I will be brief

Reading and writing continues. I just cleared a section of Hengist and Undine that I think was much improved by being gone over once more. I've also noticed that at some point I stopped finding it painful to re-read my own writing. I think this means I've grown as a writer.

Besides trying to edit down Shakespeare, I'm reading Patrick Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear. Like its predecessor, it's quite enjoyable. However, if I didn't want to beat Kvothe unconscious with a pool noodle before, I would now, and since I did before, now I want to do it twice. The reason is the same as before--Denna--only more so. More and more so.

Oh well. This is what happens when we get invested in characters. I should be so lucky as to inspire such frustration. Through my fictional characters, I mean. I've got people lined up around the block to beat me unconscious with pool noodles.

I went to the library today (with Girlfriend, who had to return books) and picked up Rashomon, which admittedly is not a book but a movie. I had to stop myself from looking down on myself as one of those people who only goes to the library to borrow free movies, reminding myself that the reason I don't take out books is that I have too many books at home that I still haven't read.

My Shakespeare is shrinking!

Well, shame on me, first off, for delaying last weekend's post until the middle of this week. I should know better.

I've kept busy, if perhaps not on the things I should be busy with. Girlfriend (a while ago, actually) got it into her head to produce Romeo and Juliet with her middle school, and I consequently got it into my head to go through the script and cut it down into a middle-school-manageable size. It turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected, and I've spent a good bit of the last few days reading, cutting, and splicing the first three acts. Not rewriting--she was vehemently opposed, and it is probably for the best. Just presuming to cut the play in half is intoxicating enough in its boldness.

It's been a while since I had read Romeo and Juliet (I won't say how long) and it is better than I had remembered--not that I remembered it badly. It seems fashionable to knock R&J, perhaps precisely because it is the preeminently popular Shakespeare play of this generation, but I think it deserves its laurels. Re-reading it, and needing to really get a sense of the scenes and the lines, is forcing me to appreciate it.

On one hand, we have those who take R&J as a great love story. On the other hand we have the scoffers (not scoffing at the text, but at the people on the first hand) who take it as a deconstruction, pointing out that Romeo and Juliet are stupid teenagers who get entirely carried away and die in a hormonal conflagration that takes four other people with them.

I think the beauty of the play is that it's all of those things. I have insisted and will continue to insist that Romeo and Juliet's romance is a good and beautiful thing--or at least that it would be if the context for the romance weren't a murderous powder keg. The play also deconstructs romance, but without denying its potential beauty. Romeo and Juliet's love is simultaneously poetic and chemical, profound and superficial, innocent and lustful, redemptive and annihilative. The play is both a cautionary tale and a celebration.

It's actually misleading to say that Romeo and Juliet get carried away by their emotions. They do--oh, they definitely do--but so does everyone else. To dismiss Romeo and Juliet (or Juliet and Romeo, for the sake of variety) as overemotional teenagers misses the point. The play seems to say that they get carried away, not because they are adolescents, but because they are humans. That is the tragedy of humanity, and the tragedy of the play only comes about because so many major players act on their emotions at exactly the wrong time.

Juliet and Romeo's emotional vices are love, which has the potential to be a good thing, and despair, which--given their ultimate situation--is understandable. The emotions that rule their elders--spite, rage, and cowardice--are less forgivable.

Let's take a moment to consider how almost everyone who should be helping Juliet and Romeo screws the play up by being emotional.

First and most obviously, the anger driving the Capulet-Montague feud seems to touch everyone except Benvolio. Tybalt is supposed to be Juliet's friend, but he's a ball of hate from curtain-up to curtain-down. Mercutio is not much better. His anger on Romeo's behalf provokes him to escalate Tybalt's insults into violence, and where Mercutio draws a sword in Romeo's cause is where things actually start going downhill.

The next unforced error by a grownup goes to Lord Capulet. The problem isn't that he is so tone-deaf as to arrange Juliet's marriage on the afternoon of her cousin's death. The problem is that when Juliet objects he becomes enraged. His anger takes everyone else in the scene aback. His plan to lift his daughter's spirits becomes an ultimatum: obey utterly or be disowned. For fear of his anger, Lady Capulet will not even discuss delaying the wedding. Thus Juliet has to replace her original plan with haste.

And Friar Laurence--oh, Friar Laurence. Here's a man who knows what he's about, for the most part. In the safety of his cell he can lay a pretty good plan--heck, his plan for Juliet works just fine in Much Ado About Nothing. Maybe there's nothing he could have done to save Romeo's life, but he is there in the crypt when Juliet wakes up. He should be protecting her--she could survive. In fact, Laurence previously stopped Romeo from stabbing himself--maybe he could do the same service for poor Juliet?* But no--in Juliet's moment of extreme need he hears people coming and flees. His betrayal is so sudden and banal it must come from sheer terror. We never saw this weakness in him before because we never saw him in immediate personal danger. In the end he can give good advice, but the pressure of a do-or-die moment breaks him, and the flight reflex overwhelms all his well-intentioned schemes.

With these people around them, it really would have taken more than a cold shower to save Romeo or Juliet. A bucket of cold water in the face of Mercutio, Lord Capulet, or Friar Laurence at a critical moment could have saved their lives.

* He does exactly this in Act 4--which I had forgotten, having only gotten through the first three acts as of writing yesterday... I don't think Friar Laurence's official policy on this is "Everybody gets one."

My novel is shrinking!

I think it's because Girlfriend isn't here this weekend, and I don't have anyone to look busy for, that I've done such prodigious procrastinating these last two days. I came into the weekend with three hours of writing to do and have only just, only now, starting it, at 6 o'clock on Sunday evening. Some days this situation might bother me; tonight I feel pretty writerly.

