Genre trouble: By any means necessary, or novels on the edge

Posted on February 22, 2012 by epbeaumont

The novel is the shape-shifter of the literary world, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. It can look like a diary, a bundle of letters, a collection of theatrical monologues, a cycle of tersely told folk-tales, oral history, or clinical case-studies. Whatever people do with words, the novel can pretend to do.

When I think about my favorite novels, a good many of them sit on the boundary between forms, with voices entering and leaving the stage, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

As many times as the novel has changed shape in the hands of its practitioners, the literary gate-keepers have stepped forward to nail the box shut and say “This is a proper novel, and this is not.”

My favorite novels are the ones that live on the edge.

Jeanette Winterson’s Art & Lies taught me worlds about the uses of person and tense as camera-work. Winterson is the master of the time-slip as narrative device (or, I’d say, as more truthful representation of how we actually live inside time and history.) The critics hated it, I gather, but I love it. There are stories, songs, theatrical monologues, dropped hints, notebooks, and in the closing, an operatic aria. The matter is controversial: art and sex, historical memory and official versions, familial and political; the setting: a near-future dystopian London that looks more and more like straight documentary. The poet Sappho is doubled with her modern namesake, a punk poet living in a boarded-up house. The most rational speaker in the chorus, the conservative Catholic doctor Handel, turns out to be the most unreliable of all. What sounds rational can merely be rationalizing.

Then there’s Alexander Herzen’s novel Who is to Blame? It’s told in perfectly ordinary mid-nineteenth-century fashion; dramatic scenes alternate with narrative interludes, in third person. The camera work in this one is brilliant, from domestic scenes so closely observed that you feel more than a little claustrophobic, followed by the zoom out to the long view. In the opening scene, we meet all of the principal players but one, and then the author zooms out to track the back-story of each one of them. It’s the furthest thing from data-dump that I’ve ever read, and it takes only a handful of pages, in a light ironic voice, to anatomize these players and by implication the society to which they belong. Then there’s another zoom in to follow the rest of the story. There are journal entries in the persona of a teenaged girl, who is sharp-sighted and observant, so that adolescent doubt co-exists in brilliant tension with clinical ruthlessness. Every means is brought to bear on a domestic drama that’s at the same time a political indictment.

We’re told these days that authorial voice is off-limits, and that we are not to question political assumptions. And woe betide the author who does, whether in the voice of the poet, the prophet, the clinician or the revolutionary …

… Even those, like Herzen, who are safely dead.

Winterson’s novel is unapologetically twenty-first-century and postmodern (though written in the 1990s); Herzen’s novel is nineteenth-century (dating from the early 1840s), though far less prolix than many of its kin. Both writers play with language in a manner more usually reserved to poets. Herzen’s text was one of the first I read in Russian, after departing the nursery of graded readers, and his twists on the expected, not to mention his original coinages—of which I lost count—led me a merry chase. Winterson’s changes of person and tense had me re-reading to puzzle out how grammar shapes tone. Both novels are nominally domestic in scope, while taking on the accepted social arrangements, particularly the restricted role of women and the lies told about what sort of society we live in.

The critics, for the most part, hate them for it.

If you’re going to write a radical, thinking person’s novel, then you do it by any means necessary. Seduce them into a family comedy (and Herzen’s version anticipates Chekhov in its sharks-under-the-surface humor, while Winterson’s leads on by hint and indirection). Then watch the characters struggle in the chains of the usual arrangements, and anatomize the struggle from inside or outside or both; bring poetry and song and journal and case-report into it.

All’s fair in love and war.

All’s fair in revolution and novel-writing.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 19 February 2012 (The Necromancer and the Barbarian: a Love Story)

Posted on February 19, 2012 by epbeaumont

Albert approached Kirsten now, under the watchful eye of Petra. 

Yes, she granted, he might have a dance.

Kirsten matched him figure for figure. 

Somewhere in the middle of the set, another player joined  with drums. The rhythm grew insistent, marching one moment, jazz the next; Kirsten stamped, whirled, used Albert’s strong arm as a springboard for a somersault, both of her hands on his wrist—one of those stunts that seemed to erupt into the world like rough magic. Her hair flew about her face, the braid whipping like a snake behind her as she landed, back arched and feet foursquare, earth and air in the same motion, Antaeus as acrobat. 

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Flash fiction: There’s only so much I can do

Posted on February 17, 2012 by epbeaumont

Author’s note: In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009, someone put up daily prompts on one of the forums. I did them in the spirit of warm-ups, but some of them turned into stories. Here is one such, from 10/3/2009. This scene later found its way into my 2009 NaNo novel, The Reincarnations of Miss Anne.

