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The dose to comatose, slyly administered
While recovering from (minor, but still anesthesia-involving) surgery is probably not the best time to analyze one’s own writing techniques. Nevertheless, Tylenol with codeine is our friend; and so, apparently, is introspection. Look out.
A few days ago, I finished a story. "Drink Down" will appear in Not One of Us #34; it's 7300 words in length, its primary musical influences are PJ Harvey's "Yuri-G," the Dresden Dolls' "Sex Changes," and the folksong "The Bird in the Bush," and it's a love quadrangle involving the moon. This is not the unusual part. In stories of mine, people fall in love with the supernatural—or at least it obsesses them—all the time. It's probably a sort of trademark by now.* What's unusual is the time-frame. It took me from June 30th to August 8th to write "Drink Down," or from April 9th if you count one fragmentary scene, with some portion of the story written or rewritten almost every day. Most of my stories are completed in a matter of days. Some are all-nighters. Occasionally a story, starts, stalls, and is picked up some days, weeks, or months later; but once re-started, it's oblivious burn all the way.** I am not sure I have ever before written a story that took up such a constant and extended period of time as "Drink Down," or underwent so many revisions in-progress.
(Cut for potential spoilers, although I'm not sure it’s possible to spoil one's own work. Similarly, I'm not sure one can write fanfic about one's own characters. Thoughts?)
Admittedly, I cannot tell which came first: whether the necessity for rewriting stretched out the time until completion, or whether the protracted process left me with more space to observe all the changes; I'm inclined to wonder if they fed off one another, as a number of other factors in my life were interfering with the story in any case. Either way, it's safe to say "Drink Down" was one of the most frustrating stories to write that I can remember. With the exception of the dream sequences, which for some reason were the easiest scenes in the entire story, each scene was rewritten at least two or three times.*** And I really wish I had kept a more careful record of all the permutations the plot went through: it was practically an endless exercise in alternate possibilities. I would write a scene; no, that's not it. I'd rewrite; no, that's not it, either. Two of the characters were supposed to become lovers; or they weren't. One of the characters was supposed to turn out to be the moon; or wasn't. Or was supposed to change genders: they always said that sex would change you, sex would change you . . . Or not. The relationships kept shifting, and the story's direction with them. All the supernatural aspects kept muting themselves until they were confined mostly to the dream sequences and the subtext of one character's conversation. And I had even less idea than usual how the story was going to end. In many ways, I'm still amazed that "Drink Down" now exists as a completed text—at any point it could have broken up into dissociated fragments, pieces of story that went nowhere and pointed to no end at all, and I would only have been frustrated over the loss of time; not surprised.
Likewise, I'm left wondering about the effects of random consciousness on writing. The decisions you make because you're awake at a certain hour; the inspirations that hit you on Tuesday that might not have on Monday or Wednesday; the direction a story takes because you're listening to Concrete Blonde rather than Tom Waits, Schönberg rather than Britten. I know for a fact that a certain quotation appears in the text only because I took thirty seconds to look up the authorship of Pierrot Lunaire, while working on a particular scene, and found some lines in the German translation so appealing that I promptly dropped them into the dialogue; they spun off an angle of conversation that no doubt affected the narrative around them, and later recurred in other scenes. Did I realize how to fix a nagging inconsistency in the relationship between two characters because I was awake at four in the morning, or would I have come to the same realization the next morning if I'd fallen asleep two hours earlier, or would I have thought of a wholly different fix to the same problem? Incomplete narratives are so bizarrely fragile; and you cannot make them go in any direction you like. You have to let them feel their own way toward the end of the story, whatever that happens to be, or they simply stop. I wrote at least four different final scenes for "Drink Down" before I found one that felt right.**** And I still don't know if the same ending would have felt right if I had been writing it at another time of day, on another day, while listening to different music . . . It might have been an equally valid ending. But it would have been different. And the same for the whole story. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum authorship.
And if "Drink Down" had been an easier story to write, would I be asking myself these questions at all?
*On acceptance of "Drink Down," John Benson remarked, "A good thing about Brace's characterization is that you can't tell if the moon-fucking is metaphorical or will somehow turn out to be real (because it's one of your stories)." Typecast again! It's like reading a story in a mainstream magazine rather than a speculative venue, I suppose: because of context, you make certain assumptions even before you have finished the story. One of these days I will have to write a piece in which the supernatural turns out to be pure metaphor, just to watch readers' heads explode.
**I am the same way for academic projects: I have been known to stay up for two or three days in a row in order to finish papers, because once I get out of a particular groove of inspiration, it's almost impossible to find it again. My master's thesis was written in one very intense, tea-fueled week. Obviously this is not a viable pattern for a dissertation: I'd consign myself to an asylum within a week if I tried. A plausible alternative, however, remains to be discovered . . .
