Errors, wrong turns, and exciting opportunities

I woke up at noon with the baseline from Don't Fear the Reaper running through my head.  It wasn't the first time I had woken up today but I hoped it would be the last.  I tell you this only because I think when you have an opportunity to start a story that way, you should take it.

Unfortunately there's nowhere to go forward from there.  I ate.  In a little while I will have blogged.  So let us go back in time.

I got some feedback on the current draft of Hengist and Undine, and it was not great.  (Should I warn my beta readers that I will blog about their opinions?  Should I refrain from doing so?  Do they take it for granted?)  By "not great" I specifically mean that the latest draft is, in some ways, inferior to its predecessor.  So that is disappointing and, among other things, a lesson in why I shouldn't put off receiving feedback.

I was not in a great mood about that last night or this morning (after I woke up the first and second time) but there are pleasant complications.  My beta reader (an artist in his own right, and further along his own path than I am) agreed with me that there is a certain relief in hearing a negative review that confirms your own instincts.  And I had felt like something was missing from Hengist and Undine as I produced its last iteration.  In a word, it might have been "exuberance."  Based on what I heard it might also be called my "voice."

What do I make of that?  For one thing it is a little confusing, at least, to hear that I write well, but not in my most conscientiously edited output.  This blog, for example, was offered as a good example of my voice, while for my own part I have been perpetually worried that I do you, the reader, a disservice by writing these posts too quickly, by rambling, by not adding enough worthwhile thoughts or entertaining turns of phrase per post.

There's something frankly frightening in the thought that what I do best I do unconsciously, and that my conscious mind can kill it.

So that is confusing and frightening, but not new.  It reminds me of my last few art courses in college, many (5) years ago.  My professor was trying to get me to do... something.  He wanted me to try a looser, more frenetic, rawer style, which was something I would attempt but as I tried to smooth out the errors I made in my initial marks my painting would get more controlled and, somehow, the end result would come out looking almost sloppy.

In my next course with that professor he stopped me one day early in a project and warned me not to make very many changes to the drawing I was working on.  This, he told me, was what I had been trying to do with my unsuccessful painting the previous semester.

He was right, of course.  My first strokes with chalk and charcoal had a character to them that would only get erased if I overlaid them with more considered marks.  So it wasn't perfect but what I wanted was there, and it was as there as it was going to get.

I don't know exactly what the moral of this story is.  But if the best qualities of my voice are something spontaneous then I need to find a way to harness that.

Finally, on this not, I am excited because I have a direction.  For a long time I've known H&U needed work but not exactly what kind of work it needed.  But if it's lost my voice, that's a problem I can attack.  I can try--I don't know exactly how yet--to put my exuberance back in.

I woke up at noon today feeling a little manic.  I wanted to write something.  I have an dragon living in my novel--when next I pick up my writing sword I will have something to slay besides the manuscript.  So while I would much rather have heard that my current draft was genius, and I should send it out today unchanged, in some ways the world is back the way it should be.

This post is getting a little long but there is more to say and this time I think I will say it.

My helpful beta reader asked incisively: "What do you love about fantasy?  You need to answer this question."  Apparently this was not evident in my novel and this cut me to the quick.  Being drunk at the time I begged off answering right away.  The answer was something I had lost.  But now I can offer an answer, both what I love about fantasy and about my story in particular, and I hope that the answer will be a sort of North Star when I attack my novel again.

Here we go.  I'm going to think as I write.

I prefer Fantasy to Reality as a source of raw material for fiction.  When faced with an empty space, to fill it by invention is an act with intrinsic value.  Imitation has its place, but perfect imitation is redundancy.

I love the romantic mode (by "romantic" I mean the mode of Thomas Mallory, not Danielle Steel) for the vividness it brings.  When the constraints of everyday feasibility are broken, when the amp really does go up to 11, the colors are bolder, the stakes are clearer, the virtues are greater.  Not that there is a lack of subtlety but the spectrum is wider.  And if we are honest, there is more to real life than we can conceive.  We are truer to it when we imagine without constraint than when we imitate what we can see of it.

I love the ability to distort, magnify, and recombine, to make the alien familiar and the familiar alien.  I think fiction does us the service, if nothing else, of expanding our capacity to conceive, and as I said, the real world demands that expanded capacity of us.

As for the merit of making the familiar alien, I want to go back to visual art for an example.  Most people have a very hard time drawing their own face.  It is largely because we all have an idea in our head of what our face should look like, and that's what we try to draw.  Even with a mirror right in front of us we ignore the evidence of our eyes in favor or our prejudices.  It takes practice to see what you look at--to see things as if you had not seen them before, and didn't know what they "should" look like.

