Tim Powers and novel construction

I just finished rereading The Stress of Her Regard and am now starting Last Call, both by Tim Powers.

I do like his work very much. I also have a soft spot in my heart for Powers because he was one of the best writing teachers I ever had. He taught at my first week at Clarion. I remember that when he got up to speak to us that first night, the paper he was holding shook because he was so nervous, but he jumped into critiquing our stories with enthusiasm, and I learned so much from him. He was the one who taught me that if you really want the reader to feel that they're right there in the scene, describe the smells. And I've mentioned before that I've always remembered that talk that he gave us at the end of the week about remembering to remain a decent human being while we're learning to become writers as one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten from a writing mentor.

I interviewed him for one of my papers for my Master's degree about On Stranger Tides, and it was one of the first chances I'd ever gotten to pump a writer, in depth, about the process of writing a novel. I just ran across the tape--the interview was in 1989--and I think I might transcribe it and send him a copy. He gave me one working suggestion which I incorporated when I was writing The Wild Swans: When you are dealing with trying to fit fictional plot around historical happenings, make a calendar, and put your historical facts in pen and pencil in your fictional plot as you work out the sequence of events.

I love the vividness of his style. Sometimes there are sentences I just have to stop and reread, just to savor the unusual, fresh look at what should be old and tired and familiar. I was talking with a beginning writer about this recently, and prescribed Powers fiction to her as I was talking to her about avoiding the cliche in similes and descriptions. He speaks of an airplane as a splinter in the sky, he speaks of clouds that are like gods sculpted from tortured living marble.

I was thinking tonight, as I continued through Last Call, that what I hope to do with this ice palace book is probably quite akin to the way Powers works, more than the books I've done before. Powers told me that what he likes to do is to research an intriguing historical character, time or setting, make note of the things that seem odd or out of place or strange, and then ask himself, "What was he really up to? What's the magical explanation for what he was trying to do?"

I wonder whether he writes out of sequence or not. His magical systems are revealed by a sort of free associative method. I'm intrigued--and heartened by how often his characters grope for explanations (just as I grope for connections as I plot). They're always explaining the magical happenings by saying, "It's sort of like . .. " and then he pulls in a bit of poetry or music or quantum physics. Individual bits of data from wildly different spheres, but when he puts them side by side, you suddenly see a pattern, and you think Huh, I wonder what that means? What's the connection? The sphinx's riddle mentions 4, then 2, then 3--and what does that have to do with the number of electrons looking for particles to fill their outer shells? Powers plots by having his characters make intuitive leaps.

Yeah, that sounds like what I've been thinking about as I try to flesh out the ice palace book. It's about water and cold and form and structure and phlogiston and mosquitoes and architecture and escape from death. And fish. And ice. So what do we make of ice fishing, magically? What do we make of the fact that Frank Gehry, one of the foremost architects in the world, made a huge sculpture of a fish out of interlocking glass plates? And what does this have to do with the fact that a fish gets frozen into the cornerstone of the ice palace every time it gets built?

[Goes away to think some more. And read more of Last Call.]

(no subject)

Gacked from kijjohnson. I agree. Why no Bujold or JRR Tolkien???

( SF reading meme )