Re: Moving the story forward


"Catja Pafort" <green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1i05lzc.1sef4y913uazrdN%green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Patricia C. Wrede wrote:

"Catja Pafort" <green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

OK -- can you consciously make up five or six things that *could* work,

No. Doing so breaks the mood and makes it more difficult to find the
right details. It would be authorial intrusion, and my characters resent
that.

and
then look at them and at your character and say "Oh, yes, *this* one's a
match," the way you did for the coin-tossing thing? Or come up with
something like the fruit waffles and then think "No, they don't have
fruit
waffles...what *do* they have instead?" and find it out that way?

I can look at things _in other contexts_ (books, films, photographs) and
notice similarities and 'that would work' or 'that's just like <x>,
except for <difference>. Most of it comes from loading my brain with
countless trivia so I am never in a state of 'this is an x' but have
several varieties of X to choose from, which means I can pick the one
that's best, or make up my own from an understanding of how an X
functions.

Well, if that's how you have to work, it's how you have to work. Can you go
looking through movies, other people's books, etc. for things deliberately,
or do you have to run across them by accident?

I have never written 'she was beautiful' in my life. Well, not in
fiction and meaning it.

Yes; that's why I used it as the comparison. You wouldn't write "she was
beautiful," so why would you write "she was worried"?

I suppose it's because 'she was beautiful' has no meaning for me; while
'she felt worried' carries a host of connotations; I can build a mental
picture from it that is richly textures and satisfactory.

Well, it works the same way -- *for you*, "she was worried" has
connotations, but they don't connect any further than the inside of your own
head. You have to build the picture and then get the *picture* out there on
the page, where everyone else can see it.

Did you see the analysis of the resonances of Turner's river metaphor
that I
did elsethread?

I did. Colour me green with envy.

Mind you, I'm not saying she did all that consciously and deliberately, with
malice aforethought. Sometimes, the best symbols just grow out of using
things where and as they need to be used. But *because* she'd used that
river repeatedly in the plots, it was ready and full of juice when she
needed an appropriate metaphor.

How I did the digging was...well first, I actually thought of a blizzard,
and then I thought "Wait a minute, there have to be things that'll do
this
that aren't weather." So then I thought about how I'd describe different
sorts of quarrels, and I thought of the ones where even the most innocent
statements seem to hurt and you can't get *out* because whichever way you
try, there's some way it stings. And I thought "what else is like that?"

I sometimes *do* feel guilty about asking people to put down the
workings of their thought processes, but right now, it's paying off.
Getting from 'quarrel' to 'bramble patch' mystifies me in a way that
'thinking about the dynamics of different kinds of quarrel' and 'what is
the quarrel like' doesn't. Right now... Farilin is walking on a
tightrope, afraid that any small thing might upset the equilibrium. They
were alright as long as there was a group of them together, and they
could sit on opposite ends of Techin's really large really solid table,
though Hesqui scowled because Alyk was sitting next to Farilin, but now
that it's only the three of them -

I think that there may be some vocabulary problem, too, because when I asked
later on "How does Farilin feel?" what I was trying to get at was something
like that tightrope metaphor. More on this in a minute.


Hmm. I don't think the wall of silence is the problem, the real problem
is that she feels she has to keep them apart or things will get nasty.
Iron bars to keep out burglars. The little channel in which rainwater
and various nasty affluents are contained being blocked or breached and
making a mess of the pavement. A man restraining his dog who tries to
attack another.
The wall of silence is almost a defense - it's not nice, it would be
much better if they could honestly appreciate one another, but until
that day, segregation is better than open hostility. The old city gate,
maybe, from the times when Rhiaton had to keep out armed intruders - the
rest of the wall has long been used for buildings, but the gate remains,
even if it's no longer a barrier.

See, you can do it just fine. You just have to figure out *your own*
process, and especially the place you start from, instead of trying to do
what other people do. If thinking about the dynamics of a relationship in
the abstract is where you have to start to get to concrete details and
metaphors that work, who cares if it's backwards from how lots of other
people do it?

You can start anywhere and move in any direction. To me, it looks as if
you're working from the abstract to the concrete -- from "she has to keep
them apart" to iron bars and rain gutters and a man restraining a dog --
and then, presumably, from those things you build up more of a picture of
the surroundings. Or perhaps you already have a feel for the surroundings,
so you look at the details and know instantly that in this city, the little
rainwater channels are present, but nobody's allowed to keep dogs (so if you
want to use that, it'll have to be a memory of some other place), and only
the rich use iron bars to keep out burglers.

Me, when I'm casting around for things like this and they just won't come
up, I start with what I want to reflect -- the quarrel or whatever -- and
then I cast around for what materials I have to work with. Outside, that's
the weather, the landscape, buildings, passers-by, animals, plants, objects.
Inside, that's the building, the room, the decor, the furnishings, any
people and animals who happen to be there, and maybe what can be seen out a
window. Then I brainstorm them, the way I've been doing in these posts,
until something clicks. But it doesn't have to be done that way.

