Striving for Perfection

I think as writers we all want to write the most amazing things possible - stories that just grab our readers and won't let go.

That takes rewriting.

Sure, I'd like to have my work be perfect the first time. I also know it's not going to be that way. I have particular difficulty with beginnings. For every novel I've written so far, the scene I started the novel with on the first draft isn't the one I was supposed to start the novel with.

Yes, I find this demoralizing. Now when I'm starting out I have to sit down and ask myself very seriously, "Where does the main conflict of the story start?" And I remind myself that a main conflict is not necessarily proprietary to one character, nor does it focus crucially on a character's history or on that character's world. But I still second-guess myself all the time, because I want to get it right. I keep hoping that my first drafts are going to be good.

If I were to let these worries shut me down, though, I'd be nowhere. There's no way to finish a story that you don't start! So I try to think back to writing my big school papers, where people used to say to me, "Write the introduction last. How will you know what you're going to say until you've already said it?" I get all my character, world, and language ducks in a row and dive in, figuring I'll end up returning to the start anyway - because there's no such thing as making it perfect on the first try.

Then, of course, the problem becomes how to know when it's finished. At a certain point you get to a place where you're just changing a word here or there, and you can't see anyplace to make it better. The problem is, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best it can be - it only means that your current view won't show you any way forward. This is the point at which I go looking for critique. Someone else will have a different angle on my story, that will show me where I can go next. As I've discussed here before in Critique and the Writer's Compass, it's important to keep one's own goals in mind at the same time.

One of the most interesting things I've heard about the sculptor Michelangelo was that he said this about sculpting:

“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”

So the idea is that the sculpture is already there; he just has to sculpt away until he gets to it.

This isn't far off from the way I feel about revision. There is a difference - in my case, I can't see the end product from the start, and only have an idealized vision of what I'm trying to achieve. But this metaphor works for me - and in fact, this is the reason critiques don't bother me (they actually inspire me). I rejoice every time someone gives me a glimpse deeper into my own story, because often enough once I've sensed that deeper level, I can carve the entire story more deeply to match. For me, the perfect story is in there somewhere, and I have to find it. Every revision that pushes the story deeper is one step closer to my goal, and each opportunity for a critique that offers me a fresh view, from a unique angle, is a potential opportunity to see through the veil of stone and find the treasure inside.

New Poll on Worldbuilding Workshop

I hope you all can take a look and vote in my poll. I initially posted it (for a few minutes) as a June workshop, but in fact I meant to make it April. So please take a look and let me know if you're interested in a possible worldbuilding workshop beginning around April 10th.

Thanks!

More on hypergraphia and writer's block

After my post called "Insanity and Creativity" was featured on the SF network site "Red Rocket Station," I had a few interesting comments there, most of which said something like the following:

Hypergraphia? Can I please have some?

Really, I don't think these people want hypergraphia. I mean, the Marquis de Sade apparently had hypergraphia, which is why when people took his quills away he found all kinds of awful ways to keep writing. Hypergraphia is an obsession with writing, where you'll write on anything, with anything, just for the feeling of the writing and the words coming out.

What I think these people really want is to avoid writer's block.

Janice has a great post on writer's block on her blog, here. Maybe she and I are just fortunate, but we never feel like we have writer's block - at least, not per se.

For me the question of not being able to write boils down to three major factors.

One: having no time to write
This is not writer's block. I get frustrated because often I'll have thoughts flying through my head but I won't have a moment to sit down alone at the computer and actually get them down. Sure, sometimes I use a little notebook. Mostly - and my friends will attest to this, Janice particularly - I corner someone and talk my ideas out. Talking ideas out helps me to solidify them, to test their relevance to what I'm writing and see how they fit into the story structure as a whole.

Two: being too exhausted to write
This happens, far more often than I'd like. I get so underwater with all the other demands of my life that the words just go to sleep. Often I'll think of sitting down to write, and then decide other priorities have to come first. And then something unexpected will happen. And then it will be the weekend. And then the kids will have the day off school on Monday or something. And pretty soon I'll find that I haven't written for days. It takes a while before I can wake up the system after that. So I edit. I read what I've written. I read what other people have written. I take a Ridiculously Close Look at something. All of these things help to wake up my drowsy Muse.

