Blue Banana

Not so long back, this blog found me wondering what I have lost.
I think I can see that the answer is 'simplicity'.
Moreover, it's probably worthwhile (or more constructive) to consider what I have gained in my years of study and practice.
Choices.
I can't help but think of Educating Rita when I hear that word.

RITA: So, I was thinking about it all when I should've been doing my exam. Do you know what the first question was?
'Suggest ways in which one might deal with some of the staging difficulties in a production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt.'
FRANK: And you wrote 'Do it on the radio?'
RITA: No - I could've done. You'd have been dead proud of me if I'd done that wouldn't you.
But I chose not to. I had a choice. I did the exam.
Because of what you'd given me, I had a choice.
Anyway, that's what I wanted to come back and tell you: You're a good teacher.

I understand that there are a good many authors who have a cosy selection of tools, and they have reached a point where many of their choices have migrated from the think it through part of the brain to the autopilot part of the brain.
Indeed, I've found that much of writing has become second-nature, if you will.

But what happens if you develop so many choices?
As an extreme example, imagine that Person A has to choose from an apple or a banana.
Then imagine that Person B has ten thousand fruits to choose from.
Person B has by far the biggest challenge. Yet Person B is gonna have the biggest variety in his diet. Person B's life is never going to be dull. It's not going to be easy either, until he starts formulating some sort of decision-making process - perhaps a rota system or a preference for citrus fruits or whatever.

I have created a huge arsenal of choices for myself, and I am endeavouring to keep on top of the decision-making process. But what I have noticed is that I have recently been neglecting simple things. This is the danger.
I refer to these periods as blue banana phases.
I remember, in my early student days, how so many doors to strange environments were unlocked for me. In particular, I recall the day that Colin Measures placed a piece of fruit before us all, told us to take out our coloured pencils, and instructed us to draw the fruit paying particular attention to the colours.
Sure enough, we drew yellow bananas and pink rhubarb.
Colin made us try again - he made us look harder. He made us see.
In my banana, I could see blues and golds and purples and reds ... I could see a myriad of colours.
My banana came out technicoloured, although I seemed to have found a bias towards blue.
My blue banana.
Then came the drawn out phase of dealing with this revelation - these quixotic colours that had been hidden away from me for all those years.
Slowly, I learned to control and balance these colours, and to see the effects of shifting the balance. During this blue banana phase, I learned to deal with my choices.

I find myself in an inexorable series of blue banana phases these days. Not so long ago, I was experimenting with emotional topography, and I reached a relatively stable position with my last short-story (which is, of course, not to say that I can't continue to refine). I try one extreme out and then another, exploring the landscape, looking under stones and in shadowed nooks. At some point, I develop a feel for the landscape and begin to control its form.
During the blue banana phase, everything breaks.
Playing with sensory information, I have taken out too much. Snap.
Playing with abstract descriptions, I have recently shifted from 'smells yeasty like tuberculosis' to 'smells like rabies'. Shatter.

The irony?
I have no choice.
I cannot prevent my head from poking around and breaking things.
But I don't think I'd have it any other way. My journey is always filled with surprises and with interesting experiments and world after world of undiscovered terrains.
I must continue to remind myself that things get worse before they get better: that the blue banana phase is indicative of evolution and will make me into a more powerful and satisfying story teller.

For no reason other than to help with the visualization process, here's a picture by Zdzislaw Beksinski - one of his alien terrains. I adore this guy's work, and you can learn about him here.

Pace

What is pace?
When writers discuss pace, they typically refer to the flow of action: pace is used almost exclusively to describe highs and lows in narrative action.
Imagine that we might describe pace, instead, as the length of time spent on any given element.
Pace is the amount of time devoted to A, before being superceded by B.

I think that all-too-many writers pepper their components throughout the narrative without much consideration. I think this is missing a wonderful trick.

