Tag Archives: authors

My second draft is starting to feel like an alternative universe

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My novel The Portal takes its inspiration from the idea of the multiverse, in which there are an infinite number of alternative universes, each slightly different from one another.  In the sequel to this novel, my second draft is starting to feel like its own alternative universe.  I’m 12,000 words in, and it’s becoming a strange near-replica of the first draft.  Characters are slightly different; motivations are slightly changed; plot elements are slightly rearranged.  It’s frustrating that I have to throw away so much work, but it’s also kind of interesting.  Where is our hero going to end up in this draft?  Maybe there should be an endless series of drafts, each one heading in a different direction.  No need to end up in either Oakland or Aukland–the journey is what matters.

In which I tell you what you should think about “Go Set a Watchman”

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In case you haven’t already made up your mind.

I agree with the editor who rejected Go Set a Watchman.  But I can also understand why he didn’t want to give up on Harper Lee.  She obviously knew how to write.  She could create vivid characters and evoke a sense of time and place.  What she didn’t demonstrate in this book is that she knew how to write a novel.  Just at the point when you expect the tension to ratchet up–when she discovers that her beloved father and the man she thinks she’s going to marry have joined a citizens’ council to fight integration–the plot stops dead in its tracks, and we have to endure a series of long conversations between the narrator and her uncle, lover, and father.  Show, don’t tell, Harper!

I actually found those conversations reasonably interesting.  Here are smart, presumably reasonable men at the dawn of the Civil Rights era making the best case they can that Civil Rights is a bad idea, both for them and for Negroes.  I don’t find it a convincing case, and neither does the narrator, but it’s well presented.  What Lee should have done is dramatize the case they are making, but she doesn’t (and maybe couldn’t).  She walks right up to the drama–she has Atticus agree to defend a black man for running down a no-‘count white drunk; but he does this only to keep the NAACP lawyers from taking the case and potentially riling up the town by getting the black man off on a technicality. That has a lot of potential, it seems to me.  But ultimately this goes nowhere.

Her editor could have told her to focus on that plot element, but instead he evidently told her to focus on her childhood; the reminiscences that are interspersed in Go Set a Watchman are charming (and also completely extraneous).  It made perfect sense to weave a novel out of them.

And it also made sense to avoid focusing on the grown-up Scout.  Lee gives her a good narrative voice, but her life never really comes into focus–what is she doing in New York?  Is she happy there?  I got the sense that Lee really wasn’t particularly interested in her; Atticus was all that mattered.  I wonder why.

What makes a plot “arthritic”?

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In my post on Ann Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread I quoted the Washington Post’s assessment (at the beginning of a rave review) that its plot was “arthritic”  I don’t know what that means.  Presumably the reviewer is talking about the events of the novel, which are standard-issue Ann Tyler: ordinary people working their way through ordinary problems.  But isn’t that what most literary fiction is about?  Alice McDermott’s Somewhere and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteredge, for example, are no different, except in their locations.  (I talk about them briefly here and here.)

Maybe the reviewer doesn’t like how Tyler lays out the structure of the events?  But that can’t be it.  The structure is perfectly comprehensible, but she fractures the time sequence and the points of view in interesting and modern ways.  The novel begins by hopping forward through time a bit, and it ends unexpectedtly with two deep flashbacks, one with about the grandparents, who are dead long before the main action begins, and the other about how the parents fell in love, decades before the action begins.  And it ends with a brief scene that gives us the first point of view section of a main character (perhaps the main character).  Again, this is similar to what McDermott and Strout do in their novels, which hop around endlessly in their time sequences.

Ultimately, I think the reviewer just felt the need to make a glancing reference to Tyler’s age.  She’s been writing fine novels for 50 years, and she knows what she’s doing.

I wish I could do it.

 

How did I become so darn creative?

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The blog The Passive Voice points me to some guy I’ve never heard of who offers six ways to boost your creativity:

  1. Wake up early
  2. Exercise frequently
  3. Stick to a strict schedule
  4. Keep your day job
  5. Learn to work anywhere, anytime
  6. Realize that “creative blocks” are just procrastination

Well, you know, I do all that stuff, and everything the guy says makes perfect sense.  Like his comment on #3:

It’s a common misconception that in order to be creative, one must live life on a whim with no structure and no sense of need to do anything, but the habits of highly successful and creative people suggest otherwise. In fact, most creative minds schedule their days rigorously. Psychologist William James described the impact of a schedule on creativity, saying that only by having a schedule can we “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.”