I like pseudohistorical settings because I like old ideas--not all of them, obviously.  I miss mystery, and the sense that no one knows what exists far away.  Even in the unexplored places, now, there's a pretty good sense of what kind of thing we can expect to find.  I think our society may even overestimate the extent to which we've exhausted our mysteries.  I would like to see more maps with "dragons?" scrawled in the middle of large empty spaces.  Somewhere.

Not between here and the supermarket, of course, but at least in books.

As for my own story, I want to tell a story that does some of these things, first of all.  But also, I want to tell a story where the epic scale exists in service of the human scale.  Not the realistic human scale--I don't want to write The Great Gatsby--but I want to push heroic characters to heroic lengths.  I want bolder virtues and bleaker evils, still essentially experienced by individual minds and souls.

I want to tell a story about people trying to do the right thing.  I'd like even to create characters who are admirable.  I want to tell a story about dealing with change and uncertainty, adulthood and the nature of integrity.

Is there more?  I was tempted to getting into the virtues of particular plot points, and then coyly replacing them with "[spoiler redacted]" and maybe I will later, but right now I think I've spent long enough writing this thing.  I've also got real writing to do, which I will discuss in the past tense when appropriate, in the near future.

On an unrelated note, I found out yesterday that girlfriends don't like stories that begin with "So I almost suffered a debilitating injury on Wednesday," even if they turn out to be slightly exaggerated.  I'm still learning.

Dice as writing implements

The good news is that I'm writing other things, although some of them are technically games that I'm playing and not works of fiction.  I wonder if there is any benefit to the writer in participating in this sort of thing, or if it takes up time that would otherwise be spent writing more seriously?  I know that it's taking up time I could otherwise spend blogging.

Having suckered myself into getting involved in two games of online Diplomacy, I won't spend much time trying to justify it.  But getting involved in a play-by-post Burning Wheel campaign actually raises the question of whether--or to what extent--my contribution to the game is practice in or a distraction from the writing craft.  Most of the other players are of a literary persuasion, and I know two of them are spinning a different campaign off into a novel, so it's not necessarily a waste.  And where Burning Wheel looks like it should shine is in creating characters with depth and wringing story out of them.  I have to wonder.

A few years ago I DM'd a D&D campaign that was apparently well-liked by my players.  I DM'd in college more or less continuously, but just found it harder and harder to create sessions.  I wrapped up one long campaign to everyone's satisfaction, but everything since then has sort of sputtered and gone out.

To the extent that running a game is performance, I fear it.  To the extent that it is writing, it is trying to write a story when you have no direct control over the main characters.  (A million good GMs would tell me that I'm doing it wrong if that's how I'm looking at it, and they would probably be right.)  And I think that the attentive GM will be the most aware, of anyone at the table, of everywhere the game drags or stalls, and every sword swing that stretches over 15 minutes because arewesurethisishowthatthingactuallyworksohshootIforgotaboutthis.

But for all that frustration it's worth mentioning that my most recent stalled D&D campaign has recently fermented into the concept of a novel.  As I strip out the epic fantasy generica and trademarked materials something genuinely intriguing--to me anyway--is taking shape.  Although I run into a new problem there, in that several of my characters were created by good friends of mine, who became invested in their avatars over the course of the game.  In the vagaries of interpersonal emotional law it is hard to see how much right I have to take these characters and change them to suit my needs, as I do with my own.  And can I play the capricious god with characters who wear my friends' faces?  It was easy enough to do in the game, when the friends could fight back with dice and their own ideas, but is someone being denied a fair deal when I'm at both ends of the table?

Playing from the passenger seat has given me some perspective, not only on gaming as such but on writing.  Getting to play characters instead of running things is a relatively new experience for me, then, and I often find myself preferring it.  But I can see that I conceptualize characters differently than most of my friends, whether they're for games or stories.

When does a fictional character acquire a soul?  By this I think I mean at what point does the character acquire an integrity that can be violated--when does changing the character become writing them wrong?  I see my friends hit this point pretty early on, perhaps less than halfway through character creation in the case of an RPG.  Whereas I come to a potential story wanting certain things to happen to certain sorts of people, and I pick and shape the characters to make that happen.  I suppose when writing, a character is mutable until the final draft, but you only have one go at a game.  That would perhaps argue for ensouling an RPG avatar relatively early, but I find that I don't know my character until I have a firm grasp of the world that they're inhabiting.

The World includes the Rules.  Rules are worldview.  The game developer codifies the answers to questions that we struggle with in real life: What defines a (human) being?  What is important?  What brings success, and what brings failure?  In Dungeons and Dragons it pays to take risks, and be larger than life.  In Call of Cthulhu it doesn't pay to get out of bed in the morning.

This is getting fairly long.  I should save some thoughts for the future.