When to stop cracking the books, and other thoughts on writing
I actually managed to finish a story recently, which now resides in temve's new zine, 'The Indigo Warrior'. This is fanfic with a vengeance, because it is based around an AU story that Tem-ve created, placing the TPM characters in early seventeenth century Japan. So the rest of us were writing bonus tracks in Tem-ve's universe, which was modelled on Lucas' characters and Japanese history and Tem's own inspiration from a naughty bit of Japanese gay art... Yeah. Very referential :)
As usual, I was...somewhat behind deadline in finishing it. But, oh friends, I was not last! For even after I was done, lferion was still working desperately on her contribution. For reasons of extreme incestuousness, in the madly rushed week that then resulted she would send me what she'd been writing into the wee hours of every morning, and I would beta it in time to talk her through possible revisions the next afternoon.
What this meant was that I got to see from very close up the working processes of another writer, and to compare them to my own when tackling pretty much the same base reference material. So, over two posts, here are some thoughts on writing, and the research that goes into doing it.
I've rarely come to a story with such a sharp purpose in mind - which was to change my writing style with a vengeance. More on that below; but first, the stuff I did before I started writing.
Tem-ve muttered to us about the zine years in advance of publication, and as usual I said that I'd like to, while internally positive I had no ideas at all that would work. And lo and behold, a few weeks later I knew exactly what I wanted to write about - the characters a number of years after the events in her story - and what the whole plot structure would be.
In other words, if you're thinking this post might be enlightening as to how another author comes up with plots or ideas - forget it. My experience, which I'm slowly coming to trust, is that the best way to generate an idea for a given challenge is to let the subconscious stew on it. The 'right' thing will eventually pop up from the murky depths; what's important for me at that early stage is not to flog the wrong, misleading thing that's also popped up to death, and get discouraged. If an idea is birthed but then won't get to its legs and run, no matter how tempting it is it should be turned into Bambi steaks and digested again, for possible later regurgitation in another form. Ew. Now that I think of it, that's a really gross metaphor.
Anyway, so the plot was not a problem, and the characters... Well, I had a lot of latitude with them, since I could either go with Tem's AU, or bring them back a bit closer to TPM canon, or veer off in my own sweet direction. But I knew that the samurai bit had to come in somewhere, so when I came across The Sword and the Mind, a Japanese sword-fighting manual written at exactly the period of Tem's story, on special in Borders... Perfect.
My friends, I read it. It wasn't easy, because there is nothing so obscure as a Zen swordfighting manual when your knowledge of Zen is weak, your knowledge of swordfighting is non-existant, and anyway the book is full of how none of this can be taught in words, only learnt in action. Still, I was beginning to get hold of a key concept: the idea of impermanence. And with that there came a few striking images: the moon reflecting on a pond, a gourd floating on water.
It was an interesting glimpse into the SW universe, too. Awhile ago somebody on MA had mentioned that Lucas made a major error in basing the Jedi on monks, not warriors. I thought at the time she was talking bollocks, but this book made it clear just how uninformed her comments were, by showing the influence of the great Zen monk Takuan on the school of Shinkage swordfighting. There's piles in there on whether a sword can be the weapon of a man seeking Heaven's Way, and the importance of the Released Mind - the mind that is not attached to any one thing - for the warrior. It creates a window on some of the Jedi concepts Lucas put into the second trilogy. All far too complex to put in directly - now that would be serious exposition!! - but it gave me some scaffolding for the samurai teaching that had to be part of the story, as well as giving me a link into canon.
Early on I made two far more important decisions, though: which were to make the style a major aspect of the story; and to subordinate character to style.
The reason for this was as follows: I'd finished writing a long story (20,000 words) for Sian's ConStrict zine in 2005, and my dissatisfaction with it - specifically, the feeling that it was far too long and wordy for the underlying flavour, which was simple and delicate - made me want to do something which would be much tighter. (The fact that I love the underlying flavour very much, and that I'd been working on this story for over three years during which it had always been one of my favourite wips, just makes it even more galling.)
Now, if there's any setting that suits a tight, concise and even enigmatic style, it must be something Japanese. (See? The story was fore-ordained.) There's that spareness to the Japanese aesthetic. I mean, who else could have come up with gardens of combed pebbles, or a poetry form of three lines, seventeen syllables long?
