1A How To Write A First Drafte Novel - Why Writers Write

The defining external feature of writers is that they writes. This external way of describing a person is ancient and useful for us, because if a nonwriter writes, she will usually become a writer. But as I assume you want to write something marvellous, then there is much more information hidden in the simple fact that writers write.

Stories are mostly about the external world. This ground of our shared humanity is set in linear time, with cause and effect reaching forward and back, and characters involved in external action with others and the world to produce definite material results. It is useful for describing this: a writer writes to produce a book, for instance. But this view has limits.

The great shift in narration in recent centuries has been internally. In its extreme, this ground we share is set in nonlinear time, with only effects or perhaps organising synchronicities, with principles embodied as characters enacting internal conflicts in their lives through reflection and relationships to produce significant change in their subjective experience. The result has been a corresponding deepening in collective subjective experience. What we are experiencing in this shift inward is nothing less than a popularisation of reflective ways of being: the hermetic is dissolved in the hermeneutic, the subjective vanishes into phenomenological, and interpersonal conflict sinks into social theory and psychoanalitic enquiry.

Both are valid. Both have limits. But the reality is that much of the human species only values the outside world rather than the inside except insofar as the inside world produces a tidy profit. So in writing that is designed to inspire millions it is essential to use the external world to achieve reflective ends. Neither view alone is ever sufficient.

Reflection is loveliest when directed towards action.

The word for this is orthopraxis. Ortho is latin for bones and structure, and praxis implies locomotion, kinesis, action and machination. For instance, the orthopraxis of a Marxist intellectual might be to join a union, write journalism and attend marches. The othropraxis of a healer-style doctor might be to read about ethics, attend to spiritual life, not get addicted to medications, and do no harm. For a writer, a major part of their orthopraxis is writing certainly.

But orthopraxis is also the essential indispensable inner work of creating a novel through reflection. It is not totally indispensable I suppose, since it is also okay to suffer dumbly the chaos and distress induced by an unexamined premise that undermines your first draft. But I would not recommend such self-created suffering.

So orthopraxis - in other words, a structured reflection towards action - is what induces writers to write. In many ways writing is not a personal process, but rather the playing out of internal structures generated by a deep unspoken question the writer must answer. The writer feels a deep enquiry that registers on consciousness as inspiration, and manifests as a desire to write. I might add that this is not a particularly personal project and interposing ones egotism into it is not particularly useful.

Writers reflect and contemplate because of WHO THEY ARE. Who are you? This question is a synctium of the following questions:

How do you see the world? What kind of world is it?
How do you see God or the forces of nature? What kind of character do these have?
What forms of negativity are you entrapped in, that you assume are simply you and therefore unavoidable? What excuses do you offer for feeling entitled to these forms of negativity? What opinions do you bother to hold about them?
What are the chains that bind you to generations, nations, the land, and the people?
When and where is the self at peace and silent?
What do you revere, love, honor, cherish and feel willing to sacrifice yourself to out of love?

I will finish with a small quote about inspiration from David Hawkins. This quote is masterful example of orthopraxis in action, and for me has merited multiple readings and reflection:

Grace is the expression of the power of aesthetic sensitivity, and power is always manifested with grace, whether in beauty of line or style of expression. We associate grace with elegance, refinement and economy of effort. We marvel at the grace of the Olympic athlete, just as we are uplifted by the grace of the Gothic vault. Gracious power patterns acknowledge and support life, respect and uphold the dignity of others; grace is an aspect of unconditional love.

Graciousness also implies generosity - not merely material generosity but generosity of spirit, such as the willingness to express thanks or acknowledge the importance of others in our lives. Grace is associated with modesty and humility. Power does not need to flaunt itself, though force always must becauses it originates in self-doubt. Great artists are thankful for their power, whatever its expression, because they know it is a gift for the good of mankind, entailing responsibility to others.

Neal Stephenson puts commercialism and publishing in context.

Neal Stephenson gave an interview on slashdot. It was interesting mainly as a display of the dazzling slashdot cultural millieu and the way the writer disported himself. However, Stephenson had some stuff to say about SF publishing categories which at first seemed highly signicant. In fact it is a fairly simple reframe of the notion of commercialism around his work. Read this quote and that's all you need to know:

"The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of the population became literate. But when the conditions were right, it suddenly became huge. The great serialized novelists of the 19th Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to a mass audience. And the economics worked out such that they didn't need to land a commission or find a patron in order to put bread on the table. The creators of those novels were therefore able to have a connection with a mass audience and a livelihood fundamentally different from other types of artists.

"Nowadays, rock stars and movie stars are making all the money. But the publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put bread on their tables. It's conventional to refer to these as "commercial" novelists, but I hate that term, so I'm going to call them Beowulf writers.


"But this is not true for a great many other writers who are every bit as talented and worthy of finding readers. And so, in addition, we have got an alternate system that makes it possible for those writers to pursue their careers and make their voices heard. Just as Renaissance princes supported writers like Dante because they felt it was the right thing to do, there are many affluent persons in modern society who, by making donations to cultural institutions like universities, support all sorts of artists, including writers. Usually they are called "literary" as opposed to "commercial" but I hate that term too, so I'm going to call them Dante writers. And this is what I mean when I speak of a bifurcated system. "

Now the only significant thing about this quote is that it alters the context of commercialism for SOME people reading it. For me it's like DUH; I already know that commercialism has certain positive and a negative aspects.

A quote which is equally as significant sounding is this:

"f you take the narrow view that a bookstore is nothing more than a machine that swaps money for books, then it follows that there's no need for a physical store. But here we are five years later. Some bookstores have gone out of business, it's true. But there are big, beautiful bookstores all over the place, with sofas and coffee bars and author appearances and so on. Why? Because it turns out that a bookstore is a lot more than a machine that swaps money for books.

"Likewise, if you think of a publisher as a machine that makes copies of bits and sells them, then you're going to predict the elimination of publishers. But that's only the smallest part of what publishers actually do."

Another recontextualisation. I think the core idea here is that a business is about people. The publishers matter because they are people, so naturally we care about them and their role is significant. The care factor in books, it turns out, is remarkably high. Care in publishing is an incredibly significant commodity, and it is sold and bought between writers, agents, executives and editors. In many ways it is the bartering currency of a long term writing career.

This is a significant idea. The marvel with Stephenson is that a fairly wordy reply manages to skitter over the glittering slashdot surface without catching on any hooks or flaws, thereby giving the requisite impression of SF/geek coolness.

The rest of this interview is also glamour with little substance, but with fewer ideas.

How to outline a SF book

Outlining is the tool for creating public stories, stories involving a drama that has necessary, powerful, and unavoidance conflict.

Private stories need no outlining because their satisfaction is different. But for public stories it is useful to know the following facts:

The human mind works less by reason than by pattern recognition. Stories that are told in a classic pattern are by definition of appeal to more human beings, so in writing a story that is public-oriented, it is important to structure a story deliberately and consciously.

This is not a natural skill. Storytelling orally is learnt as a child, and the skill of telling a large scale story is not natural at all. It must be learnt, consciously or not. It is safe, as a beginning writer, to assume the skill is not simply there by virtue of your having lived your life.

So, here is a fantastic outlining tool,starting organically and expanding ina snowflake pattern into a novel. It appears to not only save time but also make writing the usually painful first draft actually enjoyable.

My only criticism is that the instructions are not clearly written enough for me. As a result, I will be adapting them for this blog later on. Click on:

http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/the_snowflake.html

and enjoy!

