I wasn't planning to write a blog
article, but felt after yesterday I wanted to make some notes while
the recent events were fresh in my mind. I'm not sure what this
piece will be about, but I guess it's going to touch on creativity
(also see
The Creative Process and the Unconscious,
Where Ideas Come From)
and
An update on Creativity and the Unconscious),
blocks, editing, and book 4 progress.
Yesterday was one of those wonderful
writing days that sometimes happen, so this is partly about what led
up to that.
I haven't written any articles for a
while because I feel I'm way behind schedule on where I wanted to
be for this fourth book. I had felt pretty comfortable that I could
have it ready about mid-2018, but that turned out to be wildly
optimistic. I'll lay out the reasons why, and let you see what you
think of them.
I think I started writing the MS in
1991, and completed that 1st draft near the end of 1993.
I just realised that might be a fun image to share… here's a
photo of the MS.
I used mostly used sheets of paper that had been printed. In fact,
on the left you can find a draft of a page from my wife Stella's
PhD thesis on the
Percy Folio.
In my first draft of the start of Leeth's story, it opened on the scene where Dr Harmon is in
the office of the Mother Superior of the orphanage, looking for a
suitable subject to adopt.
Anyway, the MS went through many stages
— the next one being typing it up on the computer, in the troff/MM
markup. I worked on it and polished and edited it, sending it off to
little or no response to publishers, and then about ten years later
realised the whole second half was full of story — but no plot. So
I bit the bullet and cut it in half. Then it seemed a little short,
and I still felt it was lacking something. The Godsson-Disten idea
came from somewhere to fill the gap, and I developed that and wove it
in to the story. At the end, the MS was back to its original,
pre-halved size.
I still kept editing and polishing,
improving my craft. I fed that whole MS, chapter by chapter, through
the
Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror,
and learned so much from the many very helpful reviews I received,
and equally, from writing reviews of other writers' submissions
there.
Learning your craft by writing a long
novel is a hard way to do it — you need to fix stylistic errors
through a much larger mass than a short story — but I rarely enjoy
reading or writing short fiction. So I kept at it.
The point of this historical digression
is to explain the first couple of special problems I faced with book
4. The first was that I hadn't touched (even read) this half of
the original MS in about 15 years, so there was a reasonable amount
of work just to apply what I'd learned in the meantime. A bigger
problem was the lack of plot. Now, the large anti-emotion plot arc
definitely helped, and tied nicely into what was already there — but
even so, it needed more. There was also the fear that maybe the old
MS simply might not be good enough? I had little idea what to expect
when I sat down to read it again, but found myself pleasantly
surprised: it was kind of nice, I felt. Leeth had grown and changed
more, however, thanks to all the additional trials I'd put her
through while developing the 1st three books, so stretches
had to be rewritten: what was there was more the Leeth you saw
straight out of the Institute: no d'Artelle spirit confrontation,
nothing with Disten, and, a really huge difference — no Marcie in
her life.
Due to the need to write a short piece
for my local writers' group, the
Marrickville Writers Corner,
I thought that one incident briefly passed over in the MS deserved
some expansion: the heartbreaking Luiz assassination. And while
writing that piece, while Leeth crept through the dark apartment in
shock at what had just happened, she heard a creepy scratching coming
from a drawer in Luiz's desk. I had no idea what was coming, just
that it connected to Luiz's nasty past, but that led to the black
dagger. That tiny seed germinated into the other major plot element
for book 4.
The title came surprisingly easily:
Violent Causes having several meanings, all of which were applicable
for this book, so that was one element that I didn't have a big
struggle with. But with all the things that needed addressing, and
my desire to keep as much as I could of what was there, somehow even
getting to the stage of the MS ready to send off to Dave at
ThEditors.com) seemed
harder. I'd arranged a slot, and as the deadline approached I
found I was struggling to meet it. In the end I sent it off before
I'd done my usual 2nd polish, which was stupid. I'd
told myself it would make it easier for me to cut things if I hadn't
made over-polished them. Instead, it just made more work for poor
Dave.
