Dissecting A Story: Way to Blue

Writers often seem to loathe the thought of commenting on their own writing process, and even more so upon their finished stories.  This is probably a good thing, and I for the most part concur.  A finished piece of writing should stand on its own, without explanation or annotation.   It is the reader’s right to discover the charms of the tale on their own, and let the story be what it is for them and them alone.

Still, as a reader, I often times long to know what a writer was thinking when they crafted a particular story.  (I wonder this perhaps even more as a writer as well)  For this reason, I don’t have a problem if an author comments upon their own story.  I just think the comments should follow the story, so the reader has that chance to let the story enchant them on its own first.

Since this is a writing blog, I often comment on the craft of writing, and perhaps offer a line or two of commentary on a story of mine from time to time, but I’ve never really dissected one of my own stories in detail.  I’ve been considering doing this, however, as a exercise unto itself.  I am still in the process of growing as a writer (something I hope never stops, actually), so I think the endeavor might be not only of interest to a few readers, but beneficial for me as well. 

I’ve decided to comment upon the genesis of a recently published story of mine called Way to Blue.  Before I begin, however, I ask that you give it a quick read.  It won’t talk long.  It’s a piece of flash fiction.  You can read it here.

Way to Blue had a twofold origin.  The first was a germ of an idea that I had summer before last for a story about a fairy who falls in love with a mortal woman, and he is so flummoxed he loses the ability to fly.  That idea sat unrealized for quite some time.  While it was certainly an intriguing premise, I just couldn’t move forward with a story about a romance between a fairy and a mortal.  The second half of the origin lay in one of my tendencies to use music as inspiration.  I was shuffling my iPod with such intent in mind and the Nick Drake song Fly came on.  I’ve always loved Drake’s music, and particularly this song, so I decided to write a story inspired by it. 

As I wrestled with myself in that ‘blank page’ moment that all writers fear, thoughts of my ‘fairy in love’ idea came back to me.  I decided this might be the time to try to develop it. 

For some reason, however, a story about a fairy didn’t seem to fit the Nick Drake song.  The song is certainly about losing the ability to fly, at least metaphorically so, but the song is so somber and sad that it didn’t seem to fit a story about fairies.  Fairies felt too ‘happy’ for this song, and also they carry a lot of historical and literary baggage of their own.  Readers expect certain things from fairies, so using them didn’t seem to work.  Fairies certainly fly, but it is not integral to what they are.  I needed beings for which flying was so central that it was at the core of their very being.  For this reason, I invented the winged ‘Cloudfolk,’ beautiful and humanlike in size and appearance, save for their feathered wings with which they flew.  Making this change was the first step in getting the story to flow, for I no longer had the baggage of ‘fairy lore’ holding me back. 

Before I continue, let’s listen to the song. 

Click the play button to hear Nick Drake’s Fly.

Beautiful, eh?  Almost all of Drake’s music is like this.  Drake’s haunting voice and ethereal guitar tunings weave a tapestry of yearning tinged with sadness and solemnity.  I think this song is about someone who has tried and failed, and now wallows in the sorrow it has brought.  He asks perhaps for a second chance (Please, give me a second grace), or at least forgiveness.  He is also perhaps embarrassed by the act. (Give me a second face).  Whatever he has done, he has fallen, literally or metaphorically, far down.  Now he ‘Just sits on the ground in your way.’

Now, he can only ‘sit on the fence in the sun’ and ‘watch the clouds role by, and never deny, it’s really too hard for to fly.”  He contemplates the difficulty of what he has tried to do, and feels only futility in his act of trying, either metaphorically or literally, ‘to fly.’  I love this part of the song.  Who among us hasn’t tried and failed at something, particularly love, something which makes us feel like flying.  I love the particular phrasing he uses in this line of the song.  He doesn’t say ‘it’s really hard to fly,’ he says ‘it’s really too hard FOR TO fly.’  I don’t know exactly what Drake meant by this (I’d love to ask him, but alas, he died forty years ago), but there is something exceedingly eloquent and highly literary in that phrasing.  I also remember the first time I heard the song, I misheard the lyric, hearing instead ‘it’s really too hard, butterfly,’ as if he were addressing the little fluttery, delicate creature of that name.  It almost makes sense that way, too.

The song continues on to its dreamy, languid conclusion.  And thus, back to the story. 

After letting the song play over and over again, I still struggled to begin writing the story.  And then, inspiration, as it thankfully does, hit.  Instead of forcing myself to write this tale from the point of view of Nick, the stranded male cloudperson in love, I recast it and began to write from the perspective of his friend, a cloudgirl named Winny.

