Sunday 25 July 2021
As with my last entry, the intervening time seems to have flashed by. On second thought, it’s not so bad: I’d mis-dated by last entry, and looking at the timestamp shows my memory of it only being about five days was accurate.
Last Wednesday, the day after that post, I turned in my story excerpt for the Worldbuilding course. It was 25 pages, and I’d developed it over the last two weeks. I feel quite good about it — not because it is wonderful — but because I believe it’s the first time I’ve written a story, OK, part of a story, that is driven by characters rather than by ideas about technology or worlds.
When I started it — that is, when I finished the first ‘scene’ — I had no idea of a plot; I didn’t even know if the story would be SF or Fantasy. As it developed, it became fantasy, although it took me a while to become comfortable with that — the initial fantasy characters were pretty stock, and served primarily as a foil for technology. That is now changing, and I am getting some more-fleshed out fantasy characters. The characters have spawned other characters, which keeps the writing going, and so the story has sort of grown organically, kind of in a dendritic manner with one bit developing out of a small point of another, or to fulfill a need for plot or structure of the story.
At this point I am thinking that I need to step back and develop a plot. I don’t believe I can just keep writing new scenes inspired or required by this or that aspect of a prior scene. I do have a plot at the highest level, and the way it is resolved, but I feel like there is a whole of ‘scaffolding’ needed for the middle. Part of me thinks that what I should do is step back and analyze a few novels I like, to get a sense for how the sort of intermediate level of plotting ‘feels’ in terms of its structure and complexity. I will pay more attention to that as we continue to read The Dispossesed, for the world-building course. I think I will also look at some other books that are in the same approxiate area of genre space that I am working in. A Well-favored Man is one that comes to mind. Perhaps a pieces from the Bordertown ouvre, as well.
CAH very nicely sent me three writing books from SF genre authors (by LeGuine, Delany, and <the 9/12ths of Heaven person>. I think this is a good time to check them out. I also went back through the critiques I’ve done for the Worldbuilding course to try to figure out what I’ve learned. Interesting, what has been most valuable for me are not the problems I pointed out, but the occasional things I pointed out as strengths. There is no doubt a lesson there… Most of what I commented on where ways in which the authors were doing nice things at the level of phrases, or sentences.
Here are my observations, with examples, grouped very roughly into small-scale and larger-scale moves:
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Notes on what I learned from doing Critiques
Small-scale Moves
- Application of pointed observation:
- “Marq exhaled a harsh breath. Vampires didn’t need to breathe, but there was nothing like stress to bring back old habits.”
- “but I’m too hyped on adrenaline and fear to be reasonable.“
- Arch /coy reference—no need to spell out.
- “…while sipping from a flower-patterned teacup. There wasn’t tea inside it, of course. Vampires only drank one thing.”
- Resonance, but with contrast.
- “…setting aside his teacup on the saucer with a soft clank on the table between them. A smudge of blood glistened on the cup’s lip, next to a delicately patterned rose.”
- ‘Yes, of course they would do that…’
- “Bamor glanced over at me. I had a feeling he was going to make me capture the thing..”. <#scene break#> “Slowly, I descended into…”
- <protagonist is told what happened while he was passed out, and the story indicates that others took credit for what he did>
- Sarcasm:
- “Just endanger me by association. No biggie.”
- Embodiment and proxemics:
- “A bubble of abandonment formed around me.”
- “They edged away”
- ‘She threw open her arms and took a deep lung-stretching breath of the cold mountain air.’
- Full-spectrum description: sensation, embodiment, tendency
- “While her sister slept, Olivia lived in the waking world. She was four years older, with snowplow shoulders and choppy, dirty-yellow hair. She fought anyone who offered to “wake Sleeping Beauty.”
- “Olivia’s mouth tasted sour and coppery. She had bitten her lip in the fall. She spat a glob of soil and blood as Eloise pulled her to her feet.”
- “Rosemary’s legs pumped up and down to the rhythm of her lungs as they strained for oxygen. Her normal tailored skirts and shiny loafers were abandoned for sweat-stained denim and sneakers with holes in the toe.”
Larger-scale moves
- Tension leavens ambiguity. It is good to try to strike a balance between ambiguity (the number of unanswered questions) and the tension: more ambiguity requires more tension to pull the reader along
- Frame invocation. <Invoking a ‘frame’ (like salvaging) or <script> in the opening is an effective way to reduce exposition because it invokes a set of expectations, goals and roles.>
- Persistent metonym: “Chill seeps through dad’s jacket.” Recurring motif across scenes contects to history and motivation.
- Linguistic tics: Paralinguistic habits – stuttering, word or phrase repetition, unusual but customary syntactic constructions – can help distinguish one character from others.
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That’s it for now.
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