The ongoing saga of David D. Levine's writing and other adventures.
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I'm a geek, fan, and writer who lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Word count (outline and notes): 15471
I wanted to start drafting by the end of February. I didn't make it. But I did spend this evening thrashing my first draft chronological outline into an insanely complicated spreadsheet (with color coding: blue is backstory, prologue, and epilogue; green is the alien plot thread; yellow is the human plot thread).
So far I have not done anything to make sure the two threads complement each other well (balancing, echoing, mirroring, etc.). And I see that Clarity doesn't have enough to do in the second half of the novel. At this point I'm prepared to run with this, knowing that things will change as the work goes on. I can shift incidents between chapters, and even between threads if I have to, to get the balance right.
Looking over the outline, I'm excited. It looks like a rip-roaring story; the alternating plot threads seem to keep the tension up nicely, with a turning point at the end of just about every chapter.
I hope to begin drafting this weekend.
Posted 02/28/2003 21:54 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count (outline and notes): 14656
On Saturday night, over a fine dinner at Zumi, I talked with friends Matt (former astrophysicist) and Janet (former anthropologist) about the aliens and their planet. Matt thought that giving them no magnetosphere would not necessarily kill them with the radiation, though it would not produce enough radio noise to make radio impractical, and the radiation would be enough to give them a biology different enough from ours to prevent us eating each other's food (there are maybe 100 potential amino acids, of which Earth life uses about 20). Janet independently evolved the centrality of one-to-one communication from their background as presented, and agreed with my idea of "networks of small hierarchies" as the basis of their culture (a culture organized like the Internet, hmm). From this, we extrapolated a few ideas: they would have neither democracy nor dictatorship, but would be divided into small cooperating/competing clans and sects; they would have overlapping mosaics of culture (maps of religions, languages, ideologies, etc. would not overlap even as much as they do here); they might not even have the concept of a "language" as such, just swarms of ideolects of greater or lesser mutual comprehensibility; their philosophy of life might be something like "me against my brother; me and my brother against the clan; me and my clan against the world." Matt wondered if such a society could develop the industrial base for spaceflight. I didn't have an answer at the time, but I now think that their technology is more hand-crafted than industrial. (Plausible? Maybe not.) One other keen idea that came out in that conversation is that they would have Northern Lights all over the sky every night.
Oh, as long as I'm here... just got two bits of good news in the mail yesterday:
1. My story "The Tale of the Golden Eagle", which I sold to F&SF last year, will appear in the June 2003 issue. I should have my contributor copies in mid-April.
2. I received my contributor copies of Land/Space, containing my story "Fear of Widths." They look great!
Posted 02/25/2003 21:06 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count (outline and notes): 14314
At Potlatch I took a Sunday morning workshop on "Transracial Writing for the Sincere" led by Nisi Shawl and Cyn Ward, which was about half lecture and half writing exercises. (Many and varied were the writing appliances in use, including a Palm with a soft fabric keyboard that doubled as a case and a notepad with shorthand.) The good news is that I am already doing a lot of things right, in questioning assumptions and not letting my characters fall into the default ROARS (Race, Orientation, Ability, Religion, and Sex).
Key points: You are not a racist just because your reptile brain comes up with nasty stereotypical thoughts about people of different ROARS. Racism is when your conscious brain agrees with your reptile brain. -- Your first impulse for character, setting, etc. is probably wrong; question your unconsidered choices. -- If a person belongs to the "unmarked" (cultural default) ROARS his way is smoothed in ways he may never even recognize. -- SF can create new social divides to illuminate marked/unmarked states. -- As writers we can use marked/unmarked state to create parallax. Who is looking at whom? How do they look? It varies depending on the observer. -- Difference is not monolithic; not everyone who is oppressed has common cause (e.g. American Indians and African-Americans may dislike/distrust each other though they are both oppressed), and complexes of characteristics do not always go together. Avoid the categorical fallacy of mistaking the traits of an individual for the traits of the group or vice versa. Catagorical thinking is not inherently fallacious, but it can be; you can have charactes engage in categorical thinking to reveal aspects of their character (e.g. blind spots). -- Use congruence (shared characteristics) to establish ties between the reader and a character of a different ROARS. -- Even secondary characters should have multiple traits, as real people do; even if a very minor character has only a few traits, they should not all point in the same direction (e.g. have your poor black man be passionate about classical violin, not rap). -- Resonance is the association of related ideas (e.g. if a German is a torturer that inevitably raises the suspicion he might be a Nazi); it can be intentional or unintentional, but should be carefully controlled. An easy way to disarm unfortunate resonances is to have more than one member of a particular ROARS (e.g. don't have the villain be the only bisexual in the book). -- You will make mistakes, get feedback to correct them.