Critical thinking about altruism is the start of happiness.

I read the Dalai Lama today. I know a lot intellectually about buddhism now, but his call for open-minded skepticism reminds me that I need to think critically about the teachings and reach my own conclusions. Furthermore, I need to test the teachings of happiness against reason and experience, to see if they work.

The basic idea of mahayana buddhism is that altruism is the source of happiness in human beings. But the careful, sober and sensitive reasoning is far more subtle than I am accustomed to comprehending. I do not feel that I have understood. I feel familiar with the ideas yet I do not feel that I grasp the whole that the complex of buddhist ideas signifies.

All my attempts to reason on my own sound premature to me. I am like the blind man that feels the elephant's trunk and declares that it is a snake. What is most interesting is that I have read this teaching (on the 8 thoughts to transform the mind) before, and reflected on it as far as I could the first time I read it eight weeks ago. So my sense of challenge in this second reading signifies that the teachings have not altered, but that I have.

How I Spent My Sunday.

I have written for eight hours today, three on waking, one during dinner and evening television, and three now instead of sleep. Now dawn is only minutes away and the smell of ozone slides from beneath the door like cool camomile and honey, refreshing my mind even as my body reminds me with little aches of the need for sleep. That I am in a position to do so might remind me of my privileged and wealthy existence, my astonishingly prosperous life and world.

What else is there to do with a life? The great geniuses and businesspeople through history all have the answer: work and love. So this is how I spent my Sunday.

I prefer happiness

My present story draws to a close in first draft. Tonight I faced up to the gap in the ending. So I delved a bit deeper into the technology that the plot depends upon (“gene sensors”, “neuroplasm” and, my favorite of the week, “prion-based self-assembly”, inspired by the latest discoveries in how prions may be useful to humans by clumping like proteins together; anything to avoid a nanotech which would distort the crucial biotech tale I have to tell). Finally, I was rewarded with a crisp clear image of the natural course of events over the next few thousand words.

Then I reread my most recent earlier attempt at the same material for clues for the whole story. The earlier version has good stuff I am loath to abandon. Some is clearly for latter stories, but the scene where a three year old superkid drops the B-word on his father like a bomb is too funny to exclude. The story will come in at the ten thousand word mark, which makes it a pleasant enterprise to read, and a good start for me.

I am happy to botch up this ending. If it's worth doing at all it's worth doing badly at first. I also want to write the ending with due care. It would be nice to have it ready to show my best mate Dan when he arrives to visit my town in a few days.

I am wary of applying any kind of pressure to the process, happy to simply let it be what it is. If I pin my hopes on my excellence as a writer I will surely be disappointed, but if I locate my source of contentment in the process of working itself, then I will be happy. Trying to force things in any way is associated with unhappiness in my mind, I find that seeing things realistically tends to generate the required level of enthusiasm, care, and decisiveness. And even if this is not true, I prefer happiness.

50s Hard Sci-Fi

I have just started Hal Clement's classic Sci Fi book, Mission of Gravity. It is marvellous to see the hardness of style that has come to be known as Hard SF without any adornment. This book dates from 1953; this future is fifty years old and still valid. God!

From the same era, Asimov's style in his Galactic stories is similarly void of ornament, but I find his work unaccountably depressing and flat. Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity on the other hand sparkles with the fresh invention of an informed mind (he was a high school science teacher), and he so considerately explains his world that the leap of faith required to invest upfront in a new world is almost easy.

What marvellous exposition! Orson Scott Card I believe, or perhaps Robert Silverberg, or maybe both, recommend this book for the clear, concise, realistic use of complex exposition. The style would be ponderous is the story were not so fleet.

Speculations on Chinese forms of humanism

One of mankind's greatest humanists is nowadays associated with authoritarianism by virtue of the string of failed idealistic philsophies based on his ideas. Today he is known as Confucius, and the group he led failed to produce anything beside resentment from the leaders of his time. It was only three hundred years later, during the time of gentleman now known as Mencius that the ethical principles were reformed into practice against the brutal tyranny of the time. Now that Confucian humanism and tyranny are both parts of the controlled economy of China, the experiment has borne fruit finally in a prosperous if rather unstable nation. The wisdom of Confucius lies in his assertion of our alienness and strangeness as conscious beings, and his wise acceptance that mass training was required for humans to live together. He advocated domestication of our species based on five key relationships that carried moral obligations. But on top of this domestication of the human animal, he asserted the human in the most dynamic and brilliant imaginable way: through an examination of skills in poetry, calligraphy, and many others arts and sports, those humans most capable of moral and aesthetic consciousness were uplifted to an elite corpus. Over many thousands of years the Analects, the sayings of Confucius, were memorised by the Chinese people in early childhood as part of their domestication. The result was a stable system of governance that continues to this day, rooted in the realities the animal nature of the human species, yet asserting the human triumphantly within that system.

Contact with the West, which lacked any kind of mass domestication process until the Roman Empire assimilated Christianity and Judaism, showed the Chinese that en mass expressions of humanism were possible if individualism was enhanced. But individuals - or in the West these days the commercial trappings that denote individuality - are expensive commodities to train, and useless for a whole range of useful forms of governance. So the retreat to Confucian-style central control of society was a useful defense against the West while the Chinese discovered if any genuine good prospects existed in the West. Overall it would seem that Chinese society has discovered the West is a useful way to ensure prosperity for China. The sense of impeding tragedy is strong in the Chinese, and instead of the tragic being interpreted as a individual pride and egotism failing against a brutal nature as it has been in the West, the Chinese sense of the tragic embodies the failure to be the best possible beast of burden. In a race to be the most domesticated, Chinese culture idealises expressions of individualism that are ardently sentimental and mawkish, and cherish stereotypification as the embodiment of collective ideology. The Confucian experiment has finally failed, by producing only stale prosperity. We await from the Chinese a new formulation of the assertion of what it signifies to be human.

Still Life With Humanism and Numerous Offspring:

In philosophical terms the dichotomy between camp and versimilitude popular cultural forms is a conflict over how we deal with reality. One can see the conflict in public discourse in a slightly less artisitc form: idealistic agendas versus relativism.

Happily, idealism is invalid because it bases real world decisions on a hypothetical ideal - for example, “what the world needs now is love sweet love”. The world may need love ideally, but in reality only around four percent of humans are capable of love so the idea of “what the world needs now” is not wrong but simply an imprecise and ineffectual description of reality. It is a pop song that tells a sweet irrelevance to distract you from your long hour at work. It is the airport lounge literature that keeps you from losing your temper over a late flight. Idealism is a salve for the weak, which is good news because knowing this helps the would-be strong be forewarned to watch for and avoid such self-imposed victimisations. Idealism is also the first response of the weak to the prospects of empowerment, because it allows them to keep a sense of victimisation while they attempt to guide their lives in service of the ideal.

Relativism, on the other hand, is a kind of stopgap measure adopted in ethical areas where the level of complexity has outpaced human ability to comprehend, such as in politics or in liberation moralities such as feminism and gay and ethic liberation. Relativism is the philosophical version of artistic camp - it is fascinating, seductive, and, well, fabulous. But it is not usually rooted in reality any more than idealism, because holding a relative view in practice presupposes a relative self, a kind of ecology of subselves that compete for airtime in a crude kind of Darwinism. As an integral part of the selfishness of the baby boomer generation, moral relativism is an essential tool of denial, projection, and rationalisation, helping to purpetual mellenial distortions of fact that are passed off as our common humanity just because they are too absurd to refute for year another century.