And when I received his detailed
critique, he had some big issues with some of the early sections, and
lots of the early chapters had a lot of small issues, too. (Oops:
note to self: never skip the polishing!) After some very fruitful
discussions back and forth, we got a handle on them and a plan for
what I should adjust, and I carried on. And after a month of hard
work, I was halfway through Dave's comments, and it was the end of
July. Sigh.
The Marcie Problem
There was also one major extra piece of
plot to work in, involving Marcie, and a key point in that was to be
Marcie's inclusion into one scene. The problem was, that
scene was kind of tightly scripted, dramatic, and I could see no
way to work Marcie in without disrupting a sequence I'd been
looking forward to making concrete, for at least fifteen years. In
fact, I let this scene block my writing for at least a year, because I
wanted to work it out so I could move on to the next piece of
the story. This was long before I understood the role of the unconscious,
and the simple trick of just writing it down, or skipping past the
block. Instead, I'd sit down, and try to work out the scene in my
head… and eventually fall asleep, and have used up all the time I'd
set aside for writing, with visible results of zero.
Yet here I was, in 2018, with that scene
looking and working like a dream — I think it would make a great
piece in a movie — and now I needed to add Marcie, in a significant
way. So I worked my way closer to this with, not exactly a growing
fear, since I had confidence in UTT and my unconscious… but some
trepidation, let's say.
And then on Monday I was at the brink:
the next thing to do was what I had begun thinking of as The Marcie
Problem. Tuesday I visited Mum, and saw the Equalizer 2 with her and
a friend (hi Jacqui!), and then had afternoon tea and dinner with
Mum, and watched an episode of The Avengers (courtesy of my brother
Jonathan: B&W, John Steed and Honor Blackman as Dr Cathy King,
not the Marvel Avengers), followed by the Hammer Horror film The
Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
(He seemed tall. I looked him up: he was: 1.96m, 6'5"!)
So, no writing on Tuesday. A whole day
with ‘no progress'. But I wasn't too worried, since panic and
fear are your enemies and I knew I was just giving my unconscious
more time to come up with something good. And it's always a great
day, visiting Mum; not to mention, relaxing and having a great meal
to boot!
So, Wednesday arrives, and still no
breakthrough. I could also tell I wasn't going to get it without a
bit more positive action. And now we come to the nub of this
article, and what drove me to write it. Because this time, I was
more sensitive to what was going on in my own mind.
I remembered my own advice, of using
pencil and paper to write stuff down so you're not wasting mental
energy juggling ideas in your mind while trying to create new ones.
So I took my little hand-made A6-sized notepad with its 4-leaf folded
‘pages' clipped to it, and my trusty propelling pencil. There
are some nuances there: that style of pencil, using 2B leads, means
your letters are crisp and sharp and the physical act is effortless;
and the hand-sized pad means it's not flexing and flopping and
you're fighting to support it. It just fits in your hand, you can
lie back on the sofa, comfy and warm, and think, and write as ideas
spring to mind.
All trying to make it as frictionless
as possible when the ideas start flowing, you see?
But I still didn't have my idea.
What I did have was some issues. So I started writing down stuff,
and also thinking. Not rushing myself. Not stressing myself because
I wasn't actually writing the story. Just trying to make the
solution coalesce out of whatever soup of ideas was floating around
in my head.
What started happening was somehow like
doing a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces of the picture didn't
exist until I thought of them, and it wasn't two dimensional but
three. The depth part is not especially important, but the time
dimension was critical. I started with asking "How would Marcie
plausibly end up in this scene?"
(By the way, I'm going to avoid
talking about this in a way that gives any spoilers.)
