Anywhere I hang my theme is home
Mar. 9th, 2006 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonQuote of the day:
"You only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree."
—G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
Writing talk of the day: I'm working on chapter 37 now. Chapter 32 has just been posted to the OWW. Major revelation in that chapter (hint). One everyone's been asking me about for months (hint). I'm working steadily towards the end of the book, reaching a rather frightening word count, see much cutting in my future. I already have some ideas about what can go, but I'm not tackling a rewrite for awhile after finishing this monster.
Last Thursday when I finished chapter 36 I decided to reward myself by letting my Friday writing session be all about the probably-next novel, Charged with Folly. God, it felt good to work on something fresh! So exciting to be at the worldbuilding stage. I sat back and reminded myself I once felt that way about Night Warrior, that there would probably come a time when I was as sick of Charged with Folly, but it still felt good to have something new to play with. I know I've waffled back and forth quite a bit about what I'm going to write next, but that one has really started to take on dimension in the last weeks. The thematic underpinnings have started to form up, the plot to solidify.
I'm not one who generally goes out and searches for themes before I write a novel. For me, those things tend to take care of themselves in the process of writing. Often I don't recognize that I've got a theme until I'm well into the story, or even finished with it. And they tend to be rather broad themes, like, "outsiders banding together to form a family" or "how myth penetrates our lives though we're unconscious of the influence" or "how each person has to find their way through the labyrinth of their own lives."
But even though I don't actively seek out themes, I do tend to need a "philosophical" framework upon which to hang the story, and for going deep in the formation of my characters. When I was writing Shivery Bones, for instance, I read a number of books about sacred prostitutes and dark moon goddesses. I found Demetra George's Mysteries of the Dark Moon, particularly her section on the Persephone myth, to be especially helpful. The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine by Nancy Qualls-Corbett was also extremely valuable. For Night Warrior/Born to Darkness I obviously read a great deal of Arthurian material, but I tended to concentrate on those books analyzing the possibility of a real life Arthur rather than the books on the Arthurian myth cycle. If I read myth it tended to be the early Celtic material rather than the later stuff by Geoffrey, Malory, White, et al. The Norma Goodrich books were good as a spark to imagination, but I would never recommend them as pieces of scholarship. They tend to make wild and sweeping statements without backing them up or providing references, so I tended to read them as rather fact-obsessed novels.
Anyway, what I found particularly promising is that I've started to find books for Charged with Folly that are giving me that philosophical framework—books on alchemy and on the spiritual/mythological aspects of labyrinths. I have discovered, through discovering these books, how the mechanism of this created world actually works. I had a splashy premise and some intriguing characters, an interesting alternate universe, but now I begin to see the deep spaces echoing inside my characters and my world.
One book, The Genesis and Geometry of the Labyrinth, has a lot of intriguing ideas, but it's written in that densely intellectual style of Frenchies like Derrida and Lévi-Strauss. Why go in for simple, clear language when you can obfuscate and fill up space with 10 ton words? Though I suppose that dense style is appropriate for a book on labyrinths. Even so, I'm able to wind my way through the twisting paths to find my idea framework. The plot spiderwebs in my mind, the characters resonate on a deeper level—and I finally know what happens at the end!
Knowing the ending is an essential first step to truly beginning.
"You only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree."
—G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
Writing talk of the day: I'm working on chapter 37 now. Chapter 32 has just been posted to the OWW. Major revelation in that chapter (hint). One everyone's been asking me about for months (hint). I'm working steadily towards the end of the book, reaching a rather frightening word count, see much cutting in my future. I already have some ideas about what can go, but I'm not tackling a rewrite for awhile after finishing this monster.
Last Thursday when I finished chapter 36 I decided to reward myself by letting my Friday writing session be all about the probably-next novel, Charged with Folly. God, it felt good to work on something fresh! So exciting to be at the worldbuilding stage. I sat back and reminded myself I once felt that way about Night Warrior, that there would probably come a time when I was as sick of Charged with Folly, but it still felt good to have something new to play with. I know I've waffled back and forth quite a bit about what I'm going to write next, but that one has really started to take on dimension in the last weeks. The thematic underpinnings have started to form up, the plot to solidify.
I'm not one who generally goes out and searches for themes before I write a novel. For me, those things tend to take care of themselves in the process of writing. Often I don't recognize that I've got a theme until I'm well into the story, or even finished with it. And they tend to be rather broad themes, like, "outsiders banding together to form a family" or "how myth penetrates our lives though we're unconscious of the influence" or "how each person has to find their way through the labyrinth of their own lives."
But even though I don't actively seek out themes, I do tend to need a "philosophical" framework upon which to hang the story, and for going deep in the formation of my characters. When I was writing Shivery Bones, for instance, I read a number of books about sacred prostitutes and dark moon goddesses. I found Demetra George's Mysteries of the Dark Moon, particularly her section on the Persephone myth, to be especially helpful. The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine by Nancy Qualls-Corbett was also extremely valuable. For Night Warrior/Born to Darkness I obviously read a great deal of Arthurian material, but I tended to concentrate on those books analyzing the possibility of a real life Arthur rather than the books on the Arthurian myth cycle. If I read myth it tended to be the early Celtic material rather than the later stuff by Geoffrey, Malory, White, et al. The Norma Goodrich books were good as a spark to imagination, but I would never recommend them as pieces of scholarship. They tend to make wild and sweeping statements without backing them up or providing references, so I tended to read them as rather fact-obsessed novels.
Anyway, what I found particularly promising is that I've started to find books for Charged with Folly that are giving me that philosophical framework—books on alchemy and on the spiritual/mythological aspects of labyrinths. I have discovered, through discovering these books, how the mechanism of this created world actually works. I had a splashy premise and some intriguing characters, an interesting alternate universe, but now I begin to see the deep spaces echoing inside my characters and my world.
One book, The Genesis and Geometry of the Labyrinth, has a lot of intriguing ideas, but it's written in that densely intellectual style of Frenchies like Derrida and Lévi-Strauss. Why go in for simple, clear language when you can obfuscate and fill up space with 10 ton words? Though I suppose that dense style is appropriate for a book on labyrinths. Even so, I'm able to wind my way through the twisting paths to find my idea framework. The plot spiderwebs in my mind, the characters resonate on a deeper level—and I finally know what happens at the end!
Knowing the ending is an essential first step to truly beginning.
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Date: 2006-03-09 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-09 12:20 pm (UTC)