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We're starting with one that somehow wandered into the Q&A post from the last round, because if I don't, I will forget about it.
Q: What's the difference between being a kept-thief and being a pack kid? I get the idea that there are (as English comp. students like to say) "Both similarities and differences," but I'm hazy on exactly what the similarities and differences are. It's clear enough that Margot the pack-leader is a mostly-good guy while Kholkis and Felix's Keeper are bad guys, but are those individual personality differences, or are those differences inherent to their respective roles in the Lower City? My hazy understanding of the most important similarities and differences are that both train kids to work in a variety of criminal enterprises, but kept-thieves are bought, while pack kids may join the pack by some version of choice (choice that is constrained by a lack of other options), and that packs are to some degree focused on the good of the group while Keepers are focused on their own personal interests--but I'm not 100% confident about it.
A: The simplest way to explain the difference is to say that kept-thieves are a group of kids being led--or "kept"--by an adult, while a pack is a group of kids being led by another kid. Not all pack leaders are as benevolent as Margot, and I certainly hope there are thief-keepers who aren't as toxic as Keeper and Kolkhis, although it's obviously a system simply BEGGING for abuses. I stole thief-keepers wholesale from Oliver Twist, whereas packs are street gangs, mutated to fit the needs of an urban society without any kind of welfare or child protection services--and where clearly orphanages either don't exist or are very bad news.
Also, packs don't exactly "train" their members; it's just that everyone has to figure out what they can do to keep the collective afloat for one more day, and older kids teach younger kids what they know. Packs also shade off--as Mildmay comments disgustedly--into working class and bourgeois kids slumming for the "romance" of it, and those packs frequently end up as prostitution rings. (Felix's Keeper was unusual in directly and explicitly training children to be prostitutes; most thief-keepers, like Kolkhis, focus on thievery and smuggling and the like.) The packs that are made up of foundlings and orphans and abandoned children and ex-kept-thieves (most thief-keepers cut their kids loose at twelve or thirteen; Kolkhis keeps them longer if they're useful to her) stay away from prostitution if they possibly can.
Q: How much of the plot and story did you come up with before you started writing? How much did you have to go back and change?
As I've said in other answers, I tend toward the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school of plot, so I very rarely have any definite ideas of plot before I start. (The exception to this is The Mirador, where I knew the ending well before I knew the beginning.) HOWEVER, comma, an integral part of my process seems to be doing the plot wrong in the first draft. This is most often a problem of character motivations (unlike![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala, I don't have a circuit breaker in my head to keep me from doing the wrong thing), but it also happens because--apparently--the big events of the book will show up, but they won't bring any of their infrastructure along with them. So it's up to me to figure out, for instance: ( spoiler for Corambis ). Very wrong in the first draft. Very very wrong. But writing the first draft was also the only way I found out that that [spoiler for Corambis] is what happened. My process is very messy and not at all linear. Several people have commented on the appropriateness of the labyrinth as a central image for the sort of spiral-shaped structure of the narratives, and I have to confess, it's also appropriate to the process by which the books got written.
Q: You've said your main inspiration for DoL came from getting the idea of Felix, and then trying to figure out the world that would have to exist to make him. How much did he influence the world of DoL, and how much did the world influence him, during writing?
A: If you take Felix's pieces of the first seven chapters of Mélusine and excise the interlude in St. Crellifer's, you have (minus the bits that had to be cut for illogic and embarrassment) the original and originating piece of story around which the rest of the thing accreted. So Felix showed up a wizard, gay, vain, with a deeply traumatic past of which he is ashamed and fairly pathological anger management issues of which he is not nearly as ashamed as he should be, with a malevolent master whom he has not escaped nearly as cleanly as he thinks he has, living in a massive, windowless citadel with byzantine, antagonistic politics and an enemy as powerful as itself--and underneath the citadel are the catacombs which, not coincidentally, are all about the parts of his life Felix is trying and failing to leave behind. Oddly enough, I also knew about the Fire very early. (Originally, Felix had burn scars on one pectoral and shoulder, but there comes a point where you have to admit that enough is enough and prune back your Mary Sue climbing roses.)
That's what I knew when I started writing. Essentially, the rape scene was where the story started, with a little lead in and exploration of the consequences as far as I could see them. (Which leads to the next question, so hold that thought.)
The world there is fairly vague, so all of the specifics and concreteness of Mélusine were world-building based on what Felix gave me, and in return, all the details of Felix's past--Keeper and Joline and Lorenzo and Vincent and the specific influences they had and have on him--came from building the world. The magic system was also built around having to explain what Malkar did and how he did it, and that recursed around to making Felix really exceptionally geeky, in a very suave, cooler-than-thou kind of way.
