Echoes in a Hollow Space

A recent conversation withgreen_knight prompted me to pick up this book by Corrine Kenner again and at least do the first exercise in Part II.

Part I is titled, “Tarot 101,” and it really is that. If you’re not familiar with tarot and want to learn, you could definitely use this section as a primer. I got bogged down, though, because it was repetitive for me, so I skipped it. I’m not saying I couldn’t learn more about tarot—I most certainly can—but I didn’t think this would help me that much. Corinne Kenner states in her introduction that she’s fine with people skipping around. Ms. Kenner uses the classic Rider Waite Smith deck (RWS),* but it’s one of the few decks I’ve tried that doesn’t really work for me, so I used my favorite Crow Tarot instead.

Anyway, the first chapter in Part II, “The Writer’s Tarot,” is “Character Creation,” and the first exercise is on using the cards to pick and flesh out a cast of characters. This would probably work best for a new idea, a new story, but I’m almost 20k into the current novel. Still, there are some unknown variables in my story. I’m a pantser, you see: I write from the seat of my pants rather than from an outline, so I don’t really know all that will happen in my stories before I write them. However, I thought it might be interesting to do this exercise and see what I got.

I have to confess that character stuff is generally the thing I need least help on. They seem to arrive fully formed in my psyche with their motivations already in play. My job is to build the story around them. Usually, I spend a certain amount of time filling in backstory (sometimes an excessive amount of time) to explain to myself how they got to be the way they are and to clean up any historical stuff. In the current WIP, I’ve got two characters acting like protagonists, a third who swings back and forth between protagging and antagging, and a fourth who is a significant supporting player (a foil). Three of these characters appeared in an earlier work so I know them well and it’s easy to write for them. But again, I thought this would be worth a shot—if for no other reason than straightening out the protagging and the antagging. I still don’t know who the real antagonist is. So far it has been a Thing, but I’ve always known that would resolve itself into a person/being who is driving the Thing.

How this works

In the first exercise, you deal yourself a starting spread, one card each for protagonist(s); antagonist(s); protagonist’s foil (Dr. Watson, Sancho Panza, et al.); antagonist’s foil (Capt. Hook’s Mr. Smee, Mini Me, et al.); and supporting character (characters who pop up and have important but not continuing roles like a foil). Then you read the card for each and make notes about what the card suggests for that character(s). At first, I used the booklet that came with the Crow Tarot but duh, this process works much better with the card meanings Ms. Kenner has included in the book. The largest section of the book (pgs. 122-323) are tarot meanings based on RWS and slanted towards the writing process. Once I used that, things seemed to fall into place and I did get some insights into the complex character dynamic I’ve got going here. Each exercise also includes a Writing Practice and/or writing prompts.

Other exercises in the character section:

•  “Personality Plus” - rounding out characters, including a group of questions to ask. You can draw cards to answer these questions (and the ones following), as many as you like.
• “Character Building” – filling in the background
•  “Casting Call” – for a larger work like a novel or screenplay
• “Typecasting” – playing with archetypes
•  “Minor Characters”
•  “The Private Lives of Public Personalities” – psychological underpinnings
• “Hopes and Fears”
• “A Note About Names”
• “Dialogues and Interviews”
• “Fill in the Blanks”
• “Compare Notes”

I’d be willing to share the results of my exercise in another post if anyone is interested.


*And yes, I know many of the decks I use are based on RWS, but the actual classic deck doesn't work for me.

Random quote of the day:

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”

—Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Laurel and Hardy, Ariana Grande, or the Salvation Army Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

It’s a funny thing about having all the time in the world: there still aren’t enough hours in the day.

As of October 1, I am no longer a working woman. But after a lifetime of holding down a job it’s been surprisingly difficult to turn off the internal dictator who berates me regularly with what I should be doing with my time. She doesn’t listen when I tell her that I’m allowed to do whatever I want. Her shoulds revolve around both working on the house and creative work and it’s a never-ending cycle of guilt.

As a friend pointed out, it’s only been a month. I need time to depressurize from what was frankly a difficult few years of forcing myself to get up and go to work when I felt lousy. I was so completely drained of energy that my Saturdays were usually a full body collapse and Sundays the only day of the week when I could accomplish anything. Now I have a whole week of weekends. At first, I did the full body collapse and it was difficult to get over the feeling that I was on a prolonged vacation and would have to return to the unbearable slog eventually. I’m just now beginning to get over that feeling, but I’m still not completely there yet.

