When the Dam Breaks

What kind of creatures are we? Okay, we homo sap, but we writers in particular. What is this drive to look at things and imagine if only they were “different”, “stronger”, “if only they made sense”?

When my first son was little, I used to put him in the baby carriage and go out for an hour or two long walk, to clear my head. Since we lived at the edge of downtown, this meant walking past coffee shops, going into bookstores, crossing the park. I have no idea what normal people do or think about in this situation. We are all, alas, tragically, caught in our own minds. For me, I’d see a person in the corner, and immediately a story would attach to him. I’d walk past the lighted windows of a Victorian and imagine the interior, and imagine the parties that took place there long ago. I could no more stop myself than I could stop breathing.

Now I don’t consciously base my characters on people or situations I see, but I do spend a great amount of time daydreaming about people I’ve met/seen. I spend a great deal of time well... not quite making up stories about them, but sort of “seeing the stories around them” which are always, btw, bigger and brighter than real people’s stories, somehow. I spend a lot of time listening to conversations. I think this is part of the reason I like diners so much. I’ll sit there, sipping my coffee and ten or twenty real people – other people always seem more real than I am, somehow – have conversations around me. I will confess I also read a lot of bios – from famous people and self-published by Joe Schmoe alike. And again, I don’t base my characters on any of this. Not consciously. But things as it were fall in the hopper. And the hopper is where character and story brews.

Sometimes I can tell where an incident/description/character came from. Like... the tv in Dipped, Stripped and Dead. Sometimes even I couldn’t guess. The characters arrive in my head. They talk their own language.

So... apropos what am I telling you that? Well, I don’t know how the rest of you are and I know even less how non-writers are, but I know for a fact after a while, my well runs dry. If I haven’t had time to read a lot and even more importantly, if I haven’t been out and away from the computer enough, I can’t seem to write. I’ve been feeling that way lately. It manifests as day dreaming about going away for a weekend – usually our big, expensive vacations are in Denver for a weekend – and going to museums and parks and gardens and the amusement park (which is almost as good as diners for people watching.)

It’s probably a good thing that I’m going to NASFIC this weekend. However, the reason I’m writing about this at all is that I realized I have to take either the laptop or the eee.

Now, it’s entirely possible that I’ll take these and never write. Just be too busy with NASFIcky stuff to write. In fact, this is highly likely.

However, when the pressure has built to this point, my experience is that if I go away – weekend, con, etc. – the first day I am too fried to do anything. And then the second day I wake up with whatever was blocking me removed and the story trying to pour out.

I’ve written outlines/chapters on: hotel note pads; napkins; the back of receipts; my arm and (the outline of what became DST) on the back of a fast food bag for the happy meal one of the kids had eaten.

Do you have similar experiences? What’s the weirdest thing you ever found yourself compelled to write on? What breaks your “not quite block”? Do you prepare for the break? Or do you have to trick your subconscious into believing you’re not expecting it?

Trouble By Any Other Name

As I hinted in my answer to Dave’s Monday post, names of characters assume a disproportionate importance to me. I don’t know if anyone else is bedeviled with this problem, but I can’t seem to write a character at all until his name is right. The voice won’t come into focus until I know to whom it belongs.

Now on the outside it looks like a very weird ideosyncrasy. I mean, as good old Will of the shaking lance told us, a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet. In real life, I’m fairly sure we’ve all met the equivalent of Prudebunny Pussicat who was hell on wheels. It is a well known fact – though its so well known it could be used in naming characters, frankly – that if you name a kid Grace she will trip on her own two feet all day, a Joy will be a sourpuss and I’m fairly sure all the young men now named Storm or Blaze will turn out mild-mannered milquetoasts. Heck if you want to be assured of a go-getter as a son name him – as one of my mother’s friends was – Amavel (in Portuguese, non literal, it means "mild mannered.")

So why does it assume such a disproportionate importance in characters? I don’t know. Perhaps it is one of those instances in which life does not have to be plausible, but fiction does. Or perhaps it’s the newly-hatched duck syndrome. As I get tired of preaching to new writers, it’s very nice that you want to start your book with this incidental never-again-seen character, but your reader, like a newly hatched duckling, will attach to it and be very upset when he’s not the main character. In the same way, when we get introduced to someone in real life, we’re not bound to the name only. If Amavel has a roguish twinkle in his eye, we’ll know better than take him at his name-value.

On the page, though, no matter how much you describe the character, the name gives us a hint to what he is. And unless you make it a point early on of pointing out that he is ironically named, people will think you mean it.

I first ran into this with Nigel Oldhall, who was a secondary character in Heart of Light. For a secondary character, and given his attitude, I wanted staid and somewhat wet. I didn’t realize that making him the hero of the third book would drive me insane and I’d be dragging "Nigel" up and down the page. (I asked, but the editor wouldn’t let me give him a more colorful pseudonym.)

