postscript to earlier entry
Jul. 20th, 2008 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Weirdly enough, the perfect thing to pick up my mood was dragging my ass out of the house and going to get some exercise.
I got out of it out soaking wet but far from exhausted, and feeling somewhat exhilarated-- there's just something about focusing on my body, poor though my control of it really is, and making it do things it's perfectly capable of but lacks the precision to always remember to do. As long as you make some progress at mastering the skill in question, it's an awesomely inspiring sensation.
I got my iPod working after being without it for about six months, and had it cranked in the car ride home, on music I don't normally listen to. I was driving the Prius like it was a muscle car, and generally being silly, but it had lifted my mood into a peculiar place I'm particularly happy in. I had flashes of made-up characters coming to me-- I don't think primarily in worlds, but in characters, and my best moments of inspiration for writing comes from these odd unsolicited little flashes that come to me in my absent moments, where I suddenly am someone else doing something else and feeling it. That's where my stories grow from-- I never have a plot until I have people feeling something, and the plot grows from that. Almost everything I write starts out close to the characters and stays there-- I am unable to step outside of a point of view, and have such problems with plot and pacing because of it.
Maybe I should write short stories-- but I get attached to the characters and want to know everything about them, and I can't leave them after only five hundred or five thousand words.
These little moments come from songs a lot. Oddly they're not usually my favorite songs, or songs I particularly love, but they speak to me. Often there's no direct correlation in the lyrics-- for instance, I wouldn't hear a song about someone being in love and then write a story about someone being in love. Usually it doesn't spark a whole story. It just usually sheds insight onto the one I'm writing.
Like, Shannon Curfman's "I Don't Make Promises (I Can't Break)" (listen here) gave me a big insight into how Barbarians_Novel should be structured. External forces tearing the two lovers apart was not a strong enough theme for the book. She had to betray him, or he her. The line "How could you lie, when you know I can't?" became the male character's pivotal character-defining philosophy-- so thoroughly honest a man that he could not engage in deceit. Not a simpleton who can't process untruth, but a product of a culture so crucially hung-up on honor that deceit is not an option. [I myself have been hung up on that theme since I read Cuchulain of Muirthemne in eleventh grade, incidentally. See footnote 1.] That meant, of course, that the female character I pair with him must not be the näif I originally created for the role. She could not be the innocent sheltered virginal daughter of a repressively-antifemale culture. No... Well, first I toyed with her being truly innocent but being framed for being a spy, leading to his agony over her deception. That lasted quite a long time. But then it shifted, and I realized she had to really be a spy. A courtesan and a spy. Instead of dramatically meeting her on the battlefield after rescuing her city-- no, heroically saving her from an abduction and rape that left her devalued in the eyes of her people-- no, he would rescue her from an abduction and rape only to discover that she was no innocent traveler, but a spy on her way to seduce an important politician to fullfil a secret mission. But he would know that from the beginning, I realized at last after far far far too much angst. (I knew I'd gone too far when I tortured him to near-death and had to resort to magic to bring him back to a usable condition to finish the novel. Ehhhhmmmm... too much angst. Especially since there wasn't meant to be any magic in this novel.)
So now he figures right off the bat that she's a spy, but is taken in enough by her charm that he takes her under his protection anyway. I am still working out what precisely happens-- whether she is framed for the event and he believes it, doesn't believe it, or simply can't go against the powers that be-- but I've certainly toned down the sense of betrayal-- there are still issues, and I resist this being The True Love That Must Conquer All. But that song and the thought it sparked still remain relevant. It may be he who betrays her, however.
The story, in the process, has shifted from being about him to being about her. Because she doesn't take him in with her charm, he takes her in. The book is no longer in his first per. POV. Because if it was you wouldn't know how unreliable a narrator he is, and how extremely unreliable she is-- she deliberately sets out to decieve, to conceal, out of sheer habit, and he accidentally not only draws her out of her shell, but breaks the shell. He has no idea what he is doing to her; she's in denial over it.
It makes the Secret Baby a whole lot less of an awful disturbing cliché, I must say.
D'oh, I am so bad about spoilers for my own books. It doesn't matter, though, because even if I got this one published it'd be like another five years to write and another ten to get published, so you'll forget about the spoilers in plenty of time.
Other things work the same way, though there's not always a clear connection. But it's almost always the characters. I get plot point ideas, yeah, but I much more often get these flashes into the character's head. Well, not head, always-- often it's body, it's a sensory idea. Tonight's was a lyric that mentioned something about breathing, giving me a very clear sensual shot of a character being hyper-aware of another character's breathing-- this would have to be either during a quiet intimate scene, such as a sleep or sex scene, or a violent suffering scene, such as someone lying nearly unconscious. You only really hear your companion's breathing, or feel it, during an intimate vigil of some kind. I can't remember the lyric exactly, which just points out how unrelated it can be. I don't know yet what I'll make of this, whether it will be in one of the fanfics or whether it will make it into Barbarians_Novel or whether I will steal it away for the one with the Bronze Age guy and the girl with magic in it. I don't know whether it will be related to illness, injury, or intimacy. I don't know yet but I will probably flash back to it at some point and use it.