That meant there was a danger in referring too much to Tem's own story. She's a lush writer, with an incredibly distinctive voice, and she had very much approached her own epic with that voice firmly in place. So despite the temptation to try and pick up themes from her, I put her story firmly aside, determined not even to refer to it until I was nearly finished myself, despite the temptation. (And yes, I did suffer from having to hack about the continuity afterwards, since you ask.)
I also really wanted to use Japanese imagery if I could. That meant, like, finding out something about it! Since I was pretty much ignorant on the subject, I thought I would look at some poetry from the period, just to get the flavour of the thing. After all, poetry, when stripped of sound and meter as it would be in translation into prose, is essentially images.
I was expecting something on the line of sonnets, or epics; something I could get my teeth into. But no. Turned out that Japanese poetry in the sixteenth century was dominated by the haikai no renga - a really long form, in Japanese terms, in that it was all of five lines, 34 syllables. (Haiku developed in the mid-seventeenth century by stripping out the last two lines.)
Deep sigh. That meant I had to do haiku. I bought a couple of collections of Basho (you can't do haiku without doing Basho: "Frog Jumps / Into pond / sound of water"), but wasn't getting very far. And that's when coincidence struck.
I was in a small seaside town south of San Francisco, all very touristy and pictureskew, which happened to have a bookshop. And in the bookshop there was this: Japanese Death Poems Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death by Yoel Hoffmann. Well. Zen monks.
It turned out to be a godsend. Not only was there a detailed (and very readable) introduction covering all sorts of fascinating things, like the Zen philosophy behind the poetic images, the implications of dropping the last two lines from renga, and Japanese views of the afterlife. There were also ravishing translations of hundreds of haiku, with explanations of many of the more arcane cultural allusions.
Here's an example: a tanka (slightly longer poem) from a Zen monk that I didn't work into my story, but I wish I'd been able to. Remember that these were usually written on the monk's deathbed:
Inhale, exhale
Forward, back
Living, dying:
Arrows, let flown each to each
Meet midway and slice
The void in aimless flight -
Thus I return to the source.
So I began a (much interrupted) writing regime. First thing in the morning I would read the poetry for about an hour, as slowly as I could. Then I would write. The structure of the story grew completely from that. It's divided into many sections, each headed by a Japanese poetic term and each informed by a specific haiku that used the term. Knowing what I wanted to include often gave me a way into another part of the story that I couldn't quite get a handle around. Conversely, I would have a section all mapped out in my head but no reference for it - and then I would stumble across the perfect haiku. Wonderful :)
Genesis is very fine, but the amazing thing about writing is the evolution. I had skipped over some poems, but as the story shifted and changed in the writing, certain points becoming clearer and stronger, I'd go back to a poem and find out where it fit in. And of course the best thing was to have these intense images in the background of one's mind: fields of snow, the call of winter ducks coming to roost on distant frozen ponds, the first plum blossoms drifting down with the last snowflakes. I expanded on them everywhere, always conscious that I was shining a light on the tip of an iceberg, held up by the rest of the floe invisible beneath me.
Of course, it couldn't last. A third of the way into the story, six months gone, and it was deadline time. The remaining two-thirds were written in three weeks - which, in a way, suited the story arc, because that was when the winter ended, when the plot began to impel, when stasis turned to movement. The language grew far less structured, more direct and less allusive; the sections grew longer. The style changed.
Now that it's done, I can't say whether this was successful or not. I imagine the first third as being read out loud: it demands a slow pace, an attentive eye. The last two-thirds are for silent reading, the eye moving swiftly over the page. The latter certainly reads easier, and it's hard to judge whether the former is in fact too mannered, too referential.
But in another sense, the story echoes the way I often approach reading myself. The first taste of a fanfic story is both a puzzle and a test. What's the story about? Where does it fit into canon/fanon/my own view of both? I'm constantly looking for clues, reading things into the hints the author has left of where she's going, and how she's approached the material. And I'm judging her, too. Do I enjoy what I'm reading? Is she continually making me jump out of the story with various errors or, worse, various leaps of characterisation or plot that she's not developed? Can I trust her?
Once I know I can, I relax into the story, let it just pick me up and sweep me away. My reading pace becomes much faster as I get more and more eager to find out how the story ends; typos or whatever that would have hit me in the face in the earlier sections are skipped over without a snag. So in a very meta and unexpected way, this story turned into a map of how I read fiction :)
Of course, it was all built on the work of other people - on an entire culture, in fact. When it finally times out to the web, I want to put up an entire webpage with the annotations and quotations of all the wonderful poetry that underlies it. But that was it: just two books to build a tiny world within another one.
