Shoved in between a couple of sessions of General Conference, I managed to slam out just over two thousand words in Writ in Blood, a nice accomplishment done solely because Jeremy was asleep and Gayle had taken Peter to Target. The silence of the house allowed me to concentrate well enough to get the flashback done.
That leads me to what I wanted to document today: The form of my novel.
When I first started this behemoth (as it's turning out to be), I was watching the first season of Lost. While I've enjoyed what pieces of the show I've been able to watch (stopping some point early on in Season Two), part of what really grabbed me was the way in which the characters' stories were revealed. Lost is set up with a handful of main characters. Each episode focuses on one specifically. During "the narratological present", the characters work together (or not) and advance the mystery of the island. Punctuating the narratological present they have flashbacks, which provide background and explanation to what we're seeing in the present. Having a crisis in the present causes the instant friction and conflict that makes for interesting stories, while the flashbacks allows for a more thorough understanding of the characters, their motivations, their secrets, their pains, and their potential. Also, they kill off a couple of characters, something that I always admire. While I would never kill a character simply because it was unexpected, it does provide a more tangible dread in the readers, knowing that no one is safe. (For an excellent example of that, check out George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, in which an eight-year-old boy--and P.O.V. character--is thrown from a tower. No one's safe in Martin's world.)
This new world (then unnamed, now called the Tagan Continent) needed an extra dimension of storytelling that I had struggled to expose in my previous debacle, Tales of the Flame.* I learned a lot by that spectacular failure, and I was eager and hopeful that the new story would be able to push new ideas at them in a new way. The experimentation of using overt flashbacks began.
I had a bit of a trick the first flashback I wrote (for Chapter 2), relying on asterisks and a generous page break to indicate that the scene had shifted back in time. It didn't work, so the next time I submitted a flashback, I included, after the asterisks, a bolded date: "Twenty Years Ago" or whatever was appropriate. Since then, the writers' group to which I belong has been better able to follow the pattern I've set up.
That's the second part that has been useful: The pattern. With three main characters, there's a lot of story to cover. I fragment each chapter into two or three parts: A bumper, the narratological present, and the flashback.
Bumper--Nicomachus
I use the bumper to instantly denote whose point of view the particular chapter is in. For Nicomachus (to me, the 'main' character), his skill and livelihood are all tied into the magic of the world, or, in other words, Poetry (creatively capitalized so that you know that it's magical...somehow). As a Corathan Poet, he has the largest stake in the crisis of the book. To go along with that, I start his chapters off with a poem that I've written. It provides a type of characterization--that he is a Poet, for example--and it explains why there's more elevated language and metaphor inside of his chapters.
This is particularly enjoyable for me, as it allows me to try a great number of poetic forms in real life and then pretend that Nicomachus either wrote them all himself, or just remembers a big portion of them. Bekah (in my group) suggested providing a Poet's name from the world as attribution, just so the reader knows. I'm not sure if I want that or not. It isn't that I like the ambiguity or anything, it's just that I don't know if I want to rip off that many names. I know I could just have one major Poet that starts Nic's portions, but if that's the case, why not just have Nic be the author of most of them?
Anyway, I've expanded my poetry via this process, having crafted a good 20 or so of them for the purposes of this book. (Note that the 'good' in the preceding sentence doesn't really have anything to do with describing the quality of the poems.) I have haikus, a pantoum, a Shakespearean sonnet (of course), a Spencerian sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet (I think), some free verse, some blank verse, and others that probably don't have any real label. This has been very rewarding for me, as it's broadened my writing more than any other aspect of this book.