Marcie's appearance needed to fit in with a major plot strand
we'd agreed on, that involved Harmon. But how would he know? So,
that meant Nelson gave him the info. And then Harmon needed to
persuade someone else. And that was kind of interesting. And then
Marcie herself needed to find out enough to wind up in the scene. So
I wrote that little sequence, which worked very plausibly and nicely
I felt, and did good things for the plot, tension, and pacing. I now had the
background of my jigsaw, in the sense of both the chain of events
that led up to it, and of course I already had the tightly-written
scene where Marcie would appear.
Her appearance also had to be
significant: it'd be pretty weak if she just waved from the
sidelines. Dave had suggested Marcie's appearance should cause
problems for Leeth, so that was kind of the ‘shape' of one piece.
But I still didn't see how to fit her in.
Now, I'd had one thought, too, that
disturbed me: "if Marcie is here, and X is here too, then Scary-Y
could easily result, and blow everything to pieces." But at the
same time, they say you're supposed to place your characters at
risk. Yikes! So that was percolating in the back of my mind.
1st Wednesday of the month
was my MWC meetup, so I gave a quick polish to a scene I'd written
the week before, and headed off for a very convivial and inspiring
evening at Where's Nick. But I still didn't have the Marcie
Problem solved.
Thursday arrived, and I kept feeling,
for some reason, that Marcie wasn't going to go alone into this
scene. I kept imagining someone with her. Which just complicated
things, I felt, and I didn't want to do it. But in the end, since
I was just lying on the sofa and not exactly making massive progress,
I shrugged and decided to explore that. I asked myself "How does
Marcie go from where she is, to here?" and just started imagining
and jotting down some points. That all seemed pretty natural, and
that would put Marcie at the required place, with this other person.
And their reaction to my smoothly-scripted scene would definitely fit
into new-Harmon-plot-item-Z, and advance that.
Then Scary-Y idea popped back in my
head.
And I suddenly saw that Scary-Y could
easily unfold after the smoothly-scripted scene. And with
that, the problem was solved. The solution wasn't to force Marcie
and her scene to meld into the existing scene: it was to let that
follow on and develop from the scene!
This definitely felt a Eureka moment.
So then I just let the characters do
their stuff. All the different parties with their own agendas,
colliding and reacting. Let me just have a count ([Spoilers stripped out]): total of 9
parties. And so events flowed, and the drama climbed, and Leeth
pushed back, and things started spiralling into dangerous areas.
Maybe half of it was just in my head, the other half the occasional
explanatory note written down so I wouldn't forget, or a line or
two of dialogue. My notes occupied less than two A6 pages of my tiny
writing, but I had enough to set off and I was eager to do so. I
broke for dinner, but basically wrote from 4pm till 1am, a bit over
4k words. Sitting back, I summarised it in the flush of excitement
as "very plausible, didn't change the existing scene much at all,
upped the tension, fulfilled more expectations, causes more troubles
down the track, and also has some laughs and more character
development, all while advancing the plot!"
And it was time for bed. Looking at
the page, I saw that I just needed to write the emotional aftermath,
and in due course explore the repercussions of what happened. "I'll
just write a little bit, to start that," I thought. Then sat back
and saw it was 2am. I'd summarise that effort as taking what had
happened to a whole new level. Leeth once again surprised me; but
this time, herself, too, and even scared herself.
So I ended the day feeling high,
extremely pleased with how it all worked out, and of course relieved
to have the Marcie Problem solved and the pressure/stress removed.
I won't have a chance to do any
editing or writing today, and I'll be taking a day off tomorrow, so
no progress then, either. And I still have the other half of the MS
critique to work through. But I'm feeling much more relaxed now.
Hopefully, there should only be small bumps in the road ahead.
So, what's next? I hope to have my
editing and polishing done by around the end of August. Hopefully
I'll find a slot in Dave's schedule for a 2nd round
critique, and then with any luck a much easier job for both him and
myself following that. Mirella is on the job with the cover design
(again, with another idea mainly from Dave), and then I need to try
to do some proper marketing for a month or two before releasing this
one. So my guess is it will be ready near the end of the year.
Better late than half-baked.