At least in my head. I don't always get these things committed to words, but I live them, one way or another, often several times.
If you clicked, above, you can read the lyrics of "I Don't Make Promises" and realize that they have nothing to do with a character being violently betrayed by another. Even the lyrics go on from "I don't make promises I can't break," straight to "Not like before." The whole song is focusing on a pivot in the singer's attitude to the world. The theme/climax in my story is focusing on the raw betrayal felt by a man who is incapable of deception being lied to. He may not wind up ever getting lied to; but I do want to get back to that theme and see what would happen to a man of that kind of honor when paired up with others who are not bound in the same ways.
___________________
[1] Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's Victorian-era translation of the Tain. Her version is very sanitized, but all the editions I've read share the same tale of Ferdiad and Cuchulain, foster-brothers and sworn companions forced into mortal combat by the dictates of honor. Ferdiad simply had no choice because if he refused to stand against Cuchulain, his honor would be worthless; likewise Cuchulain could not give way to Ferdiad or his homeland would be invaded, as he stood alone in its defense. Says Gregory in 1905:
Kinsella says, in his more poetic '60s translation, after the fight is over:
[2] Given that this and the Lord of the Rings were my favorite books growing up, is it any wonder at all that I have had such a lifelong issue with the overuse of semicolons?
I'm just sayin'.
______________________________
Anyway. Someone asked me a while back how I wrote, and I don't know that I'd ever shared that insight into thought-process, so I thought now might be a good time-- I'm too distracted and tired to make anything get written down well, but I can write this down and come back to it.
I got out of it out soaking wet but far from exhausted, and feeling somewhat exhilarated-- there's just something about focusing on my body, poor though my control of it really is, and making it do things it's perfectly capable of but lacks the precision to always remember to do. As long as you make some progress at mastering the skill in question, it's an awesomely inspiring sensation.
I got my iPod working after being without it for about six months, and had it cranked in the car ride home, on music I don't normally listen to. I was driving the Prius like it was a muscle car, and generally being silly, but it had lifted my mood into a peculiar place I'm particularly happy in. I had flashes of made-up characters coming to me-- I don't think primarily in worlds, but in characters, and my best moments of inspiration for writing comes from these odd unsolicited little flashes that come to me in my absent moments, where I suddenly am someone else doing something else and feeling it. That's where my stories grow from-- I never have a plot until I have people feeling something, and the plot grows from that. Almost everything I write starts out close to the characters and stays there-- I am unable to step outside of a point of view, and have such problems with plot and pacing because of it.
Maybe I should write short stories-- but I get attached to the characters and want to know everything about them, and I can't leave them after only five hundred or five thousand words.
These little moments come from songs a lot. Oddly they're not usually my favorite songs, or songs I particularly love, but they speak to me. Often there's no direct correlation in the lyrics-- for instance, I wouldn't hear a song about someone being in love and then write a story about someone being in love. Usually it doesn't spark a whole story. It just usually sheds insight onto the one I'm writing.
Like, Shannon Curfman's "I Don't Make Promises (I Can't Break)" (listen here) gave me a big insight into how Barbarians_Novel should be structured. External forces tearing the two lovers apart was not a strong enough theme for the book. She had to betray him, or he her. The line "How could you lie, when you know I can't?" became the male character's pivotal character-defining philosophy-- so thoroughly honest a man that he could not engage in deceit. Not a simpleton who can't process untruth, but a product of a culture so crucially hung-up on honor that deceit is not an option. [I myself have been hung up on that theme since I read Cuchulain of Muirthemne in eleventh grade, incidentally. See footnote 1.] That meant, of course, that the female character I pair with him must not be the näif I originally created for the role. She could not be the innocent sheltered virginal daughter of a repressively-antifemale culture. No... Well, first I toyed with her being truly innocent but being framed for being a spy, leading to his agony over her deception. That lasted quite a long time. But then it shifted, and I realized she had to really be a spy. A courtesan and a spy. Instead of dramatically meeting her on the battlefield after rescuing her city-- no, heroically saving her from an abduction and rape that left her devalued in the eyes of her people-- no, he would rescue her from an abduction and rape only to discover that she was no innocent traveler, but a spy on her way to seduce an important politician to fullfil a secret mission. But he would know that from the beginning, I realized at last after far far far too much angst. (I knew I'd gone too far when I tortured him to near-death and had to resort to magic to bring him back to a usable condition to finish the novel. Ehhhhmmmm... too much angst. Especially since there wasn't meant to be any magic in this novel.)