One story in particular that I wanted to record is the happenstance around a sestina. I noted in passing that one of the characters in the story, Aspina, had been writing sestinas since she was about six, or something like that. After rereading the passage, I stopped and said, "I have no idea what a sestina is." Rather than letting it slide, I did a little research. Not only is it an incredibly cool type of poetry (follow the link above if you'd like a definition), but one of my most favorite authors, Dante Alighieri wrote a beautiful sestina. Inspired, I decided to try my hand at it, unsure of how well it would work. To my surprise, not only did it fit the correct form, there were additional meanings to some of the words that allowed it to bend with greater meaning to my drift. Additionally, it was written as a type of back story to the basic cosmogony of the Tagan Continent, allowing it to be a type of proem (if I so choose) or just an epigraph at the beginning of the book. Add into that that I wove the title of the book into the sestina, I could--if another book is to be written in this world--derive the title from that self-same sestina.
Bumper--Calistar
The second main character is a mercenary-turned-field-guide from the country of Jajiin who is conflicted, contradictory, and pretty cool. He's much more perfunctory than Nicomachus, and, though he's prone to his own musings and self-loathings, he's not very likely to wax poetic. To reflect that, I indicate his chapters with a simple description of the location in which the chapter starts. It's as straight-forward as the character is in general, so it fits really well. Plus, when I'm not really in the poetic mood, it means that I can write a Calistar chapter without having to wax poetic or sound profound. This also means that Calistar chapters don't have the benefit of a worthwhile bumper to increase the word count. Ultimately, that's irrelevant, but it is another offshoot of this format. I'm just sayin'...
Bumper--Saldrae
A good dozen chapters into the book, I realized I not only needed another character, but I needed one from the other main country on the continent, Meleah. I had already introduced a countergirl (that is, a waitress) in a chophouse. I decided to bring her in as a full character mostly because I really liked the name. Bringing her in meant that I needed a new bumper. Turning to the culture of the Meleahans, I realized that their matriarchy and communialism would require a different kind of philosophy in order to work inside of the story. That lead to the creation of their scripture, The Doctrines of Meleah. These are broken into small quotes that usually are thematic for the following chapter: On Fear, On Listening, On Relationships, and so on. Their tone is partially derived from the Tao Te Ching, partially from a very tight analysis of the theme. The group is responding well to them, so wherever they're coming from, they're convincing the readers.
Narratological Present
In this section is the main action and crises of the book. It is rather slow moving because a lot of the tension is derived from the political situation. The actual depth of the main catastrophe is still a little weak, so I will have to tighten that upon revision. This component of the chapter is pretty straightforward: It's what most people think of when they think of reading a book.
The Flashback
As I've already mentioned, I have a flashback to expand on the character whose point of view was seen in the narratological present. This is where their beliefs, their memories, their tragedies, their victories, and the answers to the questions framed by the narratological present are found. It drags the pace of the story down significantly, as the reader is required to jump back and forth, keeping track of multiple stories at once. Yet the group hasn't had as much of an issue with this as I had originally feared, despite the fact that they only read two chapters a month for the group. We've been working through it for nearly 18 months and there haven't been any major instances of "writer's lag" when they can't remember what is happening in a particular way because it's been too long since they read an earlier part of the story.
Final Thoughts
This new approach for the way I'm writing this story has surprised me a great deal. I hadn't anticipated its success. I had planned on trying it for a little while, then ditching it further in. I've done that with a couple of details (for example, Saldrae speaks with a distinct accent in the opening chapters with her, which has been lost as she became a main character), but the format and pattern I've created has allowed me much more versatility than I had assumed. For example, I can now--in the 40s for the chapters--skip the narratological present if necessary, giving the reader a flashback in the P.O.V. of the bumper. Or I'll skip the flashback, relying on only the present to progress the story and carry the chapter. I haven't written a chapter in only poetry yet, though I wouldn't put it past me. I've dropped flashbacks and put interludes in instead, small snippets of other characters to show that the world is bigger than what's being seen and amplifying the threat that the main characters are struggling with.
For me, it's satisfying; how others view it, of course, remains to be seen.
---
*Tales of the Flame had a character whose memories had been altered. By the end of the story, it was utterly unclear if anything that Victor cared about had actually transpired. While it's a fascinating problem from a philosophical standpoint, it's pretty frustrating from a reading standpoint. My writers' group was supportive but tepid about the story. I wanted to avoid that sort of response in the next entry.
