Those who can't do...ponder methodology

Now I'm finally down to putting words on paper. And I'm struggling. That's the real gulf. It's the difference between knowing what you are supposed to be doing with the violin, and actually playing the violin. The later is using all of that knowledge and skill in real time. Simultaneously. And writing is no different.

So I'm wandering off into thoughts about processes and methods and constructing more elaborate models and analogies instead of, actually, writing. Of course.

Last week I was talking about a plotting problem. My Bronze Age novel is still stuck on basically a plotting problem. I just hit another plotting problem, having to do with one character needing to be what appeared to be two different, incompatible things. For all that I talked about Venn/Euler Diagrams, for all that I tried out a new piece of software to make a sort of Org Chart (a proper flowchart might have worked better), in the end I brute-forced it by following every branch of the decision tree that was open to me.

And I do this in text; I write out a statement on each branch, as clearly and unambiguously as I can, and then see where it branches below that, still being as concrete as I can. That's a lot of branches to explore.

The real trick is also asking up the hierarchy. Be like that annoying character on Animaniacs. "Honey, I need to get my car out of the garage." "Why?" asks the child. "Because I need to go to work." "Why?" "Because we need the money." "Why?" "Because our society doesn't provide food and shelter for free." "Why?" "Because our planet doesn't have infinite resources." "Why?" "Because the physics of our universe ensure entropic increase..."

As an aside, I still think that solving a problem is easier if you can first state the problem unambiguously. It isn't just language, it is the thought process involved in fixing what may be inchoate concerns into a statement that can be analyzed. Of course you are dropping important nuances in the process. But once you've tested and solved on this more abstract level, you can come back and see how it works.

That's where I am right now, by the way. I've charted what seems to be the way the character needs to be played, but now I have to actually write them like that and see if it actually works.

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These characters are still too new to me. My latest character creation metaphor is that when you are first putting together a character it's like stitching together a body from random parts. You are borrowing the appearance of an actor, a background you read about in a book, the mannerisms of someone you met a long time ago.

Later in the process, a character is like meeting someone new. You already know their resume; their name, age, other details (including details so private they'd never intentionally write them down) but you don't have that experience of how they talk, how they move, how they feel as a fully fleshed out person standing in the room with you.

Right now my characters are at the twitching hand stage. The lightning has been sent down to the slab but the eyes aren't fully open yet.

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Putting down words is of course a mechanical task in addition to being an artistic task. And there's a lot of process involved. I have evolved ways to manipulate within a strictly text environment. I append working notes at the back of whatever slice of text (usually scene-length) I'm working on at the time. As I revise, I shift blocks of no longer desired text into the bottom of the file. When I have to leave a note to come back to, I set out my comments within diagonals.

It could be prettier.  It could be faster. I'm looking at some of the possibilities within Scrivener again. You can color-code text in various ways, you can also identify blocks of text with attached comment or keyword.

What I think I would like at this point would be to switch to a different color to mark text that is going to be removed, text that is new and being tried out as an alternative, and text that is commenting on the process. And have the ability to automatically hide the comments and the deletions because I am very visual and I can't review a text properly unless the distractions are stripped out.

(Heck, I even have trouble when dealing with differences in font size and page width. My paragraphs have evolved to a certain visual size, and that sense is thrown off when I try to look at text on the tiny display of my iPhone.)

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I figured out why reading parallel fanfic is so much fun. It exercises the same muscles when you are staring at multiple ways of handling a scene or a character development and trying to compare the strengths between them. A fanfic is, by definition, a story deriving from a specific source. Like a jazz standard, there are a lot of directions you can go in interpreting it but the original form is still under there.

You also read history the same way. I have six different books of Greek history open right now but that's because I'm reading preview chapters trying to decide which ones to buy. History done right is getting to the most primary sources you can and having multiple sources whenever possible; it is by comparing different accounts that the historian creates a sort of bit map of a plausible underlying truth.

(When I mean parallel, I do mean parallel. I'll read as little as a page of one before flipping to another. It is an interesting task. In reading any book you have a tally of things to keep track of; they haven't reached Amsterdam yet, Phil broke his leg three days ago. Reading six at once, you are trying to remember all the branching choices for each so you can continue to make sense of what is happening on the page.)

(Right, and this also happens when you read books out of order or watch episodes out of order. Interesting exercise!)