Both idealism and relativism are ways of handling the challenge presented to our species by the assertion of the human, known as humanism. What makes a human being? What is the measure of a man? What is the place of humanity within the universe? Where did man originate, and whence does man travel hereafter?

With the answers to these famous questions the West ascended to cultural predominance over the last four hundred years. The driver of Western Civilisation was the assertion of the human, just as the driver of Western wealth was the presence of world-mastering genius, forging innovations new to mankind.

Humanism presents enormous conflicts to human society. Most notably humanism challenges the social structures we share with the other animals. In response, human society tries and fails to organise itself along lines that could be described as rational, sensible, or even peaceful. Humanity has and will always fail in the tragic project of generating a stable, peaceful, moral and useful society, but nevertheless the promise humanism holds out is not an ideal but a genuine intuition of the capabilities of man, based in experience rather than theory. We all sense that humans have the potential to grow and change and learn that is is at least somewhat greater than the species most close to ours. We sense this potential and so seek to enshrine it in culture, tragically and idealistically. Or we seek to enshrine it as an individual moral response to life, bring moral relativism to bear on the interpersonal problems we suffer which are beyond our competence to solve. Or, worst of all, we simply deny our humanity and seek common sense, which is the animal consciousness of our species. To displace the challenge raised by the assertion of the human is to accept by default animal mores developed by our species from ancient times. However, it is also by default to deny the possibility of human potential in order to maintain the semblance of humanity. This is tragic and most-difficult-to-accept condition of just over 80 percent of humans presently alive.

The idealistic progeny of humanism are notorious and varied:

Humanistic principles have originated classicism, the rennaissance and its ensuing so-called “religious” bloodshed of the reformation and the enlightenment, the marxist view of human values enshrined in class struggle, and the mass murdering nationalism of the early 20th century. In our lifetimes it has given rise to baby boomer liberation movements, 12 step recovery, and many extraordinary, passionate and ennobling American expressions of pragmatism and liberalism. Lastly but not least these same human values have been at the source of the grand attempt to fuse humanism and economics known as neo-liberalism, the ecologically-inspired version of humanism known as the green movement, and the confabulations of the new economy, which can be seen as an idealistic attempt to use economic means in the service of a (now old fashioned) baby boomer-style liberation of the working masses, a sad idealism whose promise will haunt us for another century to come.

The presence of our humanity is best explained by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The movie depicts a massive obisidian obelisk, obviously constructed by intelligent beings, found unaccountably in a crater on the moon. The challenge of the assertion of the human is that it is alien to human culture, and risks alienation from everyday life to exist.

Bad taste as good taste

Dance music is best praised by displaying its worst moments. Bad creators require a certain degree of talent, which keeps intact the discipline and skill of a good creator and only cuts out those elements that would make their work merely mediocre. Noteworthy and eminent bad taste requires a vile kind of greatness that we culturally have only allowed to flourish through history beneath the mean slur of commercialism. But commercial merit does not secure genuine bad taste any more than the blandishments of literary criticism secure literary status for a choice book. Charles Dickens is a vulgar and commercial writer, but his special kind of bad taste seems to be effective in people who have not already been inoculated by French refinement or Yankee frankness in literature. It is said that Stephen King admires Dickens greatly, but perhaps he admires their similarities in character (since both seem to enjoy tormenting children in their novels).

Bad taste is an enormous unexplored tract of potential. I predict the songs and stories yet to be told by humans will feature the use of bad taste as skilfully as our artificial ideals of excellence have featured in past and present works.

The Uniqueness of Dance Music as a Genre:

I have been collating the best dance songs I can find. They are based on predictably sound principles of construction, rooted I would suppose in the basic neural structures of humankind since story and song first emerged, some 3 hundred thousand years ago.

But there are traits unique to dance music. Notably is the dialectic of camp impersonation versus realistic versimilitude. Said another way: how far does a dance song go in exaggerating, overstating, making unreal or ironic - in other words, how camp can a song be without sacrificing the essential sense that the song is about something REAL and actual.

The same conflict plays out in the postmodern expressions of popular culture through mass market paperbacks. How possible is it for writers to depict outrageous and highly amusing and improbable events that will entertain their readers, without the sacrifice of the sense of self-consistent reality that a good story must have?

This dichotomy touches on the very essence of the postmodern, because in fact, in the best dance songs, both camp and the sense of the real arrive effectively FUSED TOGETHER in aesthetic unity. The power of the song arrives from above, from the inherent nonintellectual moral values that transcend the song itself and are part of the genre. It is the transcendent moral value of the song that generates the strong structure and precise form, rather than the strong structure of an excellent song somehow signifying aesthetic excellence.

Dance music seriously and profoundly explores and comments on the notions of collectivism versus individuality, the emotional and spiritual nature of liberation and illumination, the phenomenological reality of the passing moment of joy and rememberance, and, at their absolute pinnacle, dance music is capable of holding two ideas that are normally opposites and, in the most extraordinary and post-verbal manner, unify the two in the zero-effect sacred space generated spontaneously between the music and the listener. What is even more extraordinary about dance music is that it is capable of doing all this without recourse to either language or the conscious mind. Dance music is the postmodern equivalent of zen calligraphy: as calligraphy is a form of creativity on the verge of vanishing into experiencing itself, so dance music is a form of creativity on the verge of vanishing into camp commercialism and the crude sexual-social realism of the song's content.

What is garbage in other genres is a very very serious matter in dance music. This is the genre that plays the role of court fool, saying what no-one else can say without fear of reprisal.

So in collecting this music together I am collecting my thoughts, thoughts held in a new way about new ideas, that are no-where else expressed so simply and well as in these dance songs.

On Bloodshed and Violence

I was just finishing a particular meditation, and I was returning to consciousness with the usual whole-brain arousal commonplace when you do regular deep meditation. As I rolled off the meditation mat and crawled over to pick up my slippers I saw the house spider, a thumbnail sized black female, flee from her hiding place beneath the second slipper.

WHAM! I went from meditation to animal in one breath… I fell back whimpering, then cagily went back through all the shoes which I keep beneath my altar to find the spider, slipper in hand.

The whole mind state potentiated by meditation focused on the most primitive brain functions within seconds… I literally went ape, and simultaneously the forebrain ran the programs for “human” - prioritizing my near-cooked breakfast to the mental back shelf, hesitating, rationalizing, considering, then… the human function gave way to the broader primate functions. Find and destroy.

I threw the shoes aside but I forgot that spiders can perceive regular patterns (duh, they build perfect webs!), and she had realized her life was in grave peril and fled to beneath the altar. I backed off to consider for a few seconds, then stripped the altar and flung the cloth aside and found her underneath. She had been smart hiding there and there was no other hiding spot near.

I hit her hard three times; she died after the first blow but I hit because she had shocked me into a certain primate vindictiveness. Then I crawled onto my seat and whimpered with surprise for a few seconds, caught temporarily without words and in a different mental environment.

I turned off the bubbling pot and then, driven by inexorable instinct, returned to the shoes. The 'safe' ones I merely tossed against the brick wall, but the 'dangerous' ones I nudged carefully with the hard plastic flipflops, looking for something more on a sure instinct.

It had given me sorrow to see the female I'd just killed move from her customary spot, because it meant that either she had died or become pregnant. That spot had had good picking of flies and moths, so she'd had no other reason to shift. So over several days I had been concerned mainly that I would find her corpse in my sheets or meditation matting.

