Present Moment, Wonderful Moment

Finally! I’ve wanted a morning picture of the Olympic Mountains for weeks, but the weather has only cooperated on workdays when I’m dashing to the car. The sun sharpens the snowy peaks and shadowy hollows in a way unmatched by any other time of day, and this morning—my day off—I seized the moment.

I am not a morning person. Being forced to rise before my preferred time, however, has taught me to appreciate the glory of a sunrise and the quiet moments before the rest of the world awakens. Now that spring/summer is here, my treasured morning meanderings are about to resume. Sometimes I sit by the water, other times I stroll through the neighbourhood with all senses attuned. I smell the salty tang of the sea, watch the sun pull colour from the gardens, listen to the music of birdsong and the whispering breeze in the leaves. I lose myself in the moment, walking and marvelling until my big joints start to whine. Then it’s time for home and tea in the Ocean Room, where I can sit and watch the world cruise by outside my window.

Or, as in today’s case, do some blogging, listen to some smooth jazz, and decide where the day will take me from here. Writing figures prominently, of course. As I expected, Cristal’s angel story is coming to the surface—I’ve already written a ton of stuff for her, so right now I’m pondering what I can use and what I must dump. I’d rather not dump any of it, since every word represents a flash of inspiration and a bucket of sweat. That said, what I don’t use with her may be useful in another story. It happens, sometimes. Because I write without a definite plan, sometimes two tales begin as one and eventually I have to determine what piece belongs where. It’s as much a puzzle as it is a conjuring and if I relax and go with it, I have more fun. It’s magical when the pieces fall into place and a story emerges. The ending often comes halfway through the project; until then, I am quietly freaking out as I wonder where I’m going. Again, relax and go with it, Ru. Geez. It’s not like I’m defusing a bomb or anything.

I’m just playin’.

Musings

My first writerly Christmas tree ornament!

No story this week. I have yet to decide which way to go with the next serial. I’d like to post something new, but haven’t got anything new to post. We’ll see what I can do with two more weeks of vacation.

Now that the seasonal festivities have ended, I can devote more attention to Shade. I’ve felt him drifting in the mental background; given time and some solitude, I’ll get his story in writing. There’s a song called “Breathe Me” on Sarah Brightman’s latest album that is so powerful it might be him singing in her voice. Often I will hear a lyric that suggests a character in such condensed detail, I am compelled to expand on the theme and bring him to life. Strangely, Shade himself has not caused any real trouble, though he isn’t as I had originally envisioned him. The other characters are starting to come, crossing wires and messing up the backstory as they emerge. That means some rewriting, some relocating, and some plain – I hate this most of all – deleting. I have yet to accept that it’s okay to write a thousand words and use none. This story will be worth the blood and angst, I think. It’s only that it’s been so long since I’ve tackled a whole new cast in a whole new world and every step I take seems to be on quicksand.

Cristal and her plastic Pony-driving lover are on indefinite hold. Her story seems to be more of a comedy, which is brutally difficult to write well and is not my literary forte. At least Shade isn’t leading me too far off my usual twisty-turny-tragic-romance path. His darkness seems a good fit for winter writing. Maybe Cristal’s story will be less daunting come spring/summer.

As for the novel … kill me now.

I also want to revisit the Cassandra series from a dozen years back, to get that into some sort of shape and resolve the calamities that were left hanging when Lucius took over my life.

Then there’s the Julian series to a) tidy up and b) continue in the present day.

Once the novel is done, the next in that series awaits, too. So much to write, so little time in which to write. I am my own worst enemy in that regard. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but perhaps I should start. In 2014, I will write more!!!

Getting to Know You

During a mindless moment at the office last week, I clicked over to Chuck Wendig’s blog and discovered a lengthy post on character development. It was an informative and somewhat entertaining read (I find him unnecessarily crude, but his message often rings true), especially because I am currently disentangling Cristal from Shade and trying to get a handle on each of their stories. Nicole is also struggling with the voices of her latest fiction, so something must be in the literary collective consciousness to have inspired Chuck’s piece on characters.

As usual, I agree with some of what he says and disagree with the rest. Personally, writing is more about what feels good than what the experts advise. Creativity doesn’t have rules – or it shouldn’t. The business side insists on them, however, and that’s as frustrating as a natural talent being critiqued by an arts degree. I know someone who is a published writer in the real world, and she spends a lot of time adhering to editors, agents and pollsters to get where she wants to go. I envy her in some ways, respect her in all ways, and honestly wish her the greatest success – which I believe she will eventually have because she works so diligently at it. But I wonder, where in the process does she have any fun?

