Re-Iteration

I love iterative design.

When I did my Retro Raygun I started from sketches, moved to massing studies and cut-outs, then to mock-up, then CAD design. And I've long been fond of the idea of solving writing problems as early as possible in the text, through index cards, diagramming, spreadsheets, outlines, and so on.

Even among non-outliners the Snowflake method is discussed; this is when you start with the bare idea and fractally explore it, breaking each bit into smaller and smaller bits until it fills sufficient story space to be a novel.

Pardon me while I drop the rant again. No, I don't research everything I can about Paris and then stop, go to the outline and try to cram it all in. That is almost completely orthogonal to my process. Or rather, how I intend my process to work, and there's where it gets weird.

The Paris book was totally the wrong book for fractal writing.

The core of the book, what is going on below everything else, is a demonstration of Eternal Paris. That undefinable but unmistakable, that, if you will forgive me, je ne sais quoi that so many artists have struggled to capture. The idea, that is, that through wars and revolutions and modernization Paris still remains, somehow, Paris.

So it isn't really a Dan Brown. There's no deadly secret hidden by a cabal of poorly-trained cryptographers with a Riddler-like propensity for blazoning their clues on public monuments. There is a scavenger hunt in a book created by a tired survivor of the Great War who wants his reader to see Paris as he had, the Paris of the fabulous belle époque. 

And that's my purpose, too, but at another remove; the idea of history as something other than a dry academic subject for the ivory tower, but something to be engaged with actively by ordinary people. Experienced and celebrated even if they muck up the details a bit. For all of Nathan Snow's building-climbing, lock-breaking, monument-defacing antics, he is taking his own joy in history. As is Penny, following on his heels and trying to reign in his excesses.

So the clues and the unfolding isn't the bones of the book. It is the working-out of the theme of the book. I'm not finding the best place to hide the next link to Mary's sepulcher, I'm looking for a place that says something about the time and people I'm trying to bring to life.

I'm right now working on a conversation where the hidden fact is that there is no way Jonathan Huxley's last bit of doggerel meant "go to Les Invalides and visit Napoleon's Tomb." Because Hux is all about the artists of Montmartre and the world they inhabited (the clue, in fact, points towards Hotel Biron where Rodin had a studio).

Sure, there are several things I already knew I wanted in the book. But could I really have nailed them all down early in the outlining then built the plot around them? To me a plot is always a multi-body problem, only solvable by running it step by step and seeing where it goes. The interaction of the unveiling of several mysteries, the development of several characters, the underlying character arc and thematic arc, all intersect in ways that just aren't clear until I try them on the page.

I do write iteratively. It is just, for this book the iteration involves writing the whole damned scene, then tossing it out and trying something different in its place.