That leads me to what I wanted to document today: The form of my novel.
When I first started this behemoth (as it's turning out to be), I was watching the first season of Lost. While I've enjoyed what pieces of the show I've been able to watch (stopping some point early on in Season Two), part of what really grabbed me was the way in which the characters' stories were revealed. Lost is set up with a handful of main characters. Each episode focuses on one specifically. During "the narratological present", the characters work together (or not) and advance the mystery of the island. Punctuating the narratological present they have flashbacks, which provide background and explanation to what we're seeing in the present. Having a crisis in the present causes the instant friction and conflict that makes for interesting stories, while the flashbacks allows for a more thorough understanding of the characters, their motivations, their secrets, their pains, and their potential. Also, they kill off a couple of characters, something that I always admire. While I would never kill a character simply because it was unexpected, it does provide a more tangible dread in the readers, knowing that no one is safe. (For an excellent example of that, check out George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, in which an eight-year-old boy--and P.O.V. character--is thrown from a tower. No one's safe in Martin's world.)
This new world (then unnamed, now called the Tagan Continent) needed an extra dimension of storytelling that I had struggled to expose in my previous debacle, Tales of the Flame.* I learned a lot by that spectacular failure, and I was eager and hopeful that the new story would be able to push new ideas at them in a new way. The experimentation of using overt flashbacks began.
I had a bit of a trick the first flashback I wrote (for Chapter 2), relying on asterisks and a generous page break to indicate that the scene had shifted back in time. It didn't work, so the next time I submitted a flashback, I included, after the asterisks, a bolded date: "Twenty Years Ago" or whatever was appropriate. Since then, the writers' group to which I belong has been better able to follow the pattern I've set up.
That's the second part that has been useful: The pattern. With three main characters, there's a lot of story to cover. I fragment each chapter into two or three parts: A bumper, the narratological present, and the flashback.
Bumper--Nicomachus
I use the bumper to instantly denote whose point of view the particular chapter is in. For Nicomachus (to me, the 'main' character), his skill and livelihood are all tied into the magic of the world, or, in other words, Poetry (creatively capitalized so that you know that it's magical...somehow). As a Corathan Poet, he has the largest stake in the crisis of the book. To go along with that, I start his chapters off with a poem that I've written. It provides a type of characterization--that he is a Poet, for example--and it explains why there's more elevated language and metaphor inside of his chapters.
This is particularly enjoyable for me, as it allows me to try a great number of poetic forms in real life and then pretend that Nicomachus either wrote them all himself, or just remembers a big portion of them. Bekah (in my group) suggested providing a Poet's name from the world as attribution, just so the reader knows. I'm not sure if I want that or not. It isn't that I like the ambiguity or anything, it's just that I don't know if I want to rip off that many names. I know I could just have one major Poet that starts Nic's portions, but if that's the case, why not just have Nic be the author of most of them?
Anyway, I've expanded my poetry via this process, having crafted a good 20 or so of them for the purposes of this book. (Note that the 'good' in the preceding sentence doesn't really have anything to do with describing the quality of the poems.) I have haikus, a pantoum, a Shakespearean sonnet (of course), a Spencerian sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet (I think), some free verse, some blank verse, and others that probably don't have any real label. This has been very rewarding for me, as it's broadened my writing more than any other aspect of this book.
One story in particular that I wanted to record is the happenstance around a sestina. I noted in passing that one of the characters in the story, Aspina, had been writing sestinas since she was about six, or something like that. After rereading the passage, I stopped and said, "I have no idea what a sestina is." Rather than letting it slide, I did a little research. Not only is it an incredibly cool type of poetry (follow the link above if you'd like a definition), but one of my most favorite authors, Dante Alighieri wrote a beautiful sestina. Inspired, I decided to try my hand at it, unsure of how well it would work. To my surprise, not only did it fit the correct form, there were additional meanings to some of the words that allowed it to bend with greater meaning to my drift. Additionally, it was written as a type of back story to the basic cosmogony of the Tagan Continent, allowing it to be a type of proem (if I so choose) or just an epigraph at the beginning of the book. Add into that that I wove the title of the book into the sestina, I could--if another book is to be written in this world--derive the title from that self-same sestina.
