Marginalia (7), or Molding the Mud of the Swamp

[netpositive]

Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good,
will ever come out as you first hoped.
-Lillian Hellman

Characters are starting to show up in chapters.

This is a good thing.

Not just the characters who are supposed to be there,
or I'd planned to be there, but characters who say,
"I would be there too, and this is what I would say
and do."

It's a chapter. It's a chapter late in my outline,
because at the moment I'm just trying to accomplish
chapters, or scenes, or whatever, without worrying
about how the final result might hold together until
there's a first draft of everything I've planned out.

When I used to catalog books [CDs, online resources,
etc.] I used to joke that I carved away everything
from the cataloging record that _wasn't_ the book.

I wasn't actually joking. The problem with writing
like this is that first, one must produce one's own
clay, stone, metal, or material, before ever pulling
out a chisel and hammer in order to get what's there.

Take 3 pages worth of historical bibliography, put it
in a blender of a brain, puree, slap it on an armature,
let it congeal, and then start shaping to find its form.

My process is not your process.... See you in about
five hundred pages.
-Seanan McGuire

Nonetheless, this feels right. I'm perfectionistic;
I wish I could write prose that would be correct as is,
an initial copy clean enough to eat off of. How I long
to be efficient! At present, I'm settling for productive.
Maybe with practice I will come closer to some ideal, but
I'm ten-plus years rusty and twenty-five years without
any novel-length effort. So that slack I'll cut myself --
for the time being. (Ask me again in three years. I may
laugh at my naivete, cry at my wasted time, or shrug and
point to my finished work. I know which one I'd rather do.)

The outline is helping. Even if I bend it, or break it,
I can see some boundaries to what I'm trying to create,
and it's becoming less daunting than exhilarating. Yes,
I'm prepared to write this backwards, forwards, and I'm
sure there will even be some upside down at some point.

Because my characters are starting to talk to me.

And that's a good thing.

Don't let the fear of the time it will take
to accomplish something stand in the way of your
doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might
just as well put that passing time to the best
possible use.
-Earl Nightingale

Comments

[jmax315.livejournal.com]

The outline is helping

Outlines are like plans; the value is not in the thing, but in the process of creating the thing. Once you've created it, you can (almost) ignore it.

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

Exactly. (http://netpositive.livejournal.com/47840.html) :)

For a long while, I had a very simple timeline with some occasional events that I knew I absolutely needed to include, and then I was trying to come up with other events to fit to it. However, I found that was *too* open-ended; everything I ran into "could" fit, and I'd have a Shelby Foote-size monster before I ever got to the parts that were important to my version of events. Sure, I might live so long, but I'll never write that fast. :(

When I forced myself to finish the outline as a more or less narrative flow¹, it seemed like it became much clearer which elements would be "fun" ["fun" in the way that many ludricrous but true Civil War incidents cause hysterics from a sort of ironic surprise -- much like if one actually saw a traffic accident which involved an asphalt melter and a chicken transport truck] vs. which were essential to tell the particular story I'm aiming at: not another sprawling history of the Civil War (more than enough of those out there), not even just another alternate history of the War Between the States (plenty of those out there too), but what could have happened to these particular people who were involved in the War of the Rebellion, if certain unspoken things underlay actual recorded history.

¹I'll admit I still have a couple blank chapters, usually entitled "Battle of X happens here." Battles are generally well-chronicled enough these days that I expect it to be a matter of "pick 2-3 vignettes to (1) support the central story and (2) reinforce that yes, war can be really bloody and stupid."