Off Writing

[spqrblues]

I don't necessarily like writing about writing. Occasionally I babble at length on a favourite topic. But I'm not one to chat regularly about the mechanics of authoring a story. Maybe I've spent so many years considering the mechanics of writing that I've run out of patience with talking and am agitating to use that speculation. There may be a certain frustration at those speculators who are positive they've cracked the code of "How It Works" rather than realising what they've probably discovered is "how writing works for me and perhaps some other people, at this stage in life." I fear expressing this will come across as snobbish. Some people do enjoy discussing the "craft" of writing every day for their entire lives and do it well—by that I don't mean those whose profession is to teach and train people to write, but folks who enjoy gathering in bands to explore this weird habit. I enjoy gathering in bands to discuss a specific piece of writing or to work with a specific person. But I seem to have burned out a decade ago on the pleasures of general discussion, and enjoy it more as an infrequent social activity, a way to chat with friends, than as a quest for revelation. There is always more to learn. But learning also requires one expand, not circle the same bones in search of more to eat.

However, occasionally, a topic sparks some neurons somewhere in my jaded brain (all my recent blathering about juvenilia, for example), or someone brings up some aspect On Writing that I suddenly feel I haven't talked nearly enough about. Tempest has a recent journal entry on the complexity of human behaviour in which she progresses from Shakespeare to modern society to fictional characters. I want to keep her ideas on my bedside table so I don't forget they're there.

As I've been working on the never-to-be-finished MonkPunk manuscript (which figured in a different part of the "long walk off a long pier" dream last night, as I begged an editor to read it in its four-fifths-finished form, and he laughed, unimpressed), I've been discovering that some of the characters who propel the action have awfully tangly motivations. The plan in their twisty little heads isn't "If we tell Joe X, we'll get Y," but, "If we tell Joe A, B, and C, then do D and E, he might do F in response, which would get us Y, but he might also end up doing G depending on how he feels about H, which we could use to get Z, which would also serve." So, these characters are trying to figure out which way the hero will fall out of the tree if they shove him, and there are several things they need and various things they'd settle for, all of which informs their actions.

I took a look at this and I thought: No, that's far too complicated, and impossible to bring all the details across in the text. Won't readers prefer to be able to look at the actions of the characters and say: "Aha, they did this so they could get that"? There may be a risk of losing readers in such a tangle, particularly in (forgive me) fantasy, where that complexity is competing for the reader's brain-space and attention with constructing an alien world, establishing historical and social contexts, defining a logical system of magic, introducing weird beasties, figuring out where the privies are—myriad layers of details for the reader to process.

There may be two types of the "no one would believe this as a story" real-life scenario. The type where the story is too cut-and-dried and perfect; and the type where the story is so multi-threaded and tangled and subject to all the real-life whims of real-life people that it reads like a nonfiction tome on the Tudors.

You know the generically simple sort of plot: Evil Wizard wants the Magic Muffin because then he can be the Boss of You, so he sends his hairy fanged thugs out on rampages. Good Guy wants to destroy and/or eat the Magic Muffin so that the world can live free and he can snog the pretty princess. He may also want to be Prince, or he may be a reluctant hero. Evil Wizard may have been the thwarted suitor of Pretty Princess' grandmother, or he may have fallen on his head as a wee sprog and now hears Voices. Whatever. When you add increasingly deep layers of psychological and social complexity, are you giving the readers what they crave? Or are you obscuring the world you're trying to build by hiding it in a haze of reality, where motivations are often murky, made up of missteps and restarts, doubling back and rethinking, changing motive and goals in midstream, arbitrariness and confusion and error? Real-life people sometimes do things that don't make any sense even to themselves, and it could be because they woke in the morning to the cat yakking up on their best duvet and they had to get out the wrong side of the bed. I don't believe fiction gives us the latitude to toss in all the randomness of human behaviour. Stick the character in a pot, boil him down to the bones, maybe take a bit of the meat along, sprinkle on some seasoning and pour out the stock.

All right, not the tastiest image. Unless your character happens to be a chicken.

Comments

[stephdray.livejournal.com]

Recently, I was reading Margaret Georges Mary queen of Scots and the aisles. At first, it was a rather conventional story. but somewhere around the time that the Earl of Bothwell thanks to himself, "I think I will blow up the King" I couldn't put the story down.

But I realized, that only in historical fiction could you get away with it . Only real people behave in such irrational ways. Story people behave in orderly, predictable ways otherwise the reader rejects the story .