Words Light as Rocks

Ugh. One ugly sentence after another. Every word is like a rock. I lay down one, another, another and another… then they all spill at my feet, hurting my brain.

Shelter for a Fragil Thought

“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.”

~Edward P. Morgan

There are emotions too shameful, or fleeting, or strange to admit to any form of documentation except fiction.

Suzi McGowen said…
I live by this rule:
1. Is it kind?
2. Is it honest?
3. Is it necessary?

Suzi, I agree with you, but this reminds me of a joke.

A man ran up to Socrates and cried, “Socrates, you’ll never guess the rumor I just heard about one of your students!”

Socrates held up his hand. “Before you speak, let me ask you three questions. Is what you want to say kind?”

“Er.” The student blushed. “Not really.”

“Is it true?” asked Socrates.

“Uh… I really don’t know if it’s true or not… it’s a rumor…”

“Is it necessary?” continued Socrates, lifting an eyebrow. “Given that it is neither kind nor even necessarily true, is it going to make the world a better place to tell me this rumor?”

The man hung his head in shame. “You’re right, Socrates. Never mind.”

This incident shows why Socrates was regarded as a wise and good man.

It’s also why he never found out that Plato was boinking his wife.

How I Structure Books

I’m strict about the structure of my books. I tend to write too much, so I limit my number of available chapters as a way to limit my word count. I cheat, at times, by sticking 7,000 words into a chapter that’s supposed to only be 5,000, but if I start to have a chapter with a 9,000 or 10,000 word count, I know something HAS to go. If I can’t cut the scenes there, I have to cut in a chapter before or after and shift scenes up or down.

That’s the bare bones of the book structure. Muscling over the bones, I also have a plot/character structure. In addition to the main plotline, which is Dindi’s, I give a different set of secondary characters their own plotline in each book. In Book 1, the secondary characters were the widow Brena, her love interest villain-hero Rthan, and her hypocondriac daughter, Gwenika.

In Book 2, the secondary characters are Kemla and Tamio, who are scheming together, à la Les Liaisons dangereuses, against Dindi, and Finnadro, who wields the Singing Bow.

Each book also has its own series of “flashbacks”; these aren’t really flashbacks, but a third major plotline told out of chronological order to the rest of the story. In Book 1, that plotline followed something that happened twenty years ago to a mysterious girl called the Corn Maiden, which Dindi discovers through ongoing Visions throughout the story. Of course, the events of the past turn out to be critical to her story as well.

In Book 2, a major villain is introduced, and he searches out Visions that will ultimately lead him to kidnap Dindi.

Draft of Book 2

I’ve been working on Dindi Book 2, operating on the idea this will be a Quartet.

First off, I dragged every scene I’d ever written into one file. That gave me about 80,000 words right there, but the order was haphazard, some whole chapters were duplicates, there were the wrong number of chapters overall — in short, a pretty mess.

Using my post-it note outline method, I culled through the draft chapter by chapter. I removed duplicate scenes. Each book in the Dindi series is to have three sections of seven chapters each, for a total of twenty-one scenes.

Altogether I have a minimum of fourteen new scenes to write. Since one of those is a newly beefed-up battle, and another an all new climax sequence for the book, it will probably be more like twenty to twenty-five new scenes. Not to mention every other scene in the book has to be re-written. I need only change a few details and polish the style in some cases, but many other chapters require substantial re-writes. I’ve left them in now as place holders, because the new versions will probably have a similar word count.

Altogether, I have to write about 30,000 words worth of new material, and re-vamp another 40,000, then go back and comb the tangles out of the whole thing.

Art vs Capitalism

In the comments of my last post, “You’re going to be eaten by hyenas,” my friend Ban remarked, “When someone rejects something you’ve created it’s in essence a rejection of one’s inner self. You are that book – you are those characters – they live in your head. When someone says they don’t like – they ARE in fact saying they don’t like a part of you – however small or big that part my be.”

Allow me to repsond.

No. They aren’t. It just feels as though they are. Which was my point.

Seriously, my fellow writers, think about it.

I sent out a query letter. It was 179 words. Hey, sure, I put a lot of thought into those 179 words. An amazing amount of thought. I did research on query letters, read other query letters, read agent blogs, even parted with cold, hard cash to learn to polish those 179 words. And yes, it sucked rocks that those 179 words were still not good enough to entice even a request for a partial. It means I have more work to do. Damn.

But do those 179 words in any way summarize the contents and value of my inner soul?

Uh, let’s hope not. It would be one sorry-ass inner soul that could be shoved into 179 words of what is, in essence, an advertisement. That’s all a query letter is really, a specific kind of ad.

We live in a global, industrial, capitalist society, where art is a commodity. You aren’t sharing your deepest self with another human being when you send you mss into an agent or an editor, you’re peddling a commodity to a middle-man, who has to sell it in turn to someone else. THIS FACT MAKES THE BRAINS OF ARTISTS IMPLODE.

It’s wrong. It’s evil. It’s a betrayal of everything art has meant to our species for the past ten thousand years.

I believe we did evolve the arts as part of our unique human way of sharing our inner sense of self. A species could have sociality without art. Termites manage it. (See my post on why ants don’t have art.) Termites don’t have selfhood, either, so although they have sociality — eusociality, in fact, which may arguably be superior– they don’t have community. To have a community, you need to have individuality first, because community is what binds individuals together. I don’t think you can be human without art.

If we evolved art to bind us into small, hunter-gather communities, then everything about how art works today in a capitalist society necessarily feels wrong. That’s why there’s a disconnect between the artist and the society in which we are now making art. Rejected query letters are just the start of an artist’s agony. What about the Beta readers who say they just don’t “connect” with your characters? What about the publishers who turn down your agent? What about the reviewers? Oh, god, the reviewers. A reviewer wrote, about the first book I ever published, that it made her LAUGH… not because it was that good but because it was that BAD. OH GOD PEOPLE ARE LAUGHING AT ME IN PUBLIC. Let me die now, please. Please?

Ahem. The point is, things just get worse after you are published, not better. Now you are being judged on the fruit of your soul, you feel naked in front of a million judges, and no matter how many people like your book, someone will hate it. That’s the law of large numbers.

There’s a good side to the law of large numbers. Now matter how quirky your story is, it’s possible there is an audience out there who can connect with your characters. If you were a hunter-gatherer in a tribe of a 150 people, you were pretty much stuck with whatever art forms everyone else had already agreed upon. If you didn’t like their art, or if they didn’t like yours…. see my post below about the care and feeding of hyenas.

Now even weirdo freaks such as yours truly have a shot at touching the hearts of like-minded freaks. Woohoo! Unfortunately, to find the community of brilliant souls who will at last appreciate my greatness, I have to risk repeated rejection from a lot of otherwise decent human beings who just aren’t that into me. The healthy thing would be to shrug off the people who say, “No, thanks, not my cuppa,” and just focus on the kindred souls. The healthy thing would be to view art as a business, not as an existential battle. The healthy thing would be to treat rejection as a part of the profession, and just move on without obsessing over it day and night, night and day, years on end.

And, by the way, Clueless Reviewer, of course you laughed, that scene was SUPPOSED to be funny!