Re: Warp and Weft of stories

Patricia C. Wrede <pwrede6492@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> > I thought I had a pretty good way of measuring things - that I could
> > tell which bits were good and which bits needed working on. Now I find
> > that the good bits were flawed, too - so if my instinct tells me that
> > <smaller portion of text> is good and should not be tinkered with, how
> > do I know it's not just me being in luuuurve with my own words and, in
> > fact, they stink?
>
> It probably *was* a good way of figuring out which bits were good and which
> bits needed work...*then*. Things don't stay the same. When your skills
> get better, they don't get better evenly and in the same proportions as what
> you started with. Instead, the stuff that you were, for that level, quite
> good at doing often remains at the same level or improves only a little bit
> (because that's not what you were busy learning, consciously or
> unconsciously), and the stuff that you were *terrible* at, the places where
> all the flaws were, takes a big leap forward. So then all your ways of
> spotting the flawed bits don't work any more, because now the stuff you used
> to not be able to do is the stuff you do better, while the stuff you used to
> do best is lagging behind. (That's the generic "you", BTW -- it looks to me
> as if you are currently in the middle of the big skill leap, which means
> that *nothing* looks as if it's working properly.)


Dat's der bunny. Making a skill leap is *cool* - but also very
frustrating.


> >> > I can't get it right in longhand. I need to type and delete and
> >> > rearrange.
> >>
> >> Piffle. What do you think people did before word processors?
> >
> > They didn't write. I made up stories inside my head from the time I was
> > eleven to the time I was nineteen. Then I got my first computer with
> > Word on it. And henceforth, I was _writing_. I'd never have done that
> > were it not for the ease with which fingers fly over the keyboard.
>
> So nobody wrote any books before 1980? Where do you think all those
> classics came from? What do you think *I* did, first time through? I
> didn't get my first computer until 1980, six months after SHADOW MAGIC sold
> to Ace/Berkley. What's that, chopped liver?

So you're the outlier on the curve... <EG>


Seriously, while I don't doubt that other people can write, and can
write perfectly well without computers, *I can't*.


> People figure out how to do what they need to do. If you are bound and
> determined that you cannot write in longhand under any circumstance, then
> you won't be able to.

I thought I had found a way by writing and typing it up while it was
still fresh, but that method had other flaws, as you pointed out.

> > That's what I'm hoping for. Waiting, with baited breath. Or even bated
> > breath...
>
> Waiting is not going to get you there. Waiting is standing still. You have
> to continue slogging through the jungle, frustrating though it is.

And just to prove that I'm never satisfied, I've just done a second
rewrite of that scene, this time more or less based on memory, borrowing
only a couple of phrases that I felt were particularly well thought-out.

The original scene was 634 words long, and I started a number of
subthreads. The new version, at 1306 words, was twice as long. And when
I had finished this one, it weighed in at 2321 words. I *think* it has
now the right amount of description in it - it has none of the jumpyness
of the first version where events just followed one after the other -
but, errm, this is *not* frustrating?

At *this* rate, every volume will weigh in at an Ash, and that, we are
in agreement, would *not* be commercial.

(Ok, I should stop panicking. To a degree. After all, five volumes
wouldn't be the death of it, which gives me _some_ breathing space *if I
really need it*)



> >> 2) You aren't *going* to be able to do it instinctively until you can do
> >> it *consciously*. Nobody sits down at the piano, gets told "Now, you put
> >> your fingers here and move them like this," understands it, and then has
> >> their fingers move instinctively just the way their teacher described.
> >> They have to *practice*. *Consciously*.
> >
> > The moment I try to *think* about a movement, I get my limbs in a knot.
>
> "Consciously" in the above sentence does not necessarily mean "thinking
> about it" in that sense. I ought, perhaps, to have said "deliberately," for
> preference, but I didn't, and there it is.

Doesn't make much difference, because I don't deliberate - I seek to
recreate a feeling - the feeling that someone else has confirmed is
'right' - and my body memory recognises it, and it is good.


> > It took me years to figure this out, but yes, I really need to dump the
> > knowledge in my subconcious. It's a left brain/right brain thing, and
> > mine don't crossover very well. So I move fingers until I get it right,
> > then I store that feeling. At least with physical things, a teacher can
> > put my body in the right positions. With writing, you can't.
>
> And it's the "move your fingers until it's right" part that I'm referring to
> above -- how you get it into your subconscious in the first place, so you
> can *use* it instinctively and intuitively from then on. However you go
> about getting things in there, that has to happen *first*.

I just... move, and calibrate against the results, and hopefully have
someone else to give me 'hotter/colder' hints while I do it and 'that's
it' when I get it right, so that I'll recognise rightness more easily
next time.


