Over the third part of the book I've been trying to sneak in a parallel story. While Penny is digging with her fellow archaeologists ahead of the construction crews at the old Nine Elms Station, a local paper has been publishing excerpts from the diary written by a young women who sheltered down on the abandoned platform during the Blitz.
I didn't get the parallelism as good as I might have liked. Well, I also didn't like it to be too obvious. Well, the way the scenes shook out for me as I moved from outline to actually fleshing them out, Penny's relationship with her friend Graham is hitting critical points just as Linnet has finally managed to start writing about Captain Wentworth, the man responsible for sticking an Aux Unit depot in the Nine Elms shelter.
And they are bonding over SF. Which was a somewhat late addition on my part. Wentworth is mooning over the glorious last stands of the past, from Rorke's Drift to the Siege of Acre. Linnet, not to be a passive part of the conversation, is coming back with the armageddons of, well, Buck Rogers.
And this is already tough as hell to write because while an educated woman of 1940 -- particularly one that educated largely on pulp magazines -- is a familiar voice to me, quotes within quotes are just not much fun. The scene I'm working on, Penny and Graham are discussing Linnet's latest diary entries where she discusses what she and the Captain talked about and this is less Phillip Nowlan and more Christopher Nolan.
(Cue the Inception sound effect).
There's two other things on the table at this point. Penny has been zig-zagging back and forth between being a responsible -- but boring -- worker bee of an archaeologist. A junior digger. And in the excursions inspired by Graham, she's been running around meeting eccentric people and eventually getting into more and more "stunts." Like breaking into Battersea Power Station.
So this is coming to a head as well. At the center of this particular story, as much as it is wrapped in a mystery and a Blitz story, is Penny feeling forced to decide between Serious Archaeology and being Indiana Jones.
But there's a subtler side to this. Whatever happened in Athens that let Penny be a real-life Athena Fox, it is an uncertain magic. The main reason she got shot with a bow at Highgate Cemetery is so she could be bleeding and in pain for the rest of the story. Stunts don't always work and real violence isn't like the movies.
One of the things Captain Wentworth is hiding is the kind of violence he experienced first-hand in ugly things like the Arab Revolts. And Linnet is in the same naive stage where she is going to volunteer for SOE before this is all over.
And Graham may appear to be an ordinary, out-of-shape guy, but he's a serious Roman reenactor. Well, something he did let him understand something of how violence really works. It is a lesson Penny is going to be learning deep under the streets of London. It is something I'm going back and forth on endlessly and having a lot of problems with myself because it totally changes the feel of her stories.
So I'm trying to fold this in as well. My Inception conversation over chicken tikka masala is trying to parallel not just Linnet and Penny both spending their days/nights down in the Nine Elms shelter, it is both having too close a contact with worlds of fantasy and having an older male mentor figure (though not Mentor figure) who is for whatever reason unwilling to try to explain to them the true cost of violence.
And thus it is going to suck. I mean, sure. I can write it. I can cut out a lot and it would probably be a better scene for it. Allusions the readers doesn't get just makes them bored and confused. The thing that really sucks is I can't possibly put in it what I wanted to put in.
All those months of figuring and outlining and researching and everything I know about Captain Wentworth and his past and his relationship to Linnet I can only touch at third hand, through a half-dozen snatches of quoted dialog. And that ain't enough.
The other thing I realized this weekend is that Penny is exhausting. Maybe it is just a quality of First Person. Maybe it is her energy and raw nerves and the way she jumps around like the later regnerations of The Doctor. Or maybe it is the peculiar effort of going inside the head of someone very different from you and having to feel what they feel as you speak in their voice.
Whatever it is, I had to take frequent breaks. So I'm happy I got 2-3,000 words done over the weekend. Even the first draft of the Lensman scene. Next chapter includes the sword fight, so I know I'll lose a little time doing some specific research for that. Might even open my book on the New Globe. Assuming I still have it!
No comments:
Post a Comment