Bumper--Calistar
The second main character is a mercenary-turned-field-guide from the country of Jajiin who is conflicted, contradictory, and pretty cool. He's much more perfunctory than Nicomachus, and, though he's prone to his own musings and self-loathings, he's not very likely to wax poetic. To reflect that, I indicate his chapters with a simple description of the location in which the chapter starts. It's as straight-forward as the character is in general, so it fits really well. Plus, when I'm not really in the poetic mood, it means that I can write a Calistar chapter without having to wax poetic or sound profound. This also means that Calistar chapters don't have the benefit of a worthwhile bumper to increase the word count. Ultimately, that's irrelevant, but it is another offshoot of this format. I'm just sayin'...
Bumper--Saldrae
A good dozen chapters into the book, I realized I not only needed another character, but I needed one from the other main country on the continent, Meleah. I had already introduced a countergirl (that is, a waitress) in a chophouse. I decided to bring her in as a full character mostly because I really liked the name. Bringing her in meant that I needed a new bumper. Turning to the culture of the Meleahans, I realized that their matriarchy and communialism would require a different kind of philosophy in order to work inside of the story. That lead to the creation of their scripture, The Doctrines of Meleah. These are broken into small quotes that usually are thematic for the following chapter: On Fear, On Listening, On Relationships, and so on. Their tone is partially derived from the Tao Te Ching, partially from a very tight analysis of the theme. The group is responding well to them, so wherever they're coming from, they're convincing the readers.
Narratological Present
In this section is the main action and crises of the book. It is rather slow moving because a lot of the tension is derived from the political situation. The actual depth of the main catastrophe is still a little weak, so I will have to tighten that upon revision. This component of the chapter is pretty straightforward: It's what most people think of when they think of reading a book.
The Flashback
As I've already mentioned, I have a flashback to expand on the character whose point of view was seen in the narratological present. This is where their beliefs, their memories, their tragedies, their victories, and the answers to the questions framed by the narratological present are found. It drags the pace of the story down significantly, as the reader is required to jump back and forth, keeping track of multiple stories at once. Yet the group hasn't had as much of an issue with this as I had originally feared, despite the fact that they only read two chapters a month for the group. We've been working through it for nearly 18 months and there haven't been any major instances of "writer's lag" when they can't remember what is happening in a particular way because it's been too long since they read an earlier part of the story.
Final Thoughts
This new approach for the way I'm writing this story has surprised me a great deal. I hadn't anticipated its success. I had planned on trying it for a little while, then ditching it further in. I've done that with a couple of details (for example, Saldrae speaks with a distinct accent in the opening chapters with her, which has been lost as she became a main character), but the format and pattern I've created has allowed me much more versatility than I had assumed. For example, I can now--in the 40s for the chapters--skip the narratological present if necessary, giving the reader a flashback in the P.O.V. of the bumper. Or I'll skip the flashback, relying on only the present to progress the story and carry the chapter. I haven't written a chapter in only poetry yet, though I wouldn't put it past me. I've dropped flashbacks and put interludes in instead, small snippets of other characters to show that the world is bigger than what's being seen and amplifying the threat that the main characters are struggling with.
For me, it's satisfying; how others view it, of course, remains to be seen.
---
*Tales of the Flame had a character whose memories had been altered. By the end of the story, it was utterly unclear if anything that Victor cared about had actually transpired. While it's a fascinating problem from a philosophical standpoint, it's pretty frustrating from a reading standpoint. My writers' group was supportive but tepid about the story. I wanted to avoid that sort of response in the next entry.
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