From this POV, the tale began to flow, and I finished it quickly.  I didn’t know when I first started out that Winny was in love with Nick, but this soon revealed itself to me, and the tale thus became hers, and not Nick’s.  I always love it when I’m surprised in the course of my own writing. 

With the tale complete, it needed a title.  I already had another story called ‘Fly,’ but more to the point that didn’t seem like the right title for the tale anyway.  Ultimately I chose ‘Way to Blue,’ which is the title of another Nick Drake song.  I’m very happy with the title, as it is a double entendre of sorts.  On the one hand, it speaks of the ‘way to blue,’ i.e., the ‘way to the sky,’ which is of course for them literally flying off into the sky, but also love.  But it also phonically echoes the phrase ‘way too blue,’ as in ‘way too sad,’ which both characters are at the conclusion of the story.

I got a lot of great feedback from friends and readers on this one.  One of the comments at Every Day Fiction was as follows:  “A charming story about the impetuousness of love. Winny loves Nick, Nick loves Nena, and Nena loves the boatman’s son. All that’s left is for the boatman’s son to see Winny and become smitten in his own case of unrequited love.”  I love that scenario.  It’s reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night.  I just might have to write a longer version of this tale, and explore such things!   

Paintings and Prose

My story, The Luncheon of the Boating Party, just came out today over at Every Day Fiction.  It was inspired by the Renoir painting of the same name:

I use many things to inspire stories—music, random collections of words, little snippets of conversation I overhear, dreams—but sometimes I also use images to inspire stories.   These can be random photographs I’ve found in a book or on the internet, something someone posts on Facebook, or in the case of this story, something hanging on the wall of my very own house. 

I’ve always loved Renoir’s Boating Party, and a print of it has been hanging in my breakfast nook since I moved into my house fourteen years ago.  The figures in the painting just look like wonderful people having a wonderful time, and staring into the painting always stirs a longing in me. 

Images can be wonderful sources for inspiration in one’s writing.  Sometimes you just stare into the picture and wonder what the story is, and it slowly reveals itself in your head.  Sometimes the story will have a similar feel as the painting, but sometimes it might take off on a tangent and end up somewhere you’d never expect.  In the case of my Boating Party story, the painting itself is a character, driving the actions of the protagonist. 

I’ve used other paintings as inspiration, and I’m particularly fond of the Impressionists  and Art Nouveau.  Thus I’ve written stories based on paintings by Toulouse Lautrec, Monet, Manet, Mucha,  and Van Gogh.  For the latter I did three pieces of flash based on each of his famous ‘starry’ paintings, ‘Starry Night,’ ‘Starry Night Over the Rhone,” and “Café Terrace at Night.”  Hopefully, these stories will see the light of day sometime in the future.

Starry Night - Vincent Van Gogh

Starry night Over the Rhone - Vincent Van Gogh

Cafe Terrace at Night - Vincent Van Gogh

All right, time to go write!

Chris



Today's Writing Challenge

My normal target goal for each day of writing is one thousand words.  I usually exceed this, but a thousand is very doable and good for those days when the words just don’t seem to want to come.  It also works out well that a thousand words is the commonly accepted length for flash fiction, which I really enjoy writing these days.   If I can’t seem to get anything else going, I can usually brainstorm up a flash piece and knock it out for the day.  Sometimes they suck.  Sometimes they’re acceptable.  Every once in a while, I get a really good one.  Those are the keepers.

Some days, like I said, I exceed my thousand-word limit.  I easily hit two thousand quite often, and sometimes even three.  I’ve exceeded five thousand a couple of times, and my all time record is sixty-five hundred, which I did on a day when my wife was out of town, and I was in a groove, so I decided to skip dinner and just keep writing until late in the night.

I’ve been getting a lot of writing done lately, which is a good thing, but much of it hasn’t been prose writing.  I’ve picked up a project  to do a rewrite on a screenplay for a producer friend of mine, and I’m also doing some writing for the Bail Out web series (and hopefully, someday, TV series) that I’m also working on as First Assistant Director.  There’s nothing wrong with this...any writing is good writing.  I’m not opposed to continuing to work in screenwriting from time to time, so it’s good to keep my skills up in that area, and all the words count toward my daily goals.   But my first love is prose writing, so want to keep working in that area as much as possible.  Since I know I have some screenwriting commitments this week, I decided that today I would do a marathon prose writing session, and see if I can beat my personal best and crank out seven thousand words of prose today. 

As I type this, I am already three hundred and fifty words toward that goal (blog entries count).  So, here goes.  I’ll report back on how I did. 

UPDATE:  Mission Accomplished.  7271 words in six hours.  Whew!  I'm spent!  Two stories knocked out. An SF piece and a mainstream piece.  

