Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“Every novelist ought to invent his own technique, that is the fact of the matter. Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna. Thus, Faulkner’s technique is certainly the best one with which to paint Faulkner’s world, and Kafka’s nightmare has produced its own myths that make it communicable. . . . The work of art itself. . . is the solution to the problem of technique.”

—François Mauriac, La Table Ronde magazine, August 1949



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

You may remember a recent post in which I stated that the structure of my novel had begun to resemble a water tower with a big glob of denouement on top of spindly legs. I forced myself to outline all the stuff that needed to be crammed in at the end and come up with a sequence of events that seemed less bulbous. I've been chipping away at it ever since, doing the grown up thing, just grinding it out until I can type The End. This is not the fun part of writing, this is just what you have to do sometimes. It's been a slow, painful process, somewhat resembling this:



Yanno, closing in on the end of my sixth completed novel (sloooooooooowly) I can truly say that every novel is a royal pain in its own way. Whether you outline or not, whether you saturate yourself with research or not, whether you get to know your characters well enough to forge their signatures—or not—it's still going to give you a royal pain somewhere along the line. You think you're starting to get the hang of it after a few of them, and some things are easier, but inevitably, every damned time, you're forced to learn something new.

Or, not you, yanno, necessarily. Maybe that's just me.

I wish it was more like this:



But, alas.

Here's another one, just because it's so frickin' cuuuuuuuuuute.

As I'm stumbling through the first draft of my novels, trying to find the line of the narrative, I have a tendency to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into the story to see what sticks. This is enormously inefficient, and I wind up having to cut many scenes when it comes to the next draft. But I can never quite seem to see what should stay or what should go until revisions. I'm confused and afraid to throw anything away lest I might need it later.

Classic hoarder mentally. Fortunately, some scenes are so glaringly out of place that I wind up deleting them—but I put them into an "off" file just in case. It's sick. And I suspect it's a big failing because I wind up with big, bloated first drafts that require a lot of rewriting. Although these days they aren't as horribly bloated as they used to be, so maybe I'm learning. Maybe.

In the moment, though, as I'm writing, everything seems vitally important. No one could possibly understand this book without that scene. How can I throw it away? I've gotten a lot better at trusting the reader on the scene and sentence level—really, people can infer quite a bit and "get it" just fine—but I've yet to whip that demon on the plot/book level.

Venus in Transit is having that problem now. Even though I'm writing new material to supposedly replace some of that kitchen sink material, I find it very difficult to throw out the old elements of the structure, characters that could probably be skipped for the sake of streamlining and the drive towards the climax, and etc.

It's a gall-durned cussed streak, that's what it is. Like I said, probably a big failing. I'm working to get beyond it, but I fear sometimes I may need an intervention or a 12-Step program to unlearn these bad habits for good.

Two steps forward, one step back.

Nah—just Keep It Simple, Stupid.