Peg Kerr's Journal

I've been thinking about making this entry for a few days. I've struggled a bit over the drafting of it, and I'm not certain I've expressed myself very well and fear I will end up looking like a fool, but oh, well. If I blow it, I suppose you'll forgive me eventually. Here goes.

I've thought about this periodically through the years, throughout my growth as a writer, and it came to the forefront again for me just recently because of some of the replies I received on my entries concerning career envy and my dinner with Pat and Lois.

( More )

From work:

I went down to Starbucks today to get an espresso brownie. The clerk at the register was someone I hadn't seen before. As he handed me the brownie and my change, I blurted out, "Pardon me, but I'm-a-novelist-and-so-I-study-peoples'-faces-and-would-you-mind-telling-me-about-your-eyebrow?"

He blinked in surprise, but obligingly told me. He has a condition called vitiligo, which causes parts of his skin to lose pigmentation. The only sign of it on him is that one of his eyebrows is jet black and the other is snow white. Very striking.

Hmm. Might I use this for Jack?

You have no idea what weird things I ask perfect strangers at times. The hazards of being a writer.

Peg

P.S. Maybe, on second thought, I shouldn't. There was that streak of white hair on Willy Silver in War for the Oaks.

So. It's been done. Feh.

Mulling over several things:

Inga's comments on the timeframe have made me realize that I have to consider whether I need to start again almost from scratch figuring out the plot structure of the novel.

I had thought: main action of book opens Memorial Day weekend with firm announcing they've won contest to design ice palace. Solveig and Jack meet, stuff with Aquatennial in July (summer magic climax), maybe the Little Guy is consulted, State Fair occurs (maybe Ingrid disappears here), ice palace is built in December, Winter Carnival/book climax in January, book ends at May Day Festival in May (Jack becomes Jack o' the Green). One year in review, boom.

But if work on the design doesn't even start until late summer, and they don't learn that they've won the contest until fall . . . well, that changes everything. Now the Aquatennial stuff and the State Fair stuff is entirely thrown into doubt.

I can approach this problem three different ways: 1) accept the info Inga has given me and work up a new plot event structure, lopping off all the summer magic stuff 2) reason that few people will come back to tap me on the shoulder to say, hey, it doesn't take so long to design an ice palace, so I stick to my original plan and ignore that it happened otherwise in real history, or 3) state that the ice palace was designed more quickly last time, but come up with a plausible excuse for stretching the process out this time. (Actually, there is a fourth option: crawl into a corner and dither a lot. I often resort to that one, which is why I've been blocked at novel writing for quite a while.)

I know I still want to tell the story of Solveig, an architect, designing an ice palace. She has a daughter named Ingrid, a mother named Agnes, her father died when she was a child, and it all has something to do with the fish. And there's this guy named Jack, and there's something about the ice palace that's magical, and there's something about choosing a heart of flesh. What the question boils down to here is, where does this book begin? That is not always so easy to tell. I don't have an answer on it, either. And perhaps I won't until I come up with those other elements that I think that I'm still missing . . . perhaps a fairy tale to give the book a spine, or an answer to the question, "What are the fish up to?"

Have also been thinking today about Solveig today, after reading this bit from the Terri Sutton article I mentioned earlier:

. . . What's most significant to me is that she [LeGuin] went back to her tale to worry one of the most cherished tropes of YA fantasy: the idea of a "chosen," fated hero. In a sense, all protagonists are chosen people, because the author has chosen to focus on them. But the concept of fated heroes, so often male in the past, has been troubling to me as an adult reader of fantasy. I'm not more special than anyone else. My actions do not resonate across the world(s). At the same time we always need heroes to jolt us into movement . . . What I find myself craving in YA fantasy is average protagonists, compelled by events to discover themselves capable of heroic acts--the Frodo Baggins type.

Now, this struck me quite strongly, and I think I might need to think about this a bit. I had been thinking that Solveig is the center of the action, because she got "saturated" with winter magic when she fell through the ice as a child, and she fell through because the fish were calling her. Why, though? Does she have to be chosen? What if she's just a normal woman, facing extraordinary magical challenges, and she has to solve them, not with a latent magical power that she suddenly discovers within herself, but by suddenly locating inner real resources, of nerve and steel and courage . . . by using her heart of flesh?

I used the latent magical talent tack in my first book. Perhaps . . . I should try the Frodo Baggins approach in this?

Eddi McCandry was chosen in War for the Oaks partly because she was a musician, which gave her a kind of magic, too. Is that the same thing? After all, she did spend a fair amount of the book grumbling "Why choose me?" (She was also chosen because she happened to be the ex-girlfriend of the guy who was chosen by the Unseelie Court.)

I remember how delighted I was with the central idea of the movie "Oh God." Not because I thought John Denver was such a good actor . . . but because I thought, when the movie was over and the lights went up, you know, why wouldn't God come to speak to someone as ordinary as the assistant manager of the produce department of a grocery store? And what would that very ordinary man discover about himself as he faces an extraordinary thing?

The Frodo Baggins story is tremendously moving to me. And yes, perhaps that is closer to the story I want to tell . . . the story of an ordinary person facing something strange and dangerous and perhaps wonderful, something never faced before and she pulls out something extraordinary in response.

On the other hand . . . maybe I'm just confused about what I want to do.

If you haven't noticed yet, I tend to dither a lot.

Peg

I am continuing to mull over the book without starting to write yet.