As usual, I was...somewhat behind deadline in finishing it. But, oh friends, I was not last! For even after I was done, lferion was still working desperately on her contribution. For reasons of extreme incestuousness, in the madly rushed week that then resulted she would send me what she'd been writing into the wee hours of every morning, and I would beta it in time to talk her through possible revisions the next afternoon.
What this meant was that I got to see from very close up the working processes of another writer, and to compare them to my own when tackling pretty much the same base reference material. So, over two posts, here are some thoughts on writing, and the research that goes into doing it.
I've rarely come to a story with such a sharp purpose in mind - which was to change my writing style with a vengeance. More on that below; but first, the stuff I did before I started writing.
Tem-ve muttered to us about the zine years in advance of publication, and as usual I said that I'd like to, while internally positive I had no ideas at all that would work. And lo and behold, a few weeks later I knew exactly what I wanted to write about - the characters a number of years after the events in her story - and what the whole plot structure would be.
In other words, if you're thinking this post might be enlightening as to how another author comes up with plots or ideas - forget it. My experience, which I'm slowly coming to trust, is that the best way to generate an idea for a given challenge is to let the subconscious stew on it. The 'right' thing will eventually pop up from the murky depths; what's important for me at that early stage is not to flog the wrong, misleading thing that's also popped up to death, and get discouraged. If an idea is birthed but then won't get to its legs and run, no matter how tempting it is it should be turned into Bambi steaks and digested again, for possible later regurgitation in another form. Ew. Now that I think of it, that's a really gross metaphor.
Anyway, so the plot was not a problem, and the characters... Well, I had a lot of latitude with them, since I could either go with Tem's AU, or bring them back a bit closer to TPM canon, or veer off in my own sweet direction. But I knew that the samurai bit had to come in somewhere, so when I came across The Sword and the Mind, a Japanese sword-fighting manual written at exactly the period of Tem's story, on special in Borders... Perfect.
My friends, I read it. It wasn't easy, because there is nothing so obscure as a Zen swordfighting manual when your knowledge of Zen is weak, your knowledge of swordfighting is non-existant, and anyway the book is full of how none of this can be taught in words, only learnt in action. Still, I was beginning to get hold of a key concept: the idea of impermanence. And with that there came a few striking images: the moon reflecting on a pond, a gourd floating on water.
It was an interesting glimpse into the SW universe, too. Awhile ago somebody on MA had mentioned that Lucas made a major error in basing the Jedi on monks, not warriors. I thought at the time she was talking bollocks, but this book made it clear just how uninformed her comments were, by showing the influence of the great Zen monk Takuan on the school of Shinkage swordfighting. There's piles in there on whether a sword can be the weapon of a man seeking Heaven's Way, and the importance of the Released Mind - the mind that is not attached to any one thing - for the warrior. It creates a window on some of the Jedi concepts Lucas put into the second trilogy. All far too complex to put in directly - now that would be serious exposition!! - but it gave me some scaffolding for the samurai teaching that had to be part of the story, as well as giving me a link into canon.
Early on I made two far more important decisions, though: which were to make the style a major aspect of the story; and to subordinate character to style.
The reason for this was as follows: I'd finished writing a long story (20,000 words) for Sian's ConStrict zine in 2005, and my dissatisfaction with it - specifically, the feeling that it was far too long and wordy for the underlying flavour, which was simple and delicate - made me want to do something which would be much tighter. (The fact that I love the underlying flavour very much, and that I'd been working on this story for over three years during which it had always been one of my favourite wips, just makes it even more galling.)
Now, if there's any setting that suits a tight, concise and even enigmatic style, it must be something Japanese. (See? The story was fore-ordained.) There's that spareness to the Japanese aesthetic. I mean, who else could have come up with gardens of combed pebbles, or a poetry form of three lines, seventeen syllables long?
That meant there was a danger in referring too much to Tem's own story. She's a lush writer, with an incredibly distinctive voice, and she had very much approached her own epic with that voice firmly in place. So despite the temptation to try and pick up themes from her, I put her story firmly aside, determined not even to refer to it until I was nearly finished myself, despite the temptation. (And yes, I did suffer from having to hack about the continuity afterwards, since you ask.)