But I was wrong. Suddenly, her man appeared, about the size of a little finger nail. She had vanished in order to make babies.

Now you must understand that spiders are not stupid creatures. They have sensors in their legs that alert them to the vibrations of all creatures great and small, and they have delicate chemical sensors that alert them to the biochemistry of predators and prey.

So I must've stank of bloody murder to this poor male, having just killed his mate, and he had been trying to escape up the wall when I found him. I missed him and he fell into the corner out of reach of the flipflop, so I got a plastic handle and nudged him til in terror he fled beneath my dumbell weights.

I waited.

He emerged on the other side and I dispatched him in a quick thump.

If only they hadn't reproduced, they would've been alive now, I reflected, aware that this might apply as much to my own species as to the spiders.

I put a plastic bag over my hand and collected the two bodies and threw them in the bin. Normally I would have put them in the compost but I was angry they had put themselves in a position to be killed. What was I to do? The female would have been pregnant for three days at least, since her disappearence. Even throwing them outside alive would have brought their children in later on.

As to the other house spider, whom I have called Henry, he is clearly a male (and a rather stout one at that), and inhabits the spot above my office desk. He is stoic about changes, remaining in the one spot and travelling no more than a foot for the plentiful prey that comes in for the cool office air when I leave the back door open.

It is not violence and murder that are acquired traits in humans. Peace and forebearance are the acquired, learned and practiced, traits, and the varying taste for these virtues among our species bears witness to the seduction of bloodshed over the human soul.

On a related note, the public prosecutor rang me just now to tell me I am to testify against the brutal violence I was sole witness to last year, and face the men responsible.

I scampered up my wall immediately telling her that the detective in charge of the case had threatened to make life difficult for me if I did not testify, with no provocation from me to do so. But she simply brought the shoe up and asked when would be a good time to visit the site and walk through the events of that terrible night.

I am scared. I don't want to face them again. But I am honestly angry still that they could hurt others for their pleasure.

Deeper than mere emotions, however, is my soul. And my soul clearly tells me that by testifying I can perhaps begin to let go of the nightmare that was last year.

So I will testify. And I will move on.

What do I do if what I write is shit? From merde to manure.

I have adapted the material into short stories, detailed the plots of the first eight short stories, then put down the text of the first in a few thousand words. Like most things, it would be beneficial to keep writing until its done so that I can improve the overall structuring of viewpoint and narrative, but today I found myself unaccountably convinced it was simply shit and nothing good could come of it, despite several years of careful research, world-building, character shaping, etc.

This is a crucial issue for beginning professional writers, related to the perceptions of the overall process of creation while it occurs, and I began this entry with the obvious question to which I (and other writers also) need an answer:

WHAT DO I DO IF WHAT I WRITE IS SHIT? FROM MERDE TO MANURE...

There are immediate and long term remedies for this problem.

The immediate remedy is to stop, rest, recoup and do something productive other than writing. The benefits of the day job as not always clear until I am frustrated about work that does not seem quite right. Then, when I need to do something, else, it is a boon.

The long term remedy is to undermine my arrogant faith in my perfect opinion of myself as a writer. The simple fact is, I am not the arbiter of excellence in writing... my readers are. And their enjoyment and education is contingent on my attitude of service. Because writers work alone it is difficult to realize that we in fact provide a vital service to others. Books are not merely a business, they are also a contribution to society. And there is no end to books published that you and I would consider to be, yes, "shit". But that is a matter of perspective. This point is driven home diplomatically by critic and writer Andre Gide, a man whose taste in writing was the most astringent I have even known, who said in his Journals: Sometimes I look at a certain kind of book and wonder who on earth could read such a thing; and then I meet certain people and I realize who read them.

To make the long term remedy very clear it is useful to realise what aspects of the writing process we can control, and what aspects we cannot:

I cannot control whether what I write is good or bad, because the terms, "good" and "bad" are relative to the particular readers of the piece. I cannot control how long the piece will take to write, because I cannot be sure when the piece is to be considered excellent. I cannot ever create a perfect piece of writing, only a potentially excellent piece of writing. I cannot rely on emotions to guide me in the quality of the work, nor can I rely on friends or family to guide me in the quality of my work; I can only rely on agents, publishers, assessors, editors, and professional writers with editing experience to guide me accurately in the quality of my work. So I am in the dark on many matters of great importance when it comes to writing.


I can, however, control several factors:

- Writing at all. I can and do write, which sets me apart from non-writers, would-be writers, and journal or therapy writers.

- Writing to finish. I can finish what I write. This has several benefits: I can criticise the plotting of a complete piece, while a partial piece has no plot curve to critique. I can clearly see in a complete piece, even if it is terrible, the changes in character over time, or lack thereof. The highest benefit of a finished piece is that it may merit the criticism of a qualified agent, publishers, assessor, editor, of experienced professional writer, so finishing writing has definite educational benefits.

- Writing pieces I am adequate to. If I am not adequate to write a novel it is an exercise in despair pretending I can. Adequateness is not related to self-esteem, but is an impersonal capacity to contain and carry through the creative process. It is a muscle that increases with use also. So a beginning professional is better creating successfully an excellent curve of a two thousand word short story, that working on a series of long stories. Because novel-writing is a different form, it is better to think in terms of novellas (30 thousand words long) that can be evolved into grown up novels, than to work and start and stop on futile novel projects that never bear fruit.

- Finally, I can control my reactions. It is natural to have no idea where I am going when I write, because I am making it up. Confusion, frustration, despair, inadequacy, irritation, boredom - these are normal learning emotions. So I can control my reactions by accepted these experiences.

I believe in writers block like I believe in the tooth fairy: both exist to help children handle pain. The idea of a "writer's block" is a good way to pretend you do not have control over your choices and thoughts, and an excellent way to deny that you have no control over the outside world.

Abandoning the notion of writer's block has a blear benefit, however. Acceptance of the nature of writing itself allows for a clear-eyed acceptance of the craft of writing.

In turn, appeciation of the craft of writing leads to an comprehension of the nature of talent. Samuel Clemens said that genius is 99% perspiration but I think that is a whiteknuckling and overly macho way to say it. Talent is more precisely the expression of great patience, caring determination, and accumulated capacity over time. Talent aligns aspects of egotism within a coherent intention to provide a service, in much the same way a corportate invisibly organised multiple employees to provide services that governments or individuals alone could not. But talent is also manifested as an expression of the willingness to learn from errors. The developmental processes we tend to describe as talent gradually culminate in the ability to let go of one's personal selfish agenda when creating, and experience one's own Voice as an impersonal quality of self.

Writers talk about "finding their voice", when in fact it is merely revealed when we drop the barriers to it. The sense of one's creative voice is distinct from one's day to day sense of self by virtue of the great, clean, clear sense of openness in the throat and chest. The throat especially seems to open up like a blossoming flower, and creating can be a great joy in those often brief times.

It is after the flowering that the craftsman returns to his intention to provide service, and his commitment to being willing to learn. If creating is a flowering or fruiting plant, then an intention to give service is the earth of creation, and willingness to grow the roots of creation. You cannot block the process of growth, life and death any more than you can block plants from growing freely everywhere.

By accepting shit writing, by creating more and more and more shit writing, sooner or later the material manures and generates a fertile creative state. Nature's efficiency in due time recycles our bad work into our good.

Reading and How to Structure Story Starts and Ends

I've been reading.