I really like the business with the gate, by the way.

and came up with the raspberries I used to grow, which were absolutely
vicious if you didn't go in prepared -- those thorns could go through
leather gloves. "Raspberry canes" didn't have the right resonance, for a
general population most of whom would never have grown the prickly
things;

Rasberry canes sounds tame.

Well, yeah; that's why I didn't use those words.

so what else do they get called? Brambles. Briars. Hence, bramble
patch,
briar patch.

Oh, you mean blackberries? Because raspberries would not be referred to
by those names.

No, I mean raspberries. That's where I started. But if you've ever grown
them, you know that raspberry canes and blackberry canes aren't all that
different in appearance or behavior, and most of the descriptions that apply
to one can be applied to the other with very little thought. Especially if
one has not been as careful about keeping up with one's garden as one ought
to have been, and the raspberries have gone wild and made an enormous
tangle.

Water draining down a plughole because their relationship goes down the
drain.

Water draining down a plughole makes eddies, like whirlpools. Whirlpools
in
the water, tornadoes in wind...what would that be for earth or fire?
Sinkholes in the earth, maybe...or quicksand? Maybe just slogging
through
mud that builds up and builds up on your shoes until you can hardly lift
your feet for the ten pounds and more of gunk you're hauling along
with...

I see what you mean by 'don't stop'. Doesn't mean I can do it, but I see
what you mean.

You've never done brainstorming or free-associating? That's all it is,
really.

Then on to the next verb --
what things cut? Knives, swords, scythes, broken glass (might tie in
with
the window...), paper, scissors... And since cutting is a transitive
verb,
you also ask, what things can *get* cut? Skin, flesh, trees, paper,
yarn,
grass, rope, cloth... Mix and match really fast, looking for anything
that
has a resonance; if you can't find one, move along to the next verb.
Like
that.

Wow. You _really_ have a way with words. You make them work hard.

I have a thesaurus and I know how to use it. (Actually, it's just lists.
Like some of the word games from when I was a kid -- how many words can you
make with just the letters in your name, how many things can you think of
that have some association with the word "green," stuff like that.)

Um. It's not necessarily an image. If you're strongly kinesthetic, it's
more likely to be an action...or at least, to *start* with an action.
Like
"breaking" and "cutting," that you mentioned before. Then you work from
the
action to the thing(s) that might be doing the action, and *then* you
maybe
work out what it looks like for a visual image. But maybe you'd do
better
concentrating on *sounds* instead of visual imagery, or on smells.

Sounds, yes, bt mostly, I think, actions. relationships-between-things.
I'm not quite certain how this will work, it's one of those annoying
mind-equivalents of 'on the tip of your tongue' - I have that thought
almost within grasp, but I can't quite get it yet, much less articulate.

Well, actions, then. When you think of the way Farilin is, and the
emotional dynamic between her and the two guys when they're walking down the
street, what kinds of actions fit? You've already mentioned blocking and
defending and segregation; anything else? Then go on from there.

Well, if images don't have associations for you, what does? Actions?
Particular words?

Actions, emotions, movement - real and emotional -, abstracts. I'm the
sort of person for whom 'do _something_ nothing' is a perfectly good
instruction on how to ride. (In case anyone wonders, it describes the
perfect seat - which is relaxed and going with the movement, but
retaining muscle tone rather than being floppy and weak; to maintain
that state of relaxation, you make a series of very very small
adjustments to your position while looking as if you sit absolutely
still without doing anything at all; but you don't reach the state of
appearing to do nothing by literally doing nothing.)

But when you know you have to explain to me what "do _something_ nothing"
means, you can do it, and you do it by describing the muscle tone and the
tiny movements while appearing motionless. Maybe that's how you need to
think about this other stuff -- as a way of explaining the specifics of your
nice, evocative, abstract phrase to people who don't know what you mean by
it?

The only images I can work with are dynamic ones - where the eye is
drawn in and moves around from one point to the next, and each of those
items adds to the story of the picture.

And this is a problem because...? Nothing says your landscape has to
just
sit there, or that you can't have things moving through it in ways that
reflect the action/emotions that are key to your characters. Water
flowing,
leaves or paper blowing around, branches waving in the wind (or
stopping),
wagons rolling, shutters banging, cats and dogs charging after squirrels
or
each other, spear-carriers doing all sorts of things...

It's a problem because I don't write the things I want to read. My
default writing style was, if you recall, 'there was a table and at the
table sat a man. He had a letter in front of him,' and if I don't watch
out, that's the kind of description I come back to - a shopping list of
items present. _Producing_ images that work for me is hard work.

I think I'm having a little trouble getting the hang of this. On the one
hand, ISTR you saying that you "see" the characters, that you can't just
pull stuff out of the air and write it down, it has to "be there" in the
picture in your head. On the other hand, you seem to like to start with
abstract generalities like "she was worried," and my memory of your default
writing style isn't a man at a table with a letter, it's more like "He was
miserably overworked," assuming that from this, the reader would somehow
visualize the table, the man, and the letter.

cats in heat; wind ripping tiles from a roof or branches from
trees...);

The tiles are part of the 'storm' continuum. But cats in heat?
<disbelieving stare> They're noisy, but they're so *different*.