In the exercises I tried rewriting a scene from "Nucleon" with Carl the junkyard owner as a Puerto Rican rather than a Polish-American, and a scene from "Primates" (a Clarion story, unpublished) with the primatologist as a woman rather than a man. I was intrigued to see how much the other characters changed in reaction to these changes.
Obviously I need to do some research on African-Americans, if I'm going to get Sienna right.
Posted 02/24/2003 18:23 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count (outline and notes): 13803
(Typing in the It's Tops Coffee Shop on Market Street.) Yesterday I found something on the net about an AT&T research project called ShortTalk. This is a speech-based text editing system that uses non-English command words for commands, such as "looft" for "cursor left," "spooce" for "insert a space," and "gairk" for "move cursor to mark". The advantage is that there is no ambguity as to whether an utterance is a command or a word to be typed. The disadvantage is that when using it you sound like the Swedish Chef.
I think I may adapt this for use with datappliances by adopting the non-English command language but not so silly. Perhaps each command word starts with "z": zeft, zight, zup, zown, zelect, zopy, zaste. "Zup zive; zelect zentence; zelete." Hmm, still silly. But such a thing could catch on, if it works (e.g. Graffitti) and once it catches on it becomes part of the language. "Zuck zou!" "Zelete zat!" (Datappliances use small screens (the cheap ones) or heads-up displays (like Sienna's) or project directly into the eyeball (the top of the line). There is no holography in this world.) The command language would be called ZTalk -- no, Zalk.
(Now at the Bombay Bazaar, eating ginger ice cream.) Alien words would also get picked up (viz. "tycoon," "verandah"), but since the language is signed and the written language symbolic, how would it be picked up? Perhaps, like the ASL signs oh-I-see and you-and-me (vs. me-and-someone-else) such words can only be translated approximately and/or by phrases. This would limit their acceptance. We may see alien gestures being mixed in with human speech.
(At a yarn shop, waiting for Kate, working on 2-column outline in Excel.) It occurs to me that if I can write these notes a paragraph at a time, in the small interstices of life, I could be writing the novel itself in the same way...
Posted 02/21/2003 18:24 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count (outline and notes): 12949
In The Making of Memento, there's a quote from director Chris Nolan: "When I had written the script, which seemed to work on the page, the feeling was if you're going to use this unconventional structure, my impulse at script stage was to teach the reader the structure, to do it very quickly with small scenes, so that in the first ten pages you have an idea of the structure throughout. What I found with Following and Memento, when you come to watch the film, was that's counterproductive. It becomes too baffling for the audience. The audience has to have a period in which just to connect with characters. With both films, I took a couple of the initial blocks, and combining them, so they run conventionally over two blocks. With Memento, there were cut points at the arriving at the derelict building, and I ran that together. It's a longer block of time."
This ties together with what Tim Powers said at Writers of the Future: "Don't run over little Johnny till I know him." In other words, establish character first, plot second.
Wrote about 300 words of notes on story structure, bridging conflict, and Jason's motivations based on the above.
Going to San Francisco for Potlatch tonight. Have some critiques to do, but hope to get some writing done on the plane. Maybe even start drafting!
Posted 02/20/2003 07:27 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Word count (outline and notes): 12239
Just finished reading Shoot the Women First by Eileen MacDonald. I read this partly to get a handle on Sienna, but mostly for Jason. I wanted an answer to the question Why does someone become a terrorist?
My reading of the stories in this book is that, as a rule, they do so because they are wholly committed to the cause -- that it seems more important than human life. Which is not to say that all terrorists are cold-blooded killers; many of the women interviewed in this book felt remorse about the people they had killed (some regretted the entire terrorist thing; others did not). But in general they felt that these deaths were necessary in order to make the serious changes in society they sought.