I've read my first novels by established SF authors Stephen Baxter ("Timelike Infinity"), and Gregory Benford ("Foundation's Fear"). It is with marvellous excitement that I become acquainted with the deepest concerns of these writers, as revealed through those subjects they express passion on in their books. Baxter's time-travel riffs I compared to Orson Scott Card in the bookshop, and came up with a marvellous idea between the two for a short story. And Benford's book is part of Asimov's Foundation series, first book of a new trilogy. What is most notable about this trilogy, however, is that it is written by a trilogy of authors, and, incredibly, they do Asimov's idea justice. Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin. Should be an exciting read.

Writing and reading all weekend. Peaceful, even languid, I have stayed close to home, going out only to vote and attend a meeting which, even as I entered the rooms, I was aware I had no intentions of staying at. Sure enough I left before it started and came home frustrated and irate with myself. People!

I started reading the Iliad. Successfully for the first time I immediately grasped the sense of astonished sublimity in the world Homer creates. The java version I was reading collasped as soon as I went offline, which is yet another subject lesson on the grave limitations of java applets.

On the other hand I started reading Plato's Apology of Socrates, but I think I will have to be an old old man to appreciate Socrates. I have found him and his adherents, including Ben Franklin, annoyingly sanctimonious in the studied and manipulative ignorance of their rhetoric. Everything about him I find tiresome, and yet people who love him find it all sublime. Experimental melodrama more likely.

Saturday I read Orson Scott Card's How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. He has some fascinating things to say about plot structuring:

The plot should be structured around the character who suffers the most, first and foremost.
The plot should be structured around the kind of story that is being told: in other words, the story that is started at the start must be completed at the end.
Many stories begin too early or too late or from the wrong point of view altogether, and this is because the wrong structural principles misinform the author's choices.
Often a story's start gives you one idea, and ending gives you another. This is because the structure changes in the story itself.
Caring and the nature of the drama itself define what kind of ending you feel is necessary. In turn, the ending defines where, when and with whom you must begin.

The key to all this is faithfully investigating into what kind of structure informs your plot. Experienced and inexperienced writers all seek the correct structure to write within, some more consciously than others. By knowing the structure, you gain freedom and power to express your drama fully:

Card's lens for investigating what kind of structure best fits is MICE - Millieu, Information, Character, and Events. MICE is an investigative or hermeneutic tool, rather than a diagnositic device. Here's how it works:

- You know the story is about a MILLIEU, when the true start of the story features a stranger entering a world, and the true end features them leaving that world.
- You know the story is about INFORMATION, when the true start of the story is the realisation that information is missing, and the true end of the story is the transformation that ensues as the missing information is revealed.
You know the story is about CHARTACTER, when the true start of the story is the moment the character realises that they have suffered so much that they need to begin the process of change, and the true end obviously is when the process is complete.
Finally, you know the story is about EVENTS, when the true start of the story features a disturbance in the Order of Things, and the true end of the story results in a New Order, Restoration of the Old Order, or, more rarely, a Return To Chaos.

I submitted my own novel to analysis, and only now do I realise that here are several character subplots (Al, Lynne, Val, and Sattva, the main characters), no less than TWO important millieu's to explore, and a large amount of information to explore about the science and science fiction involved in creating a world wide biological network computer.

So how to structure the story?

The final key Card presents for discerning the plot structure is to look at what element of what you've written so far that evokes the most caring in you. Is it the events, information, character or millieu? I looked and it was clear that the events of the novel were what interested me most. In fact, it rapidly became clear that here was one of those rare novels which feature the events as follows:

The world is in order. The world tips out of order. The world falls into chaos. Indeed, if I have any faith in the power of the ideas of the book, then the chaos at the end is the necessary expression of the cultural consciousness of the late 21st century. Rather than the noirish sense that things are going down the drain that we experienced in the 80s, the latter part of this century will feature the sense that chaos is here, all around us, and that in fact that is quite the better thing than what came before, ie - centralised government, nationalism.

The adventure of Return To Gaia consists of the sense that, as Val and Sattva visit different isolated human cultures across Asia on their Return To Gaia, they are witnessing Gaia's experiments on humanity, as she developes a comprehensive theory about what to do about humanity. The complexity of the different cultures revolves around their relation to the Gaia gene sensors, which inevitably is the central focus of their lives since, on some level, every culture senses they are reliant on this innocent grey box for their life and livelihood. So the simple touchstone of the varied events is the grey box, but the conclusion, the descent into absolute chaos, features a complete dispersal of human potential, rather than an awakening or fulfillment... the release of tension here is in the natural sense, as the loyalty of Sattva to her people and her religion are released by the ultra-religious Thai nationalists, and the scientism and hurt of Valery are released by his acts of caring and service to Gaia. Both characters are effectively transformed. Sattva dies in defense of Gaia, and is integrated into Gaia's undated core memory. And Valery becomes something less than human by virtue of absorbing Gaia's sensor genes into his body's immune system, at the same time becoming something more than human by compassionately allowing Gaia to live.

Thus in the second book, Gaia quite naturally wishes to show Valery what she has done while humanity sleeps in the way of biotechnology, and she wishes to preserve the humanity of Sattva and Valery for further Gaian enterprises. The horribleness of this kind of conclusion is belied by the organicism of the process, as their nonhuman plot is counterpointed against the Dreamer sect in the former United States, a human love story between a Dreamer Tribe girl and a Hunter Tribe boy.

It is remarkable how much of this plot I have written, but lacking the cohesive world, and the strong backing of research, I have been unable to carry it through. My fear is that this simple plot, the natural order falling into natural chaos deeper and then still deeper, does not - to use Robert Silverberg's phrase - set the bomb's clock ticking on every page. A further problem is the detail that arises before the catastrophe itself, the slow invention curve of Biotech that leads to the inception of Gaia. How relevant is it to the story? Would the story be complete without it? Would there be aspects which could be parsed off into another book... such as a "prequel"... heh heh... bizarre idea... "Prelude To Gaia" giving the story of the early days of Valery's life and Al's early adulthood, and Lynn's career in full. Interesting!!

By advancing on the notion that I can start with the experiment, or at least somewhat before it by showing the reader reasons why they should care what happens to Valery or his father Allan, I can dispense with the (already convoluted) first 8 chapters of book one.

It is strange to write this, since I have just this Friday done a first draft of the plotting sequences for the first 8 chapters, chapters I now feel okay parsing off from the main story!

I will have to reflect some more about this, but the lesson is clear... it is important to start in exactly the right place if you are to end in exactly the right place. Midpoint corrections only make sense if the performance as a whole is in the correct parameters. More food for thought from Orson Scott Card.

Reading and How to Structure Story Starts and Ends

I've been reading.

I've read my first novels by established SF authors Stephen Baxter ("Timelike Infinity"), and Gregory Benford ("Foundation's Fear"). It is with marvellous excitement that I become acquainted with the deepest concerns of these writers, as revealed through those subjects they express passion on in their books. Baxter's time-travel riffs I compared to Orson Scott Card in the bookshop, and came up with a marvellous idea between the two for a short story. And Benford's book is part of Asimov's Foundation series, first book of a new trilogy. What is most notable about this trilogy, however, is that it is written by a trilogy of authors, and, incredibly, they do Asimov's idea justice. Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin. Should be an exciting read.

Writing and reading all weekend. Peaceful, even languid, I have stayed close to home, going out only to vote and attend a meeting which, even as I entered the rooms, I was aware I had no intentions of staying at. Sure enough I left before it started and came home frustrated and irate with myself. People!