*Of course* they're different. I'm just going with "what's loud and
harsh,
and maybe angry-sounding?"

Oh, I see. You're abstracting in a different place.

It's a way of getting to different kinds of details when you keep coming up
with the same stuff over and over. Like you with the wall and the
thunderstorm -- if you have one image, and you can't seem to get away from
it, come at it from a completely different angle; instead of "there's a wall
between them and everything I come up with has to do with walls," think
about totally other kinds of actions -- what kind of noisemaking might fit,
or what sort of weather, or...

*Anything*. You don't sort stuff out during the
brainstorming; you do that later. (And my little ex-street-kitty can
drive
off the evil enemy cat that's three times her weight, at least, in less
than
30 seconds, with a couple of angry yowls. You bet I put that on the
list...)

There was a wonderful image going round the net, of a bear treed by a
cat. It's all about determination.

Nimmie has all the determination you could want and then some. She was a
street kitty and she didn't like it one bit, and Heaven help the creature
that threatens her nice comfy situation now.

Is Farilin still the viewpoint character for this? Get inside her head
and
look left and right -- she's not likely to think "wall of silence betwen
them," because *she* is between them. So how does she feel? Like she's
been drafted to referee a Little League game between the Hatfields and
the
McCoys? Or like she's being squashed between a rock and a hard place?
What
verbs would go with her feelings -- stifled, suppressed, drafted,
squashed...? What verbs go with what she sees each of the other two
doing -- are they having some sort of silent battle of wills (in which
case
you might want to look at armor metaphors and military similies); or are
they each totally disconnected from the other, wrapped up in their own
gloomy little universe?

See further upthread. This route _doesn't_ get me there. Thinking about
the situation in abstraction - 'what are the dynamics of the situation'
produces a useful list of other situations, some of them static, some of
them not, but 'how does she feel' produced only that wall between them,
which was not the most useful of comparisons.

Well, you got there *somehow*, further up the message. "Feel" is obviously
not the keyword for you, though for me "Farilin is walking on a tightrope,
afraid to do anything that might upset the equilibrium" is exactly what I
was fishing for with "how does she feel?"

So let's go at it the other way for a minute, like on "Jeopardy" -- in your
mind, what is the question to which "Farilin is walking on a tightrope,
afraid to upset the equilibrium" is the answer?

When you brainstorm and/or free-associate about other kinds of things,
what
do you start with and where do you start from?

I don't. I leave it to my backbrain to come up with something useful,

I meant non-writing things. Like, how to get the large fallen tree branch
out of the lilac bushes when you don't have a ladder and it's managed to get
all tangled in them, so that just pulling it will break something, and you
don't have a saw and you have a bad shoulder. Or what to do with a leek,
three carrots, a kiwi fruit, and some cottage cheese that won't involve
running to the store in order to make something for lunch. Or...I don't
know enough real programming to know what the comparable situation would be,
but I bet there is one. When you have to figure out how to do something,
and there may be several things that will get the job done, and you don't
want to settle for the first thing that comes to mind in case there's
something better (and anyway, the first thing may not be all that
obvious) -- how do you figure out what to do?

and if it doesn't, I throw input at it (by reading about a similar
culture or location) and let it work out what it needs. When I was
writing about the province of Kefli, separated by mountains and with a
reputation of _being different_, all I knew was that it was hot and
colourful. I looked at a lot of pictures of Marocco before Kefli gelled
for me, and I scanned pictures on Flickr for anything that jumped out as
fitting the mood of 'this is so weird, I wanna go home' and threw in a
few experiences from Spain and Portugal that were matching the 'hot, no
water, the greens look different, they grow lots of fruit.'

That's certainly one way of doing background, and it's one I use a lot,
actually, but it doesn't always work at the sentence-to-scene level, and
sometimes one has a deadline and can't allow oneself the luxury of waiting
for things to cook at a leisurely pace. Sometimes you have to poke a bit.

It's great for worldbuilding, but it doesn't give me the telling detail
that resonates.

No; that's, for me, a slightly different process. The reason I do the
background stuff and the mood stuff, the stuff you sum up so nicely as "hot,
no water, the greens look different, lots of fruit," is so that when I need
a telling detail, I can pile up a heap of cobblestones, pavers, gravel,
asphalt, dirt, dust, mud, and so on, and know instantly which of them fit
the "feel" (and so are possible road surfaces in this place), and which
absolutely don't. It's a sorting filter.

Thinking about dynamics seems to work better. Brambles. What else snags
you? Roses (a more urban plant, although I think that brambles along
fences and on wasteground are perfectly fitting). Wood. Shoelaces.


Yes. I think I can do soemthing with that.

Good.

Patricia C. Wrede


.

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