I'm going to my home town's little Fourth of July festival in another hour. It's a dry festival, and besides, I'm driving. But I really, really want a beer right now.
So that's helping me get in the right mood for the big Oktoberfest chapter.
My protagonist wants to get drunk and party. And as least I can get behind the drinking part. A little. I'm really having trouble connecting with the party part. She's not going to shy away from crowds. She has very little social awkwardness or nervousness. And that's not me.
I've talked about the default protagonist. Us writers tend to be bookish, wallflowers, even agoraphobic. If I was in Munich I'd be going to the quieter tents and checking out the history and drinking ONE beer (they are really big beers, though.) Maybe first-person POV makes it even harder. I have to keep stopping, backing up, and asking, "Is this how Penny would react, or is this me speaking."
See, protagonists tend to be good looking. Nothing wrong with that. But society doesn't like the good people to be aware that they are good looking. On a male protagonist, you'll get phrases like "roguishly handsome." It isn't an entirely positive description. On a female...the first label that pops up is vain. The work-arounds for this conundrum tends to be that he or she hasn't had the chance to realize they are good looking ("He cleans up nicely"), that their looks are unusual in some specific way that is totally unacceptable to the fictional society (but in the reader's culture hot as hell; "They hated me because of my long red hair and emerald green eyes"). And then there's naive. Which is okay for the guys maybe but on the girls, well...there's a big ick factor there is all I can say.
Or he or she is good looking and doesn't care. And she's "not like the other girls" which means she doesn't use chapstick or own a razor (because all that "primping" is something only vamps and bad girls and stuck-up cheerleaders do, not our heroine thank you very much.) And, yes, they are right about that. They aren't like other girls. Because psychologically and physiologically, that particular description isn't even human,
But, hell, we accept out-of-the-norm physiology ("Anyone else would have drowned down there,") and a ludicrous inability to accept their own strengths ("Just because I defeated Ragnock the Mighty doesn't mean I'm some great fighter!") So maybe we can accept a protagonist who by accident of biology just happens to look like she just left her stylist, and yet somehow has never twigged to this fact.
Yeah, no. Penny is still buying a dirndl bra (she may not actually mention it, but she knows and I know...)
I'm not really fond of first person. Most of my writing has been in third person POV. Last time I did first was Samantha Nishimura, who was a lot easier to work with than Penny. Sam swears a streak, but more than anything else she likes the sound of her voice; she's very aware of narrating, in love with her own cleverness, and perfectly happy explaining things to the reader.
For Penny I'm trying to give more of an illusion of a running dictation, as if the events are in the process of happening and Penny doesn't know any more than the reader does what happens next.
Another thing is that Sam had these glorious mood swings. When she had an emotional reaction she committed to it. Penny is almost relentlessly up. And her entire default approach is anthropological. Observe, move only when necessary, form tentative hypothesis and don't be surprised or upset when it fails.
She makes a lot of mistakes. But she doesn't dwell on them. Instead of beating herself up she moves on. So unless the reader is really paying attention they don't even notice the correction. Maybe this is something else I have to consciously change. Make her less separated, less an observer in her own skull, and more participant. Because the more she is involved in what is happening, the more the reader will be.
The last thing that's current kicking me is the German Language. Well, that and culture. This is very much intended as a tourist-eye view. It is a basic theme in this book; of learning to travel and of first encountering a culture as a tourist does, then, if you are lucky and focused, getting an opportunity to go a little deeper.
Of course the way this plotted out, a lot of the practical stuff I learned as a tourist and would like to touch on is getting skipped. She hasn't even experienced Frühstück. The only hotel she's been close to was off-screen.
Language, however. My interest, like her interest, is anthropological. It isn't so much about learning German, it is learning about German. I'm in the scene where people want to talk about how the Bayern dialect is so different (the simple version; in Germany proper there is a Hochdeutsch -- also referred to as the standarddeutsch -- which functions like British RP; it is the language of the schools and the broadcasters and business. Then you have regional dialects, most of which have connotations similar to regional dialects in the US; "deep south," "hillbilly," "Jersey," etc.)
This isn't some technical thing that only frazzle-hair linguists will get excited by. If you sing the "Prosit," you might be tempted to sing "Eins, zwei, drei" the way I did in school. The locals, and any experienced Weisn hand, will pronounce it more like "oans, zwoa..."
And it isn't just accent; there are significant word changes and even some grammatical shifts. Thing is, the Prosit gets sung every fifteen minutes -- the subject of how to pronounce it will come around more often than the next maß.
But outside of that...yeah, although Penny wants to ask and locals would love to share, she, I, and especially the reader don't know enough to understand these distinctions. My academic friend at the pub once tried to show me the clearly distinct ways verbs are conjugated in Ionic and Doric. Thing is...I can't even read Greek letters. So that lesson was utterly lost on me...
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