I’ve utterly reset my body clock to my natural state of being up until the wee small hours and sleeping in late and I’m finally to the point of not needing 11-12 hours of sleep a night. I’m getting by on a mere 9 hours now and hope to get back to a conventional 8. Curiously, the dictator has never berated me about that (well, hardly ever). Even she recognized that I desperately needed the rest.

But as soon as I am out of bed, she starts with the shoulds. Clean this, write that, pick up this, finish that craft project, on and on and on.

What she doesn’t realize, and what I’ve only recently realized on a conscious level myself, was that I needed to completely dismantle the old structure of my life. What worked then is not going to work now. Once that is thoroughly dismantled, I can start building it back up again from the ground floor. Structure and schedules are necessary things for any kind of productivity. But I have to rebuild them to match my new reality.

Oh reality, you’re such a tricky bastard.

Another friend of mine retired July 1 and we’ve had many discussions about this. Like me, when she first retired she berated herself on a regular basis for not using the luxury of time in a better fashion. Like me, she’d been longing for years to get back to a place where she had enough energy to do her creative work. Because she didn’t immediately jump into the fray and start doing, she sent herself many hate messages. I’m happy to report her creative life has come back online—but it took a while of not doing anything, of stripping herself down and rebuilding herself to get that going.

The thing about having all the time in the world is that it takes time to be able to use it well. It’s a process like anything else. Artists are supposed to understand about process, but sometimes we fool ourselves, or forget, or get locked into a way of doing things that no longer works for us. What nobody tells you (because it’s not a conspiracy of silence but something you have to discover on your own) is that every artist who wants to keep doing art will periodically have to reinvent themselves. And it’s not as if I didn’t know this! I’ve had to reinvent my reason for writing and doing art a couple of times in my life, and I had conveniently forgotten that birthing a new process is painful. (One does tend to gloss over the icky bits.)

As my friend said, “There’s most likely growth going on subliminally that will manifest down the road.”

Ah yes, the growth thing. It’s so hard, I whine.

Being is becoming, as many a philosopher has pointed out. We are in a constant state of being until we be no more. That’s what the living do, taking it day by day, trying to build a productive life on the ash heap of illusion and ticking time. I don’t know why I thought having all the time in the world would make that any easier. Because, really, we don’t have all the time in the world. That is the biggest illusion of all. The trick is, I think, not to fear time running out so much that it freezes us in place or makes us set up panicky structures that don’t work for us.

Being is becoming. Becoming is taking the time to find that golden thread that pulls us along our true path.

Random quote of the day:

“Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.”

—Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Orville and Wilbur, Katy Perry, or the Avengers. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Be regular in your daily life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

—Gustave Flaubert, as quoted in The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction by John Defresne

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

 Random quote of the day:

“We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives. If we had, we would know everything—but at most that is only a pretense. At bottom we never know how it has all come about.”

—Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (tr. Clara and Richard Winston)

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

It’s both disturbing and gratifying to read old stories I haven’t touched in a few years. Gratifying because I can see the progress I’ve made as a writer; disturbing because I realize that stories I think are pretty danged good at this moment in time will probably make me cringe at some future reading. Not all of the old stories make me cringe, fortunately, but sometimes, as now when I am rereading a novella from some years ago, I wonder what kind of line of self-delusion I might be walking. Reading this poor old thing just makes me so tired, so much so that I wrote this blog post during my writing time rather than continue reading it. Back in the day, I thought it one of the best things I’d written. It even got some recognition as an Editor’s Choice on the Online Writing Workshop. And maybe it was the best story I’d written at that point in time.

The other cringe-making thing is that I reworked this novella so many times I edited some of the life out of it. Now that I’m incorporating it into my WIP, I’ve gone back to an older version to compare/contrast. Some of what I cut out to streamline can probably be added back into the novel with no harm, reincorporating some of the richness that got rinsed away.

Or I may wind up cutting it out all over again.

That’s the thing about writing. One has to stay true to the current moment: pushing and expanding outside the comfort zone, climbing the next hill, and the next. I have to keep learning my craft, not resting on what I learned last year or the year before. It’s a constant climb up the rock face, scrabbling for finger and toe holds. Sometimes when one reaches a plateau, one can take a break, but there will always be another rock face. I can’t worry that some future plateau will show me what a hash I made of the last plateau and the stories it contained. I have to stay true to where I am now, either climbing or resting, and realize I’m doing the best I can now with the tools I have provided myself. And the tools that each day of writing helps me develop.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.