Did I mention I hated writing in First-Person?
Actually, it isn't that. Or it isn't just that. It is writing in "Immediate Past" tense. First-Person just makes it worse.
I had two sequences recently in which my protagonist had to endure. Which meant time had to pass. But because of the "Immediate Past" tense I couldn't write, "another hour had passed" or "for the next two hours" or any of that usual narrative time bridge.
A way to look at that tense is as frames in sequential art. Any action that is captured is done so with a discrete snapshot. Comic Book artist John Byrne would talk about beginning writers who would say, "In panel #3 Spider-Man swings in through the window, notices there is a bomb, and swings back out just before it goes off." No, that's three panels. At least.
So what I've established at this point is that when my narrator speaks, she describes what is contemporary to the moment; "I was in the water." The only way for her to say, "I had been in the water an hour ago" is if something specific in the present moment had brought that to her attention. Say, "I looked at my watch again. Yup. I'd been in the water for over an hour."
When it works it is seamless and invisible, even if it does impart a slightly breathless quality to things. What it doesn't let me do is fast forward through the boring parts. I am either in the moment with the action, or looking back on the action.
Because Immediate Past tense is so rooted in the now, each jump has more impact and is more potentially disorienting. It takes more words; to re-establish the moment after each jump, and to prepare for the jump. This is on a paragraph level at least. The major jumps, I had established earlier actually went across a scene break.
I have a feeling it would be easier to deal with this in Third Person.
Monday, July 29, 2019
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Shipping News
50K. So maybe I don't need to add a whole sub-plot. I'll see how the Athens chapters unpack.
I finished the stuff with the car ferry and the cigarette boat. There's now several scenes where I could go back and add another 500 words dialog easy -- particularly Venice after she gets fished out of the canal. So I'm not worried about reaching total page count. Just about getting the pacing right and the various plot turns and climaxes happening where they should.
Okay, numbers check. I started the Italy sequence on July 7 (or, rather, I blogged on that day about being done with the Germany sequence). As of the 28th I've put down 15,000 words and am back in Athens. That's a bit over 700 words a day average. Not all that bad, actually.
So I think it is reasonable to expect to finish a draft by the end of September. Then I can clean house, record some more music...
...do final editing, do the cover...
I finished the stuff with the car ferry and the cigarette boat. There's now several scenes where I could go back and add another 500 words dialog easy -- particularly Venice after she gets fished out of the canal. So I'm not worried about reaching total page count. Just about getting the pacing right and the various plot turns and climaxes happening where they should.
Okay, numbers check. I started the Italy sequence on July 7 (or, rather, I blogged on that day about being done with the Germany sequence). As of the 28th I've put down 15,000 words and am back in Athens. That's a bit over 700 words a day average. Not all that bad, actually.
So I think it is reasonable to expect to finish a draft by the end of September. Then I can clean house, record some more music...
...do final editing, do the cover...
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Badger-1 ready for launch
Woke up and jotted down a bunch of notes for the Transhumanist Future War Love Triangle. There's enough there to fill a book and there are strong enough threads to make decent plot.
When I have a whole bunch of notes come to me at once I use a BBC technique. Might have been the old show As it Happens where I heard this. Anyhow, the newscaster would both preview and recap the top stories with a series of extremely short phrases: "Iranian Election, Space colonized, bees rise up, singularity achieved."
So the first thing I wrote down was; "Bess, Bob, hunger, paperclip, Fermi, Nature vs., Mr. Black.
On the actual current novel, I missed a chance to do more method acting-writing. I was sick for a couple of days. My character, I've decided, is going to be sick on the car ferry back to Greece. Sick the entire day. There's not much to look at from the center of a shipping lane anyhow.
When I have a whole bunch of notes come to me at once I use a BBC technique. Might have been the old show As it Happens where I heard this. Anyhow, the newscaster would both preview and recap the top stories with a series of extremely short phrases: "Iranian Election, Space colonized, bees rise up, singularity achieved."
So the first thing I wrote down was; "Bess, Bob, hunger, paperclip, Fermi, Nature vs., Mr. Black.
* * *
On the actual current novel, I missed a chance to do more method acting-writing. I was sick for a couple of days. My character, I've decided, is going to be sick on the car ferry back to Greece. Sick the entire day. There's not much to look at from the center of a shipping lane anyhow.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
What's Opera, Doc?
Had the first response from a beta reader today.
The phrase I want to focus on is, "I...can tell that you have been there..."
This. This sense of verisimilitude. It isn't for bragging rights, it isn't a sort of academic contest like being able to describe a scene using only words beginning with "B." It isn't even the reproducibility thing I've harped on before (if I tell a reader you can get on the people-mover at Piazalle Roma, then I run the risk that someone might try and do so on their vacation in Venice.)