Prompt (and title): There’s only so much I can do.

The sky overhead is grey and threatens at any moment to let loose its burden of snow.  How the clouds lose their edges in this weather—the colder the air, the looser the shape—and the sky over us is unraveling wool, the air at the ground raw and chilly.  The trains have been standing on the siding for hours now.  There’s no word from the stationmaster, and the local gendarmes are standing on the platform with another detachment of prisoners to be loaded, and there’s the usual whimpering children and distraught husbands and wives.  Noise.

There’s only so much I can do.  I’ve almost learned to tune out the noise.  It sounds like human voices, but really this is cargo.  Ticks on a manifest.  There’s another convoy behind that one, so it would be really nice if the stationmaster could come up with some rolling stock before we have them backed up the road from town.  Not good, that sort of thing.  It reflects badly on the organization.

“Have you seen my husband Anton?  He’s this tall, black hair, wearing a grey cap and an overcoat…”  well, no, I haven’t seen your bloody husband, not if he’s been minding his business, and if he hasn’t, then that’s too bad.  Too bad in any case.

I don’t answer them any more, not aloud, although there’s still an annoying voice in my head that says what I’d say if I weren’t so dedicated to efficiency.  That’s the problem with this peasant rabble.  No appreciation for efficiency or modernity or any of the virtues of progress.

“Mama! Mama! Did you see my mama?”

Look up that road, where the birch trees almost make an allee, past those blank muddy fields.  You wouldn’t think that was overpopulated, would you?  Well, it is, so says that lady from Berlin.  She explained it all to us, how there’s too many of them compared to what they produce.  See, they grow food and make shoes and so forth, but it’s all for each other.  It doesn’t serve the greater world.  It makes no contribution to the economy, see?

There’s only so much I can do, and if that bloody stationmaster had any appreciation for his part in the New Europe, he’d get us those cars forthwith.  Damned Polish backwater.  No respect.  And it’s started to snow.

(Process information: 390 words, maybe 15 min)


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Six Sentence Sunday, 12 February 2012 (The Necromancer and the Barbarian: a Love Story)

Posted on February 12, 2012 by epbeaumont

From the west came word of shape-shifters and forest witches, who changed shape and sex and even species, turning into rock or wind at will. In North America, the resurgent timberwolf population had to contend with competition from werewolves, and the social order was threatened, it was said, by a fashion for vampirism among the young. Whether those were fanciful tales or not, the response of the Anglo-American world was ferocious. The United Kingdom had a Witch-Finder General for the first time in three centuries, and burning at the stake, officially sanctioned in the U.K. and extrajudicially in the U.S.A., became so common that the news outlets ceased to report it. 

The first echo-shock of the Great Change struck in Elsa’s immediate vicinity with the news that a young American forensic pathologist, with whom her mentor had been working on the mass graves of the Balkan Wars, had been lynched by witch-hunters. 

“The threat of witches is convenient; it gives the authorities an opportunity to root out other threats as well,” he said.

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Flash fiction: Claustrophobia and Coffee

Posted on February 10, 2012 by epbeaumont

Author’s note: In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009, someone put up daily prompts on one of the forums. I did them in the spirit of warm-ups, but some of them turned into stories. Here is one such, from 10/7/2009.

Prompt:  Write a 100 word story in a claustrophobic setting.

Talitha took the coffee cup and set it on the little desk top set into the wall, and then she turned on the computer that occupied half of the desk.  The cabin was small, coffin-narrow, and outside of it was zero gravity and absolute zero cold and no air at all. Outside the cabin was nothing, and inside—well, inside was the well that held the coffee cup, and the lid to keep it from sliding up into the air and making caffeine bubbles, so the morning cup of coffee was more like a baby bottle.  You had to suckle.  And the computer ran off solar power, and she slept, when she did, next to its blue warmth, in the smooth graveside darkness, in the night that her clock made in default of a sun.  And all the while she woke or slept, the great ship was headed out to the uttermost stars.

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NaNoFeed: NaNo 2011 is finished, and now a backward look

Posted on February 8, 2012 by epbeaumont

Last night around 9:30pm I finished writing the endgame of my 2011 National Novel Writing Month project, The Necromancer and the Barbarian: A Love Story. I promptly sent the revised full manuscript and the replacement final chapters to my beta readers.

And then I sat up until 2 a.m., on a work night no less, doing celebratory goofing-off, which is to say, rereading the stuff I’d just written, reviewing chats with my writing buddies, and thinking about the next steps.

