Writing journal, no. 1
City Song: Adjusting course because my characters suggested it.
First off, I think of myself as more of a fiction writer than…anything else. I’ve not written much about it, though, because I generally find it hard to write anything about writing that I haven’t seen written somewhere else and better than I thought I might say it.
But the thing is, I’ve been writing a lot of fiction recently. It’s the main thing occupying my mind, as it happens. It occurs to me that one of the few sorts of writing about writing that I can do better than anyone else is writing about the writing that I am currently doing.
So I’ll start a journal. It might go nowhere. It might go somewhere. I don’t know.
This anecdote rises from a project I’m cooking right now called City Song. It’s a piece of urban fantasy that I’m using to try and answer several questions.
Questions like, “is it possible to add anything interesting to the urban fantasy genre? A genre that, to me, feels flogged past undeath into permanent mush?”
And like, “In spite of my proclivity to write over-serious fiction, is it possible for me to make myself laugh with my fiction?”
And like, “In spite of my talent for inventing the dullest main characters ever set to paper, could I write a character-driven piece of fiction that would keep me coming back?”
And like, “Could Firefly get a fantasy-style retooling?”
The answers to these questions have yet to be determined.
The point is, those are kind of the impetuous sparkles that came together with a few other things and got me working on a writing project that’s got my attention better than a lot of writing projects of mine have. And they’re enough to start with.
Because, basically, City Song is about a small group of ragamuffin thieves living on the outskirts of their society, in the magical shadows of a modern city, and fighting every night to keep hold of the small piece of pie that they manage to scrounge during the day. For the sake of these journal entries, I’ll call the crew the Swickers, for reasons that make sense in the book and don’t matter much here.
I finished the first book in the world earlier this year. It was about the leader of the crew in City Song recruiting a new support caster. I’ve been using a bunch of Dungeons & Dragons terms in my outlining, because it ends up being easier than making up terms that mean what the D&D terms mean. Doesn’t matter too much what a support caster is. What matters is that the first book is, more or less, about recruiting a new member of the Swickers.
The second book — the one I’m working on now — is, as near as makes no difference, about the Swickers entering a haunted house to deal with the forces haunting it.
Now, so, the thing is, I never get scared by books. Not anymore. I used to, but I don’t anymore. I’m reading Stephen King’s It right now, and it’s just sort of grossing me out every now and then. I read The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro, and ’Salem’s Lot by Stephen King and NOS4A2 by Joe Hill. All good books. I enjoyed all of them. Of these books, NOS4A2 got closest to scaring me. But what usually happens, see, is that I just absorb them as adventure stories with particularly dire and hopeless themes.
Which I’ve taken as kind of a dare to myself. So what I thought I might do, see, was write this story about the Swickers entering a haunted house in a fashion that would frighten me. It hasn’t happened in over a dozen years that a book frightened me. May as well try, right?
So I wrote the first couple chapters, all full of mysterious ambiance. I made it clear the events would take place in a location that I would not like to visit — which sort of made me feel like I wanted to go there, because that’s how my mind works.
Getting into about the third chapter, I started to slow down with the writing. It started to be more difficult to get the story out.
And something else started happening about the same time in the story.
In the quiet pauses between the two serious characters arguing talking about the serious seriousness present in the haunted house, the wise-ass character kept asking tactless questions and interrupting the “carefully constructed ambiance” that I wanted so desperately to build.
The thing is, I operate under a couple of philosophies of writing that seemed to be clashing here. Or I claim to operate under them, and I think I have to remind myself of them fairly often, because I seem to forget sometimes.
My main philosophy is that stories are about characters overcoming obstacles in settings. Kind of intuitive, maybe, but it’s an important thing for me to remember, so that I don’t fall into a variety of traps. Traps like falling too in love with settings and forgetting to write about obstacles or characters, or overbalance that triad in some other way.
Which applied here because basically what I had done is made this setting — a good setting — an obstacle-filled one — and then I had put the characters into it.
Then, rather than getting out of the way, I got all involved with that setting.
But the problem is that I wasn’t in the setting. My characters were. Maybe I’d respond to it in particular ways, but my characters were there. And part of the purpose of characters in a story is to provide the reader with a way to get into the situations made by the setting.
Which brings up, in a sideways way, another philosophy that I try to operate under, which is that it’s part of the narrator’s job to get out of the way of the relationship between the reader and the adventures that the characters get into.
I was getting too involved in the story, or trying to. I was trying to force the scene to have a certain attitude, because I WANTED it to be that way.
The thing is, I had coaxed these immensely interesting characters into existence, tried really hard to give them psychology with depth and different facets, and then put them into an interesting setting.
And then they responded in a different way to the way that I would have responded. Because they were there, and I wasn’t.
So when I wanted them to have a serious conversation in this creepy environment, they kept interrupting to point out things to interrupt the creepy mood.
I was being asked to get out of the way.
Message received.
Let’s have an adventure.
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