy storytelling. "It's just how the story goes" works when you're telling stories about your life, or when you're a Simpsons writer with an A plot and a B plot you have to connect, or when you know you've got to have an exciting chase sequence at the end to make the audience happy. It does not work when you're a rookie constructing a novel or a short story that has to be good enough for people to want to read it.

There's no because in either of these examples. It is what it is because it is what it is, and while I think that can work pretty well with visual narrative art since the consumer is distracted by all else about the medium, it's not how you write books. There has to be a because. The Indians have to have a damn good reason why they're not shooting the horses.

So, lesson learnt, Miracle Reader. No more listening to John Ford (by all accounts, he was a jerk, anyway), no more listening to Marge. Plots have to have purposes. It all has to connect and make sense. It doesn't in real life, as we all know, but in fiction there has to be a because.

*I couldn't find a place to put this above, but I can't miss the opportunity to say it: a rare exception to this attitude is the Coen brothers. I've yet to find a single plot hole in any of their movies. Their screenwriting is shockingly perfect, and they're no less amazing for creating stories both outlandish and insanely neatly tied up.