Three: being stuck on a story problem
Okay, so let's say I'm writing along, and suddenly I run out of things to say. The scene, which seemed to be going so well, just peters out. Or the novel starts losing momentum. That's when I know that something is wrong. It's not writer's block, because it's not something that's wrong with me. Something is wrong with the story. I call this a story problem. Generally speaking, a story problem turns out to be a question I haven't answered properly. Maybe I don't really understand the main character's state of mind in this scene (this is why I'm fanatical about writing in chronological order). Maybe I don't understand the motives of the peripheral actors in the scene. Or maybe I haven't really thought through how the logistics need to work. It's always something practical: some detail I've missed, or some angle I haven't considered. Usually the problem isn't even in the place where the writing started to get slow. Two days ago I got stuck writing a conversation between two people on page 224. After lots of thinking and several conversations on the topic with different people, I realized that in order to solve the problem, I had to go back to page 208 and think through every detail of my main character's state of mind, specifically, what models she was using to understand her situation and how and where these changed and developed. Once I could track that, I could go back and understand how she would interpret something in the tricky conversation. And voilà, today I'm starting on page 232.

Mind you, I believe in writer's block. I wouldn't say it doesn't exist. But I would encourage you to think through the reasons why the words aren't coming out right now. If it's no time to write, take notes and go back later. If it's exhaustion, take your time and do other things to wake your Muse up rather than banging your head on your notebook or computer. If it's a story problem, use whatever means you can - research, conversation, brainstorming exercises, structural revision, etc. - to address the issue, making sure not to blame the problem entirely on the area where it occurs, but to look earlier in the manuscript for possible sources of the problem.

Then maybe you won't need those hypergraphia pills that someone was asking me for.

For all of you curious about writing and publishing

My friend Janice Hardy, whom I have mentioned here before, just started a blog called "The Other Side of the Story" - so I thought I'd recommend it and give you the link:

http://storyflip.blogspot.com

She's got all kinds of insights on writing, querying, agents, and other various aspects of the process from writing your book to getting it published. She's also got some great links there to blogs about publishing.

So go check it out, and enjoy.

Unreliable Narrators

Unreliable narrators can be fascinating and frustrating - both to read and to write.

Over the past few days, I started thinking through possible types of unreliable narrators, and I've come up with this list:

1. An insane 1st person narrator
2. A sane 1st person narrator
3. An insane 3rd person limited narrator
4. A sane 3rd person limited narrator

Insanity is not a requirement for an unreliable narrator - it's merely the most extreme case. Because it's extreme, it can be pretty easy to recognize when you're listening to the voice and internal thoughts of an insane person. For the writer, establishing the patterns of an insane voice will take some effort, but at the same time, the voice itself provides critical evidence of the narrator's unreliability. Thus, it isn't quite so critical to give the reader external evidence for the narrator's bad judgment.

A sane narrator can also be unreliable, for any number of reasons. All they have to do is be wrong about something. There are plenty of ways for this to happen - as many ways as there are for the character to cast judgment. Maybe the character misjudges a situation, or misjudges people in a systematic way.

One of my own characters, Imbati Xinta, is unreliable because he constantly denigrates and undervalues himself. The tricky part is that his unreliability is difficult to recognize, because he's reliable in his judgments of just about everything else. How, then, can you tell that he's an unreliable narrator in the first place? That's where you need evidence.

For the misjudgment of a situation, you can contradict a narrator's stated/internalized judgments about a place, or people, using details of the situation. Say a character enters a room and thinks it's not dangerous - the writer can place an object in the room that belongs to the antagonist, for example. The writer can have the unreliable narrator see this object, yet not recognize its significance. Then, provided that the reader can identify this object as indicating the possible presence of danger (or the antagonist him/herself), the contradiction works and the narrator is shown to be unreliable.

Anytime the reader can read a situation differently from the judgments expressed by the narrator, it will become clear that the narrator is unreliable.

In the case of a character who misjudges himself, like Xinta, it's tricky. I can plant counterevidence to his view of himself in a number of ways. I can have people be respectful and deferent to him, or compliment him on something he's done. I can show him getting things done properly even though he isn't satisfied with his own performance. Or I can always switch to another point of view so readers get a view of him that isn't colored by his own judgment. Mind you, this doesn't always mean the second POV character is correct in all judgments, either!

I love a situation where every point of view character interprets things a little differently, and nobody is precisely right.

One thing I would say is that as a writer, I don't ever want to lose the reader's trust. So giving the reader an impression that is later contradicted has to be done carefully. If it's a discovery made by the point of view character, the reader who is identifying with that character is likely to accept it. If it can be interpreted as authorial deception, however, the reader may abandon the story right there. This is why I would never try to have a third person omniscient narrator be unreliable - because that person is trusted to be omniscient!