Self-indulgence can be energizing or enervating. Most recently I've been indulging myself by reading about writing again--this time reading The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes. Reading about how to write is a drug for the aspiring writer--so I suspect--but it's a stimulant, and my system has been clear of it more or less since I set down my Orson Scott Card writing books last year, so it packs a kick. With any luck I can ride it past the end of this post.

One point that Keyes makes is that good writing is clear. He does not go quite so far as to say--but he comes close to saying--that writing well is as easy as thinking something interesting and then communicating it in words.

I'd been rediscovering this myself as I edit Hengist and Undine again, for what I once again hope is the last time. My last edit did not go well, as I confessed at the time, and I put it aside for a good while, and accomplished some things in the interim. But I think at least part of what went wrong last time was that I spent my time embellishing the words on the page, rather than improving my communication of the story. I had inadvertently turned it into a book about words.

As I've been editing, I've been remembering what's actually happening in the book--or what should be happening. I've been paring away some of my lexical and syntactic indulgences. In a few places, and all places I am pleased with so far, I have expanded on scenes, fleshing things out where time has "revealed" more about the characters and cultures of my story. I had hoped that this might happen more often, and my book (then 88,000 words long) would expand like it did from its first rewrite (from a mere 50,000 words) to assume a respectable epic heft. Instead I find that nearly everything, at this point, is mostly improved by shortening.

To my horror, the draft has been gradually shrinking in spite of my efforts to bolster it. A third of the way into the draft, the manuscript is a little over 1,000 words shorter, in spite of the addition of at least that much new material.

I realize that part of what frightens me is that as my book creeps steadily closer in length to The Last Unicorn than Knife of Dreams, I expect more to be expected of me. Who do I think I am, asking people to buy my skinny little book? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Ezra Pound? Of course such anxiety is foolish and insulting to everyone involved. And if the leaders in my weight class are too light on their feet for me, the solution certainly isn't to pack on fat until I can enjoy more sluggish competition--no doubt that is an invitation for the worst kind of percussive enlightenment.

So I expect that Hengist and Undine, when it is finished, will be 85,000 words long.

On villainy

Last night I watched the 1996 movie version of The Crucible, which prompted me to read parts of the play. Girlfriend's edition of The Crucible has something that I think was missing from whatever edition I (think I) read back in high school: long digressions by Arthur Miller on the characters and his research. While my reading of plays is admittedly limited, I don't know of anything to parallel The Crucible for the length, depth, or digressiveness of its character descriptions. When Reverend Hale comes on the scene, for example, Miller dispatches the character's physical description in one sentence, his history and personality in four more, and then goes on for three additional pages about the idea of the Devil as a political tool.

But in the spirit of such digressions, I'm using this as an excuse to talk about something else. The very first character description in The Crucible set me thinking in this particular direction: it was the description of Reverend Parris, that "In history he cut a villainous path, and there is very little good to be said for him." (On the subject of that "very little good," the text is silent; we learn instead about the bad rest of him.) It got me thinking about the construction of good villains.

Parris isn't the villain of The Crucible, but he doesn't come off well, and Miller makes no effort to soften the blow. It is a problem, I think; I believe I am against the portrayal of evil people with no good at all in them. This isn't to say that a work of art should contort itself to show a glimmer of goodness in every evil character, but to look behind the curtain and see that Miller saw nothing positive in him gives me the sense that his conception of the character was lacking.

Oh, yes, pick a fight with Arthur Miller, why don't I?

Well it's not really about him, but this mostly reminded me that there has been something good, or at the very least pitiably human, in every villain who has really affected me. Sometimes it is a very small thing, but it creates depth--I would go so far as to say that it allows horror.

As is often the case, I go to movies for my examples. I first noticed this effect in the 2007 version of 3:10 to Yuma, in the character of Charlie Prince; he was violent, sadistic, thoroughly amoral, and loyal with a purity that touched on innocence. I thought at the time that it was the ability to be hurt that made him stick in my mind, and that was part of it, but not all.

As I said, it allows horror. A villain who is merely a force is immune to judgment, like a natural disaster. We need the glimmer of good in order to register that it is a human doing the villainous deeds in a story.

A good villain is both evil and imposing (with regard to the protagonists). The necessary opposite faces of these elements are good and pathos. Without them a villain is hollow from behind.

Hence we have Darth Vader's paternal impulses and physical disfigurement. Hence we have Heath Ledger's Joker unconsciously tonguing his scars. (I search my memory for some sign of good in him, and can only think of his rationalizations. He claims to be seeking after some sort of truth; contrast with Bane in the following movie, who accomplishes similar kinds of terror but with explicitly sadistic intent.)

"What about Iago?" a certain sort of person might challenge. "He is evil without good or pathos, and considered to be the greatest villain ever set down."

"I disagree," I would say to this imaginary person who I created for the sole purpose of disagreeing with him. I would patiently explain how it is the mystery of Iago's motivation, not its absence, that seizes the imagination. Iago has values, he has a grievance, and he has a motivation. We are interested in him because we know these things; if we discovered that he wasn't, in fact, human, I suspect that we as an audience would lose interest.

(Meanwhile, as I write this, the Superbowl has apparently stopped because the lights went out. Speaking of losing interest.)

A last point on the subject is that I don't think the ideas of "good" and "evil" are very useful in creating compelling characters. Not to say that I prefer a grey-and-grey moral universe to a black-and-white one (not least because the greys tend to darken until the morality is black-and-black). But perhaps it is better to regard characters as "virtuous" and "vicious." The question of virtue and vice shouldn't be wholly detached from what side of the story the character falls on, but it represents a whole lot of continuums.