Most of these women became terrorists in reaction to societal oppression expressed personally. For example, the Palestinian and Irish Republican suffered societal oppression of their entire people (their language prohibited, the loss of the right to assemble, etc.) as well as a personal expression of that oppression (both women were repeatedly forced to move from house to house as children -- either forced to move by their oppressors or just trying to avoid them -- and suffered constant physical intimidation by the Israelis/Protestants respectively). However, it was not any specific act of personal oppression that convinced them to take action. Rather, they cited these acts of personal oppression as examples of the suffering of their people as a whole. Their primary motivation was to rescue their people from domination rather than to redress personal offences.
This is true even for the Italian and German left-wing terrorists who sought to radically change their own culture's politics rather than to expel an invading culture. "Astrid Proll, a former member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, once described herself and her comrades as being 'very well-armed social workers.'"
The author makes much of the idea that these women gave up conventional motherhood (in some cases abandoning existing children) in favor of expressing maternal feelings for the Cause, and often felt a closer attachment to the Cause than to their lovers or husbands. Personally, and for purposes of the novel, I don't think this is an expressly female trait. The point, I think, is that before you can kill, you must become attached to something that literally matters more to you than life itself.
Another book I've been reading is The Making of Memento by James Mottram (a Christmas present from Kate's brother). One problem I anticipate in the complex interleaved plot I have in mind is how to keep the reader from getting confused about when each individual chapter takes place. Mottram points out some of the tricks that director Nolan uses to keep the viewers oriented in Memento, including the scratches on Leonard's face. Something that simple and visual is too subtle for a novel, I think, but what if Jason breaks his leg during the escape from the UN? That's something that will influence his every action and will make perfectly clear whether a particular chapter takes place before or after that point.
Posted 02/17/2003 14:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Just received a contract and check from Marty Greenberg for Haunted Holidays. Woo hoo! This reminds me that I don't suck, and provides the excuse I needed to send out a kvellogram to everyone in my address book. It's been a while since the last one. But first I need to decide whether I'm going to post a novel journal, and if so how. Get a page at some site like livejournal.com? Install movabletype on my aracnet account and use that? Post my progress to my Speculations topic? Create an sff.people.dlevine newsgroup and use that? Keep it as a plain HTML page?
Finally decided to write a real simple shell script to generate flat HTML pages from separate files for each day ("most recent 5 entries" and "all entries" in your choice of newest-first or oldest-first), based on my log script, and whipped off a first draft of it today. A little more work and it will also handle the uploading for me. Also wrote a little maintenance script to make writing each day's entry easier. After I actually start writing I will add current word count (hopefully this can be automated).
The novel journal will share some content with my Notes file, but will not be the same. Most of the Notes file is for me alone, a chance to get my thoughts on paper; the posted journal is just to document progress.
Right now I should be working on Bento...
Posted 02/13/2003 22:13 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
Got it. Jason's parents were killed by an alien weapon -- that's why he wants them off his planet, now. But the Taurans blew up that particular stretch of countryside only because the US government told them that anti-alien terrorists were hiding there and only that particular weapon could take out their fortified hide-out. It was a ploy to get better data on the capabilities of the weapon. The aliens have apologized for blowing up innocent civilians, but they don't know how thoroughly they were hornswoggled. The US Army officer who instigated that scheme is also part of the DER faction that is supporting the FFL.
At the climax, Jason is using the social engineering skills Sienna has taught him in an attempt to outwit pursuit (they are on the run at this point -- Sienna knows that her former allies are now trying to get her, because the plague has worked too well and she is now a liability). But what he learns is not just the current info he needs; he also finds out that a) Sienna is working for the government, and b) that selfsame government is responsible for the death of his parents. So, in effect, Sienna causes her own downfall, and the outer crisis is resolved by an inner turning (Jason switches loyalties, leaves Sienna to be torn apart by an angry mob [handwave handwave] and avoids pursuit by running to the aliens instead of from them -- his previous relationship with Clarity gets him in the door with the aliens).
The novel now starts with Jason, pissed, making contact with the FFL and demanding to be allowed in. Sienna's lieutenant wants nothing to do with his hot-headed, inexperienced kid, but Sienna thinks he might be just the thing they need to crack the alien biocomputer they haven't had any luck with so far...