Leaping into the Year

Just noticed that February has almost slipped by and I don’t have a blog post for the month.  So I figured I’d better get something whipped up, and what better day to do it on than that most elusive of rare days, February 29^th. 

So, first, an update, I guess.  Work on my novel “Behavior” started in mid January, and progress was good out of the gate.  I got about 20,000 words of background material, world building and whatnot written, but then I hit a wall, and things have been slow going.  I think there are two reasons for that.  First, I’ve exhausted all the ideas that had been floating around in my head about the futuristic society in which the novel takes place (it is currently set in 2064), and I guess I need time for new ones to fill it.  I’m also used to doing invention work on the fly, as I write the story itself, so I may just have to dig in and start the narrative, so that I can see what corners of my world need to be created and fleshed out, even if I have to revise significantly later. 

The second thing that has slowed me up is I’ve gotten back into filmmaking in a minor way.  I was heavily into this several years ago, but pretty much got out of it to focus on my prose writing.  But I have a friend who I worked on a pilot for two years ago, and he is starting production on more episodes, and asked if I would come back to help with production.  I agreed, as I enjoy filmmaking, (I’m currently working as First Assistant Director on the shoot, as well as doing a bit of writing on the scripts) and figured it would be a nice change of pace.  But like anything, it takes a lot of time, and in the last two weeks I’ve been working on it, I’ve made little progress on my novel, or any other prose writing.  So I’m going to have to see if I can get my head back into the game, and make the novel priority number one, or else bow out of the film project at some point in the future.  We shall see. 

On the publication front, I’ve had a few sales since the beginning of the year, and a couple of stories have come out as well.  Every Day Fiction just bought “Way to Blue,” my story of a winged man who can no longer fly, inspired by the Nick Drake songs “Fly” and the eponymous “Way to Blue.”   Used Gravitons released “Rememories” in January.  This story, about a disfigured man who visits ‘mem joints’ to relive his former life in his head over and over again, got ripped to shreds by a professional author at Odyssey, but I made a few changes (though probably not as many as he suggested) and I’m happy with it.  Sometimes you just have to let a story get out there and see what the world thinks.  Finally “The Ale Wife,” a story about a farcical courtship with unexpected results, will be published by Mirror Dance in March. 

My wife and I watched the Woody Allen film Midnight In Paris last weekend, and we quite enjoyed it.  The fact that it featured some of the “Lost Generation” writers as characters really made me want to reread some of these authors.  Hemingway, Fitzgerald and some of the others were heroes to me during college, when I read pretty much their entire oeuvre.  The film also brought the romance...the ideal...the fanciful dream of the writer’s life back to my mind.  The day to day life of a writer in reality can be pretty banal, though satisfying.  Sometimes one has to let one’s mind wander a bit, and look at things from a distant place, to realize that the romance, the ideal, and the dream are indeed there, just as they were for Ernest, and F. Scott, and Gertrude, and all the rest.  

"Fun Project" finished

Well, I finished my ‘fun project,’ yesterday, which entailed completing the fantasy novel that I started writing when I was nineteen.  The novel finished out at 90,992 words, of which 39,763 are new words added to the twenty-four-year-old manuscript. 

As I mentioned I would do in a previous post, I just blazed through the writing, using the forty-six page outline as it was written, and I didn’t take any time to worry about fixing all the major problems that this piece held.  It was a tedious and even painful thing to do at times, but I feel overall the effort was a great learning experience, and it feels good to be able to say that I’ve created even a crude, quite bad, rough draft of a novel. 

Laundry listing all the problems this novel had, or the things I’ve learned from finishing it, is probably beyond the scope of this blog.  But I’ll highlight a few of them here.  First off, the novel was quite derivative, drawing heavily on Tolkien and his imitators, as well as the game Dungeons and Dragons.  This in itself is not inherently uncharacteristic of the fantasy genre, but I myself find I wish to be more original in my writing, and that alone will probably preclude me from ever revisiting this work as something to revise.  I do like the characters, and a few elements of the plot, so perhaps these will find their way into a future work.  We shall see. 

Another problem that I found with the work was massive amounts of point of view (POV) shifts throughout, all of which were not handled very well by me.  I had three main characters in this novel, and I tended to jump between all three throughout the work.  While the third person omniscient POV is a legitimate form, it requires the most skillful of writers to handle it well (Mario Puzo’s The Godfather comes to mind) and I feel such is beyond me at this point.  It was definitely beyond me then.  This POV, if not handled well, can be very distracting for the reader, and can often thrust them out of the narrative.  It is much safer to stick to third person limited POV in most cases.  George R. R. Martin succeeds with multiple POVs in his Song of Ice and Fire series, but he handles it by breaking the work into chapters with a single viewpoint character for each. 

