Direction

Cygnet, Leamington Spa, June 2006

Yeah, I’ve been writing, but I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that it doesn’t count, ’cause just about everything I’ve written since my initial chapter or two has been drivel. Well, let me qualify that: I’ve written some more of the stories that go inside the story, and those, I think, are pretty much drivel-free. But when I attempt to write the narrative, to describe what’s in front of me when I’m flying low over my fictional world, I don’t much like what emerges lately. I feel like some huge part of my talent has flown south for the winter. Mexico is nice this time of year. The rest of me is pretty much drifting, and I’m not sure where to look for it.

 I know brave and wonderful writers who, upon realizing they’ve written 25,000 words or so of less-than-deathless prose, shrug their shoulders and bin it, then write 25,000 good words to replace it. Of course some of these folks can turn out that kind of wordage in a weekend, but I suspect the truth is it’s more a matter of superior temperament on their part, and the fact that I don’t write fast. Yet. I’m working on a lot of changes this century, and I think some improvements in the speed department would not go amiss.

I’ll tell you something I love about being up to my eyeballs in a project: that feeling you sometimes get that the Cosmos is conspiring to make you trip over exactly the things you need to make it happen. I’m willing to grant that at least half of that comes from being on the alert for anything and everything that might possibly be made into fictional grist, but whatever’s left over seems to be some spooky partnership between your subconscious mind and the quantum field. Or maybe space aliens with big buggy eyes.

Case in point: a few weeks ago I thought of an architecture book I’d seen 20 year ago or so: A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander, et al. I had no idea why I was thinking of it other than that I’m interested in architecture (I’d only glanced through it very cursorily once, and couldn’t have told you what it was about, but I remembered the title), and for a couple of weeks I looked for it wherever I went, without success. Finally I reserved it at the library, and when I got it home I realized this was the next book I needed to read to understand some of the places this novel is going, and where it came from, for that matter.  A Pattern Language is about designing a world — not a fictional world per se, but one to live in — from the décor of rooms, through design of houses, gardens, streets, parks, villages, towns, cities, metropoli, and political regions. As it happens, the world in Eden — working title, but you know about working titles, don’t you? — is a deliberately-designed one. The inhabitants live in regions, towns, villages, streets, and houses that were bestowed upon them by mysterious benefactors, and they build new ones with the help of a similarly-bestowed book: The Book of Towns. Well, I just found the book, and I hadn’t consciously realized it existed. This sort of thing fills me with gratitude and glee. So as I give thanks this year for my 100% soy-based turkey surrogate and all the trimmings, my wonderful family, dear friends, a roof overhead in Seattle’s rainiest November ever, and novels written and otherwise, I’m going to throw in a very special thank-you for my wacky subconscious and its fabulous filing system. Keep the surprises coming.

The Shape of Things

(Left: Kennington Gasworks, London) 

 

A woman once found herself fascinated with structure. She was entranced by the bones in her feet and her hands and her head, she photographed the undersides of bridges and the shapes of buildings, and just about any hunk of naked substructure she came across in her travels. And she wondered endlessly why things were made the way they were. “A paramecium not only has no brain,” she told herself, “it hasn’t a single neuron to call its own.” Yet she knew that a paramecium manages all the actions that define a living thing, from eating its lunch to making the beast with two nuclei with that hot paramecium next door. It could do those things because its one paltry cell had lots and lots of microtubules that served it as neurons served her. Different structures, similar functions. Fascinating. “My brain has about a bazillion cells, by actual count,” she said to anyone who would listen, “and yet much of what I do, especially on Mondays, isn’t a great deal more complex than that to which any paramecium might aspire.” Her lunches might be more interesting, she decided, especially leftover Indian food. And the chances were excellent that of the two of them, only one could write.

Writing has plenty of structure, even if you can make yourself forget those sentence diagrams that were burned into your retinas in seventh grade. Beyond the outline – and you might as well know now that I do make outlines, though I never actually follow one – every book has a shape that when we find it helps us understand how we might proceed to tell our story within it. Some resemble clockfaces or calendars or Route 66, or a map of Hell, or the contents of a box found under the bed. My latest venture, for which my subconscious is even now searching for a title, is shaped like an infinity symbol or a möbius strip. This shape is described in the opening paragraph, though not named, and it was this description that revealed the story’s shape to me. So I know that it will begin at some point, curve on upwards and over and back down, meet itself in the middle, and eventually come back to where it started, which point will by that time be somewhere completely different, since nothing stands still. This is a tremendous help to me in figuring out how certain events will unfold. Beneath this shape is an infrastructure of stories within stories, but the actual ironwork is still a little out of focus. If I squint, I can see tiny little people crawling around in there, getting to know their way around. When they do, I hope they’ll clue me in. 

I love writing about writing, or writing about anything, really. I could do it all day. It’s so much easier than telling a story. I’ve been critical of using writing about Stuff That’s Interesting to avoid writing The Stuff That Hurts if You Don’t Write it, and Also Hurts When You Do, and I’m not backing down from that stand here. Talking, Blogging, and Journaling, live or dead tree varieties, are none of them the same as writing fiction, so if writing fiction what you burn to do, don’t make the mistake of thinking anything else is an acceptable substitute. I’ve blogged and journalled, played games, called meetings, gone to lunch, swept floors, even cleaned ovens to avoid writing, so I know from avoidance. I have a story I want to tell, so I’m getting it down where someone can read it and hopefully buy it. I’ll do it on the days that are easy, and I’ll do it on the days that are hard. That’s my promise to myself and anyone who’s listening.

So here’s the rule: if I don’t write, I can’t write about writing, or write about anything else here. I won’t write here every day I write, ’cause hey, got a life, and when I do I’ll often write about things that seem unrelated to writing, but of course nothing is really unrelated. To anything.

Kicking Ass, Chewing Bubblegum

My current novel is kicking my ass, and by that I mean that it’s slapping me around like a little girl. Of course when I was a little girl I aspired to be a boxer, and for a while I was the terror of the neighborhood, with my big brother setting up opponents for me to knock down. I was well-nigh invincible until one day he brought around a little boy I had a crush on, and when that one hit me I actually felt pain. That was the end of my boxing career. Washed up at seven. There was nothing left for me but to become a writer, a career I took up at age nine, after two years of retirement from the ring. No-one warned me about the pain this time, but I guarantee you it’s there. When you find your bliss, you also find your pain. When you find the thing you most love, you also find the thing that can black your eye, split your lip, and leave you bleeding on the mat. Isn’t it wonderful?

In addition to publishing something like twelve pieces of short sf/f in major markets over the years I’ve written half a dozen very minor mystery novels, three under my own name, another three mercifully pseudonymous. I co-edit a magazine, which provides a lot of creative jollies, but nothing can take the place of writing my own stuff when I can nail my ass to the chair and do it. Sometimes that’s a problem.

I recently completed a strange contemporary fantasy (Daemon) which is propping up one leg of my agent’s desk. This new (untitled) thing is science fiction with a heavy underlay of invented mythology, told as stories within stories. It’s got a traveling society, monks, monkeys, mythical masters, idealistic revolutionaries, talking dogs, and a living god or two, and getting it down on paper has been like pulling chicken teeth.

So I call on you all as witnesses to what it’s going to take to finish this book. In addition to reporting my progress from time to time, I’ll discuss what writing means to me, what it does to me and for me, and what that feels like. You’ll read some stories about my oddball past, I’ll report on what’s happening to me in the present, and the future is entirely up for grabs, so let’s grab us some.