Tag: mister

The More We Know

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I don’t mind the overnight snow, since we need the moisture. Dust storms have been clouding the valley. Even the daffodils don’t mind. They whispered that they’re built to withstand this kind of thing.

Over at Word Whores – my group blog, if you didn’t know – we’ve been talking this week about drafting styles. Whether you plan it all out ahead of time or discover as you go. Whatever terms you may assign to to those styles, writers seem to fall pretty solidly into one court or another.

On Laura Bickle’s post from yesterday, she talks about her plotting method. The comments conversation has become very interesting, as other writers profess horror or admiration for her detailed outlines.

That she does *before* she writes the book. Ahem.

At any rate, in the comments, the issue of revising came up. It’s long been the lore that the great drawback of not plotting ahead of time is that you spend a lot more time revising. KAK, who is a german dictator under all that red hair and those pretty smiles, declared that every scene must pass the “purpose” test. If it doesn’t serve the overall story, off it goes.

She’s ruthless. Believe me, I know.

I can see her point. And definitely the revising process is more cerebral than drafting for me. The drafting is all about the misting along and letting anyone and everything into the story. Revising brings the critical lens to the entire arc of the story. I’m not sure anyone can revise in a subconscious, misty way.

Except.

Okay, I’m a self-confessed sub-conscious, dreamthink, misty writer. I do believe the stories and characters exist in some reality and reveal themselves to me. I rarely feel like I “think” them up. Sometimes I can’t logically defend why someone or something is there. The critical lens would have me delete that stuff. The purpose test would demand excision. Goal, motivation, conflict? They scoff at these bits.

This is where my gut comes in. Neither the conscious, nor the subconscious, but the deep part that is most me. If I don’t trust that part, then I’m not me, for better or worse. The GMC stuff (see above) arises out of classic storytelling. People like to talk about archetypes of the hero’s journey and so forth. The thing is, archetypes, which Jung originally described as subconsciously shared concepts are something, by definition, already exist inside us. We can critically analyze them, but on some levels, they defy conscious definition.

No, I can’t always defend the purpose of a scene. Sometimes it’s because the scene is junk, or something I needed to write through to get somewhere. But one of the most surprising things I discovered over the ten years I spent writing and publishing essays – the things people keyed in on the most, were those things I had not planned. Scenes or images that just popped up when I was writing. Things that, sometimes, I nearly skipped writing, or thought about deleting later, because they seemed extraneous.

I keep reminding myself of that lesson.

Mosaics and Misting

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This morning at the gym, the guy lifting weights nearby had his music up loud enough that some leaked from his ear buds. He was listening to the Superman theme music. Somehow this both made me laugh and endeared me to him. Go Superman guy! Build those tasty muscles!

I totally want to build a character around that now.

Today is a very special Happy Birthday to my mom. Many of you already passed along good wishes last week during my surprise visit.

My mom’s new project is making mosaics.She took a class to learn how and now she’s creating this table top. It’s really perfect for her, because she shines at combining shapes and color. Pressed into service – and because my avowed task for the visit was to do whatever she wanted to do – I helped her put it together. It’s fun and different, like a puzzle where you don’t know what the picture will be when you’re done.

Oh, wait, that’s how I write.

It’s a good analogy, really. You choose the general shape of your story, the outline, the themes, the color scheme. You might have several really wonderful pieces that you know have to be in there, that you build around. But the final picture only emerges when you’ve finished.

This was actually the second time my mom put this together. The first time she had only the vertical border around the outside edge, which looked all wrong to her, once she finished. So, she took it apart and added the second, horizontal border. She kind of minded having to do that, but she’s retired and has this lovely leisurely life, so she has the time.

One of my friends wants to “reform” and learn to be a plotter. She’s said that she wants to save the time it takes by “pantsing” her books and plot first. It put me in mind of another comment I saw by a person who says that she’s a pantser and that’s why her blogs are so unfocused.

I think this last is like seeing the mosaic needs one more border and adding it in. The unfocused isn’t from not planning every detail ahead of time, it’s being unwilling to take the time to fix it. As for wanting to save that time in the first place, well, I understand. I totally do.