Oh, by the way, a 1995 calendar will do for 2051.
Posted 02/11/2003 21:43 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
I just re-read the novel "sketch" I wrote in the Outline A Novel In An Hour workshop at OryCon. The Jason described in that sketch is a lot harder, a lot more evil, than the Jason I'm thinking about now. That Jason combines the current Jason's computer skills with Sienna's motivations and priorities. That Jason is a more interesting character, but not as sympathetic. Which would be better for the novel?
I admit I like Sienna better as a character than the current Jason. Even if Jason is fighting against his privileged background, as I considered yesterday, he's still a bit of a nebish, a nonentity -- not a good central character for a "near-future medical thriller with aliens." But the Jason I outlined at OryCon is so harsh I wonder if the reader will identify with him, and for him to turn around at the end and work to save the aliens might not be believable.
What if he doesn't turn around? What if he remains committed to the cause? That makes him a villain -- makes him Sienna. The challenge then is that the reader has to overcome his/her initial prejudices to consider the heroic human freedom fighter as the villain and the evil alien overlord as the hero. I could structure the whole book that way, with Clarity as the main character and hero and Jason as the villain (this new Jason would basically be the current Sienna with Jason's skills). This book would start with Remembrance Day and be entirely about the plague.
(Long pause for thought.)
No, I think not. Jason must at least start out as a sympathetic guy. Once the reader is attached to him I can drag him deeper and deeper into the resistance, let him lose his conscience, but in the end when he turns on Sienna and saves the aliens it is in keeping with his earlier personality.
So what is it that drives him into the resistance in the first place? It can't just be that he gets involved with Sienna; he has to have a personal reason to want to bring the aliens down. But it still has to be plausible for him to turn around later, when he learns more about the aliens and who's really responsible for the repression.
Ponder ponder ponder...
Posted 02/09/2003 19:09 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
I've been having trouble getting a handle on Jason, and yesterday I recalled something from The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing about using contrast between characters. I know that Sienna grew up poor, is still poor, and this has shaped her. I was thinking that Jason would also be from an impoverished background of petty thieves, like Kevin Mitnick, but that makes them too similar. What if he grew up rich instead? What if his hacking (and maybe his bisexuality) are a reaction to that background? What if he is committed to making it on his own -- he has estranged himself from his family? This explains why he is working in a coffee shop but has serious computer skills and an apartment full of hardware. (Or does it?) Anyway, I think it gives me the "handle" I've been looking for.
It also gives some parallels between Jason and Clarity -- they are both rebelling against their parents and background. But in the case of Jason and Clarity, they are so different already that creating parallels is a good thing. This also gives them something in common to explain their sexual relationship.
I have not yet decided whether Jason and Clarity meet during the novel or beforehand. Probably beforehand, and reveal the relationship in flashback. As for Jason and Sienna, I want to start the novel when they meet, but it might be better to begin in media res. Ah, but if so... where?
I am also not yet sure what effect the aliens' preference of one-to-one vs. one-to-many communication has on their society and psychology. I had written "they are more individualistic and more hierarchical than we are", but I wonder if hierarchy is not their style either. An alternative thought I had was "they form networks rather than hierarchies", which sounds great, but what does it mean? I need to answer this question before I can get a handle on Clarity.
Wrote about 900 words on the history of the world, 2003-2051.
Posted 02/08/2003 21:41 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
In the last month I've been doing a lot of reading.