So now he figures right off the bat that she's a spy, but is taken in enough by her charm that he takes her under his protection anyway. I am still working out what precisely happens-- whether she is framed for the event and he believes it, doesn't believe it, or simply can't go against the powers that be-- but I've certainly toned down the sense of betrayal-- there are still issues, and I resist this being The True Love That Must Conquer All. But that song and the thought it sparked still remain relevant. It may be he who betrays her, however.
The story, in the process, has shifted from being about him to being about her. Because she doesn't take him in with her charm, he takes her in. The book is no longer in his first per. POV. Because if it was you wouldn't know how unreliable a narrator he is, and how extremely unreliable she is-- she deliberately sets out to decieve, to conceal, out of sheer habit, and he accidentally not only draws her out of her shell, but breaks the shell. He has no idea what he is doing to her; she's in denial over it.
It makes the Secret Baby a whole lot less of an awful disturbing cliché, I must say.
D'oh, I am so bad about spoilers for my own books. It doesn't matter, though, because even if I got this one published it'd be like another five years to write and another ten to get published, so you'll forget about the spoilers in plenty of time.
Other things work the same way, though there's not always a clear connection. But it's almost always the characters. I get plot point ideas, yeah, but I much more often get these flashes into the character's head. Well, not head, always-- often it's body, it's a sensory idea. Tonight's was a lyric that mentioned something about breathing, giving me a very clear sensual shot of a character being hyper-aware of another character's breathing-- this would have to be either during a quiet intimate scene, such as a sleep or sex scene, or a violent suffering scene, such as someone lying nearly unconscious. You only really hear your companion's breathing, or feel it, during an intimate vigil of some kind. I can't remember the lyric exactly, which just points out how unrelated it can be. I don't know yet what I'll make of this, whether it will be in one of the fanfics or whether it will make it into Barbarians_Novel or whether I will steal it away for the one with the Bronze Age guy and the girl with magic in it. I don't know whether it will be related to illness, injury, or intimacy. I don't know yet but I will probably flash back to it at some point and use it.
At least in my head. I don't always get these things committed to words, but I live them, one way or another, often several times.
If you clicked, above, you can read the lyrics of "I Don't Make Promises" and realize that they have nothing to do with a character being violently betrayed by another. Even the lyrics go on from "I don't make promises I can't break," straight to "Not like before." The whole song is focusing on a pivot in the singer's attitude to the world. The theme/climax in my story is focusing on the raw betrayal felt by a man who is incapable of deception being lied to. He may not wind up ever getting lied to; but I do want to get back to that theme and see what would happen to a man of that kind of honor when paired up with others who are not bound in the same ways.
___________________
[1] Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's Victorian-era translation of the Tain. Her version is very sanitized, but all the editions I've read share the same tale of Ferdiad and Cuchulain, foster-brothers and sworn companions forced into mortal combat by the dictates of honor. Ferdiad simply had no choice because if he refused to stand against Cuchulain, his honor would be worthless; likewise Cuchulain could not give way to Ferdiad or his homeland would be invaded, as he stood alone in its defense. Says Gregory in 1905:
But Cuchulain said, "When we were together with [our teacher] Scathach, we used to be practising together, we used to go to every battle together, because of our courage that was equal. You were my heart companion, you were my people, you were my family— I never found one that was dearer; [2] it is sorrowful your death would be to me."
"Where is the use of all this talk?" said Ferdiad; "your great name will be lost, your head will be on a stake before the crowing of the cock."
Kinsella says, in his more poetic '60s translation, after the fight is over:
Ill-met, Ferdia, like this
— you crimson and pale in my sight;
stretched in a bed of blood,
and I with my weapon unwiped.
When we were beyond the sea,
Scathach's and Uathach's pupils,
who thought of such pale lips
or a weapon-struggle between us?
[...]
Misery has befallen us,
two foster-sons of Scathach
— I, broken and blood red,
your chariot standing empty.
Misery has befallen us,
two foster-sons of Scathach
— I, broken and blood-raw,
and you lying stark dead.
Misery has befallen us,
two foster-sons of Scathach
—you dead and I alive.
Bravery is battle-madness!
[2] Given that this and the Lord of the Rings were my favorite books growing up, is it any wonder at all that I have had such a lifelong issue with the overuse of semicolons?
I'm just sayin'.
______________________________
Anyway. Someone asked me a while back how I wrote, and I don't know that I'd ever shared that insight into thought-process, so I thought now might be a good time-- I'm too distracted and tired to make anything get written down well, but I can write this down and come back to it.
