Islands and Bridges

I'd just shut off the computer last night when I had an insight. Not just to the scene I'd been struggling with, but it showed me a mistake I'd been making for years.

Simply put, it is scenes that don't want to be there.

So the opener for the first chapter is Penny standing on the Acropolis in that flush of giddy joy and accomplishment and disbelief of actually being there. The "I still can't believe I'm actually in Athens!" thing. And this is such an emotional moment I don't want to steal it from her. I'd like to be able to share the whole thing with her, that first day, those first steps on the streets.

I checked flight schedules and the timing works out for an early-morning, as-soon-as-the-shops-open first day (leave SFO at 1700, 17 hour flight with stop-over, arrive ATH 2000 the next day, sleep the sleep of the jet-lagged and up bright and early with internal clock reset. Yeah...that's been my experience with flying towards Europe.)

NOAA has a little calculator for solar angle and azimuth (very neat). I wasted some time trying to figure out how to do azimuth overlay on Google but the options seemed to start with "download and install this, then register here, then..." Or take a screen shot into GIMP and use that as a transparency in a dedicated compass ap. Or just approximate it as ESE and good enough for me. Anyhow; turns out that as you exit the Propylaea on an October morning the sun will be rising behind the Parthenon. (The builders designed the grand entrance so your first sight of the building is at an angle to the Western Facade, not looking dead-on. They knew how to show it off.)

But the scene wasn't working. It felt breathless and rushed and emotionally distant.

And I didn't figure out why until I was getting ready for bed. See, I knew this was a throwaway, a backtrack out of the strict chronology of the surrounding scene. This groundrock, this "Penny is on the Acropolis about to film a lecture" is the place I'm trying to get back to. So I'd been treating any words about waking in the hotel, eating some fruit, walking the wide cobbled way, climbing the long stairs, etc., as something to get through as quickly as possible so I could get the scene back to where it belonged.

And I've been doing this a lot. I have big chunks of text which are, "Don't pay attention to me, I'm just back story or a technical explanation or something. Just breeze through me, don't spend a lot of time thinking about me, the important stuff is back in the real scene."

Hence a lot of rushed, breathless, emotionally uninvolving writing. Even worse, writing that so begrudged the time spent in the detour it left out necessary words. A sort of "They drove. Car. Anyhow back to the story..."

So here's the paradigm I'm going to try to adhere to (more) in future. That the text wants to be on an island of stability. That at every moment, it has a place it belongs to (whether this is a physical location or a less tangible grounding, say in an emotion or a thrust of action or even a mechanical task, "This is the scene explaining how the star drive works.")

For each story beat all the rules of a "scene" still apply. Define the setting, find the purpose, speak to the five senses, have a pacing and an arc. In this case, either treat the pre-Acropolis scenes exactly as I treat the Acropolis scenes, or omit them.

There are still bridges, small chunks of text that are only to bring you from one island to another. But those are small, and there really isn't anything important happening in them.



Actually, the way I'm probably going to deal with this case is stay in the present and collapse the emotional moment into arriving on the Acropolis. So any detour about how the Acropolis looked glimpsed from the hotel shuttle the night before is folded into the immediate past of the narrative tense; "It had gleamed golden in the floodlights glimpsed above the darkened city like a mountain top poking through the clouds and it gleamed rosy-gold now in the early morning light."

Err, yeah, so there was a pluperfect there but the narrator is still in the simple past tense. You get the picture!

Not actual text by the by. Just made up for this post.