writing is/as process
Jul. 17th, 2010 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI'm working on a Booth story called "Thirdhop Scarp." (First line: The current owner of Thirdhop Scarp claims that the name is a contraction of "third hope," but this is etymologically dubious in the extreme; still improbable but far more likely is the local explanation: that if you fall off the escarpment, you reach the bottom in three hops.) I've been working on this one for a long time (at least four years) and I'm not done yet, but it occurred to me that it might be worth making a post about the process of writing this story.
It's a haunted house story. (I love haunted house stories, and even though I will never be Shirley Jackson, it was inevitable that I would try one sooner or later.) It's also a haunted house story with an incredibly complicated backstory, and one of the reasons it's taking me so long to write is that I'm having to figure out ways to get the backstory into the story proper through the medium of my first-person narrator.
It's also riffing off "The Residence at Westminster," which is an M. R. James story I mostly don't like very much, but that has a couple of things in it that lodged in my brain. Another reason that this story is taking so long to write is that the particular character in whom those things are personified is a difficult bastard to write. In fact, I keep getting him wrong and having to go back and try again.
But fundamentally, the problem with "Thirdhop Scarp" is that it's a very complicated story that was trying to masquerade as a much simpler story. I wrote the simple, surface version and hated it. Trunked it. Kept coming back and poking at it. Eventually realized that there wasn't enough space in the story for the story it needed to tell, and gutted it. I kept the beginning and the end and chunks of the middle* and started trying to carve out space to put the rest of the story in.
This has resulted in some progress, but also a great deal of confusion, and I finally admitted that I needed to write an outline. The old shape was gone, and I couldn't find the new shape with so many pieces missing. So I outlined the first thirty-five pages, paused to note some queries (e.g. Q: what is Myra trying to do? Is she trying to raise TZT or claim his power?), and then wrote PROGRESSION of EVENTS and started listing the things that needed to happen to get us from page 35 to the still intact climax floating around out there at 35 + N.
In the process of writing the PROGRESSION of EVENTS, I have discovered a couple of very useful things, one about the "Residence at Westminster" character and his ultimate fate, the other about the way my protagonist, poor bastard, is actually connected to the plot. One of the very difficult things about writing Booth stories is that my models (H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James) were writing before it was considered necessary for genre stories to bother with things like character arcs or protagonists. (I'm reading Clark Ashton Smith right now, who is, if anything, worse.) They had main characters and sometimes heroes, but almost never protagonists. Their characters, who are frequently no more than very sketchy "I"-holders with no actual personality, don't learn, don't grow, don't change at all--except for occasionally going mad. So when you go to remap the Jamesian/Lovecraftian story onto modern standards, you have a bit of a problem. You can handwave past it--"The Yellow Dressing Gown," for instance, has no particular character arc for anybody--and Booth's character arc in any given story is most likely to be self-revelation: the supernatural shenanigans force him to confront something about himself or to recognize something of himself in the characters to whom the plot is actually happening. Or his character arc is the very simple one of him going from a state of passive non-involvement to trying to do something to help ("Wait for Me" is a good example there). Since Booth's character is such that he does have to fight that battle with himself every time, I can get a fair amount of mileage out of that.
But I still have to find ways to connect him to the story, to make him more than just the viewpoint character. And what's particularly pleasing in this case is that the connection--Booth's presence makes the house's spectral manifestations more active--is (1) organic, rising out of something we already know to be true about him, (2) becomes a plot point instantly, as the antagonist wants to use that for her own ends, which therefore means that the rising action, rather than being arbitrary, is directly related to my protagonist's presence in the story, and (3) makes him a mirror to the "Residence at Westminster" character--which in turn makes the events of the story connect back to Booth's own psychomachia.
(Yes, I do intellectualize my own process this much. S.O.P.)
There are still things I'm not sure what to do with--principally, a number of secondary characters who need either to justify their existence or get the hell off the island--but the story has a shape, and the denseness and richness of that story has bled from the occurrences at and history of Thirdhop Scarp back into my protagonist. Which means I may yet be able to make this story greater than the sum of its parts.
---
*I would rather fiddle and rejigger a paragraph to make it fit in a new context than write a new paragraph.
It's a haunted house story. (I love haunted house stories, and even though I will never be Shirley Jackson, it was inevitable that I would try one sooner or later.) It's also a haunted house story with an incredibly complicated backstory, and one of the reasons it's taking me so long to write is that I'm having to figure out ways to get the backstory into the story proper through the medium of my first-person narrator.
It's also riffing off "The Residence at Westminster," which is an M. R. James story I mostly don't like very much, but that has a couple of things in it that lodged in my brain. Another reason that this story is taking so long to write is that the particular character in whom those things are personified is a difficult bastard to write. In fact, I keep getting him wrong and having to go back and try again.