I digress. Back to character development. For me, a new character is like meeting a stranger. Either you click or you don’t. If you don’t click, then the relationship won’t work and you should each seek satisfaction with someone else. I cannot conjure a character from thin air. To me, that’s like building a robot – you’ll have the physical details in place and maybe some personality programmed into it, but at the deepest level, he will only ever be two-dimensional. Great for a formulaic genre, but not for me. I want feeling. I want emotion, conflict and drama. I want to bleed with my characters. I want to soar with them, love with them, hate with them, fight with them, die with them, give birth with them. I want to be scared with them, of them, and for them. I can’t do that with a checklist. Nope, characters come to me fully-formed and full of mystery. They know who and what they are. My job – my pleasure – is to discover who and what they are as I write about them. It’s slower than hammering out the top ten qualities and manipulating them into situations, but I prefer it despite my whining at how little I get done in a day.

Shade began as a cheerful sort, a bit mischievous and a lot mysterious – when Cristal was telling the story. When I switched to his point of view, I got a completely different take on him, and that’s how I knew he and she actually feature in two different stories. Now that I’ve split them up, she is still befuddled by a mischievous mystery man, and Shade is free to tell his different, darker tale. I didn’t know any of this when I started my angel story all those weeks ago. I learned it as I wrote, first about her, then about him. The secondary characters are introduced by the main. I write what I see and hear. I write what I am told, and if I have a question, I ask the character. What happened then? Why did you—? Who said—? Sometimes the answer surprises me, but I must trust that it’s accurate.

Only one character has ever outright lied to me. For many many years, I believed something that everyone else in the story had to believe, and that one character was responsible for duping us all. Her argument? “The scribe had to be deceived lest the secret be imperiled.” In short, I’m the weakest link!

Insulting as it is, the revelation presents grand potential for a new story down the road … when I am ready to let someone die.

Some stories I don’t want to tell.

There might be something to the cardboard cutout character after all.

Auto Biography VII

"Judging a Character by His Wheels"

humble pie 2000

A horrifying development in my current short story. One of the sexiest characters I have ever written is driving a plastic Mustang. How can that be? Where did I go wrong? No one is perfect, but a plastic Mustang??? Kill me now.

I was barreling happily along, watching the story unfold as I typed. Feeling pretty good about it, too, as I attempt to apply some advice that Nicole posted over at The Paper Teapot a couple of weeks ago: “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.—John Steinbeck.” She followed up with a bunch of his quotes which I will address anon, given that I loved every one of them, but at this point I was merely forging ahead with no end in sight.

I get through the first scene: the morning after with Cristal and her mystery lover. Then the second scene, still that morning. Then the third, where they must part and she realizes that he drove her home in her car the previous night. It made sense to me, so I went with it. Then the fourth and fifth scenes poured out and in the sixth scene, she spies him in the rearview mirror driving a … something. I couldn’t see what it was. I know it’s not the black Jeep; that belongs in another story. I was getting hung up on the details, though, and that directly countered Steinbeck’s advice, so I typed in “(his car)” and kept going.

Then I walked into the village, paying particular attention to the vehicles around me in hope that one would strike a chord. And, much to my chagrin, one did.

Since I am such a car fiend, I try to populate my stories with vehicles I myself would like to drive. I am also a Mustang snob. My wee sister, who drives a 2006, is constantly subjected to my scorn on the purity of the breed and how Ford totally missed when they tried to recreate the classic body style using modern technology—kind of like George Lucas continually reworking (and re-releasing) Star Wars because CDI is so much better now than what he had to work with in the 1970s. Because you can doesn’t always mean you should. (Good advice, Ru; maybe you should take it when you think of revamping some of your old writing!) So imagine my surprise when a shiny black convertible cruised along my sightline and it was no stretch to picture Cristal’s lover behind the wheel. Then I recognized the make and model, and my hair buzzed out like I’d been Tasered. Augh! A black plastic Mustang! Oh, noooooooo! Say it isn’t so! What does that say about the character? He’s supposed to be a hero, a real Joe Cool, a worthy recipient of my protagonist’s heart. Well, I’ll tell you … in truth I fear he’s a bit of a bad boy and Cristal might be in for some trouble with him, in which case the fake Pony is probably a righteous choice for him.

I want to warn Cristal that he may be bad news, but I’m just the scribe. She is trying to convince herself that she should feel something for him, given how intimate she has already been with him, so I have no idea how this is going to end. Well, I hope. I’ll have to keep writing and see …

Writer's Conundrum

A Scribe’s Skirmish

writer’s conflict

the impossibility

of writing with

magnificence

contrasted with

the impossibility

 

of

 

abandoning

the challenge

writer’s conundrum

            © Nicole D. Myers 2013

What do you do when neither version is working? You dump the whole project. Except that there is something in a writer’s makeup that refuses to quit.

My personal poet laureate, the exceptional Nicole D. Myers, wrote this poem a few weeks—yes, weeks—ago, and has kindly given her consent for me to share it here. I asked because dang if she didn’t nail the universal quandary square on the coconut. I loved the poem from the get-go (it’s posted on my office bulletin board) and came face to face with an example of “the conundrum” last weekend.

The angel story isn’t working. Shifting perspective temporarily fooled me into believing otherwise, but as Ter observed following my latest grouchy rant, I have emerged from my room unhappy and dissatisfied each time I’ve tangled with it. She recommended that I bag it for the nonce, adding that I can always go back to it when the time is right. The story is good. It’s just not meant to happen right now. So I skulked back to my room, opened chapter 18 of my stalled Castasian novel, and actually finished it (the chapter, not the novel). At least I worked on something, even if it evolved from admitting defeat on another count.