I started reading the Iliad. Successfully for the first time I immediately grasped the sense of astonished sublimity in the world Homer creates. The java version I was reading collasped as soon as I went offline, which is yet another subject lesson on the grave limitations of java applets.

On the other hand I started reading Plato's Apology of Socrates, but I think I will have to be an old old man to appreciate Socrates. I have found him and his adherents, including Ben Franklin, annoyingly sanctimonious in the studied and manipulative ignorance of their rhetoric. Everything about him I find tiresome, and yet people who love him find it all sublime. Experimental melodrama more likely.

Saturday I read Orson Scott Card's How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. He has some fascinating things to say about plot structuring:

The plot should be structured around the character who suffers the most, first and foremost.
The plot should be structured around the kind of story that is being told: in other words, the story that is started at the start must be completed at the end.
Many stories begin too early or too late or from the wrong point of view altogether, and this is because the wrong structural principles misinform the author's choices.
Often a story's start gives you one idea, and ending gives you another. This is because the structure changes in the story itself.
Caring and the nature of the drama itself define what kind of ending you feel is necessary. In turn, the ending defines where, when and with whom you must begin.

The key to all this is faithfully investigating into what kind of structure informs your plot. Experienced and inexperienced writers all seek the correct structure to write within, some more consciously than others. By knowing the structure, you gain freedom and power to express your drama fully:

Card's lens for investigating what kind of structure best fits is MICE - Millieu, Information, Character, and Events. MICE is an investigative or hermeneutic tool, rather than a diagnositic device. Here's how it works:

- You know the story is about a MILLIEU, when the true start of the story features a stranger entering a world, and the true end features them leaving that world.
- You know the story is about INFORMATION, when the true start of the story is the realisation that information is missing, and the true end of the story is the transformation that ensues as the missing information is revealed.
You know the story is about CHARTACTER, when the true start of the story is the moment the character realises that they have suffered so much that they need to begin the process of change, and the true end obviously is when the process is complete.
Finally, you know the story is about EVENTS, when the true start of the story features a disturbance in the Order of Things, and the true end of the story results in a New Order, Restoration of the Old Order, or, more rarely, a Return To Chaos.

I submitted my own novel to analysis, and only now do I realise that here are several character subplots (Al, Lynne, Val, and Sattva, the main characters), no less than TWO important millieu's to explore, and a large amount of information to explore about the science and science fiction involved in creating a world wide biological network computer.

So how to structure the story?

The final key Card presents for discerning the plot structure is to look at what element of what you've written so far that evokes the most caring in you. Is it the events, information, character or millieu? I looked and it was clear that the events of the novel were what interested me most. In fact, it rapidly became clear that here was one of those rare novels which feature the events as follows:

The world is in order. The world tips out of order. The world falls into chaos. Indeed, if I have any faith in the power of the ideas of the book, then the chaos at the end is the necessary expression of the cultural consciousness of the late 21st century. Rather than the noirish sense that things are going down the drain that we experienced in the 80s, the latter part of this century will feature the sense that chaos is here, all around us, and that in fact that is quite the better thing than what came before, ie - centralised government, nationalism.

The adventure of Return To Gaia consists of the sense that, as Val and Sattva visit different isolated human cultures across Asia on their Return To Gaia, they are witnessing Gaia's experiments on humanity, as she developes a comprehensive theory about what to do about humanity. The complexity of the different cultures revolves around their relation to the Gaia gene sensors, which inevitably is the central focus of their lives since, on some level, every culture senses they are reliant on this innocent grey box for their life and livelihood. So the simple touchstone of the varied events is the grey box, but the conclusion, the descent into absolute chaos, features a complete dispersal of human potential, rather than an awakening or fulfillment... the release of tension here is in the natural sense, as the loyalty of Sattva to her people and her religion are released by the ultra-religious Thai nationalists, and the scientism and hurt of Valery are released by his acts of caring and service to Gaia. Both characters are effectively transformed. Sattva dies in defense of Gaia, and is integrated into Gaia's undated core memory. And Valery becomes something less than human by virtue of absorbing Gaia's sensor genes into his body's immune system, at the same time becoming something more than human by compassionately allowing Gaia to live.

Thus in the second book, Gaia quite naturally wishes to show Valery what she has done while humanity sleeps in the way of biotechnology, and she wishes to preserve the humanity of Sattva and Valery for further Gaian enterprises. The horribleness of this kind of conclusion is belied by the organicism of the process, as their nonhuman plot is counterpointed against the Dreamer sect in the former United States, a human love story between a Dreamer Tribe girl and a Hunter Tribe boy.

It is remarkable how much of this plot I have written, but lacking the cohesive world, and the strong backing of research, I have been unable to carry it through. My fear is that this simple plot, the natural order falling into natural chaos deeper and then still deeper, does not - to use Robert Silverberg's phrase - set the bomb's clock ticking on every page. A further problem is the detail that arises before the catastrophe itself, the slow invention curve of Biotech that leads to the inception of Gaia. How relevant is it to the story? Would the story be complete without it? Would there be aspects which could be parsed off into another book... such as a "prequel"... heh heh... bizarre idea... "Prelude To Gaia" giving the story of the early days of Valery's life and Al's early adulthood, and Lynn's career in full. Interesting!!

By advancing on the notion that I can start with the experiment, or at least somewhat before it by showing the reader reasons why they should care what happens to Valery or his father Allan, I can dispense with the (already convoluted) first 8 chapters of book one.

It is strange to write this, since I have just this Friday done a first draft of the plotting sequences for the first 8 chapters, chapters I now feel okay parsing off from the main story!

I will have to reflect some more about this, but the lesson is clear... it is important to start in exactly the right place if you are to end in exactly the right place. Midpoint corrections only make sense if the performance as a whole is in the correct parameters. More food for thought from Orson Scott Card.

How I'm Going - Personal Post

I'm just going... no questions, very comfortable, taking it easy. Why? should I be upset?

It is one thing to want an uncomplicated life, another to eschew complications.

What's strangest to me, is that since I gave up coffee, I don't feel the kind of wild restlessness I have called motivation anymore. Certainly I feel anxious and then tired, which are the normal cycles of the adrenelain system playing themselves out. But at the same time I simply don't have the sharp, bitter, piercing sense of I MUST GO NOW. Go figure.

My appetite is extremely subdued... I eat once a day at the moment, unless I have fruit about... other than fruit I simply have little interest in eating food otherwise. I get carbo cravings once a day, eat pasta or dahl, and they go. It is a strange thing.

The weather has changed in my little sector of the universe... the planet has wobbled back into summertime, and a ferocious UV heat bangs down, accompanied by a restless and agitating wind... I find myself reluctant to go out. Outside I dry up. I go into that kind of heat feeling as if I am about to be evaporated.

I will have to go out today simply to do administrative things. Australia has an election on Saturday and I must ring the electoral commission to discover if I can register to vote here in this place far from my home, since I am registered to a faraway place for voting.

I have no hat, and no inclination to spend the money to buy one. This, unfortunately, means it is not time to buy a hat, and I will burn.

I have surrendered coffee for life, without reservation, and it is very strange. Very strange indeed. I had depended on that drug for, well, for stimulation and bigger ups and downs. Life seemed more intense.

I want what's real, however. I want what's actual, experiential, and there now, and i want it on its own terms. That is to say, I want it unconditionally.

For the readers at my yahoo group, Return To Gaia has altered somewhat its conception, and I would like to briefly talk about it here before finishing.

