Fast and Simple

I'm beginning to wonder if fast and simple are antithetical.

People keep giving me trouble about "putting too much stuff in," and when I complain about how long it takes to write a book, they sigh and say, "maybe if you didn't put so much stuff in."

I think it might be the other way around. I'm doing all this research to try to find those singular characteristic emblematic things that can stand by themselves without any of that other stuff. And I'm far too conscious that I'm working on too tight a deadline, without enough time for research or planning to be able to discover then focus down on those single vivid bits.

If I was just doing an info dump, there would be no research at all. If I were to just "put in everything I know about Japan" I would fill a book easily and I wouldn't have to look up anything first.

But yet, I'm not even sure that the simple and clear actually exists, even if I spent all the time I wanted trying to find it.

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I still don't know how to fill pages. When you get down to it, it is about filling pages. Things go on the page that are interesting enough for the reader to want to continue.

And, yes, you can't just have one thing. Nothing but plot would be a dry exercise indeed. Nothing but description would feel empty, nothing but action would feel trite, nothing but dialogue...you get the picture.

The London book ended up being dialog-intense. Well, the Athens book was largely a solo trip -- it's the reason I made her a first-person narrator, so someone could talk during the long journey. Both, too, I was conscious of the huge info-dump. Largely, the narrator explained in the Athens book. In the London book, people explained to the narrator. Hence so much dialog. I did try to slip some in through direct experience or demonstration, though.

The Japan book I'm trying not to have so much stuff to communicate. My intent was to fill the bulk of the pages with "raw" description. Not explanations, not info-dumps, not lists of things or Japanese names of things, just trees and rocks and clouds and sun.

Somehow.

The other idea was to fill a bunch of pages with description of physical activity, and again not so much technical details of climbing or info-dumps about physiology or names of exercise types but more than anything else the experiences -- physiological and psychological -- of exercise.

I just did a thousand-word scene which can be summed up with, "That morning I went for a run."

Well, okay, I cheated. First there's a conversation with her friend, via the magical bluetooth earpiece (it is only identified as "something special from a company Aki flew out to interview at" so it can do whatever I need it to do without worrying about real-world details). Then her friend cues up a workout soundtrack for her.

The original plan was to go 20,000 words worth of exercise, plus some shrines-and-temples-and-sushi Old Kyoto tourism stuff, plus some flirting with Ichiro. 

And so I'm up against it again. I have two scenes in my planning list right now. One is street food in a popular alley in Kyoto. Another is a small rock gym and a beginning climber to be a Watson for the scene.

So I could list and describe street foods for pages. I would have to look that up but it wouldn't take long. Could pretty much vomit the right Wikipedia page.

The climbing, too, I could go a thousand words just explaining drop-knee and dyno, crimps and buckets and pockets, and that's before getting into Cliffhanger jokes and T-Rex routes...

I still  don't have a feel for what the Japan book is going to do. And I still haven't quite worked out if there is a standard Athena Fox story, once she's finally accepted the role and gained the basic skills (a process she is still ongoing).