Q: You said you only got the idea for Mildmay partway through writing-- what did the story look like before Mildmay was in it? What made Mildmay a necessity?
A: So, like I said in the previous question, the first seven chapters of Mélusine are more or less the original ... [I'm trying to think of the right word, which isn't coming, but if you were here, I could totally show you the hand gesture] ... discrete unit of story that the initial inspiration produced. Which is to say, I got Felix to Hermione with his entire life in ruins around his feet, and there I was stuck. Completely utterly stuck, like Winnie-the-Pooh in Rabbit's doorway or Rosebud the Basselope over a fence.
I was a college sophomore; I had other things to do. I left it alone, came back and poked it occasionally, but it just rolled itself up tighter and put its paws over its eyes. Eventually it occurred to me that Felix, in his current state of non compos mentis, could not get out of that jam on his own and maybe I needed another protagonist to come along and do the protagonist things Felix couldn't do.
That's what I needed Mildmay for.
The hard part with him was going back and generating those seven chapters' worth of stuff for him to be doing before he showed up in Hermione. It took me a long time to figure him out, and I was worried that his sections would be boring and people would skip them. Which turned out to be possibly the most unfounded worry I have ever had.
Q: How do you describe the Doctrine of Labyrinth series to others, especially those that don't read for pleasure?
A: Hoo boy. As anyone who's seen me try to answer the "What is your book about?" question can attest, I'm really not the person to ask. I tend to offer the basic comparison to Tolkien and then try to change the subject. There is nothing in the world I find more embarrassing than trying to describe my own books.
Q: I'm not sure if this really is a question about the Doctrine of Labyrinths, but I'll ask it here anyway. What do you see as the difference between drama, melodrama, and angst? You noted in Q&A #9 (snip) "In fact, all the reasons for giving Felix power--his sex, his wizardry, his class status (even, for readers who live in a world in which pale skin is a status marker, his skin color)--is so that his fall will be more dramatic. More melodramatic, even, because I'm not going to deny that charge." You clearly distinguish between the terms. Would you please elaborate on that?
A: You people keep asking the hard questions.
Okay. In the specific sense I was using it in the sentence you quote, the quality of being "dramatic" is the quality that makes a story gripping. It's what generates tension and excitement. (There are other meanings for the word "drama," but that's the one I was using there.) "Melodrama" is over-the-top drama, or to put it another way, drama that doesn't earn the tension it generates, like a three-act opera about the agony of a paper-cut. It's openly and cheaply manipulative. One of the things that produces it is stacking the deck against your protagonist, as I stacked the deck against poor Felix. (This is another of those choices I would make differently at 34 than I did at 19.) Of course, the other side to melodrama is that many readers enjoy it and seek it out--it's an easy catharsis.
(The best example I know of the the difference between drama and melodrama is the difference between Shakespeare's King Lear and the version perpetrated by the Restoration playwright Nahum Tate, in which Edgar marries Cordelia at the end and they all live happily ever after. Tate's version is melodrama; it provides excitement and the opportunity to weep vicarious tears over the sufferings of Gloucester, and then it ends with a pat, politically conservative moral and a wedding. Your emotions have been exercised--if, like Tate's audiences and audiences for the next 200 or so years, you enjoy the surfacy, facile manipulations of melodrama and consent to let them work on you--but not deeply. Shakespeare's Lear, on the other hand, leaves you wrung out and adrift. It doesn't offer cheap consolation against the visceral and existential sufferings of its characters, and it ends in bleak nihilism. It earns its effects by not pretending that there are easy answers or happy endings.)
Angst is emotional suffering. Some readers enjoy it; some readers avoid it. I think it can be a component of either drama or melodrama, but the longer the narrative dwells on the protagonist's angst, the more likely the charge of melodrama is to be made. And to stick.
ETA: Another possible characteristic of melodrama is intense physical suffering without concommitant emotional suffering--or any physical aftereffects of suffering, like needing extensive rehab. An example of this kind of melodrama would be the Sexton Blake stories Dorothy Sayers satirizes (affectionately) in Murder Must Advertise. The physical suffering (I've never been able to decide if readers are drawn to it--as they certainly are--by sadism or masochism or some of both) generates drama, but the lack of consequences make the drama unearned. Melodrama, QED.
ETA2: In fact, the difference between drama and melodrama can be boiled down to just that: consequences.
Q: You said in the last post that there is a reason for Stephen's Mother's suicide. Is this a reason that is explained in the text, and I should just go back and reread? If not, what is it? (If it is explained in the text, we can all look it up ourselves.)