Only admitting defeat does not come easily to this writer. While I was distracted with the tale of Reijo and Jannika that afternoon, the other part of my brain was pondering the problem with Cristal and Shade. It is a good story. Why the %^$#*&^ isn’t it effing working????

The answer came, as usual, at bedtime.

It’s not one story. It’s actually two. Two different freaking stories about angels. This explains why Cristal and Shade in her version are completely different from Cristal and Shade in his version. I mean it. The characters in one POV (point of view) are polar opposites of the characters in the other, hence my garment-rending angst over getting anywhere. Clearly I have four characters using two names. I’ll fix that forthwith, but the relief I felt at discovering the potential for a whole new pair of stories set in this angelic realm was akin to the relief of discovering that the headache you’ve endured for weeks is finally gone.

The impossibility of writing either with magnificence remains. Okay, so does the challenge of crafting two separate stories when I’d anticipated a single piece. If there’s any good news here, it’s that I have a whole new world in which to play ... assuming I can relax enough to accept what comes when it comes and quit forcing it when it won’t.

Writer’s conundrum indeed.

Greys of Shade

There’s a change in plan with the angels. I may have been wrong in accepting that Cristal was going to tell the story. It started out okay with her narrating, but somewhere along the line it went sideways and I’ve been unable to get it back on track. I hate when this happens. Not only is it a confidence-rattler, it’s frustrating as heck and only serves to stress me out. Seeking a fix has made my head hurt. I’ve driven Ter as nuts with it as I’ve driven myself. I set it aside for a weekend (but couldn’t stop fretting about it), and came thissssss close to bagging the project entirely … especially when another voice popped up with another story, shoot me now … but a possibility occurred to me on the walk home last night and now I’m pumped again. 

I’m going to switch the perspective to tell the story through Shade. Ironic, considering that he introduced the concept in the first place, and proof that one should follow the initial prompt and not over-think it. Over-thinking will often lead in a willfully wrong direction. 

Anyway, in considering his perspective, I’ve struck a goldmine of information about him, his place in this world, his role in the “other” world, and how he fits into Cristal’s world. I’m seeing dimensions to his character that I couldn’t grasp in hers. I’m intrigued, if not yet in love, and it’s looking like fun again. 

Soooo, after taking this long weekend off to celebrate my birthday, I’m on vacation for two weeks. A writing holiday? You better you bet.

Slipping Into Fiction

The problem with a long weekend is its inevitable end. I got so much writing done over the past three days that this morning I’m finding reality an uncomfortably tight fit. What do I do for a living again? And do I care? I should, but let’s just say I’m exceptionally grateful that I only have three days at the office before I get another three days off. I think I can fake it to Friday.

I’ve been all over the space/time continuum, that’s for sure. Present day angels, 17^th century paragons, my imaginary lovers in Castasia ... I even got some historical blog stuff written, though I forgot my flash drive at home so the post intended for today will go up tomorrow instead.

My reality is surreality.

I worked with Cristal all day Sunday. The story is slow, but at least it’s progressing. I actually over-wrote in that I pushed past my fatigue at the end of the day and wound up finishing at a less than satisfactory point. Having thought about it, I’ll be rolling back and rerouting the scene, most of which is salvageable though I see where I stumbled. I’ve also noticed a few Lincoln Navigators in the ’hood since I started writing this story – have they always been there, or have I dreamed them into being by putting one in Cristal’s parking space?

I’m also resisting the impulse to plunge headlong into my old affair with King Charles – without much success. Though I’m engrossed in the “Weather Warden” series by Rachel Caine, yesterday I pulled Antonia Fraser’s biography of Charles II off the shelf and apparently intend on reading it again. I have to, in fact. “A Royal Encounter” is just too good to let lie, but wouldn’t you know, the next scene ended abruptly and I mean abruptly. Fifteen years ago, I quit writing a scene in the middle of a sentence! Who quits in the middle of a sentence?? Having no idea where the character was going with his observation (and it wasn’t the King, by the way), I must now delve back into the time and see what the heck he could have been about to say. There might be a slight roll back in that scene, as well, though it reads smoothly right up to the thought falling off the page. Mostly I think I want to be in love and I’m pretty deep into it with Old Rowley.

As if that wasn’t enough creativity, I also resumed work on the novel! A cup of Persian Apple tea got me into Jannika’s head and pushed me back to the scene where I left her, and darned if I didn’t get us both out of the mire by the end of the day! Joe Elliott’s birthday probably kicked that one into gear. Lucius is going to be her father-in-law (is that a spoiler?) and she’s finding him easier to comprehend than his eldest son. I thought this romance would be easy. Roll your eyes here.

So, with Right Brain fully in charge, I’m looking at a pile of invoices and wondering what I’m supposed to do with them ... is it Friday yet?