Saturation

One of the things about going through a dry spell as an author of historical fiction is that getting back to writing involves more than simply ass-in-chair hours. When you leave behind a work involving masses of research, world-building, and characters who possess entirely different mindsets than the modern American cube-farmer, you become desaturated.

Writing fantasy or histfic or sci fi (just a few examples, I know) means world building. And when you stop building - researching, occupying, *knowing* a place and its denizens - you become desaturated. It's extremely difficult to be in that world again on a dime, when you have neglected it for a long time.

To the exclusion of much social life, and to no complaint of any kind (I would have been nowhere else), I have focused on my family for a good six months now. With my stepfather's decline stretching across eight years, my immersion has been NOTHING next to my mom's. (To say nothing of the man himself, which seems cruelly self-involved.) But, as family circulates through all our lives, so has his failty.

And, yeah, I saw that typo. But it fits. Let's make it a word: failty. (Perfectly cromulent.)

A loved one's failty is the job and the beloved duty of those who care for him - caring, in the emotional sense, inevitably comes with caring in the custodial sense, if we live long enough. And writers often are alive, and love other people (often - not always!), and so we get distracted.

Hell, writers get distracted easier'n magpies, we all know that. How else would writing blogs ever survive?



Coming out of distraction ... there are levels, for a world-building author. You can still write about the peculiarity of someone's gaze (har), or some contained scene that exists within the greater context, but doesn't require reference to the context, with all the researched or invented knowledge of the world within easy recall.

Still, sitting down to the manuscript as a whole is terrifying. "I don't remember the context for the earliest anti-semitic riots in Christendom" or "Oh geez, how OLD was this character at this point?" I'll be frank: I can even forget who was alive when, and continuity in historicals can get so detailed you can screw up some other part of the book even noodling with what you think of as a contained scene. Containers leak, and sooner or later you've piddled your continuity all over. And cleanup can be death-defying.

(Literally - see also, that bit about forgetting who's even alive when.)

It's been a LONG time since I was doing the "W" part of the WIP.


It's always been the case with me, that I can read something I wrote and, if enough time has gone by, it won't even feel like reading my own work. Even being able to recall constructing a scene, the product of the work put in still seems fresh to me, unfamiliar. There is much brain science here, underlying the way authors say "I am a conduit" - but basically, the stream of consciousness we navigate doesn't always seem like it runs through our brains as it does a greater dynamic in which our souls are mere passengers.

(Yeah, and WOW on that piece of work. I *told* you I haven't been writing! Be forgiving, please. I'm making up lame pun-words at this point; you knew the risks, reading this.)

This unfamiliarity can be freshness, but it's also symptomatic of losing the headspace. The fixtures of research and writing are important as you keep going, but are all too easily rewired incorrectly, or even lost.

As long as it's been since I was writing the WIP: it's even longer since I was researching it.



And there it is, perhaps ...

Perhaps my "in" is with research, rather than writing.

Sometimes the ass-in-the-chair isn't scripting out a scene ... sometimes, it's mapping what happens where. What to use, and what doesn't serve. Who needs to be where, rather than the dialogue they provide once they're in situ.

Maybe I need to get myself in place - remember the place - before I try saying what happens in it.


A thought. I'll think about that, then.

I Wish I Could Ask My Readers ...

... do we need Merochar?  It still looks like he's important, to my reading.  But I know I have so little perspective.

*Sigh*

Lost and Not Lost

The internet is an amazing tool for obliterating the barrier between ourselves and the past.  It's rather a terrifying one for obliterating barriers between people (there are friends and others from my youth it took me many years to manage to lose touch with, and it is a little daunting to realize just how easy it is for that effort to go for naught, these days), for creating personal and financial vulnerability, for learning things it once might have been impossible to ever find.  For reunion with memories long past.

I did something this past week which represents both something I find kind of mystifyingly wonderful, and which also in a way goes against (some of) my beliefs.


I saw a photo of a weir the other day, and was brought to mind of the source from which I learned the word.  It was a book about a British boy, coming of age, and growing in friendship and attachment to an elusive girl he saw when exploring a weir out in the country.  The book was called The Otherwise Girl - something I'm pretty sure I bought at a library booksale when I was twelve or so - and one of those books I read at an age, and IN an age, when reading could still be so intimate and so singular an experience that it felt nobody else in the world could have ever known the story.

Reading was not, in the 1970s, especially for kids, really a blockbuster experience.  YA lit was backwater stuff, not the driving force in the publishing market it is today.  Until I discovered "Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret" and S. E. Hinton, I was unaware of anything I had ever read (other than the Bible) which had ever been read by anyone else.  And so books, for me, were an extraordinarily personal adventure.  Every story I had ever read was, for me, precisely and wholly my own object and memory.  I still write as if, all marketing notwithstanding, my work is unheard and unseen, existing only for one reader - for myself - or for some imagined fourteen-year-old-boy staying for a summer at his great aunt's, who discovers this dusty old thing on a bookshelf and reads it, and somehow loves it.

What I mean to say with all this is that  The Otherwise Girl  represents something of a personal genre, a story only I have ever known, and which, because I lost it decades since, was one of the beautiful ephemera of the universe.  In some way, that enhances its strength and its appeals, its soft lines and gentle lessons, its eerie loveliness.  Its absence, like that of my youth itself, is a part of what underscores its place in my heart ...