I re-envisioned Gaia as a series of interlocking short stories, in order to best accomodate the episodic, global and non-sequential nature of the story. The challenge with this is that it requires significantly more work to create, for instance, in book two a story about the genetic transformation of the Chinese into the borg-style Families in book two. No problem so far.

Then I have allowed myself to react and be influenced by the screenwriting and plot-structuring software I have recently got. This is good, but not good enough. The plot is not visual enough, and could easily be much much more so. But I find myself hampered by the difficulties of learning the new software as well as the challenge of structuring the plot. So I have stopped.

The best option I think is to do a visual outline on a scene by scene basis in outline mode on Word, doing a top down design of the entire plot of the first story of return to Gaia and a broad stroke design of the rest. This is to create containers, mentally and physically, for the ideas that inevitably will crop up.

The main thrust of all this rethinking and reworking is that the information (read below) on creating a successful sci-fi career, rests very much on short stories. And I want to get published in Asimov's Magazine with the first Gaia story, so it has to be simply remarkable.

I am not very experienced in the target market, even though I have a very clear idea of the (now former) head editor Gardner Dozois' idea of the Best through his yearly anthologies. I am tempted to charge straight in and write it simply from start to finish but I don't want to do a shibboleth.

"You only have research after you don't need it anymore."

TOO TRUE! Clearly I need to write it, all five to ten thousand words, and then research it appropriately for the market.

That's my personal stuff for the moment.

The shape of supernovae to come?

News stories online today concern modelling the nature of the deep space around earth, and I can't help but think that the two efforts (modelling supernovae and hydrogen dispersal thru space) are probably fairly similar enterprises.

These images are part of the attempt to discover a supernovae before it occurs.

The modelling of earth's hydrogen cavity is here:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/05/images/planar.jpg

Maps are cool. :-)

human-made track marks on Mars

warning 600 k

This picture, of chicken tracks leading across the martian surface, is doubtless gone by now, blown over by the martian winter winds. It's also likely the first image of its kind.

Kinda wonderful really.

"How do I get traffic to my Web site?"

Scroll down a little to hear some of the finest good sense I've heard in a long time about what gets someone to read.

Someone, somewhere wants to read what you have written. Mostly they will not unless you make it available. And mostly it will not impact their lives until you learn how to communicate better.

This is something that shows how I have a lot to learn. Tonight I took the opening chapters of Gaia and rewrote them as a screenplay. From novel to screen play need not be a big leap, but WOW I can't believe how non-visually I have communicated what I have to say. How obscure! So it helps to look further afield.

These few paragraphs at the link above will tell you an awful lot about writing solid sci-fi.

"Content begets traffic." In other words, having a strong moral message enables drama to exist, which in turn enables the plot and events to flow excellently and well into play.

Here's another gem:

"Intimidated about producing content? Keep an eye on your email: I find that sometimes I send 5-10 paragraph email messages to some lists that turn out to be very nice little articles unto themselves with just the tiniest tweaks."

Browsing as a source of inspiration, I can truly relate to! How can you develop the little stuff into the big. Orson Scott Card talks about how to deal with competing ideas on his website www.hatrack.com where he basically either tries to stomp the new ideas into the old or just spends a few hours on development then leaves it alone or leads it along further to see where it goes.

Excellent stuff!

Plot Complications... "NO, it's NOT okay!!"

Well, the title of this entry's deceptive. My life is the plot complications.

I registered for the "Write a novel in a month" challenge, starting on november. Meanwhile, i got a screenwriting piece of software. MEANWHILE, I decided i want to try installing Word again to write on that.

These are all plot complications, and bad quality ones at that.

The sign of a plot complication is that it appears urgent and necessary, but it actually is not important. What is an important plot complication? it is moral, simple and, in retrospect, obvious. That's it. The phrase "plot complication" is a misnomer. What we are talking about is the essence of story telling, Drama-creation.

Drama-creation is dreamtime mystification, an emmersion in the magical, whereas plot complications are dry abstractions calculated to drive you wild.

And if anything drives me wild, it's having to deal with fucking new computer software.
Click on the link and scroll down to the entry "It's Not Okay" for an idea of what I mean.

Moral transformation in science fiction novels:

This is the climax of ‘Ender’s Shadow’ for me: on page 324. Bean is talking to his brother and fellow soldier Nikolai before he departs for Command training:

(snip!)

“I’m sorry I didn’t join your squad, Bean.”

“You were right,” said Bean. “I asked you because you were my friend, and I thought I needed a friend, but I should have been a friend too, and seen what YOU needed.”

“I’ll never let you down again.”

Bean threw his arms around Nikolai. Nikolai hugged him back.

Bean remembered when he left Earth. Hugging Sister Carlotta. Analyzing. This is what she needs. It costs me nothing. Therefore I’ll give her the hug.

I’m not a kid anymore.

(snip!)

The symmetry of Bean and Ender is made complete on page 320 is made explicit here, as Ender enters a calculating zone of murderous psychosis as he conducts the war, Bean’s moral transformation is complete. Ender, whose principles had been the source of meaning for Bean, has been internalised in Bean as a kind of moralising softness of heart. The soft-hearted Poke that he helps at the novel's opening and the great-hearted Sister Carlotta who is his mentor, both find their apotheosis in his moral flowering in this magnificent and moving passage.

This passage moved me to tears.

I live like a rosy-cheeked peasant

I found a library DVD about intermediate yoga which I did last night and learnt a lot from it. The postures were good and vigorous, and the viyama, the paced breathwork, excellent. I will return to it tonight after dark.

Three days before I had gone to gym, and the soreness in my pectorals and arousal of my immune system had me keen to stretch, cos it’s hard to relax with knotted up muscles. Then today I had a visual flash of insight: my body showed me the interior of the pectoral being repaired BY the immune system. Aha, I thought, that is the purest sensawunda experience, the very essence of good science. No wonder the throat gets sore and inflamed... after the workout, that’s when the immune system gets its workout in repairing.

And so I have been using garlic, ginger, onion, and raw food to augment this process. In case you didn’t know, the first three augment the immune system, respectively, by introducing a wide spectrum antibiotic, a chi booster, and a blood and liver purifyer. The raw food works by lending the stomach digestive enzymes so that the immune system need not manifest it’s own enzymes to the task of digesting hot food. All in all, I am smelling very sensual and rich to myself, and rather foul to others... :-)

Since I have given up coffee my digestion has altered, mainly slowed, but also lost its sharp efficacy in digesting heavy proteins. Which is interesting but the absorbsion of carbo appears nevertheless as regular and stable as always. No doubt the sugar highs and lows induced by caffein stripping the ATP from the cells were what induced the ADD-like behavior in my.

My main concern now is twofold: firstly, the adrenelain-flight or flight program in my body is now relaxing slowly, it seems, for the first time in many months. All of a sudden I have discovered the ability, seemingly out of the blue of clarity from caffeine addiction, to observe crazy thoughts and contradict them. I wait and see how effective this is in behavior modification, since writing them down seems to cause great turbulence in the adrenelain curcuit... as if the fight or flight trigger had become harnessed to internal dialog, thus causing the anxiety. It is very interesting to observe.

As I lay in bed, and several times through today, the fear that I am wasting my life recurred, and I simply contradicted it with the words: I am happy and clean just for today. Did it vanish? Do I care?

It is mysterious, this process.