I ran into this headlong with the sequel to Darkship Thieves, in which took secondary character Etienne Boulanger (let alone that given my issues with double letters he was often Etiene or Ettiene) and made him main character. It just wouldn’t work. In the first book I wanted an every-man sort of name at least in the planning process and he wasn’t central enough for the name to bother me. But dragging an Etienne through the book was impossible. So, with the editor’s consent – and going back to the first book before it’s typeset – he’s been renamed Simon St. Cyr. Why this works better I don’t know, but it makes the character immediately live for me. The St. Cyr, btw, was at his insistence. I have NO clue why. (I had a similar issue with Draw One In The Dark in which I tried to name Kyrie Kris and Krissy and Katy and Kelly, but nothing would work till I named her what she thought she was called "Kyrie Grace". The fact that this was the name of the newborn daughter of a friend made no difference at all to the character.)
I confess to making extensive use of www.behindthename.com, though mostly I just skip through the desired pages until a name "clicks" with what the character.

So, why do you think this is? Are there any characters you think would change completely with different names? Would Pride and Prejudice work just as well if Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy’s names were reversed? Why not?

Sticky points

Kate, pick your mind back up out of the gutter! I meant points in the writing when you stick tighter than a plump gent superglued onto a toilet seat. The point at which writing at all seems futile, and what you've already done feels like a waste of effort. I have two or three of these every book, minimum.

So: how do I get away from it?

I can't afford to simply drop the book and write something else - until I reach the same point, yet again. (there are people out there who do this. Who have hard-drives full of great starts...)

It's usually my subconcious telling me that something is badly wrong. Of course sometimes my subconcious is talking a crock and should crawl back under its rock and stay there, but mostly it's saying 'something ain't right and ain't fair. According to the Goons - I was writing the left leg of Joe Louis ;-) -- but in practice for me it usually means motive is insufficient for prescribed course of action of the plot. I have 3 solutions - all working round that.

1)Go back. Elaborate on motive.

2) Add a new POV character - who will expand that motive

3) Jump ahead. Just leave it right there, and jump ahead - This is great when you really aren't yet sure what motives are -- they'll reveal themselves and you can backfill.

So I am still as sick as a... why the hell horse? A hippopotamus with double pneumonia -- so I'll leave you to tell me what you find works to deal with the sticking points.

Inspiration: from a spark to a damp squid

Dave Freer posting: For some of us ideas come easy. Execution is hard (especially for the executee).

For the less brilliant of us, it’s all bloody hard. Look, if you’re all inspiration and no follow-through you’re never going to write anything. But all the hard work in the world can end up as turgid and meaningless as yet another crank-the-handle book without those moments of ‘gotcha’ WOW sparkly lights and YES!!!

I wish I knew how to turn that on at will. Because it has to happen... at least once a book for me. When I simply can’t get the words out fast enough, when the pieces of the puzzle FIT, when the words are just right.

But when I stick... I stick. I have various tricks for unsticking like jumping ahead, reading back. But sometimes that’s futile. It’s my mind telling me the story needs that ‘whoopee’ moment. And unless I find that, it won’t work. You see... I am a synthesist (or a lumper). I have this sort of anti-computer in my head that takes apparently unrelated pieces of apparent garbage... and for no logical reason sticks bits together, making them fit -- possibly making them into real garbage rather than just apparent garbage.

And every now and again it says ‘does not fit. Out of cheese error.’ Occasionally ‘redo from start’

I’ve learned to listen, because the end result otherwise is pointless meaningless crap. Moreover, it’s crap that I hate.

Redo from start requires little explanation.

Does not fit... usually means I need more background. Need to remix. I have the SOME of the stimulus pinned down (in a display case. Odd name for a butterfly, but that is scientists for you. Naming odd butterflies that flap their wings and cause hurricanes of ideas... and get long pins stuck through them) to make it happen for me. Firstly I need read up my background sources, and then to clear the decks and focus hard (desk stripped of books to the wood) . E-mail and Internet disconnected. Distractions (bills) and emotional upsets need to be dealt with. Take a brisk walk. Climb something. Catch a fish. And I need to do no other writing (or reading). Not jump ahead or work on something else. I’ll swear there is something alcoholic about books because I seem to need good ingredients (albeit sometimes unlikely ones) to ferment a bit.

It can be terrifying when you hit these, especially with deadline looming.

So far the spark has always lit up a Loligo vulgaris for me. Maybe one day I’ll get a Archituethis dux or even a Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni...

Now... I’m selling calamari. If only I could find more people who liked it.