A: I'm not sure any longer if it's explicitly in the published text or not. So ( spoilers for The Mirador ). I realize that that sentence is ambiguous as it stands, and if there isn't a clarification anywhere else in the book, I apologize for that.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
Q: What's the difference between being a kept-thief and being a pack kid? I get the idea that there are (as English comp. students like to say) "Both similarities and differences," but I'm hazy on exactly what the similarities and differences are. It's clear enough that Margot the pack-leader is a mostly-good guy while Kholkis and Felix's Keeper are bad guys, but are those individual personality differences, or are those differences inherent to their respective roles in the Lower City? My hazy understanding of the most important similarities and differences are that both train kids to work in a variety of criminal enterprises, but kept-thieves are bought, while pack kids may join the pack by some version of choice (choice that is constrained by a lack of other options), and that packs are to some degree focused on the good of the group while Keepers are focused on their own personal interests--but I'm not 100% confident about it.
A: The simplest way to explain the difference is to say that kept-thieves are a group of kids being led--or "kept"--by an adult, while a pack is a group of kids being led by another kid. Not all pack leaders are as benevolent as Margot, and I certainly hope there are thief-keepers who aren't as toxic as Keeper and Kolkhis, although it's obviously a system simply BEGGING for abuses. I stole thief-keepers wholesale from Oliver Twist, whereas packs are street gangs, mutated to fit the needs of an urban society without any kind of welfare or child protection services--and where clearly orphanages either don't exist or are very bad news.
Also, packs don't exactly "train" their members; it's just that everyone has to figure out what they can do to keep the collective afloat for one more day, and older kids teach younger kids what they know. Packs also shade off--as Mildmay comments disgustedly--into working class and bourgeois kids slumming for the "romance" of it, and those packs frequently end up as prostitution rings. (Felix's Keeper was unusual in directly and explicitly training children to be prostitutes; most thief-keepers, like Kolkhis, focus on thievery and smuggling and the like.) The packs that are made up of foundlings and orphans and abandoned children and ex-kept-thieves (most thief-keepers cut their kids loose at twelve or thirteen; Kolkhis keeps them longer if they're useful to her) stay away from prostitution if they possibly can.
Q: How much of the plot and story did you come up with before you started writing? How much did you have to go back and change?
As I've said in other answers, I tend toward the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school of plot, so I very rarely have any definite ideas of plot before I start. (The exception to this is The Mirador, where I knew the ending well before I knew the beginning.) HOWEVER, comma, an integral part of my process seems to be doing the plot wrong in the first draft. This is most often a problem of character motivations (unlike
matociquala, I don't have a circuit breaker in my head to keep me from doing the wrong thing), but it also happens because--apparently--the big events of the book will show up, but they won't bring any of their infrastructure along with them. So it's up to me to figure out, for instance: ( spoiler for Corambis ). Very wrong in the first draft. Very very wrong. But writing the first draft was also the only way I found out that that [spoiler for Corambis] is what happened. My process is very messy and not at all linear. Several people have commented on the appropriateness of the labyrinth as a central image for the sort of spiral-shaped structure of the narratives, and I have to confess, it's also appropriate to the process by which the books got written.Q: You've said your main inspiration for DoL came from getting the idea of Felix, and then trying to figure out the world that would have to exist to make him. How much did he influence the world of DoL, and how much did the world influence him, during writing?
A: If you take Felix's pieces of the first seven chapters of Mélusine and excise the interlude in St. Crellifer's, you have (minus the bits that had to be cut for illogic and embarrassment) the original and originating piece of story around which the rest of the thing accreted. So Felix showed up a wizard, gay, vain, with a deeply traumatic past of which he is ashamed and fairly pathological anger management issues of which he is not nearly as ashamed as he should be, with a malevolent master whom he has not escaped nearly as cleanly as he thinks he has, living in a massive, windowless citadel with byzantine, antagonistic politics and an enemy as powerful as itself--and underneath the citadel are the catacombs which, not coincidentally, are all about the parts of his life Felix is trying and failing to leave behind. Oddly enough, I also knew about the Fire very early. (Originally, Felix had burn scars on one pectoral and shoulder, but there comes a point where you have to admit that enough is enough and prune back your Mary Sue climbing roses.)
That's what I knew when I started writing. Essentially, the rape scene was where the story started, with a little lead in and exploration of the consequences as far as I could see them. (Which leads to the next question, so hold that thought.)
The world there is fairly vague, so all of the specifics and concreteness of Mélusine were world-building based on what Felix gave me, and in return, all the details of Felix's past--Keeper and Joline and Lorenzo and Vincent and the specific influences they had and have on him--came from building the world. The magic system was also built around having to explain what Malkar did and how he did it, and that recursed around to making Felix really exceptionally geeky, in a very suave, cooler-than-thou kind of way.
