Tow not Shell

So I'm finally up to the "Apaches" sequence. Two key sequences left, maybe a dozen scenes, and I'll finally be done with this book.

Image Ophelia Holt

Up there is part of La Petite Ceinture, the "small belt" railway that circled Paris carrying freight from more-or-less the late 1850s (when several different independently operated rail lines were joined into a full loop) to the early 1950s, and passengers mostly at the turn of the century, from the 1880s and falling off rapidly after 1908 when the Metro began to take over.

The lines fell into that cursed gap where the city didn't own it and the railways weren't willing to give it up, meaning they were left largely abandoned until quite recently. The last decade has been the major sprucing up and repurposing of portions of the right-of-way (a brief small sections are still in active use by the RER) as city parks.

And then there's La Recyclerie. A sort of communal garden and recycling center and restaurant collected together in and around an old train station in Clignancourt. That's their terrace, above. It's very Whole Earth Catalog, Green Revolution, shabby-chic.

Really, all I needed was a place for my protagonist to be led down to the trackway, where she will see a bit of the old route, go into one of the tunnels, be shown (and decide against) the mouse-hole into one of the illegal sections of the Paris Catacombs, then on the way out be threatened by some street punks and finally (after failing through the rest of the book) get a parkour trick right while running away from them.

But. There's a bit of character stuff with the Carolina Girl, Amelia. Who turns out to be studying mechanical engineering at UNC (go to hell, Duke!) and around the climax of the book provides a bit of a Q Branch for Penny (mostly getting her in worse trouble than she would have on her own). I toyed with staging a visit to a hackerspace since these were some ideas about the communities of modern Paris I wanted to show.

Well, this isn't really it, but I can efficiently hit those notes with La Recyclerie. So that's why I chose to enter the tracks here (It is also...and this was not easy research!...close to the tunnel sections I think I want. Plus also passes through the corner of Parc des Buttes Chaumont, where the next big sequence is happening.

Image Lombana CC BY-SA 3.0

And it is a fun place all by itself and that's part of what I'm trying to do with this particular travel-oriented series; to find a few places that are less frequently mentioned and give the reader the experience of learning about them.

***

More and more, though, the process of writing is distressing me. I would like to think it is just a problem of first-person POV, but I think that just makes it more obvious.

We talk about "Show not tell." But ultimately everything is a "tell." It is all words on paper. With the possible exception of 3rd person omniscient, it is all filtered through the POV of a narrator, a character of the story (if not always in the story), who is telling you.

That's why I say first person just makes it more obvious. 

"There's a rocket ship on fire," the space-port guard pointed up.

I looked up into the sky. There was a rocket ship on fire.

Okay, unfair; this is all description. And "show not tell" is just as much about going to primary sources; instead of "it was cold" you write "he shivered." Which is still telling a thing, but it isn't telling "the" thing. So it is more of a direct experience. Even in the above, the absence of the filter of someone telling the narrator the thing makes the telling (by that same narrator) more immediate.

But here's the thing; in my current scene, I want to get across what I just said above about La Recyclerie. So...I can show the chickens, and the vegetable garden, heck, I could show kitchen slop being fed to the chickens. But there still needs to be a conclusion. Especially coming through the lens of a narrator who looked at this stuff for a reason. We don't just write every footstep and doorknob; we put in the details that are there to make a point. My protagonist "saw" this stuff -- mentioned it in the narrative -- because she is putting together the picture. And since we're getting her internal monolog and her learning and growth is part of the experience the book is delivering, we get to see her figuring out what it means.

So it inevitably follows that no matter how much I Show the chickens, at some point the narrative is going to Tell what they mean. 

I can leave some stuff out. I can set it up so the audience picks it up but my narrator never mentions it explicitly. I consider the latter part of the untrustworthy narrator routine, where the reader is intended to grasp something counter to what the narrator seems to be wanting to say. One specific thing I recall leaving out in the last chapter or two was the real nature of the meat market at the Foyer de la Danse. It just wasn't necessary for the story to go into the gory details.

Or, for that matter, that the "little bullfighter" is Picasso. 

Somehow, though, more and more it is starting to feel like nothing but empty words. Descriptions of things, shadows of things on the wall of the cave, not things themselves. Even in third person, even in a created environment (aka the settings of the upcoming steampunk book) where I can be much more selective about what I chose to show.

Just adding to the list of reasons I have trouble going back to the page. Even if I am writing up such a storm right now I actually have some real hope I might be finished by the end of the month.