***Or more. It's not that I don't revise while writing, but usually the revisions are on a line-by-line basis—each sentence made right before I go on to the next—not finished scenes. The opening of the story was written and rewritten five times, until I gave up temporarily and wrote a much later scene in hopes that if I had something to work toward, the first scene might miraculously materialize. Which it didn't, because spontaneous generation was debunked in the eighteenth century, but at least it did deign to show up eventually. Another anomaly: although I do not necessarily write stories from chronological start to finish, I do like to have an opening worked out before I go anywhere with the plot. It's the endings I usually have no idea about.
****The above footnote notwithstanding, stories do tend to narrow their range of possibilities as one approaches The End (although I never write that on the last page of stories; perhaps because I know that the story continues after the text stops, I just don't know what happens) and generally I know from the next-to-last scene what the last scene will be. This was, surprise, surprise, not the case for "Drink Down." I must have expiated some kind of writer's guilt with this story . . .
A few days ago, I finished a story. "Drink Down" will appear in Not One of Us #34; it's 7300 words in length, its primary musical influences are PJ Harvey's "Yuri-G," the Dresden Dolls' "Sex Changes," and the folksong "The Bird in the Bush," and it's a love quadrangle involving the moon. This is not the unusual part. In stories of mine, people fall in love with the supernatural—or at least it obsesses them—all the time. It's probably a sort of trademark by now.* What's unusual is the time-frame. It took me from June 30th to August 8th to write "Drink Down," or from April 9th if you count one fragmentary scene, with some portion of the story written or rewritten almost every day. Most of my stories are completed in a matter of days. Some are all-nighters. Occasionally a story, starts, stalls, and is picked up some days, weeks, or months later; but once re-started, it's oblivious burn all the way.** I am not sure I have ever before written a story that took up such a constant and extended period of time as "Drink Down," or underwent so many revisions in-progress.
(Cut for potential spoilers, although I'm not sure it’s possible to spoil one's own work. Similarly, I'm not sure one can write fanfic about one's own characters. Thoughts?)
Admittedly, I cannot tell which came first: whether the necessity for rewriting stretched out the time until completion, or whether the protracted process left me with more space to observe all the changes; I'm inclined to wonder if they fed off one another, as a number of other factors in my life were interfering with the story in any case. Either way, it's safe to say "Drink Down" was one of the most frustrating stories to write that I can remember. With the exception of the dream sequences, which for some reason were the easiest scenes in the entire story, each scene was rewritten at least two or three times.*** And I really wish I had kept a more careful record of all the permutations the plot went through: it was practically an endless exercise in alternate possibilities. I would write a scene; no, that's not it. I'd rewrite; no, that's not it, either. Two of the characters were supposed to become lovers; or they weren't. One of the characters was supposed to turn out to be the moon; or wasn't. Or was supposed to change genders: they always said that sex would change you, sex would change you . . . Or not. The relationships kept shifting, and the story's direction with them. All the supernatural aspects kept muting themselves until they were confined mostly to the dream sequences and the subtext of one character's conversation. And I had even less idea than usual how the story was going to end. In many ways, I'm still amazed that "Drink Down" now exists as a completed text—at any point it could have broken up into dissociated fragments, pieces of story that went nowhere and pointed to no end at all, and I would only have been frustrated over the loss of time; not surprised.
Likewise, I'm left wondering about the effects of random consciousness on writing. The decisions you make because you're awake at a certain hour; the inspirations that hit you on Tuesday that might not have on Monday or Wednesday; the direction a story takes because you're listening to Concrete Blonde rather than Tom Waits, Schönberg rather than Britten. I know for a fact that a certain quotation appears in the text only because I took thirty seconds to look up the authorship of Pierrot Lunaire, while working on a particular scene, and found some lines in the German translation so appealing that I promptly dropped them into the dialogue; they spun off an angle of conversation that no doubt affected the narrative around them, and later recurred in other scenes. Did I realize how to fix a nagging inconsistency in the relationship between two characters because I was awake at four in the morning, or would I have come to the same realization the next morning if I'd fallen asleep two hours earlier, or would I have thought of a wholly different fix to the same problem? Incomplete narratives are so bizarrely fragile; and you cannot make them go in any direction you like. You have to let them feel their own way toward the end of the story, whatever that happens to be, or they simply stop. I wrote at least four different final scenes for "Drink Down" before I found one that felt right.**** And I still don't know if the same ending would have felt right if I had been writing it at another time of day, on another day, while listening to different music . . . It might have been an equally valid ending. But it would have been different. And the same for the whole story. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum authorship.
And if "Drink Down" had been an easier story to write, would I be asking myself these questions at all?