Colin F said that "having a sane narrator talk about an insane character strikes me as being a rather sad story." This could be true, depending on who the narrator is, and whether he or she thinks it's sad. There are many permutations of this, however. There's the criminologist who's trying to get into the head of the insane criminal. There's the loved one who can't understand their beloved's condition. There's also the person who's been cured, looking back on his or her mentally ill years from a new position of sanity.

I think it should be clear at this point that unreliable narrators can take many different forms, and be unreliable in many different ways. It's fun to explore ways in which your narrator might be unreliable - because in my experience, I find that narrator unreliability adds a new level to the reader's experience. I love to feel like I'm sharing a secret with my readers, and giving them the opportunity to say "I know something he doesn't know!" That sense of confidentiality is something I love as a reader, too.

Insanity and Creativity

The word "insane" is one we tend to toss around easily without much thought most of the time (never mind the word "crazy"), but the details of mental illness and imbalance are at once horrible and fascinating.

I never really considered it as a resource for writing until I was initially trying to get to know the characters in my first Varin novel, and decided that in order for it to be as realistic as I wanted, the "evil king" character had to be inbred and mentally imbalanced. That sent me off into a whole bunch of encyclopedia research on mental illness until I found pathologies that matched his behavior (in this case, obsessive-compulsive disorder and paranoia). For a time, my husband worked at a company that offered continuing education courses to medical professionals, and several of the seminar topics related to mental illness, so I gathered quite a bit there as well.

Then I read The Midnight Disease: the drive to write, writer's block, and the creative brain, by Alice Flaherty.

Oh wow.

That book is a revelation, and I encourage all of you out there to pick it up. It's not a difficult read at all, and it's amazing. The author talks about her own experiences with hypergraphia - the uncontrollable urge to write - and about all kinds of famous writers and creative minds which also happened to be not quite balanced.

One of the most fascinating things that Flaherty discusses is the possibility of an evolutionary link between creativity and insanity. Insanity is not exactly what you'd call an adaptively successful trait - but if it's the unfortunate product of overconcentration of the genes that give us creativity, then you can easily see how the success of highly creative individuals in natural selection would mean that the possibility of insanity would never quite go away.

I compare it to the case of sickle-cell anemia. A person with two matching genes for sickle-cell anemia gets the disease and is very ill. But a person with only one of these genes has a higher resistance to malaria than a person who doesn't have the gene at all. So the adaptive success of the single-gene trait leads to the continued presence of the disease itself.

Since reading that book, I have in fact written a character who suffers from hypergraphia. Let's just say it was a serious inspiration.

At this point I'm going to have to close this post - but I think I'll come back to the topic because there are a couple of things I'd love to talk about that relate to it tangentially, specifically:
1. unreliable narrators
2. narrative voice

Hopefully I'll get to writing those in the next couple of days. If in the meantime you have anything you'd like to contribute to my preparation for such a discussion (questions, comments, etc.) please feeel free to comment.

An awesome book to look out for...

It's official! My friend Janice Hardy's book, The Shifter, is coming out on October 6th. I'm totally excited about it, especially since I got to read her early drafts.

Here's a description of the book:

Nya is an orphan, struggling for survival in a city ravaged by war. She's also a Taker - someone who can heal injuries by drawing that pain into her own body. But unlike her sister Tali and other Takers, Nya can't push the pain into pynvium, an enchanted metal used to store it. All she can do is shift it from person to person - a dangerous skill she must conceal or risk being used as a human weapon.
One fateful morning, Nya's secret is exposed to a pain merchant eager to use her ability for his sinister purposes. At first she refuses, but when Tali mysteriously disappears, Nya must decide how far she's willing to go to save her sister.

I'm not just going to give you a list of adjectives for this book, but to tell you from my own perspective why I love it.

The main character, Nya, is not only spunky and clever but has a nuanced sense of morality that is totally world-grounded. She has a distinctive voice and her backstory vibrates through her actions.

The world of Geveg and its surrounding territories has its own special flavor - and the unique economy of healing and pain looms behind every aspect of the people's life, showing through the judgments, actions and decisions of even minor characters.

It's a fascinating world. You want to go there, and meet Nya. So look out for The Shifter by Janice Hardy this October.

By the way, I'm also planning to put up a Ridiculously Close Look at the book later this year when it comes out...