Teal Deer

Got another comment on the Paris book. I am so starved for comments and criticism. I have zero reviews on that book, not even any ratings -- it sunk into the Amazon pond with nary a ripple.

I knew it was going to be dense before I even started. The main plot thread was intended to be a sort of Umberto Eco conspiracy theory, winding together multiple weird tidbits of history. The bulk of the book, I rapidly decided, was going to be "friends chatting in cafes." That's what was going to fill the page count, not climbing monuments or solving puzzles or having a knife fight in the catacombs or whatever.

But what are they going to chat about? Well, the Paris art scene is a natural. The real-world alternative is philosophy and I don't do that -- my readers should thank me for that! Which turned out to work for the mystery because then instead of stuff about Bavarian Illuminati I could do stuff about Monet and Gaugin.

From a top-down view of the process, I get too much "stuff" in the books because I start with plot and themes and search for things that will carry that plot and illustrate those themes. And in the bad old world of "Show don't tell" that means being concrete. A specific thing means you can dramatize the delivery instead of having a maid-and-butler walk on to do an info-dump on the reader. And dramatizing implies a scene, which fills out your chapter plan and lets you work out the pacing and timing of your outline.

So we've moved from the necessary plot information of "This is a military base and they have guards" to getting stopped by two Air Force people in a jeep who have some amusing interactions.

And here's the problem, which I seem to increasingly have. And that is that the real world rarely offers the perfect platonic ideal of the thing that demonstrates the thing. Instead you have things that are sort of about the theme you are after, or include part of the clue you are trying to leave, but like any ordinary ornery individual they are also doing a bunch of other things.

And that means this thing, this perfect set-piece that delivers the information, is hairy with extraneous detail. And worse; the thing you turned to for an explanation of something plot-relevant itself begs explanation. 

In the Japan book I have a quick info-dump about the historical ninja, for which I expanded on a display/semi-museum that I'd actually been to. So a real place, the Toei Edo-era standing set. Which is also these days pretty much a ninja theme park. So getting to that museum for the info-dump pretty much required explaining why there is such a museum in this part of town and why it is surrounded by multi-colored ninja.

***

But that may not actually be it.

I'm thinking today that maybe the problem isn't coming from the top down, it is happening at the root, at the sentence and paragraph level. And is potentially an artifact of both the way I craft sentences, and the working method when I am doing them.

I largely write fast, at a sentence level. I don't worry a lot about word choices and I don't really stop that often to look things up. I am these days writing in a strong narrative voice, even when not in First Person. But having a motor-mouth auto-didact who geeks out about history certainly makes it worse; it is the natural narrative "voice" for Penny/Athena Fox to drop a zillion historical and pop-cultural references in as she goes.

Every single one of my critical readers has constructed this version of my work-process in their minds where I stare at a line of text trying to figure out how to cram in yet another bit of history...which I then proceed to waste another week in researching.

That's not what is happening. My natural narrative voice seems to reach for analogy more than description, and it is always drawing comparisons. So my process is actually I do a first-pass which is written almost as fast as that character would talk. Then I go back and take out as much as I can without destroying the integrity of the sentence.

The problem is made worse because I write in spurts, and I dream up new things for the following chapters as I am working on the current one. So in the heat of the moment I might name-drop Xenophon, but I almost immediately realize I could make a running gag of it. Before I've finished that writing session, the Xenophon references are a thread winding their way through the narrative and the scene to where there would be a lot of editing to try to replace them and stitch the wounds closed where they'd been.

And I've already come up with a payoff. And I love payoffs. Plot threads should when possible come to a conclusion that the reader will find justified for the work getting there. 

And I am not entirely ignoring that future reader in this process. One short running gag in the Paris book is about Monet haystacks. He was learning about light, you see, and painting them...but never mind all that. All you need to know is he got a reputation for haystacks in different colors and a critic even called it out.

It came up quite naturally when I was doing a nickel-explanation for Expressionism -- set at a museum exhibit, because fortunately there is such a thing in Paris. My lecturer character was talking about light and mentioned the haystacks, and because it was funny, quoted that critic I mentioned. I think it works and is illuminating as to what the Impressionists were, why they mattered, and what they have to do with the rush of the modern world, the fin d'seicle and the Paris Exposition and future shock and all that (which is, in my essay, at the core of Steampunk.)

But now it was out there. Hux makes a comment about Lo Lo's "Radium Dance" (yes; scientific exploration and future shock, all wrapped in one!) He comments her dresses were in more colors than a Monet haystack.

And when Penny is tailing the would-be treasure hunting gang through a Virtual Van Gogh exhibit, she briefly hides behind a haystack. And comments again.

***

It might even be a flaw with Discovery Writing. There's a big element of seat-of-pants in my process. And I've mentioned before that especially when I am working and there's no time to write, I think about the book and I dream up stuff that I now want to include.

But I still feel it isn't "stuff." It isn't add-ons, chocolate sprinkles. It is the muscles and tendons that make the story move. It is just that, as in real biology, those muscles and tendons aren't neat. They sort of go all over the place and there's a lot of them to keep track of (yes, I studied Artistic Anatomy once).

I hear about writers who write "lean." Not only do they go back to add adjectives and descriptions and otherwise put Color Commentary until their drab retelling of events has become a proper Monet haystack, they also go back later to add the things that I can't see writing the story in the first place without!

Like, the plot. Like love interest. Like the theme; the reason any of this is happening and why the reader should care.

I just don't see it.

And now we're circling around again to why I can't just go around with a red pencil and take out all the haystacks. It isn't just on a sentence level where I am left with a gap in the logic of the sentence. And when the sentence would be three words long and too short for the rhythm if I didn't come up with one more thing to say. One more verbal tick or bit of description, something that will add another three words and make the meter come out.

It is also on a story level. The big plot and the underlying themes aren't expressed in singular well-defined things that I can prune around. There's no "The Empire is evil -- hey, look at this Darth Vader dude!" There's Sith and First Order and merchant princes and Jabba and the underworld and...

The historical vision underlying the book is the fin d'siecle (and no, for my blog posts, I don't look up spelling). The accelerating technological change, the social change that goes with it, and industrialized warfare in the form of W.W.I is racing towards them. Writers and politicians and philosophers and artists are trying to make sense of the new world.

And that's why Monet haystacks.