So read the post and do everything this guy says.

Writing olde-time dialog

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My brother passed along this article from the New York Times about writing dialog in a historical novel. The writer puts her finger on the central issue:

The problem for a writer who has seized upon a story set in the past is how to create a narrative voice that conjures the atmosphere of its historical times, without alienating contemporary readers. It’s a complicated sort of ventriloquism.

In other words, you want to be true to your characters and your time, but you also need to be comprehensible.  She goes on:

The best writers — from Charles Frazier in “Cold Mountain” to Junot Diaz in “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” — deploy foreign or arcane words sparingly, to give a realistic flavor of an era or a culture, but they also channel the atmosphere of time and place through the rhythms of speech.

Anyway, I’m facing a version of this problem in my sequel to The Portal.  We’re in an alternative universe where people speak Latin.  Some of the characters know English, but it’s not necessarily our English.  And some dialog takes place in Latin but is translated into English.  So how does one handle all this?

I’m pretty much doing what the author suggests.  I sprinkle in enough Latin words and phrases so that the reader doesn’t lose sight of the exotic locale.  A school is referred to as a schola, for example; a village is a castellum.  And I use a slightly formal, slightly non-standard rhythm to the English dialog, avoiding all modernisms.  I think this will probably work.  We’ll see.

 

Second draft: Did I write THAT?

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The one downside of working on a second draft is that you’re sort of obliged to read your first draft.  My first draft is always better in recollection than on the page.  Now that I know where I’m going, I see that I’ve gotten pretty much everything wrong on the page.  I’m now about 7000 words into my rewrite, and probably 5000 of those words are new.  That’s pretty depressing.

On the other hand, those new words are great!

At least, they will be until I have to re-read them.

I thought my novel was going to Oakland, but instead it ended up in Auckland

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We were discussing the conclusion of my novel in my writing group. The novel had taken a bit of an unexpected direction.  Well, more than a bit.  How had it ended up in a woodshed in the wilds of a parallel-universe Scotland?  Where did that come from?  Jeff said: “It’s like that guy who got on a plane thinking it was going to Oakland, but instead he ended up in Auckland.”

That really happened, and the Internet will never forget.  And now I won’t, either.

World-building and storytelling

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Posting has been light while I’ve tried to meet my goal of finishing the first draft of my novel in six months.  I probably won’t make it, but I’ll come close.

This is a sequel to my novel The Portal, and the experience of writing it is interestingly different from my previous effort: writing another novel in The Last P.I series, which turned out to be Where All the Ladders Start.  Both novels are science fiction, but Where All the Ladders Start uses a future world (and a set of characters) that I’ve already created. The challenge in writing it was coming up with another mystery plot (or two) for my protagonist to get involved in.

The sequel to The Portal takes place in a parallel (or alternative, or maybe alternate) universe.  It’s an adventure story rather than a mystery, so the plot doesn’t have to be as tightly wound as that of Where All the Ladders Start.  But I have to do a whole lot of world-building for it, and that offers its own difficulties.  There are two things that have been happening in the course of the first draft:

First, I keep coming up with new ideas about the world.  Some are just local color to give the novel added depth; others are dictated by the plot (which, as usual, has veered off in unexpected directions as I write).  All that stuff needs to be worked into the second draft. This is pretty much business as usual.

Second, and more interesting, there’s material I wanted to work into the novel, but I never seemed to find the right place for it.  Now what?  Will I have better luck in the second draft?  The problem I’m having is the world-building does not always play well with storytelling.  For example, at one point in the draft I thought I had reached a good spot in the book where a character could spend a few pages giving some needed background, but my writing group gave the scene a unanimous thumbs-down: it slowed the action too much, I was informed.  Ditch the exposition and ramp up the conflict. The best science fiction novels make integrating the description of the fictional world with the action of the plot seem natural; but it’s hard work.  At least for me.  The challenge of the second draft is going to be making that hard work look effortless.

So that’s what my novel is all about!

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When I’m writing a novel, there usually comes a point when I realize what it’s all about.  Not the details of the plot–working them out is a constant process–but the reason I’m bothering to write it.  It’s a bit odd that I never seem to figure this out before I starting in on the thing, but there you have it.

Anyway, I’m deeply into the first draft of the sequel to my novel The Portal, and I find that I have suddenly reached this point.  Which is a considerable relief, actually.  Now I’m not just telling a story; I’m telling a story that matters to me.