But fundamentally, the problem with "Thirdhop Scarp" is that it's a very complicated story that was trying to masquerade as a much simpler story. I wrote the simple, surface version and hated it. Trunked it. Kept coming back and poking at it. Eventually realized that there wasn't enough space in the story for the story it needed to tell, and gutted it. I kept the beginning and the end and chunks of the middle* and started trying to carve out space to put the rest of the story in.
This has resulted in some progress, but also a great deal of confusion, and I finally admitted that I needed to write an outline. The old shape was gone, and I couldn't find the new shape with so many pieces missing. So I outlined the first thirty-five pages, paused to note some queries (e.g. Q: what is Myra trying to do? Is she trying to raise TZT or claim his power?), and then wrote PROGRESSION of EVENTS and started listing the things that needed to happen to get us from page 35 to the still intact climax floating around out there at 35 + N.
In the process of writing the PROGRESSION of EVENTS, I have discovered a couple of very useful things, one about the "Residence at Westminster" character and his ultimate fate, the other about the way my protagonist, poor bastard, is actually connected to the plot. One of the very difficult things about writing Booth stories is that my models (H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James) were writing before it was considered necessary for genre stories to bother with things like character arcs or protagonists. (I'm reading Clark Ashton Smith right now, who is, if anything, worse.) They had main characters and sometimes heroes, but almost never protagonists. Their characters, who are frequently no more than very sketchy "I"-holders with no actual personality, don't learn, don't grow, don't change at all--except for occasionally going mad. So when you go to remap the Jamesian/Lovecraftian story onto modern standards, you have a bit of a problem. You can handwave past it--"The Yellow Dressing Gown," for instance, has no particular character arc for anybody--and Booth's character arc in any given story is most likely to be self-revelation: the supernatural shenanigans force him to confront something about himself or to recognize something of himself in the characters to whom the plot is actually happening. Or his character arc is the very simple one of him going from a state of passive non-involvement to trying to do something to help ("Wait for Me" is a good example there). Since Booth's character is such that he does have to fight that battle with himself every time, I can get a fair amount of mileage out of that.
But I still have to find ways to connect him to the story, to make him more than just the viewpoint character. And what's particularly pleasing in this case is that the connection--Booth's presence makes the house's spectral manifestations more active--is (1) organic, rising out of something we already know to be true about him, (2) becomes a plot point instantly, as the antagonist wants to use that for her own ends, which therefore means that the rising action, rather than being arbitrary, is directly related to my protagonist's presence in the story, and (3) makes him a mirror to the "Residence at Westminster" character--which in turn makes the events of the story connect back to Booth's own psychomachia.
(Yes, I do intellectualize my own process this much. S.O.P.)
There are still things I'm not sure what to do with--principally, a number of secondary characters who need either to justify their existence or get the hell off the island--but the story has a shape, and the denseness and richness of that story has bled from the occurrences at and history of Thirdhop Scarp back into my protagonist. Which means I may yet be able to make this story greater than the sum of its parts.
---
*I would rather fiddle and rejigger a paragraph to make it fit in a new context than write a new paragraph.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 06:22 pm (UTC)You're so very, very right about the problem of trying to do an old-style story for a modern audience; it's the same thing you run into with fairy tales (logic? who needs logic to explain these events?). And I sometimes do the same thing you did, pegging down What I've Got and Where I'm Trying To Go, and then listing things that need to happen between G and V, like flinging cables across a ravine as the first step in building a bridge. What's interesting to me is the stuff about Booth and how his own structural characteristics interplay with the structure of the story, and how you can work that to your advantage; I like thinking about things that way when I can, but I can't always manage it, so it's fascinating to have examples of how somebody else does it.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 10:49 pm (UTC)I love Clark Ashton Smith, but know what you mean, so many of his POV characters are not so much 'I Am A Camera' as 'I Am A Blank Slate' (to be fair, character is not his strong point per se... except for some of his monsters and gods :)
no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 03:47 am (UTC)Yay. Because then I can read it.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 05:40 am (UTC)Oh, this I understand completely. The hardest part for me is knowing that I have another line or bit of information that needs to go into a paragraph, and can't find a way to stick it in without interrupting the familiar flow of the paragraph as it stands.
I really enjoyed reading this post; it makes me feel guilty about all the stories I have sitting around, waiting for me to sit down and write their outlines and put the pieces together so that they fit, rather than loosely clump together. Have fun with yours!
no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 04:33 pm (UTC)I'm also pleased to have an update on this story because I thought I remembered you doing a lot of work on it some while back, and possibly even noting it was completed, and then it went back to being one of the uncompleted stories in the 'first line meme'. I always wondered about it (in a vague, non-obsessive sort of way I hasten to add).
Gillian A