No, the strongest reason for that intangible rightness is that it makes the story more compelling. It reaches the reader emotionally, in a specific way.
But that, alas, was in reference to a scene I set on the Acropolis of Athens. I just finished the Italy sequence, and through all of it I was reduced to second-hand. I've watched videos, looked at maps, read reviews, talked to friends. But I haven't been there, smelled, felt, heard, tried speaking the language, been part of the rhythms.
What is Venice like at 9 PM? I know how a December night unfolds in Paris; who is on the streets, when the shops close, when the bars close. I know because I was there. Venice? I had to fake it, based on what little information I could scrounge up.
But here is the big contrast.
During the Venice chapter, the following dialog occurs as a busker singing opera excerpts interacts with his audience:
This, again, is verisimilitude. I worked that opera. I know the aria, the scene, the context. Sure, I could have researched enough to find some hook to build a similar "bit" around, but this came without any need to look up anything beyond confirming the spelling of the opening phrase. Heck, I even wrote "baritone" into the text before checking the parts in a listing for Tosca.
Tosca was on my mind already, of course, because the much later area "Vissi d'arte" is named and described in my scene. The point of all this, though, is that this is how writing from experience works. You write things not just of a kind but in a way that is convincing.
(Okay...the way I experienced this aria through performance, and the way I've seen buskers and others work with an audience through similar things makes me believe you could carry it off as described. The point again being this would not even have occurred if I didn't have this deep experience to draw upon. A video can lead you to believe the roar of the mechanical lion outside a tent at Oktoberfest might be startling. Actual experience tells you the Acropolis feels like it is floating above the Attic plane; you can't even see Athens from much of it.)
The phrase I want to focus on is, "I...can tell that you have been there..."
This. This sense of verisimilitude. It isn't for bragging rights, it isn't a sort of academic contest like being able to describe a scene using only words beginning with "B." It isn't even the reproducibility thing I've harped on before (if I tell a reader you can get on the people-mover at Piazalle Roma, then I run the risk that someone might try and do so on their vacation in Venice.)
No, the strongest reason for that intangible rightness is that it makes the story more compelling. It reaches the reader emotionally, in a specific way.
But that, alas, was in reference to a scene I set on the Acropolis of Athens. I just finished the Italy sequence, and through all of it I was reduced to second-hand. I've watched videos, looked at maps, read reviews, talked to friends. But I haven't been there, smelled, felt, heard, tried speaking the language, been part of the rhythms.
What is Venice like at 9 PM? I know how a December night unfolds in Paris; who is on the streets, when the shops close, when the bars close. I know because I was there. Venice? I had to fake it, based on what little information I could scrounge up.
But here is the big contrast.
During the Venice chapter, the following dialog occurs as a busker singing opera excerpts interacts with his audience:
“For my next, I need a little help. You there, Sir, you look like a baritone.”
“I’m not much of a…” the audience member protested.
“Do not worry, Sir, the part of the Sacristan is simple. Here are the words; I will cue you. Now…’Dammi i colori…’”
This, again, is verisimilitude. I worked that opera. I know the aria, the scene, the context. Sure, I could have researched enough to find some hook to build a similar "bit" around, but this came without any need to look up anything beyond confirming the spelling of the opening phrase. Heck, I even wrote "baritone" into the text before checking the parts in a listing for Tosca.
Tosca was on my mind already, of course, because the much later area "Vissi d'arte" is named and described in my scene. The point of all this, though, is that this is how writing from experience works. You write things not just of a kind but in a way that is convincing.
(Okay...the way I experienced this aria through performance, and the way I've seen buskers and others work with an audience through similar things makes me believe you could carry it off as described. The point again being this would not even have occurred if I didn't have this deep experience to draw upon. A video can lead you to believe the roar of the mechanical lion outside a tent at Oktoberfest might be startling. Actual experience tells you the Acropolis feels like it is floating above the Attic plane; you can't even see Athens from much of it.)
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Paris, Texas
Yeah, so when the Eiffel Tower comes up on the screen, accordion music starts, do you really need the label to pop up as well?
On the other hand, just try researching night life, bicycle rental, or anything else that sounds like it should belong on Venice "Beach" and see just how hard it is to pull out results for Venice, Italy out of the noise.
On the other hand, just try researching night life, bicycle rental, or anything else that sounds like it should belong on Venice "Beach" and see just how hard it is to pull out results for Venice, Italy out of the noise.
Monday, July 22, 2019
A Fondamental truth
That bit about having to get certain things right? It came up during the big chase scene. My character runs down a fondamente along a narrow rio, through a sottoportego into a campo and along a calle to the ponte across another rio. (Over the course of about a page...it's not all in one sentence!)