But I think it’s the wrong reason.

The press of time is artificial, I think. It’s emotionally driven. We want to write more books, faster, to make more money, to quite our day jobs and be rich RIGHT NOW.

It’s a kind of hysteria, really.

Another friend of mine, Bria Quinlan, wrote a terrific post on this, called I Am Not Broken. She gets down to the point that writing is about doing the work. Let me add, it’s about the journey, the creation, the spinning of the story. You might hasten this process with extensive pre-plotting, but you still have to write the story. You might plan out exactly how the mosaic should look when you’re done, but you still have to put the pieces all together.

And be willing to take them apart again, if it doesn’t look right.

I can understand wanting to get the product out there, but art, any art, is about engaging ourselves in the creative process. My mom isn’t making mosaics to sell. She’s making it for the sheer joy of it.

She’ll have something beautiful when she’s done, too.

Murky Is as Murky Does

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A while back, I took a class in play-directing.

Okay, this was almost twenty years ago. So a titch more than a while.

At any rate, I had several reasons for doing it. I was in grad school getting a PhD in neurophysiology and all the science was making me feel like a left-brain cripple. Some of my best times in college had been running with the theater crowd. I took enough acting classes and performed in enough shows that I could have added a theater minor to my biology major, had it occurred to me. In grad school, I found myself lonely among the science-heads. I auditioned for a play, but I’m really not a very good actress. Where they didn’t know me, they didn’t even toss me the bit parts I’d had before.

(Yeah – the role I played in Equus? I totally got it because the director called me when the actress he’d cast was so offended at the role’s minor nature. Ask Jeffe – she’ll do it! It was fun, too.)

So, I thought I could break into the scene and make some little friends in the bargain, by taking a class. Finally, I was noodling about creative writing and I recalled how the Assistant Director of Equus had been an MFA student in playwriting and his adviser suggested he learn how to direct, to better understand how a script comes alive on stage.

(He also might have been a handsome blond from New Orleans with whom I had a little love affair, but that’s beside the point.)

It didn’t work out so well. I remained an outsider in the theater clique. Plus, because I was an outsider, I had a great deal of trouble casting my scenes – all the best people got snapped up by their friends.

However, I did learn something very interesting that serves me still today.

Though I seem to need to relearn the lesson, over and over.

The course culminated in two nights of One-Act Plays open to the public. Five of us put together about half an hour long plays. Mine was this creepy one (I forget the name) about a cold marriage where the wife kills the husband’s cat – either deliberately or through negligence. The husband then channels the cat (either becomes the cat or just flips out), stalks and attacks the wife.

It was a cool play.

And people liked it. They really liked it! (That’s me channeling Sally Fields.) I loved people telling me how they enjoyed it, with their faces lit up. You don’t get that in science. Then they’d say, “except I didn’t get if she killed the cat on purpose or not.” Or they’d say “I didn’t really understand if he was crazy or if it was the cat’s spirit.” This wasn’t in a contemplative, I’ll have to mull over the implications way. They were genuinely confused.

I realized that, in every spot of this little 30 to 45 minutes, where I hadn’t been crystal clear on what was going on, the audience hadn’t known either.

I thought I could leave some bits murky, but I lost them in every place I did.

Yeah, you know where this is going. I’ve completed the storyboard for The Body Gift. You can see it in all its Post-It glory above. I’m eliminating an entire POV, because its murky and I have a choice of de-murking (yes, that’s a word) or nuking it. I’m not sure I can de-murk, so off it goes.

The pink and dark blue notes? Those are places where I’m not crystal clear on why the characters are doing and saying what they do and say. See, my particular curse as a writer is I follow the characters and write the story as it happens to them. This means that I have to find out things about their world that they don’t tell me straight out. It doesn’t feel to me like I get to make it up.

The writers who plot out ahead of time call us Pantsers, because they see us as flying by the seat of our pants. I prefer the term Mister. That’s how it feels to me – like I sink into the mist and things come to me out of it.

It’s just not always easy to get the exact right thing to come out when I want it.

But, it’s clear I have to. Where I was murky on this story, the readers were confused.

Lesson learned.

And remind me next time.