> So how *do* you normally go about getting a writing technique into *your*
> particular backbrain?

I come across an explanation that makes sense, that fits into my
particular, peculiar model of how a story feels on an intuitive basis,
and I read until I can see it in other people's writing, at which point
I can see it in whatever flows out of my own feather, and then I can
stop and make small corrections until the results feel right. And when
I've done it for a while, I can explain it to others, at which point
I've _understood_ it and I don't need to give it any thought.

Only it seems I preloaded my brain with some unhelpful conceptions when
first I started to write, or maybe even sooner.


> > So if the measure is 'words that can stay' I'm still not sure I can tell
> > the brilliant passages from the bad ones.
>
> You don't actually have to, certainly not right away. What you have to do
> is the best job *you can manage*; once you've done as well as you know how,
> you send it out and let an editor decide.

Aye. That's just my inner perfectionist moaning, take no notice of her.


> >> >> > [Storm Rising vs. Sheepfarmer's Daughter]
> >
> >> > Well, Sheepfarmer's Daughter starts with action - a quarrel in which
> >> > Paks seems to gain the upper hand (she escapes a beating, won't have to
> >> > wed a guy she dislikes), then the tables are turned on her (her father
> >> > bars the door, she can't go back) and she gets on with her intentions
> >> > of
> >> > joining the army (ultimately, a win).
> >>
> >> On the *MICRO* level, I said. Sentence structure. Action vs. dialog
> >> (interior or exterior) vs. description vs. summary. Words: adjectives
> >> and
> >> adverbs vs. verbs and nouns. *NOT* theme and related-to-the-book-ness.
> >
> > What am I looking for?
>
> Patterns of words and sentences; *how* the writer achieved a particular
> effect. Stuff like that comment I made a few posts back, to the effect that
> SHEEPFARMER'S DAUGHTER has specific details and actions alternating with
> speech/dialog, while STORM RISING has specific details and description
> alternating with interior dialog.

I can follow you when you say it, but I can't see it. When I get too
close to the text I lose all sight of how a word, a sentence, a
paragraph serves the greater good.


> >> The more I look at your analysis, the more I think that maybe part of
> >> your difficulty is that you haven't *been* looking at the micro level,
> >> ever.
> >
> > I've told you that from the start. No, I haven't, because I don't
> > understand it. I don't understand how it works. I'm not even sure I
> > understand what it *is*, because it's not just rhythm, or choice of
> > words, or any of the stats I've mentioned above. I can give you a page
> > full of measurements, but it won't *say* anything about the text, or at
> > least, it won't say anything _to me_.
>
> I don't think I quite comprehended until now just how very much you don't
> understand this part. You've *seen* plenty of crit and analysis and
> examples on this newsgroup; is it that they simply don't make sense to you,
> or that the principles slide out of your brain as soon as you aren't looking
> at an actual example, or what?

I catch the occasional glimpse, like noticing that someone is using
generic words ('food, drink') when they could be providing telling
detail ('tapas' or 'steak-and-kidney pie', 'cocktails' or 'ale') or the
realisation that every piece of chicklit I have read works on the same
principle - by being outrageous *throughout*. The heroine does not wake
up next to a tall stranger in need of a shower, she wakes up next to a
seven-foot accountant who smells of fish and goes 'Hawr' a lot. The
employers-from-hell aren't just the proverbial joined-at-the-hip couple,
they were matching tracksuits and say 'we like this, don't we darling?'
In an ordinary book, you might have one or two of those details, but
chicklit seems to just string them together.

In the crit and analysis I can often see plenty of things that are wrong
with the samples, and my mind concentrates on those, I can't recall any
discussion about _exact word choice_ other than the 'she sat, she sat
down, she seated herself' in which I consented that it probably made a
difference - but it didn't help me in knowing which to choose, other
than 'I do it by instinct.'


> I don't want to do another analysis or example that isn't going to do you
> any good.

> I think what I'm asking is: What do you need, in order to get this?

If we can figure that out, I'll be halfway there.


I guess a good part of it will be to work out what is possible and how
those things serve... tension? Moving the story forward? Creating
particular associations in the reader? Keeping the reader hooked? All of
the above?



