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.