One thing that seems to cause me suffering is my addiction to reading. The fact it seems innocent enough, and does not yet cause me enough suffering and pain to address, is sufficient for me to know at the moment.

This weekend I have devoted to the task of building a compost heap worth its name, and cleaning my entire house, and doing the co-op shopping. Unfortunately I read til 3 am so I couldn’t get to the co-op, which opens only in the morning. So I have read and cooked, washed dishes and clothes, and sunbathed gently for a few minutes at a time...

mmm life is pretty good.

healthy food (homemade tomato soup with kidney beans), sun, a great book (“Ender’s Shadow” again, by Orson Scott Card, again), and some decent work for the weekend.

I live like a rosy-cheeked peasant.

coaching on length, pace, plot and character in novel writing

Coaching conversation between two writers:

Jason: "I've been told that the overall length of a novel should be between 75,000 and 100,000 words. However, it appears that most fantasy novels are larger (witness the Jordan and Goodkind novels.) Terry Goodkind's first novel (Wizard's First Rule) was huge, around 250,000 words in length. But I've been told to avoid that route. Since I'm writing a series, I have some leeway where I can end the novel.

Orson: "Choose one of the climaxes, an important one, to be the major climax of the volume, and shape the structure accordingly. If a couple of other climaxes can be timed to come near the same point in the story, so much the better.

Jason: What is the difference between climax and cliffhanger endings?

Orson: With the climax endings the reader closes the book saying, "Wow, that was great. I can't wait for the next one." This is so much better than the cliffhanger endings when the reader closes the book saying, "That was it? I have to wait for the next book to find out anything?" Guess which reader will be telling his friends about your series, or lending it out, or checking at Borders or Amazon or B&N to find out when the next volume is due. So you want to pace your book around the important climaxes you select.


PACING.
Jason: How do I pace a novel around important climaxes?

Orson: Let's look at the extremes of pacing:

There's "soap opera" pace, where things happen so incrementally, with so much angst every step of the way, and with endless scenes where characters who were not present at key events have those events recounted to them by characters who WERE there, etc. Frankly, this pacing makes me want to find the author and delete his files.

There's action-adventure pace, where you move lickety-split through the events, chewing up plot like a sumo wrestler going through a stack of sandwiches. And there are many paces in between.

Jason: How do you pace your books?

Orson: I tend to be a little more leisurely, giving a lot of the characters' personal reactions to events and their plans and ideas about what to do next. I spend a lot of time on relationships. However, I give almost no time at all to description or writerly writing, so on the whole I move through the plotline rather quickly. (This is why abridgements of my books for audio presentation almost always result in some serious incoherency -- I don't include very much that can afford to be cut.)


Having said that, I must point out that the original advice you were given -- that a book feels like a normal novel somewhere around 100,000 words and is hard to publish at less than 75,000 -- is true. This means that if you find your first volume stacking up at about 60,000 words, you need to go back and re-pace it -- you're consuming plot way too fast. (No, you don't need to add more plot. But you might want to beef up a side-story, adding chapters that follow other characters on related adventures.)

Jason: The specific problem I have had is when a writer sets up a quest, and then enters into a series of try fail cycles. The quest is linear. There are no left or right. No 'turn's in the story. Just more and more problems. This kind of pacing bogs me down, because what I really want to know is whether he gets the quest or not. It's not the journey that becomes important to me, but the achieving the aim. The journey is just boring, because I know he's going to get there eventually. I just want to know what happens when he does.

I have a character who is on a boat heading to the site of the major conflict. In my mind, the reader wants him to get there. Any kind of problem along the way is going to bore them, because what they really want to see is him getting there and entering the confrontation. But.... The ship trip is 2 months like, and meanwhile all the other characters are doing things. He's got nothing to do. Do I drop him and wait till he gets there (a long piece in the manuscript) or do I start creating artificial problems for him?

TRY FAIL CYCLES VS CONFLICTING OBJECTIVES CYCLES
Orson: The problem you're facing is the direct-line problem. The try-fail cycle you talk about not only is boring, it isn't used very much in epics that work. Rather you have the conflicting objectives cycle. Things that are worth doing, that need doing, which sidetrack the characters and distract them from their quest. Then there's the This Can't Happen trick (Gandalf dies?) that "changes everything" and causes the group to reconfigure (again, some of them being distracted as they go off on sub-quests).

Also, you need characters who are not equally committed to the main quest (think Boromir) or who have other quests that only they can perform (think Aragorn).

Then you have the protagonist's conflicting feelings about having undertaken the quest in the first place, and about putting other people's lives at risk. (I'll go off by myself, says Frodo, because this way I'm only bringing destruction down on my friends. [Actually, this was deeply stupid, since the friends were his main hope of avoiding being killed by the ring-wraiths; but Tolkien made it all come out anyway ].)

But sometimes the sidetracks don't work -- think of Tom Bombadil and the whole barrow-wight sequence in the first volume of LOTR. All very lovely, but it does nothing to advance the story (i.e., to make us care more or worry more about the characters; nothing arises out of who they are, and no one is transformed).

So you need to make sure that the conflicting desires of the characters make sense -- that each of the characters matters to us, positively or negatively, in his own right. Then the whole try-fail cycle disappears. That's a videogame, not a novel .

Jason (later): Your advice has caused an explosion in me. It started with the novel length question, which you answered in terms of pacing, which led me to ask about the try fail cycle, which you rejected and threw me into a chaos of panic. But you came back in mentioned that the 'real story' comes from the conflict within the character. That triggered my memory of Ben Bova's Emotion vs. Emotion advice, which in turn triggered my memory of my brief study of Danielle Steel (410 million copies sold) where every single one of her characters has a duel desire (Betty loves both Fred and Parker). Then Friday night I read in Elia Kazan's A Life autobiography that the secret of all stories is to have a character in conflict with himself. Back to Bova, I read the next morning that you start with the character, creating the conflicting emotion, and then give him a problem that directly impacts that conflict.

And just like that I finally understood what you meant when you said Try Fail vs. Real Story. I mean, it hit me like a ton of bricks! I applied it immediately to three of my characters and I can't tell you how excited I am. I was jumping on the bed causing my wife to growl. I couldn't stop talking. You connected with me, you led me where I needed to go? Why? The Proof: For the first time in my life, my characters are alive to me! I felt sadness and regret for them, and worry. That mysterious connection I've always missed.

And you are right, I'm going to have to rewrite the entire thing. Not that the plot has to change much, but you are totally right! I need to rewrite it! And it wasn't a waste, because it got me to this point!!!

Then, another piece of the puzzle came this morning: I'm driving to work and I remember Abraham and Issac. And I think: Obedience to God Vs. Love for his Child. But it was even worse than that. Abraham wanted kids his whole life. No kids. He prayed, and no answer, and then it was too late. But a miracle happened, and he got a kid when he was old! Not only that, he was promised generations and generations, a very important thing to the old Jewish Culture. He was thrilled. And then God asked him to kill his son.

Wow! Not only is there conflicting desires in Abraham, but his problem is the worst possible thing it could be. Hugh Nibley teaches in his collection of Essays Volume 12 Temple and Cosmos, that every single person will have to be faced with their Isaac. Whatever it is, God will come, and ask you for it, and see if you aren't willing to give it. It's the test of this life.

And I applied that to my characters, and it's haunting. It's terrible. It's sad. I think of Ender, and his duel desire for love and belonging vs. helping the world. And I felt so bad for him, because he couldn't have both. Ah!

Orson: Glad I could be of service, but you did most the work.