There’s a lot to occupy me in the six to eight weeks before I look at this project again. For one, there’s the copy-editing and second-pass beta reading I owe my good buddies, as well as a pile of editing for other projects. Oh yes, and taxes, and blog posts, and other things that pass the time.

Retrospective statistics on NaNo 2011:

  • October 2011 (plus the last week of September): 65,000 words of background material, including character interviews, plot outlines, and research notes. There was a fair amount of research time, which hasn’t been logged yet, which felt a lot like leisure reading or fooling-about on the internet.
  • November 2011: 85,000 words of first draft.
  • December 2011: 2,000 more words of first draft, 3500 words of plot notes
  • January 2012: Villain’s character interview (12,000 words); 6,000 words of first draft
  • February 2012: 2,000 words of first draft, finishing the novel on 2/7/2012 around 9:30pm. Completed first draft manuscript weighs in at around 95,000 words.

 

 

 

Total time: 4.5 months; total words: 175,500 words (95,000-word novel draft, 80,500 words of character interview and plot notes).

Research materials: probably something in the range of 200-300 pages of on-line materials; estimated 10-12 hours of video viewed; additional 500-1000 pages of references to follow up for second-draft revision. Key here (what doesn’t show up in the stats) is that it’s all fun stuff.

Early reactions from my most ambitious beta-reader echo my own impression of a fairly well-built novel. It’s not a true NaNo novel, because the full project spanned four and a half months. I did leverage the November novel-writing event to do the majority of the first-draft writing, but some of that was re-writing or clarifying scenes that already popped up in the character interviews. On the other hand, I’m a lot happier with the result.

The hardest part was stitching together the lead-in to the climactic confrontation and finding the right scene to end on. This time I decided to leave the ending a little bit open, with the thought that the end of one story is the beginning of another. The end and the beginning were the slowest parts; most of the work during high production was done in 30-45 minute bouts.

And now, on to the next thing.

 

 

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Six Sentence Sunday, 5 February 2012 (The Necromancer and the Barbarian: a Love Story)

Posted on February 5, 2012 by epbeaumont

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, as the earth began to warm and the seas to rise, something woke from sleep. At first it was odd incidents here and there, but by the time that Elsa was a student at university, the Great Change was well underway. The poetically inclined called it the Return of Magic, and speculated that it was the world, Mother Earth, waking up to confront her unruly children. In any case, the manifestations became ever more spectacular. As usual the tales from the east were more extravagant; a field biologist of her acquaintance, returning from fieldwork in the resurgent forest of the Chernobyl dead zone, claimed to have seen Baba Yaga and her daughters, and repeated rumors of shambling things spotted in the mist beyond the barbed wire lining the interdicted shores of the river running through Chelyabinsk.

Of course, those things were no worse, in their way, than the horrors already documented in the medical literature, long before the Change showed itself. 

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Flash fiction: The City Crow’s Fine Dining Guide

Posted on February 3, 2012 by epbeaumont

Author’s note: In preparation for NaNoWriMo 2009, someone put up daily prompts on one of the forums. I did them in the spirit of warm-ups, but some of them turned into stories. Here is one such, from 10/9/2009.

Prompt:  Roar! Write a 300 words story from the perspective of an animal.

The sky is over us, and the treetops reach into it.  That’s the place we settle to talk it over.  From there we can see all the good bits, and the pigeons don’t come up there to bother us.  Then there’s the grass, where we stroll to discuss matters of importance, and occasionally spot tasty bits.  The fat chittering squirrels will contest the occasional dropped roll—well, we get them, when a car hits them.  Squirrels are incredibly stupid, which is unsurprising in something that’s basically food on the hoof.  That’s why they turn up in roadkill, also known as free lunch.

Then there’s the humans.  They’re an odd sort of monkey, all wrapped in extra skins, sort of the crow of the primate world.  They’ll eat damn near anything—after all, it’s their leftovers that feed the rather degenerate local squirrels, that have gotten so tame that they’ll follow the odd pedestrian in search of a bagel or cookie or candy bar.  And here, in this quadrangle formed by the buildings, with no cars to interfere, the humans even feed the bloody things.  Shame we haven’t figured out how to tame them like that—it would make them ever so much easier to catch.  No, better to wait for cars to get them.  Of course, then there’s the tricky bit of eating while not getting hit yourself.  Grab a bit of the juicy red bits, then beat your wings to rise out of the way of the rolling metal death.  Bloody inconvenient, though the wires running over the roadway occasionally drop a free squirrel onto the pavement, which then gets run over.  You have to eat it, though, before the passing cars squash it too flat and dirty to be worth picking at.

