Glare report: 11/24/04 Nothing but angst to report

[pegkerr]

I have decided that I have gnawed the bone that is Icy Pleasures long enough and sucked all the useable marrow out of it. I haven't finished it, but I think I have pulled everything out of it that might be of use.

I am updating this from the laptop. I don't have my most current novel file on this machine; Rob is swapping all the files on the desk top to the one that Pat Wrede is handing down to me (still old, but with a faster processor; Rob will be installing a new hard drive). So . . . no writing today because I didn't have access to my working machine.

I am also cranky because I was reading an interview with Susannah Clarke (Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norrell) and an offhand comment she made has plunged me into uncomfortable cogitation. Conclusion: I still don't really know how the book resolves, and deep down inside, I think my half-assed first attempt to answer that question is totally lame and a lazy coward's way out. Aarraawraugh.

I used my light box this morning. Not a bloody minute too soon.

Comments

[scott-lynch.livejournal.com]

I am also cranky because I was reading an interview with Susannah Clarke (Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norrell) and an offhand comment she made has plunged me into uncomfortable cogitation.

What sort of offhand comment, if I might ask?

Cheers,

SL

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Damn, I can't remember where I read the interview, so I can't look it up. And I haven't read her novel. But as I remember, the interviewer was making some comment about the way she chose to end the book, and she said, yes, I don't like the standard sort of climax for fantasy novels, where good faces evil and good, of course, wins. She said she found it more complex and interesting if the character has to face the evil within himself (rather than a me/other dicotomy.

My gut reaction was yes, that's what I prefer to see, too. I love that, for example, in the climax to Lord of the Rings Frodo has to battle primarily himself: will he toss the Ring into the fire or not? And yet, my first book was more the classic cliche type, and my plotting on this book seems to be leading to a set up where again, it's the view point character vs. the Other. I did a lot of thinking about this after reading Thomas Shippey's book Tolkien, Author of the Century, esp. after reading his analysis of how Tolkien treated evil in his fiction. I thought that Shippey's analysis was insightful and fascinating.

I'm trying to figure out how to avoid cliche. I'm trying to figure out how to write this book so I'm not simply re-writing my first book. And I'm cranky because things are still so very cloudy in my mind that I'm not at all confident I will succeed, despite my knowing what I want to avoid. I don't want to do that. Yet, what, really, am I going to do? I don't have an answer yet. And it's making me irritable.

[(Anonymous)]

"Conclusion: I still don't really know how the book resolves, and deep down inside, I think my half-assed first attempt to answer that question is totally lame and a lazy coward's way out."

I am having much the same problem with the book I'm working on, and am far from convinced that I've got it yet, though I think I'm creeping ever closer (at least I hope I am & not actually creeping further away).

This is probably totally obvious, but it helped me when a friend of mine asked me -- what do you want to leave the reader with?

For me, this has meant a great deal of pondering on and refining the sense of exactly what feeling I want the reader to go away with (obviously this is a lot more subtle than "happy/sad", and to express the feeling exactly would probably take nearly as long as writing the book, but I have to get it very clear in own head before I can develop the strategies to get it onto the page; although again they're partly interdependent, and getting versions on the page gets me closer to understanding it).

With the previous book it was more of a visual image -- I knew I wanted the reader going away with a particular strong final visual picture, and I knew a bit about what the feeling and implications of that picture were, and then had to construct the story so that it led there. That was much easier. I wish I had something like that for this book.

But I do think it is important to have some kind of strong, if perhaps nonverbal, sense of what the reader should leave the book with.

Probably no help at all, but I just thought I'd ramble a bit.

maggie h