This isn't there because I'm showing off. Oh, sure, some of it is local color but it isn't the "call a rabbit a smeerp" thing James Blish made fun of. These terms are specific and descriptive in ways that would take longer to say in other ways, other ways that would sound clunky and be potentially misleading (you shouldn't really call it a "canal" because there's only half a dozen of those in Venice; the rest are smaller waterways and are called by a different name). It is more efficient, more accurate, and yes more colorful to use the Venetian terminology.
Plus that's a theme and an aim in the book; the acquisition of local knowledge. In the scene just prior I brought up the term "Acqua Alta" but never let my protagonist figure it out (she doesn't even realize the water she is seeing is basically temporary).
And so I need to make sure that I am using these terms correctly. Because some reader is going to see that and assume that is what they actually call the thing locally.
* * *
I'm still backing way off on researching stuff. It takes time which I don't want to spend any more. I feel a need to get a draft done and see what the whole thing feels like.
It still feels to me like there's too much going on. It is a problem of conservation of detail. There should be extraneous detail, of course. A mystery, a thriller, even a fairy tale is built around the ability of the hero to single out (or to fail to single out!) the one important detail from all the noise around it.
The trick is making it obvious in hindsight.
The problems I am having are three. For one, the real world IS messy. The experience of travel and the experience of history is one of a lot of information and even a lot of disagreement. To say you go to Athens and see monuments of Ancient Greece is to lie. If you go to Athens you see Athens, a modern, living city with a long history and complicated problems, and in Athens are monuments and ruins and reconstructions across a span of time from the Mycenae out to World War II.
You can focus the literary camera in on just what you want to emphasize, but the story I am trying to communicate in this particular novel is that juxtaposition; of what Ancient Greece means to a modern world struggling with current-day problems.
The second problem is you want some words there. The more concrete a detail is, the more weight it carries. Writing "a nine foot high statue in stone" is a lot less interesting to the reader than "A statue of a winged figure in helmet and spear, carved from gleaming white limestone." And it adds more resonance if you can say "A statue of Athena Nike..." (and the rest follows as of above.) It gives the reader a richer experience. It also adds words, because at some cold calculating point a novel is an organized set of words of some length and you've got to get to that length somehow.
And the last is a specific of the first; that I'm trying to be honest not just to the general shape of the world but specific details. If I say there is a bronze of Julia in the garden below "Julia's Balcony" then there really is. I'm trying very hard not to arbitrarily move trattoria and artworks and entire towns around because it allows me to focus the narrative better.
I'm willing to "Bullit" a little with the map, but at some point I have to admit that you can't climb the Acropolis without passing through a lot of stuff that isn't at all Classical Era.
This isn't there because I'm showing off. Oh, sure, some of it is local color but it isn't the "call a rabbit a smeerp" thing James Blish made fun of. These terms are specific and descriptive in ways that would take longer to say in other ways, other ways that would sound clunky and be potentially misleading (you shouldn't really call it a "canal" because there's only half a dozen of those in Venice; the rest are smaller waterways and are called by a different name). It is more efficient, more accurate, and yes more colorful to use the Venetian terminology.
Plus that's a theme and an aim in the book; the acquisition of local knowledge. In the scene just prior I brought up the term "Acqua Alta" but never let my protagonist figure it out (she doesn't even realize the water she is seeing is basically temporary).
And so I need to make sure that I am using these terms correctly. Because some reader is going to see that and assume that is what they actually call the thing locally.
* * *
I'm still backing way off on researching stuff. It takes time which I don't want to spend any more. I feel a need to get a draft done and see what the whole thing feels like.
It still feels to me like there's too much going on. It is a problem of conservation of detail. There should be extraneous detail, of course. A mystery, a thriller, even a fairy tale is built around the ability of the hero to single out (or to fail to single out!) the one important detail from all the noise around it.
The trick is making it obvious in hindsight.
The problems I am having are three. For one, the real world IS messy. The experience of travel and the experience of history is one of a lot of information and even a lot of disagreement. To say you go to Athens and see monuments of Ancient Greece is to lie. If you go to Athens you see Athens, a modern, living city with a long history and complicated problems, and in Athens are monuments and ruins and reconstructions across a span of time from the Mycenae out to World War II.
You can focus the literary camera in on just what you want to emphasize, but the story I am trying to communicate in this particular novel is that juxtaposition; of what Ancient Greece means to a modern world struggling with current-day problems.
The second problem is you want some words there. The more concrete a detail is, the more weight it carries. Writing "a nine foot high statue in stone" is a lot less interesting to the reader than "A statue of a winged figure in helmet and spear, carved from gleaming white limestone." And it adds more resonance if you can say "A statue of Athena Nike..." (and the rest follows as of above.) It gives the reader a richer experience. It also adds words, because at some cold calculating point a novel is an organized set of words of some length and you've got to get to that length somehow.
