Other things on my mind as a new book starts up

[pegkerr]

When I am just in the beginning stages of forming characters, they are very amorphous in my mind, of course. I have always described the beginning processes of creating as being rather like dropping a single crystal into a super-saturated solution. Once you add the seed, if the conditions are right, things can bloom like a crystalline structure all at once. (Tolkien, btw, had a similar image--he called it the creative stewpot. You put all the stuff you've read and experienced in your mind into a stewpot that bubbles at the back of your unconscious mind. Then, if you've put enough in for your mind to work on, and you've let it simmer long enough, you can ladle up good, hearty, satisfying stew, with beautifully blended flavors.

One way this works for me with characters in particular is that my sense of the physical nature of a character can be quite vague in the beginning, but often, when I am just beginning to think about a character, I'll see someone on the street and think: "Oooohhh . . . that's what x looks like." One of the most dramatic consequences this had for me was with a major character in my last book, Sean. I saw the "template" for Sean at a public library. This handsome stranger, reading a book and totally oblivious to my fascination with his facial bone structure, happened to be wearing an Irish sweater, and it was that small detail alone that made me decide that perhaps Sean might be interested in Irish music--a little character detail that added so much to the book. (I often think, what if he had been wearing a Hawaiian shirt? Good heavens, what a different book that would have been.)

In other words the decisions you make early on, or the "snapshot" or "gut reaction" that gets the book rolling, about either the plot or a character, will have consequences throughout the book--and you may be struggling with those consequences months later.

I imagine that's one of the reasons that I've been blocked on starting a book for so long--I'm hyper aware that there are a bunch of key decisions in the beginning, and these cut off an infinitude of decision-trees about what-the-book-could-be-but-won't-be from ever coming into fruition.

You just have to plunge ahead anyway.

I have been thinking about this today, that at this early stage I'm highly . . . I guess the word I'm struggling to come up with is something like "imprintable." You know, like those baby ducks that will follow the first thing they see that moves after they come out of their shells, even if it isn't their natural mother. For that reason, I'm careful about what I read at this point. I will start gulping down research books (aside: you know that you're becoming serious about being a fiction writer when you start reading more and more non-fiction, for research). But I'll be leery of reading books that I have some idea are too much like what I'm trying to attempt. I don't want to "imprint" on that other author's voice; I want to find my voice. Sometimes I think when I'm starting to thing about a character, "I want him to work sort of like character X in author y's work." The problem is, if I really, really like that character, I worry too much that my character will become TOO much like character x. I've got that worry right now. Jack Frost is very hazy is in my mind, but there is a particular character in a certain author's work whom I love, whom I think has several of Jack Frost's characteristics, and I'm chanting over and over to myself, "Be SURE you don't make him too much like character x."

This is rather like telling yourself: "Be SURE you don't think too much about pink gorillas." Trying to banish something from your mind can, perversely, make it stick around even more stubbornly.

Peg (who is the sort of person who worries about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow).

Comments

Yes,

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

that's a good example. I deliberately avoided seeing "Rent" for that very reason, although I was pining to see it. Another one I avoided was "Love!Valor!Compassion!" which I had heard actually included a scene where there were gay men dancing as faux ballerinas, as the voiceovers talked about their fears about AIDS. Too close to the Trockederos of Monte Carlo scene.

P.