Dan Browning

They talk about research in writing being an iceberg.  That you need to know much more than what actually goes into the book.

This is probably true. Every book is a set of choices; you go from all the variety of subjects and settings you might use, to the ones that will actually work for this one book. But to get there, you have to learn about the alternatives as well.

On this one, I had to learn about Colette before I reached the point where I knew she wasn't going to make the cut. I was also thinking about multiple eras of French history before narrowing in on the year 1900.

But there's an alternative. I think that Dan Brown achieves the (relative) economy he has because that is all he knows.

From everything I've seen he has a fairly decent balance, without so few historical tidbits that it feels empty (for all else they do right, the Indiana Jones films feel empty. The Young Indiana Jones series does much better). And without so many it feels overwhelming. And he might be achieving that because his iceberg has, against all laws of density, almost nothing below the water level. What he knows is on the page. He might in fact have researched enough until he could write a book about it (his plotting seems to indicate that!)

So anyhow I did a top-to-tail reread of Sometimes a Fox. Not that is a long project, as top to tail is around 18,000 words right now. And I got pretty depressed by how much it isn't working but I feel better now. It took a few hours but I know the edits I need to make.

There is too much detail and I'm going to have to trim some stuff way, way back.

Paris will do that to you, of course. It is a bit like Japan in that there are so many very Parisian things that have names that are clearly French. I've been doing everything I can to keep language off the screen. I've consciously got Amelia, the art fan and tarheel, using English names of the French artworks.

(Not always, since the puzzle pieces are sometimes language; there's one that Penny never gets; Huxley refers to "Elysian Fields" and the clue means the Champs-Élysées. Another clue of his is "Tiny Palace" and it means the quite literal Petit Palais.)

I changed my mind a bit ago and this is the book where Penny no longer accepts faking it in a language and actually sits down and studies. She won't get that good at French -- she doesn't have time -- but when she starts speaking French sentences the narrative will present them in translation convention; as English, but in italics.

With the "funny foreigner" words, though. "Bonjour," I said. "Have you seen this man?" I continued in French. 

The treasure hunt doesn't have enough weight. It is also broken up wrong, but I can fix a bunch of that. Some of what I've been doing is figuring out how much each "revisit" can or needs to reveal, and thus how many there will be, and I am comfortable now kicking some stuff down the road to later chapters. So that will open up some space.

The trick I tried in the Japan book was what I called "generic" descriptions. That is, trying to capture some of the lushness of the scenery, but doing it as much as possible in general-use words without using a lot of Japanese terms. Or other specialist vocabulary.

I can't do the same here because I already took excess French off the table. And the "weight" isn't in things like lists, anyhow. Not for this book. This paragraph, for instance, doesn't bother me:

“I came for the art,” she said, meeting my gaze squarely. “They all came here, Matisse and Utrillo, Manet and Monet and Gaugin and Picasso —he had a room at the Bateau-Lavoir but they all came to the clubs; the Lapin Agile, the Chat Noir where Satie played the piano, and Toulouse-Lautrec had a reserved seat at the Moulin Rouge.”

But this one does:

Time to take it inside. I did have to wait in a short line, and I made a donation, but soon enough I was in a quiet, airy little church, well-lit through stained glass windows. I squinted. Very new looking stained glass. The one nearest me looked almost modern art. They couldn’t be any older than, say, early 20^th century. The altar was ornate inlay and even newer than that, but the nave was flanked by a couple of columns, craggy in black basalt and with Merovingian capitals. I knew what these were. “The old Roman temple, or bits of it,” I said quietly. “Like I said, this church has a history.”

And I haven't quite figured out why. Somehow a list of artworks or artists or even kinds of cheese just floats by as a "look, lots of fun detail over there." But this description of a church is too much. Maybe because it is asking the reader to pay attention. Maybe because it doesn't come together in any one theme. It just feels like stuff, stuff the poor reader will try to memorize.

And maybe I am standing too close to it still, but it also feels way too much like the writer did all this research and is going to fit it in the text somehow. So that's the direction I'm going; I'm going to cut everything that isn't the bit about the Roman columns. I'm going to cut as much Napoleon as I can manage, and probably Loyola and even why they call it Abesses.

After all, if I leave it a mystery (to Penny) why Hux put "Elysian Fields" in one of his clues, I can leave out all the La Boheme stuff as a "genius bonus" to the reader.