*On acceptance of "Drink Down," John Benson remarked, "A good thing about Brace's characterization is that you can't tell if the moon-fucking is metaphorical or will somehow turn out to be real (because it's one of your stories)." Typecast again! It's like reading a story in a mainstream magazine rather than a speculative venue, I suppose: because of context, you make certain assumptions even before you have finished the story. One of these days I will have to write a piece in which the supernatural turns out to be pure metaphor, just to watch readers' heads explode.
**I am the same way for academic projects: I have been known to stay up for two or three days in a row in order to finish papers, because once I get out of a particular groove of inspiration, it's almost impossible to find it again. My master's thesis was written in one very intense, tea-fueled week. Obviously this is not a viable pattern for a dissertation: I'd consign myself to an asylum within a week if I tried. A plausible alternative, however, remains to be discovered . . .
***Or more. It's not that I don't revise while writing, but usually the revisions are on a line-by-line basis—each sentence made right before I go on to the next—not finished scenes. The opening of the story was written and rewritten five times, until I gave up temporarily and wrote a much later scene in hopes that if I had something to work toward, the first scene might miraculously materialize. Which it didn't, because spontaneous generation was debunked in the eighteenth century, but at least it did deign to show up eventually. Another anomaly: although I do not necessarily write stories from chronological start to finish, I do like to have an opening worked out before I go anywhere with the plot. It's the endings I usually have no idea about.
****The above footnote notwithstanding, stories do tend to narrow their range of possibilities as one approaches The End (although I never write that on the last page of stories; perhaps because I know that the story continues after the text stops, I just don't know what happens) and generally I know from the next-to-last scene what the last scene will be. This was, surprise, surprise, not the case for "Drink Down." I must have expiated some kind of writer's guilt with this story . . .
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But you plot your stories out ahead of time, correct? So at least you know, at any given point in the story, where it should be going: that probably helps a lot.
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Okay that makes NO sense whatsoever :)
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particularly on longer stories, it doesn't matter how well you plan it when it comes down to it being written it often twists and bends.
To take a longer example, then: how closely did your outline for Pretty Little Things match the result? (If this can be discussed without massive, massive spoilers; if not, I'll ask you offline.)
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The thing is that with short stories I often have an idea, a few scenes and maybe an ending, and just sit down to write them, trusting enough in my own abilities to know that I can pull something out of them. With something of n*vel length, however, I felt as if i owed it to the story to have more control so I treated it like a painting almost. I sketched out the entire canvass roughly, some bits rougher than others, some gaps here and there, and then systematically worked through the piece, adding in more and more detail. Since there were several story threads i could also switch between them if i became more interested in one or stuck on one, then just come back to it later and tie it all up.
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You could just write the dissertation (LJ-cut for length) directly into your LJ. Three or four posts the length of this one and you'd be finished. Well, you'd have to go back and number the endnotes, I suppose.
As a reader and editor, I enjoy learning about how authors go about creating their work. I'm a sucker for story notes, and the influence of music on imagination fascinates me. This story was more of a struggle than usual for you (it waxed and waned?), but it was worth it. I hope everyone will read "Drink Down" in Not One of Us #34 when it comes out in late September (gratuitous commercial plug) so they can see how this all turned out.
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Dissertation? Oh, dear God, I need to get mine done. If I could just prove that Samsuiluna invented fried cheese, I'd be Dr. Hans already....
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I wish I had more to report. There's almost always some kind of music playing in my life (even if it's me), but it's only in the last year or so that I've actually started recording what music I write to, much less how it shows up in my stories. At some point I should probably make a serious examination of the process. Not all songs whose lyrics show up in the text were playing as I wrote; not all songs that were playing manifest in the text. As examples, I'll point out that in addition to the songs already named in this post, Myslovitz's "Blue Velvet" and Concrete Blonde's "Tomorrow, Wendy" went into "Drink Down," as did Tom Waits' "Another Man's Vine" and "The Black Swan" from Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium. Some of these will be readily perceptible to readers other than me: lyrics, allusions, paraphrases. Some of them, however, I'm not sure anyone other than me will see how they fit. I'd be very curious to know, but how would I conduct that sort of survey? The best I can probably do is mark down the playlist (as it were) in the story note, and hope someone other than me will care years later.
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---L.
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This may also be the reason that the stories I write and the stories I tell never overlap. I'm not sure what would happen if I formally wrote down one of the latter—I did tell one once over IM, but that was an incredibly weird experience, and I carefully did not save the file—but I suspect it would die right out of my repertoire. Which would just depress me all round.
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That said, that's the only oral piece I've sold. Most of them make better tales than stories. And an actual story, once outlined or told, I don't get very far.
---L.
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---L.
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---L.
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Interesting to hear your technique. Ususally it takes me forever to write a story. As in, weeks, months and sometimes over a year. It's the rare ones that come out in the span of several days.
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