Q: You said you only got the idea for Mildmay partway through writing-- what did the story look like before Mildmay was in it? What made Mildmay a necessity?
A: So, like I said in the previous question, the first seven chapters of Mélusine are more or less the original ... [I'm trying to think of the right word, which isn't coming, but if you were here, I could totally show you the hand gesture] ... discrete unit of story that the initial inspiration produced. Which is to say, I got Felix to Hermione with his entire life in ruins around his feet, and there I was stuck. Completely utterly stuck, like Winnie-the-Pooh in Rabbit's doorway or Rosebud the Basselope over a fence.
I was a college sophomore; I had other things to do. I left it alone, came back and poked it occasionally, but it just rolled itself up tighter and put its paws over its eyes. Eventually it occurred to me that Felix, in his current state of non compos mentis, could not get out of that jam on his own and maybe I needed another protagonist to come along and do the protagonist things Felix couldn't do.
That's what I needed Mildmay for.
The hard part with him was going back and generating those seven chapters' worth of stuff for him to be doing before he showed up in Hermione. It took me a long time to figure him out, and I was worried that his sections would be boring and people would skip them. Which turned out to be possibly the most unfounded worry I have ever had.
Q: How do you describe the Doctrine of Labyrinth series to others, especially those that don't read for pleasure?
A: Hoo boy. As anyone who's seen me try to answer the "What is your book about?" question can attest, I'm really not the person to ask. I tend to offer the basic comparison to Tolkien and then try to change the subject. There is nothing in the world I find more embarrassing than trying to describe my own books.
Q: I'm not sure if this really is a question about the Doctrine of Labyrinths, but I'll ask it here anyway. What do you see as the difference between drama, melodrama, and angst? You noted in Q&A #9 (snip) "In fact, all the reasons for giving Felix power--his sex, his wizardry, his class status (even, for readers who live in a world in which pale skin is a status marker, his skin color)--is so that his fall will be more dramatic. More melodramatic, even, because I'm not going to deny that charge." You clearly distinguish between the terms. Would you please elaborate on that?
A: You people keep asking the hard questions.
Okay. In the specific sense I was using it in the sentence you quote, the quality of being "dramatic" is the quality that makes a story gripping. It's what generates tension and excitement. (There are other meanings for the word "drama," but that's the one I was using there.) "Melodrama" is over-the-top drama, or to put it another way, drama that doesn't earn the tension it generates, like a three-act opera about the agony of a paper-cut. It's openly and cheaply manipulative. One of the things that produces it is stacking the deck against your protagonist, as I stacked the deck against poor Felix. (This is another of those choices I would make differently at 34 than I did at 19.) Of course, the other side to melodrama is that many readers enjoy it and seek it out--it's an easy catharsis.
(The best example I know of the the difference between drama and melodrama is the difference between Shakespeare's King Lear and the version perpetrated by the Restoration playwright Nahum Tate, in which Edgar marries Cordelia at the end and they all live happily ever after. Tate's version is melodrama; it provides excitement and the opportunity to weep vicarious tears over the sufferings of Gloucester, and then it ends with a pat, politically conservative moral and a wedding. Your emotions have been exercised--if, like Tate's audiences and audiences for the next 200 or so years, you enjoy the surfacy, facile manipulations of melodrama and consent to let them work on you--but not deeply. Shakespeare's Lear, on the other hand, leaves you wrung out and adrift. It doesn't offer cheap consolation against the visceral and existential sufferings of its characters, and it ends in bleak nihilism. It earns its effects by not pretending that there are easy answers or happy endings.)
Angst is emotional suffering. Some readers enjoy it; some readers avoid it. I think it can be a component of either drama or melodrama, but the longer the narrative dwells on the protagonist's angst, the more likely the charge of melodrama is to be made. And to stick.
ETA: Another possible characteristic of melodrama is intense physical suffering without concommitant emotional suffering--or any physical aftereffects of suffering, like needing extensive rehab. An example of this kind of melodrama would be the Sexton Blake stories Dorothy Sayers satirizes (affectionately) in Murder Must Advertise. The physical suffering (I've never been able to decide if readers are drawn to it--as they certainly are--by sadism or masochism or some of both) generates drama, but the lack of consequences make the drama unearned. Melodrama, QED.
ETA2: In fact, the difference between drama and melodrama can be boiled down to just that: consequences.
Q: You said in the last post that there is a reason for Stephen's Mother's suicide. Is this a reason that is explained in the text, and I should just go back and reread? If not, what is it? (If it is explained in the text, we can all look it up ourselves.)
A: I'm not sure any longer if it's explicitly in the published text or not. So ( spoilers for The Mirador ). I realize that that sentence is ambiguous as it stands, and if there isn't a clarification anywhere else in the book, I apologize for that.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
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