I also really wanted to use Japanese imagery if I could. That meant, like, finding out something about it! Since I was pretty much ignorant on the subject, I thought I would look at some poetry from the period, just to get the flavour of the thing. After all, poetry, when stripped of sound and meter as it would be in translation into prose, is essentially images.
I was expecting something on the line of sonnets, or epics; something I could get my teeth into. But no. Turned out that Japanese poetry in the sixteenth century was dominated by the haikai no renga - a really long form, in Japanese terms, in that it was all of five lines, 34 syllables. (Haiku developed in the mid-seventeenth century by stripping out the last two lines.)
Deep sigh. That meant I had to do haiku. I bought a couple of collections of Basho (you can't do haiku without doing Basho: "Frog Jumps / Into pond / sound of water"), but wasn't getting very far. And that's when coincidence struck.
I was in a small seaside town south of San Francisco, all very touristy and pictureskew, which happened to have a bookshop. And in the bookshop there was this: Japanese Death Poems Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death by Yoel Hoffmann. Well. Zen monks.
It turned out to be a godsend. Not only was there a detailed (and very readable) introduction covering all sorts of fascinating things, like the Zen philosophy behind the poetic images, the implications of dropping the last two lines from renga, and Japanese views of the afterlife. There were also ravishing translations of hundreds of haiku, with explanations of many of the more arcane cultural allusions.
Here's an example: a tanka (slightly longer poem) from a Zen monk that I didn't work into my story, but I wish I'd been able to. Remember that these were usually written on the monk's deathbed:
Inhale, exhale
Forward, back
Living, dying:
Arrows, let flown each to each
Meet midway and slice
The void in aimless flight -
Thus I return to the source.
So I began a (much interrupted) writing regime. First thing in the morning I would read the poetry for about an hour, as slowly as I could. Then I would write. The structure of the story grew completely from that. It's divided into many sections, each headed by a Japanese poetic term and each informed by a specific haiku that used the term. Knowing what I wanted to include often gave me a way into another part of the story that I couldn't quite get a handle around. Conversely, I would have a section all mapped out in my head but no reference for it - and then I would stumble across the perfect haiku. Wonderful :)
Genesis is very fine, but the amazing thing about writing is the evolution. I had skipped over some poems, but as the story shifted and changed in the writing, certain points becoming clearer and stronger, I'd go back to a poem and find out where it fit in. And of course the best thing was to have these intense images in the background of one's mind: fields of snow, the call of winter ducks coming to roost on distant frozen ponds, the first plum blossoms drifting down with the last snowflakes. I expanded on them everywhere, always conscious that I was shining a light on the tip of an iceberg, held up by the rest of the floe invisible beneath me.
Of course, it couldn't last. A third of the way into the story, six months gone, and it was deadline time. The remaining two-thirds were written in three weeks - which, in a way, suited the story arc, because that was when the winter ended, when the plot began to impel, when stasis turned to movement. The language grew far less structured, more direct and less allusive; the sections grew longer. The style changed.
Now that it's done, I can't say whether this was successful or not. I imagine the first third as being read out loud: it demands a slow pace, an attentive eye. The last two-thirds are for silent reading, the eye moving swiftly over the page. The latter certainly reads easier, and it's hard to judge whether the former is in fact too mannered, too referential.
But in another sense, the story echoes the way I often approach reading myself. The first taste of a fanfic story is both a puzzle and a test. What's the story about? Where does it fit into canon/fanon/my own view of both? I'm constantly looking for clues, reading things into the hints the author has left of where she's going, and how she's approached the material. And I'm judging her, too. Do I enjoy what I'm reading? Is she continually making me jump out of the story with various errors or, worse, various leaps of characterisation or plot that she's not developed? Can I trust her?
Once I know I can, I relax into the story, let it just pick me up and sweep me away. My reading pace becomes much faster as I get more and more eager to find out how the story ends; typos or whatever that would have hit me in the face in the earlier sections are skipped over without a snag. So in a very meta and unexpected way, this story turned into a map of how I read fiction :)
Of course, it was all built on the work of other people - on an entire culture, in fact. When it finally times out to the web, I want to put up an entire webpage with the annotations and quotations of all the wonderful poetry that underlies it. But that was it: just two books to build a tiny world within another one.