I am much more aware of process at this stage of book creation than I was on my previous books. Perhaps it's because I am putting so much of my process in my LiveJournal, and so am forcing myself to explain, both to myself and to others, exactly what I'm doing.

I am feeling, as I've said previously, "gravitational pulls." If I am fishing, casting out my idea net, it's as if all the potential books I could write are swimming out there, just beyond the reach of my net, flirting with me like gorgeous iridescent fish with dazzling scales: "Pick meeeeee. Write meeeeee."

My creative back brain is restless and a little anxious. It is looking for a pattern so that it can start structuring things. But I have been thinking about something I read in Orson Scott Card's books about writing, either in On Character or How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (I forget which). He was explaining the writing exercise he does in workshops, called "1000 Ideas an Hour," where he simply asks questions, the audience throws out potential answers, and together they start structuring a story. One thing he said about that exercise that I've been thinking about today is that the first three or four answers your back brain throws up when you start asking questions of your story are the easy answers. They're the answers you've read before, or the answers you've absorbed from TV or the movies--the tried and true. The trick, if you want to write a really memorable story, is to wait a little longer until a really original idea comes up. I get anxious when confronted with uncertainty. Frankly, I don't like it at all--which, perhaps, is why I've been blocked on starting a novel for so long. I really had a damn tough time coming up with a plot on my first novel--Pat Wrede had to hold my hand practically through the whole process. I got through the process of structuring my second novel basically by stealing a plot someone else (H.C. Andersen) had written).

So now, as I've said, I'm feeling gravitational pulls, urging me to hurry up and make my decisions so I can get down to the writing. But I'm telling myself, now wait a minute, don't just grab the first obvious answer because you want to skip right past the discomfort of the not-knowing-everything stage.

For example: I've asked, okay, what is the system that this summer magic and winter magic is based upon? I saw the backgammon table at the Ren Fest which named the seasons as Jack Spring, John Barleycorn, Herne the Hunter and Jack Frost. bookofnights mentioned seeing the seasons described as Jack o' the Green, John Barleycorn, Jack o'Lantern and Jack Frost.

Now I really, really like that idea, and my first impulse is to say yes, that's it, go with it. But I recognize that it would lead me into using a structure of English folk tales. And after all, I've seen that used before (and very well, too), in Emma Bull's War for the Oaks (where Emma just basically transplanted English tales of the Sidhe court to Minneapolis) and also in Charles DeLint's Forest of the Heart, which used the Green Man legends in modern-day Ottawa. It's been done. Can I do something different?

What if I try to structure the magic system using roots that are more indigenous to Minnesota, specifically the strong Scandinavian background? Then I feel the tug of another gravitational pull, and that's Garrison Keillor, who talks endlessly about the effect of the roots of Scandinavian culture on Minnesota culture--and specifically, the emotional effects of Scandinavian culture (which gets into that heart of flesh/heart of stone territory, i.e., Minnesotans can come across as cold, don't talk about their feelings, etc.)

I think I've decided that I don't want to use the English folk tale structure, although the pattern of the four Jacks of the four different seasons is doing its best to seduce me down that path. I need, instead, to do some more research on Scandinavian conceptions of magic (and here I feel the tug of American Gods, with the idea that "Old World" conceptions of the supernatural are brought to the New World). Must do some more reading about Scandinavian folk tales. Could something in the Kalevala be helpful? I know there was that one bit about the maiden turning into a salmon, for example (Ruth MacKenzie turned into a wonderful theater production, "The Dream of the Salmon Maiden").

D'ye see what I mean? I talked with kijjohnson about this matter this weekend, the tug of gravitational pull, particularly at the beginning planning sections of a book. Perhaps it seems more bothersome this time around perhaps because I am consciously more aware of what I'm doing.

Ignorance might be bliss then. *Sigh.* But if I was really clueless about what I'm trying to do, it wouldn't be as good of a book.

The other danger, of course, is to spend too much dithering . . . reluctant to cast my net over the backs of any of those fish until they all swim away entirely.

Karen minnehaha called and left a message, assuring me I could borrow her book on the Heart of the Beast puppet theater, and also suggesting that I use the elf, by which I presume she means the Lake Harriet elf. For those not from Minneapolis: there is a tree by a lake in a city park here in Minneapolis. One day, a tiny door appeared between two tree roots. (I've never seen the home of the Lake Harriet elf, myself, and don't know exactly where it is). I don't remember how it started, but someone either wrote a note and stuck it on the door, or a note appeared on the door inviting questions, but the upshot is, people have been leaving notes by the door, and they have been mysteriously answered by someone calling himself "The Little Guy."

Great idea. Alas, it doesn't work with the ice palace timeline. The Little Guy appeared in 1995, and the last ice palace was sometime in the 80s, I think.

Unless I set the book in the near future, with a new ice palace about to be built, rather than setting it around one of the ice palaces in the past. Hmm. Decisions, decisions. . .

Peg, still cogitating

For those who read and loved Emma Bull's first novel, War for the Oaks, and remember the scene she set between Eddi McCandry and the Queen of Air and Darkness in the Witches Hat tower, here's an article from The Rake, about what the inside of that tower is really like.

If you wanted to know.

Saw Minority Report tonight. Um. Whoa. Recommended, even if I did have to cover my eyes at a couple of icky bits (I do get dreadfully squeamish at movies--I don't have much of a protective carapace against strong images because I don't watch any TV).