Another problem I found was the overall lack of danger for the characters throughout most of the novel, and the way that they usually found their way out of danger with too much ease in most cases.  A writer really needs to pile it on to their characters, and make them work hard toward their goals.  Lots of ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ moments are good as well.  The stakes should always be raised again and again and again, higher and higher, until the ultimate crisis moment when it looks like all is lost.  Sadly this work just did not do that in most cases. 

The novel overall seemed to lack what I’ll call depth, for lack of a better word.  Characters, particularly minor ones, were often wooden and two dimensional.  Even the major ones were two dimensional in many ways, not to mention the setting itself.  An author really needs to create a background for their characters and world that not only provides depth and realism, but also motivation for the actions and desires of the characters.  I’m not saying every novel needs the level of background that Tolkien created, but I think there is a happy medium between that and simply writing what only appears on the page.  This can probably be accomplished in many ways.  There are writers who do vast amounts of ‘world building’ before they begin the manuscript proper, and there are those that simply create as they go.  Both are valid, but there is no excuse for not doing it at all.  I think for me, a combination of both may be the way to go.  Since I’ve mostly worked in short stories, I’ve mainly been of the ‘create as you go’ school of thought, but for a novel, particularly a novel as complex as the ones that I want to write, I think I may try a little bit of pre-manuscript world building to get me where I want to be. 

And so, with a little sadness but also excitement I leave this world and these characters behind.  Sad, because I have enjoyed revisiting them again, breathing a little life in them and completing something that I started.  Excitement, because I am now ready (I think) to tackle the SF novel that has been gestating in my brain for several years. 

But, a few short story ideas have presented themselves over the course of the last few weeks, so now the decision is, do I knock those out, or move right into the next novel.  Only time will tell. 

On the reading front, I’ve just started George R. R.  Martin’s Game of Thrones novel, the first volume of A Song of Ice and Fire.  I very much enjoyed the HBO series based on this novel last year, and am surprised at myself for never getting around to reading this series.  I’d read a little bit of Martin’s work before, mostly short stories and the novella Sandkings (which I highly recommend), but this is the first of any of his longer fiction that I’ve read.  So far, I must say, I’m enthralled.  Martin is a master storyteller, and he has crafted a certain masterpiece here.  His plot is far-reaching and complicated and the history of his world so complex it almost reaches a Tolkienian level.  His world feels gritty and real, and he doesn’t pull any punches.  I would love to know more about how he built his world.  My only dislike with is prose is his heavy use of adverbs, which I’ve always been taught weaken one’s writing, but such is a minor complaint against what amounts to one of the best books I’ve read in quite a while.  I look forward to the next few volumes with great fervor. 

Happy New Year!

Happy new year to all!

I meant to do a quick post at year’s end, but here I am, two days late.  Ah, well, better late than never. 

THE YEAR IN REVIEW:

Looking back, 2011 was a great year on the writing front for me.  Final totals were 416,976 words written, which comprised 1,367 pages--by far the best I have ever done.  I also met my goal of submitting 100 stories by year’s end, an accomplishment of which I’m quite proud.  Of these 100, thirteen were published, sixty-seven were rejected, and twenty were still out there as of the end of the year.  The new year has so far brought two more rejections, and, huzzah!, another acceptance. 

This acceptance was for my story entitled “The Ale Wife,” to Mirror Dance Magazine.  This is a humorous little tale of false assumptions and misconceptions that I am happy has found a home, and I’m glad to place something at Mirror Dance, which I enjoy reading.  It is edited by the brilliant Megan Arkenberg, who has placed a great deal of finely-crafted stories in many well-respected venues.  When I see her name on a piece, I always know I’ve an intriguing, well-told tale in store for me.   

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m now hard at work finishing an old novel from the 80s as a little inspirational and educational side project to help ramp me up to working on the SF novel that will be my main focus in the first part of 2012.  I was averaging about 3,000 words a day on this before the holidays hit and the house filled up with family, but I’d knocked out about 16,000 words on it before that, and I’m now back at it. 

Here’s to a great 2012!

Chris

Revisiting an Old Manuscript

So I mentioned in my last post that since I reached the milestone of 400,000 words for the year, I planned to spend the balance of December, and possibly a little of the beginning of next year, working on a little ‘fun’ project.  Well, allow me to elaborate. 

First, a little background. 