And the last is a specific of the first; that I'm trying to be honest not just to the general shape of the world but specific details. If I say there is a bronze of Julia in the garden below "Julia's Balcony" then there really is. I'm trying very hard not to arbitrarily move trattoria and artworks and entire towns around because it allows me to focus the narrative better.
I'm willing to "Bullit" a little with the map, but at some point I have to admit that you can't climb the Acropolis without passing through a lot of stuff that isn't at all Classical Era.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Location scouting
Wrote a chase scene today. Set it in Venice the way Bullit is set in San Francisco. Sure, I checked maps and street-level pictures and videos to find places where certain specific actions could plausibly happen. But I used them without regard for where they were in relation to each other. I also didn't name anything, so nobody is going to know.
I also gave up on getting the setting of the next chapter completely accurate. Half the point of this book was to use what I already know. So I'm borrowing the ferry I actually rode instead of trying to describe one unseen. I'm changing the names anyhow.
There's a fine line there and I don't know what or where it is. Books name institutions and public figures and commercial products all the time. Characters in books will buy at Sears, drink Coke, vote for Truman. And it gets more specific and more close to home. Parker named specific books by specific (living) authors, and actual businesses in the Boston area.
Well, I'm naming a few actual places as well. I've just made a point to be even-handed, and the smaller the entity (like a single bookstore in Venice) the more neutral-positive I want to be. Lufthansa I'm willing to criticize. A small tratoria I'd as soon just say, "the food was good" and leave it at that.
Last week I got to fly on a short-hop business airline. Private terminal, no TSA, no lines. Shoes stayed on. Different experience and an extremely positive one. Flew to Burbank, which is an experience all in itself. I managed to remain calm while shaking the hand of someone whose shoes probably cost more than I make in a year. What isn't making me calm is that my company is ordering tens of thousands of dollars of material based on MY measurements. No pressure!
And it has nothing to do with the "location" theme of this post, but messing around with the Yamaha Venova seems to have sharpened my trumpet chops. I'm pushing through the scales fast enough the cheap valves on my current trumpet are starting to hold me back. I'm also getting the first two or three pedal tones on a regular basis. Oddly enough the violin hasn't completely left me; I pulled it out and was able to get through a couple of tunes even without the shoulder rest.
My new neighbor really hates it when I practice at home, though. That's something I have no good solution for. Well, it can wait. A lot of things can wait. I'm walking again (after having dropped a battery-powered drill on my foot from high enough to drive the bit through my shoe), and hoping to steadily increase my exercise and decrease my waist.
And I'm past the mid-point on the novel with more and more of the foundation work already done. Blew through a 2,000 word chase scene in one writing session. I already have the bulk of two or three other scenes worked out in my head. The biggest thing I have to worry about going forward is whether I fall so short of my page count I have to add some new element to the mix.
I also gave up on getting the setting of the next chapter completely accurate. Half the point of this book was to use what I already know. So I'm borrowing the ferry I actually rode instead of trying to describe one unseen. I'm changing the names anyhow.
There's a fine line there and I don't know what or where it is. Books name institutions and public figures and commercial products all the time. Characters in books will buy at Sears, drink Coke, vote for Truman. And it gets more specific and more close to home. Parker named specific books by specific (living) authors, and actual businesses in the Boston area.
Well, I'm naming a few actual places as well. I've just made a point to be even-handed, and the smaller the entity (like a single bookstore in Venice) the more neutral-positive I want to be. Lufthansa I'm willing to criticize. A small tratoria I'd as soon just say, "the food was good" and leave it at that.
Last week I got to fly on a short-hop business airline. Private terminal, no TSA, no lines. Shoes stayed on. Different experience and an extremely positive one. Flew to Burbank, which is an experience all in itself. I managed to remain calm while shaking the hand of someone whose shoes probably cost more than I make in a year. What isn't making me calm is that my company is ordering tens of thousands of dollars of material based on MY measurements. No pressure!
And it has nothing to do with the "location" theme of this post, but messing around with the Yamaha Venova seems to have sharpened my trumpet chops. I'm pushing through the scales fast enough the cheap valves on my current trumpet are starting to hold me back. I'm also getting the first two or three pedal tones on a regular basis. Oddly enough the violin hasn't completely left me; I pulled it out and was able to get through a couple of tunes even without the shoulder rest.
My new neighbor really hates it when I practice at home, though. That's something I have no good solution for. Well, it can wait. A lot of things can wait. I'm walking again (after having dropped a battery-powered drill on my foot from high enough to drive the bit through my shoe), and hoping to steadily increase my exercise and decrease my waist.
And I'm past the mid-point on the novel with more and more of the foundation work already done. Blew through a 2,000 word chase scene in one writing session. I already have the bulk of two or three other scenes worked out in my head. The biggest thing I have to worry about going forward is whether I fall so short of my page count I have to add some new element to the mix.
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