How to write a damn good novel by James Frey -- much of the same stuff I've already heard many times about how to write a damn good story. Not much new, still worth hearing again. Hacker culture by DouglasThomas -- see 1/10 entry above. Raj: a scrapbook of British India by Charles Allen -- the heat! The boredom! The numbers of servants! The unmitigated gall! The British were completely alien to the country they ruled (100,000 of them to 3 million Indians) and, for most of them, it was pretty unpleasant and not particularly rewarding financially. Lots of good imagery, though. The tossing of the pith helmets overboard as the homeward boat leaves. The fleeing to the hills during the Hot Weather. The enormous ratio of servants to served (for the upper classes). I think I want my aliens to be kinder than the British were. Writing the breakout novel by Donald Maass -- this is a book that tries to define the difference between a merely adequate novel and one that "breaks out" to the bestseller list and critical acclaim. Lots of specific advice here, but the keyword, I think, is bigger. Everything should be bigger and richer and more powerful. Some key quotes: "A breakout premise has plausibility, inherent conflict, originality, and gut emotional appeal." "High stakes yield high success; to test stakes, ask 'so what?' Breakout novels combine high public stakes with high personal stakes." "Larger-than-life characters say what we cannot say, do what we cannot do, change in ways that we cannot change; they have conflicting sides and are conscious of self. Build a cast for contrast." "Conflict in the breakout novel is meaningful, immediate, large scale, surprising, not easily resolved, and happens to people for whom we feel sympathy. Bridging conflict carries the reader from the opening line to the moment when the central conflict is set." "The secret to breakout plotting is tension on every page." "Multiple points of view and subplots enrich a novel. Connect subplots quickly; subplots must afect overall story outcome. Interweave character relationships." "Great stories go in unpredictable directoins; breakout novels tend to sprawl." "Many breakout authors... box their characters into a situation with inescapable moral choices and dilemmas. Moments of outward change... plot turning points... are probably also inward turning points. The time when things are darkest and most dire is also the time when a character's inner convictions are most sorely tested." Re-read "Writing the Breakout Novel" in July! (See also 1/23 entry above about theme and politics.) The fugitive game: online with Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman -- key concepts here are some details of Kevin's background (his whole family and mileu growing up were white trash petty crooks) and the concept of social engineering. Kevin was not a brilliant programmer; he combined passion, curiosity, a keen memory, and a powerful ability to get people to tell him what he needs. I'm thinking that Jason comes into the novel with the technical skill and the passion, and Sienna brings the social engineering (she uses social engineering techniques on Kevin to get him to do what she wants). The complete handbook of novel writing from Writer's Digest Books -- a mixed bag, and like Damn Good Novel it contains a lot of basics about "story" that I already know but don't mind being reminded of. One thing I hadn't heard before: using plot points to get through the middle of the novel. These are 3-6 scenes that change the direction of the plot and characters (vertices of K.W. Jeter's "W-shaped plot"). To increase suspense and tension surrounding these scenes: name the big scene, to alert the reader to the event's impending arrival; provide a preview that mirrors or reflects the upcoming big scene; provide a short contrasting scene immediately before the big scene to increase its impact; use lots of sensory and emotional detail to make the big scene pay off; and at the end of the scene have a disaster and revelation that changes the characters' understanding of the situation (perepeteia). The British Raj by Denis Judd -- more detail than I'd had before on what happened before the Great Mutiny, and lots of examples of British inhumanity. Example: when Victoria (who never visited India) was proclaimed Empress of India, the 21-gun salute (or however many it was -- it was all codified) stampeded the elephants and killed several of the natives. This book has numerous first-hand accounts and I own it, so I'm not going to write notes on it right now.At the moment I'm just starting Shoot the women first by Eileen MacDonald. Female terrorists are apparently the more deadly of the species.
After all that reading, in the last couple of days something went spung in my head and I had to write something. So the day before yesterday, at work, I whipped out a Shitty First Draft of the outline. I outlined the events in strict chronological order, just as a first pass... and, you know, if Sienna goes off and starts infecting aliens without telling Jason, it might just work that way. Jason, and the reader, don't know that Jason is the cause of the plague or that the plague is really a computer virus until after the Remembrance Day scene which is the big pivot point a the middle of the book. Mind you, I think the more complex interleaved structure might still be good for the book, but I will at least consider a chronological structure.
Yesterday I found a Character Worksheet on the web and filled out about half of it for Sienna. I'm starting with her because I know more about her, and because she's a more interesting character than Jason who is, so far, a bit of a nonentity. I'm going to read more about terrorists to try to get a handle on Jason -- what is the thing he wants more than anything, and why can't he get it?
Much thinking about the background of the novel. Wrote 1700 words of notes on the state of the world in 2051 and the aliens' technology, biology, reproduction, sexuality, and sociology.
Posted 02/05/2003 19:09 [e-mail me] [post comment] [permalink]
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