When I was nineteen years old, during the spring and summer of 1987, I wrote a novel.  More precisely I wrote a complex outline and summary for a novel (46 single-spaced pages) and then wrote almost two hundred pages of the novel itself.  Something then discouraged me, and I put the novel in the proverbial drawer, where is has languished for over twenty-four years. 

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Novels written by teenagers usually aren’t that good.  (and no, no apologies to Christopher Paolini)  This one wasn’t the exception, either.   It was a standard Tolkien Fantasy knockoff with Elves, Dwarves, Dragons and such, set in a standard medieval Europe-like milieu.  Such books were all the rage back in the seventies and eighties, with the likes of Terry Brooks, Stephen R. Donaldson, David Eddings and others cranking ‘em out.  I lapped ‘em up like crazy, so it is no surprise that such was the leanings of my first attempt at a novel. 

I came across that manuscript in an old filing cabinet recently, and I actually read it in its entirety--with much delight.  And no, it wasn’t that good, but it was fun to see what my skills were at that point in my life, and also my weaknesses.  I was a little disappointed when I got to the chapter where it abruptly ended.  Yes, in spite of how bad it was, I was enjoying reading it. 

I found a note I’d placed in the same folder where I’d kept the manuscript that outlined my reasons for abandoning it.  I’d been browsing the bookstore that day and I came upon a published fantasy novel that I decided had quite a few similar elements as my little opus, and I think the experience just deflated me.  I wrote a few more pages, but the burning drive to finish the novel just wasn’t there.   I think I’d been so driven because I felt I’d had a very original premise for this novel.   One that hadn’t been done yet in genre fantasy. 

That premise?  My main character was a dwarf who wanted to become a wizard.  And you see, according to the tropes of the day (as started by Tolkien, but reinforced by later, copycat authors, and of course Dungeons and Dragons), dwarves are inherently non-magical.  So I had a character, and a seemingly impossible goal, and I sat down and created a rich but quite derivative world in which to tell this story.  I did a lot of research into Norse myth for this work, and I think that is why there were so many similarities to the published novel I came across (which was, for full disclosure, called “The Plains of the Sea,” by Neil Hancock), right down to several names I’d used.   Old Mr. Hancock had mined the Norse mythos as thoroughly as I had--perhaps even more so. 

So, flash forward twenty-four years.  I’ve reread the manuscript, and while I don’t think I’ve got anything even remotely usable on my hands, I did enjoy it, and I sort of wished I’d finished it way back then.   So now, I’m thinking, just for fun, I may do just that.  It shouldn’t be too hard, as I’ve got the detailed outline and summary that I created, I just have to pick up where I left off and complete the prose.  The only question is, of course, would this be a valuable use of my time? 

Before I answer that, I’ll say that the original writing of this novel WAS a good use of my time.  I taught myself a great deal about writing that summer by simply going through the process.  The technique of writing an outline and summary for the whole thing first was a good and useful method, one which I think I will use on future novel projects that I have planned.  Then going through the day to day writing of the thing, even though I didn’t finish it, still proved to me that I could handle a work of that complexity. 

So, on the one hand, finishing out a novel that I feel has no hope of success would seem on the surface a waste of time.  But, I don’t plan to spend that great of a deal of time on it...maybe six weeks or so, and I think there can be some benefit.  I’d wanted to start on my novel called “Behavior” at the beginning of next year, but I still feel my mind is geared toward the short fiction I’ve been writing, and I need to do something to sort of ‘ramp myself up’ to the task of writing a novel.  So I think the exercise won’t be completely without benefits.  I’ll no doubt learn a few things along the way, so I think it could be time well spent.  Most established authors maintain that a writer has one or more ‘bad novels’ in their system that need to be gotten out before their better work emerges, so perhaps “Shillelagh” (as this novel was titled) could be one of those. 

So, I’ve set a few rules for myself in this endeavor.  The main one is that I’m going to stick to the story as plotted by my nineteen-year-old self, plot holes and all.  Also, no going back and fixing issues in the first two hundred pages that were already written.  (It is full of problems like POV issues, gaps in the causal chain, unresolved character arcs, etc).  As for the rest of the writing, if I can address any of these issues at the sentence level, then that is fine, but no major changes at the chapter level or greater. 

Part of me also wants to try to channel that nineteen-year-old’s voice when I write the rest of it, but that might just be asking a bit too much, and really isn’t necessary, since I’m writing this only for an audience of one...me. 

So, here I go, revisiting some characters and a world that has sat frozen in time for over half my life, waiting for the tale to be told.  I’m almost excited to begin this endeavor, and I think that nineteen year old I once was would be pleased.  Get ready to find your magic, little dwarf!

I’ll keep you posted on this little project as it develops. 

Chris