> >> If you've been trying to do "the sort of thing that the writer is doing
> >> in
> >> STORM RISING, rather than the sort of thing the writer is doing in
> >> SHEEPFARMER'S DAUGHTER," then it's not enough to know *what* is being
> >> done;
> >> you also need to know *how the writer did it*. And the "how" is usually
> >> concentrated down on the sentences-and-words level of the story.
> >
> > The problem being, of course, that there are still so many patterns
> > which I hadn't seen before, the abundance of short little arcs and the
> > ebb and flow of tension in Sheepfarmer's daughter, for instance, that I
> > tend to feel 'well, that's enough to learn for now' and put off the
> > uncomfortable stuff for later. Patterns and how they are connected are
> > my strong suit, little individual building blocks are not; I need to
> > know how they relate to a larger entity before they become useful.
>
> But there are patterns on the micro-level, too, and techniques for achieving
> a certain effect that depend on sentence-level stuff. To take one example
> from the passage you posted back awhile:
>
> > Geflan felt clumsy in comparison. Lethal though the rapier looked,
> > this
> > was not a duel to the blood. Much was at stake, Geflan's honour,
> > Geflan's future, but not his life.
> >
> > Not yet.
>
> You're using two different techniques here to increase the importance of the
> duel and emphasize Geflan's reactions to it: First, you're using
> parallelism in "Geflan's honor, Geflan's future, but not his life." You up
> the stakes with each of the first two things that's at stake -- not just
> honor, but also his future -- and then lower the tension with "but *NOT* his
> life." You underlined it by breaking the parallel structure sllightly; not
> "Geflan's honor, Geflan's future, but not Geflan's life," just "...but not
> his life," which is right because the two things that are labeled as
> "Geflan's" *are* at stake, but the biggest, most important thing (his life)
> *isn't*.
>
> And then you use the second technique -- the one-line, sentence-fragment
> paragraph -- to yank the tension right back up with "Not yet." The tension
> would increase with that phrase, even if you hadn't paragraphed, but setting
> it off like this gives it a lot of extra emphasis and significance, by
> making it stand out.
>
> *That* is the kind of thing I was talking about.

Oh dear. We're strictly in fly-by-seat-of-pants territory here. It is
useful to see how that sentence works, but now I am wondering how one
might make the rest of the passage equally strong. There is a hint of
the sentence level mirroring the whole here, is there?
Just when I thought that all I had to come to grips with was
description. Hah.


> On a macro level, you can
> say "Geflan is really worried about the duel; it's really, really important"
> or "Geflan has a lot at stake and he's really tense, even though it's not a
> duel to the blood." But the answer to "Exactly how did the writer make you
> *feel* that tension? How did she make you know that this was *really,
> really important* and *really tense*, even though the actual words look like
> they're saying 'well, it's not that dangerous; he's not fighting for his
> life, after all'?" is right there in those two paragraphs, with those
> particular words and those particular techniques.

I'm staring at this in bewilderment.

>It's a pattern that can be recognized and analyzed.

This is a whole new dimension to writing, though, isn't it? Because
you're doing more than one thing at the same time, and you're even
playing them out against each other. It's another form of inclueing,
just a very subtle one, and instead of weaving in things about the
character or the setting in seemingly incongruous passages you're
inclueing - what? Tension? Importance? Something else?


> And unless you absolutely *can't* learn
> anything from recognizing and analyzing it (which I doubt, or we wouldn't be
> having this discussion at all), I think it can be very useful to do that
> sort of analysis, so that one can understand and store various
> micro-patterns (one's own, or other people's) for later use (conscious or
> intuitive).

I don't think I've ever seen a 'what works' analysis on micro level.
I've seen plenty of 'what doesn't work' - wrong word choice, wrong level
of diction, incoherence etc, and I can spot some of them, but I've never
seen how you can use these techniques to serve a larger entity. Taking
the hyperbole I mentioned above, I don't think I've ever had guidance
_why_ one would use it, and what could be achieved with it.

A few examples showing how micromanagement of words can strengthen the
obvious meaning, or even convey a different one would be appreciated; as
long as they don't interfere with your revision.


[grounding a scene]

> Or, alternatively, to do the grounding description stuff *all* the time, and
> then take it out when you don't need it. Which would certainly give you
> more practice in doing it.

I'll attempt that, but I don't know how long I will continue it.


> > I'll go with the revision. I don't have to worry about worldbuilding or
> > plotting, just about the execution; and it needs to be revised anyway.
> > I'm not sending it out like that; and unlike my first novel (which I've
> > left out of the equation, juvenalia & all that) I don't think it is
> > fundamentally flawed.
>
> OK. What does it need done to it?

- More description.
- Less internalisation in description (using external or neutral
description rather than having everything filtered through the PoV
character), characterisation (rather than what Rhailed feels or guesses
or knows about each character) and plot (not having it take place so
much in Rhailed's head)
- making sure there are events or descriptive passage for Rhailed to
react to
- the wizardry needs streamlining, the first few chapters have a few
spells I later decided weren't possible after all
- pruning out of budding subplots that I thought were going to be
important which later turned out to have been dead ends after all.
- general consistency check, working in my notes

That's all, really.

If I double my current speed and manage a chapter a week, I'll be
finished in a year.


Sigh. I should have become a short story writer...


Catja
.

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