Page Pattern

The human eye tends to hit a new page of text and move in a curve similar to these (perhaps a little less tight on that initial curlicue) - hitting somewhat left of the middle, sliding down and then up and around, really to the point where, in our particular culture, pages "begin".  I don't know, come to think of it, whether this insta-scan pattern holds in cultures for which pagination is reversed from the standard I am talking about, or for peoples who read text vertically rather than horizontally - but I *think* that this is brain-science, so would imagine it holds true.  I am fairly certain it is true for "pages" both hard copy and electronic.

Periodicals and print material of all kinds have taught layout based on this somewhat reverse-G eye-wander for a long time indeed; I must have learned it in about eighth grade or so, working on newspaper or some other such lost miscellanea of my life.

I still lay out newsletters, and, though this particular tidbit of the flotsam of my mind isn't necessarily a leading gambit in construction, it is 'there' enough in my intelligence that it certainly informs me on some level.


The way our eyes work is a kind of momentum, and the way my mind works in writing follows a curve too.  I slip on a banana peel and - WHOOP - am off.  Perhaps in a direction I intended (usually so), but often to effect I don't necessarily know is available until it's typed out.  I find the lilt and rhythm seem to follow patterns, like the inertia of an eye's passage across a page, and get me to the right point, as the curve gets you to the beginning of the page, once your eye has scanned its shape even before properly focusing.  Once I've had my creative loop-de-loop, I can look at the way things fell out of my brain, and even with things which will need editing (they all do), at least follow an internal momentum - even those things I will need to kill at some point.

Recently, I had a different kind of loop-de-loop.

Six years ago, "The Ax and the Vase" began, for me, with a single sentence - and I was doomed.  It was a sentence in first-person.

My "choice" of POV (ugh) is another post altogether, but it's been an almost obscenely intimate part of the book since the beginning.  It's seemed all wrong - not from the point of view of the mechanics of my creativity, but from the simple standpoint of a person like me so *personally* taking on a character like Clovis.  I suspect there'll be men (and women too; there's always a guitarist at the back of the bar, doesn't matter their chromosomes) who read the work looking for me to feminize it or make mistakes ("a man would NEVER think that!") - but, more to the point, I suspect myself at that.  I didn't want to write first-person.  I have problems with certain types of historical fiction written in this POV - epistolary can work, but often times the journal concept ends up seeming *entirely* too modern, and tends to annoy me.

"Ax"'s early formation, in first-person, annoyed me.  It didn't seem to fall prey to confessional preciousness really, but I resisted.  For as long as I could - maybe as long as the first *year* of the writing and research - I held out the caveat, for the work, that it could still change its clothes.

Clovis, to be sure, did NOT behave with me as some characters to, to writers, importuning a form upon me, existing in some insistently first-person way.  We were never so intimate, he and I (and, in fact, the immediacy of intimacy with the character's experience is one of those things I am working on now) - and, frankly (har - see what i did there ... ?) I would never presume upon the King.  I'm not that interpersonal with my characters anyway - they are characters, not relationships I conduct in life itself - and have a healthy respect for them as existing outside me-me-me-me-me.  They have to be more than I.  To be sure, an ancient King of the Franks must be significantly more.

Anyway, so the first person thing - born of this accidental sentence which happened to be first-person, and which was edited out literally YEARS ago - was something I tried to give enough leeway to, for some time, to allow the novel to escape such close clutches.  By the time I got beyond the thick of research and more into the thick of real writing, the commitment felt right, and I came to love it.  (Another post:  the dynamic and freedom of close third-person POV, and how that feels good too.)

So it's a funny thing that, thanks to Leila, and thanks to the changed position of my opening and intro ...

That old sentence might actually return.

I've given it the chance to sit at the top of the novel again, see how it fits, see how it likes it there - see if it *works* there.

I'm back up to the top of that page, the scan and the curve of this momentum being so very long now.  I've just turned over the leaf.  Some invisible, infinitesimal scan has echoed the one going on for years now, and my eye has come to rest at the top.  And here is that sentence again.

"I became King of Toxandria in my sixteenth year, after the death of my father, Childeric the foederatus."