The Otherwise Girl is, of course, not the only story of its kind for me.  The Underside of the Leaf is another.  A seamier tale.  A memory of reading something, still back in grade school - I must have been about eleven - which seemed shocking and almost forbidden.  These coming of age stories came when I was very young - before the modernity of Judy Blume, or the edgy sixties-hip of Hinton's Outsiders.  They came before I even aspired to literary sophistication, when I was very much a little kid.  They came to me utterly innocent, and told me tales both of sweetness and of tasted sorrow.  I recall, from Leaf, the intensity of feeling I had about a girl liking a boy who somewhat frightened her.  I recall a description of his sweater.

It's never occurred to me to attempt to recapture these fragments, the flotsam of a childhood I bless but am content to know has been decades-since left behind.


***


And yet.

This past week, I ordered copies of both these books.  The picture of the weir did it - and got me looking, too, at Madeleine L'Engle too (great books, and fantastic, gripping titles).  I went to Amazon to buy the Book of Common Prayer I've had on my list for a bit now - and ended up coming away with these two, too.

Otherwise has arrived already.  It is the same edition I had then; a blue upon blue turquoise cover.  A girl in shorts.  A ghostly reverse image.


I wonder whether generations since my own will ever even have the opportunity for loss like this, the kind of progress through life that shapes my own entire existence, the kind of irretrievability which overrides free will and exerts itself merely by dint of time.  Life isn't the quiet backwater it once was, and I wonder what the experience will mean for my nieces - for the marvelousness that is nostalgia, the beauty of sentiment, with its ghost of melancholy making it such a beautiful feeling.

I try not to feel generationally superior - that These Kids Today have lost the very experience of loss.

But I do wonder.  Ephemerality is at the core of life's urgency and emotionality.  Being able to order up one's own preadolescence for home delivery is both wonderful ... and itself almost wistful.  I won't recapture the girl I was thirty and more years back.

And yet.

I never lost her, either.  She's still such a part of the woman I am day to day.  And if I didn't bless the fact I could give her a little nibble - could find these memories at all - I would not have placed that order.

I believe in the impenetrability of lost youth.  But I also believe in the joyousness of memory.  And reading.

Adverbial Adversarial

A terrifyingly large segment of the publishing industry is flatly, inflexibly *against* the use of (existence of?) adverbs.  It's one of those things I've never understood.  Sure, "I am angry," he said angrily is a poor piece of writing.  But adverbs came into existence in our language for a reason.  They do a job which sometimes can't be done another way as neatly.  Ahem.  "It isn't necessarily so" does not mean the same thing as "It isn't so" - sometimes, adverbs provide important content.

I was really happy to see this, is my point.  It's funny I happened to find this in my Twitter stream just this morning, because I'd been thinking of a post just like the one I'm writing last night before I went to bed - so it's nice to see that no less an entity than Harper Collins chose to Tweet it.

Kevyn Aucoin (RIP) said one that there are NO absolute rules for a makeup artist.  Not one.  Many artists and experts have acknowledged that exceptions make most rules.  I tend to be of this opinion about writing - there is no subject which MUST never be touched - no rule which must never be broken - no way of doing things we must not, cannot try.

In high school, one of my best teachers said we were never to use the words "things" or "stuff."  I refer you to the final sentence in my paragraph above, regarding my adherence to this rule.  Mrs. V. was wonderful and amazing - and the purpose of rules is to teach us something.  But if we never move beyond what we learn in class, our writing will never gain depth beyond what is taught us.  Sometimes, learning must be done by other means than instruction-by-pedagogue.  Several of us chose to respond to Mrs. V. by trying to find ways to use the phrase "stuff of life."  It was the only defense against totalitarianism by someone we loved, and who let us rebel against her in this way because she was no moron.  Her rule did something important for the kids who needed it.  For those of us who pushed at her with a smile ... we learned another way.  And, in my case, I like to think I moved well beyond the need for limiting my concern to the use of elementary terminology.

Adverbs don't just make a sentence memorable, they change its meaning. Sure, there are many times when a more precise verb can narrow the gap in understanding—but some verbs can't be fine-tuned any further. A sigh is just a sigh, but anyone who has ever been in love knows how important it is to distinguish between when she sighs happily and when she sighs otherwise.

This is the role and value of adverbs.  We have adjectives for a reason - modification is *necessary* to our tongue.  True every bit as much of verbs as it is of nouns.  Nouns are not the only parts of speech which can own character so particular it needs to be explicated.  Verbs are not by nature so much more descriptive of themselves than nouns--so it is unfair to deny them the companionship, or support, of adverbial modification.

Less, yes, is always more.  But our language - maybe all language - comes with descriptors for a reason.  Cooking without basil might well ruin dinner tonight.  Likewise, paring creative writing down by removing an entire class of descriptiveness - of *creativity* - lessens what can be done with words.

Why any writer, editor, or agent really wants to see that - I've never properly understood.

Is There Any Irony ...

... in receiving a rejection from a LITERARY agent, consisting solely of two sentence fragments?  One of them was a single word, and even the closing salutation omitted a perfectly cromulent "the".

Huh.