Tricky thing, being a city crow.  Sometimes we like to retire to the trees by the river and reminisce about the good old days when all you had to do was follow the lines of march.  Of course, nothing’s perfect.  Even in those days, you still had to share the pickings with wolves.

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Writing Goals: Making the goal, but missing the deadline

Posted on February 1, 2012 by epbeaumont

A few weekends ago, I had a write-in. My buddy wrote fiction. I wrote non-fiction (I hope): a list of 2012 goals. It got scary fast. Between unfinished projects, projects ready for second- or third-pass revision, beta reading, copy-editing, and projects that are chomping at the bit to be brought into the world, it added up to 750,000 words of fiction for 2012.

In my dreams. You know, the dreams in which independent wealth drops into my lap and I can spend all my time writing fiction, I could write 750,000 words in a year. I turned out that much and more at former day jobs that involved lots of correspondence and report-writing and proposals and specifications.

However, in present tense, that’s just not going to happen.

Today is February 1, the last date mentioned in my Writing Goals for the Next Six Months post. Here’s what I had in mind for the lasts two months:

By January 1: send NaNo 2011 to the fabulous folks who’ve already volunteered to beta-read it, and start the grungy work of dissecting it scene by scene. Last year, I did a spreadsheet of scenes, including who was in them, where they occurred, and what happened. Like a filmmaker, I treat the scene as the basic unit. Since I’m hoping to take some vacation from Ye Olde Day Jobbe at that time, let’s throw two more goals: (1) finish the revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale so that I have a finished second draft and (2) start reading about publication options, since the landscape is changing rapidly.

By February 1: Finish third-draft revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, stripping the language down to bare essentials and removing all other fat. Sort through the beta-readers’ responses on NaNo 2011.

Last week I met the goal of sending the NaNo 2011 novel to the beta-readers, not by finishing it, but by sending it, and telling them that I’d be supplementing it with the replacement chapter (as it occurs around page 340, that isn’t an immediate worry). Instead of working on the revisions on Shape-shifter, I spent the time on finishing the NaNo 2011 novel. That’s good news, actually; I had real momentum on this project, which treated the external structure of National Novel Writing Month as a chance to get writing done, but continued the work thereafter. And weirdly enough, sending the project away as if I’d given up on the unfinished part gave the muse a little jump-start. (Nothing like the prospect of being read to get It/Him/Her going.)

Oh yes, and I made my decision about the publishing: both-and. I will be pursuing self-publication (tr. setting up an e-publishing venture) as well as following up on interesting anthology calls. However, I’m more than prepared to turn down a contract if I don’t like the terms. (More on all this in a later post).

The burgeoning draft of NaNo 2011 pushed the February 1 goal into the intermediate future. It’s worth looking at this failure to see where my estimates were accurate and where they weren’t. Not surprisingly, my forecasts go awry with the projects further in the future. It’s important to think in terms of big chunks of time, but to realize that projects have a life of their own. A successful project often eats up more time than expected, which bumps other projects down the line.

So the new timeline looks like this:

By March 1: Send the final version of NaNo 2011 to the beta-readers, and review the comments they’ve sent to date. Re-visit NaNo 2009, The Shape-shifter’s Tale, and write out a final scenario. This will give me the checklist of scenes that are missing from the first draft. Finish all of my current beta-reading commitments.

By April 1: Write the missing scenes for The Shape-shifter’s Tale. Collate the beta-readers’ comments on Necromancer and Barbarian. Edit Annie Brown, Max and the Ghost, and The Lost Pissarro. April is very busy at the day job, so I’m not going to get more ambitious than this. If I decide to do Script Frenzy in April, then I have to plan the project in March.

By May 1: Finish Script Frenzy project, if I decide to do it. Continue work on the editing, and make a list of projects spawned by the parts I carve away. Collate all of the beta-readers’ comments on NaNo 2011, and write out the scenario, including a list of missing scenes. Get out the big knife and prepare to cut.

And that’s it. Three months ahead is all I can see, and this list doesn’t include the work for the publishing venture.

In three months, we’ll come back and look at how it went. Stay tuned.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 29 January 2012 (The Necromancer and the Barbarian: a Love Story)

Posted on January 29, 2012 by epbeaumont

“And I froze him,” Raina said, and her outlines sharpened, until there was a human-shaped void with a corona of moonlight about it, and a face, dimly seen, that might be bone or flesh; it seemed to slide from one to the other. “Raina Scherer, deceased,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t have any credentials of the usual sort. Dr. Felix will have to vouch for me.”

The policeman turned to Raina with his notebook and prepared to take her statement. Since the Great Change, the authorities took evidence and asked questions later, especially on the night of the full moon.

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