Let's consider some of the elements that we can pace.
Interior and exterior: I like to hold the reader inside a protag, sharing protag's thoughts and inner pov. This can often be rather claustrophic - a narrow, tunnel vision. The effect of holding the reader in this position becomes poignant when widening the focus, introducing dialogue and interaction and the like. By pacing the time spent interiorly or exteriorly, I can not only create a chosen mood, but enhance it by sustaining it, or by shortening it.
Sensory info: Again, I notice a distinct need from many writers to fill out chapters with a variety of sensory stimulae - a smell here and a taste there. The greatest writers are far more astute: they know the effects of witholding these stimulae, and also the effects of combining different stimulae and focusing on and sustaining a single sense (see Primary Representational Systems).
Emotions: The emotional topography provides a representation of desired emotional responses (and their levels) over time. The idea of topography provides as simple means of visualizing pace, and emotional topography is possibly the purest form that might be used to demonstrate the effects of pace.

We can imagine starving the reader or overwhelming them or keeping levels nice and cosy. We should endeavour to pace any given element and to learn the effects of lots and of little, of balance and of extremes. Most importantly, we can enhance the effects of an element by holding it at arm's length, and we can subsequently overwhelm the reader by condensing pages of this element into a short burst. In this way, pace can be seen as empowering our writing through contrast.

N.B. One lesson I am currently learning is that readers have come (through convention no doubt) to expect a steady spread of basic components. When the reader is denied, say, interaction with the virtual outside world, they become disturbed. If this disruption comes before orientation, or if it is sustained beyond average endurance, the reader baulks. (Well, they tend to baulk anyway, and I think the reader needs to be eased in - to be given assurance - before they will permit the author to starve them.)
As such, my experiments with pace and endurance have much mileage remaining ... For now, I need to demonstrate to the reader that all good things come ...

Thor's Paper Plates and Order and Death and Life

Starting to pick myself up again.
I'm finding that plot and pace and emotions are beginning to separate out. Like colossal clouds of summerberry jelly drifting by one another, I can see multiple shifting forms, but not their individual shape.
Thor was one of the original Litopians and he'll forever be associated with paper plates. He would write a plot element upon a plate and hang it on a washing line, and then arrange these plates until he had an order that satisfied him. I think he was probably a genius.
I'm beginning to see a little deeper than this.
I approached both of my short-stories from a different angle: I began with a set of emotions that I wanted to evoke, and I fiddled with the order of these emotions - the emotional topography.
My first ss was very naive, but a jolly fine learning experience all the same.
My most recent ss was far more involved: that is to say that I gave myself a palette of many more emotional states to evoke, some of which were quite subtle. These were written up as events that would fit into my intended narrative. As such, I had a large selection of metaphorical paper plates, and I ordered these, predominantly with trial and error, and pushed some out (in particular, the cast list lost some Paters and some ghosts) and brought new ones in, until I was happy and had the skeleton of the ss prepared.
'CREATIVITY means creative choices of inclusion and exclusion.' [Source: Robert McKee's Story.]

So imagine devoting an emotional resonance to each plate.
To this end, I have been compiling a list of emotive hotwords. By throwing these together, I can forge components that, if handled well, result in an emotional response.
I'll demonstrate:
Picking three hotwords at random ... faith, sarcasm, impulse.
Hmm ...
I can see ...
Deep belief, creates impulsiveness ... belief in impulsiveness ... life devoted to impulsiveness in conflict with conservative values ... conflict deflected with sarcasm ...

And then the phone rings.
Well, my Nan passed away in the night. Peaceful and smiling. Ninety-six.
My poor mother is doing the phone calls, letting everyone know.
I went to see my Nan in hospital a few weeks back, and that'll be my last memory of her. She wasn't awake for most of my visit - apparently she was getting a little too much oxygen and the carbon dioxide levels were making her drowsy. But she did open her eyes and recognize me, and said 'Nice to see you' and another visitor did his Brucie impersonation and we laughed, and then she asked me for a kiss and I obliged. I discovered, on that visit, from the woman who found her on the floor of her kitchen, that my Nan had five pounds in her hand and she wanted me to have the money (presumably to buy something for my son).
She's been happy the last few days and my mother is taking comfort from that - from the fact that my Nan passed away peacefully in her sleep.
I pray for you Nan. Rest in peace at God's side. x

I shall return to these ideas shortly.

Limbo

So now I am back in limbo and it is a cold and hopeless domain.

The Commuters is out there with two agents.
But it doesn't work.
How have I forged the bond between reader and Corus?

Corus is persecuted and plagued by a dark entity that lives in his soul.
Corus is motivated by immortality: he wants to share his creativity with the world; he wants to spread peace and happiness. Corus was bullied.
Not as easy to grasp as a woman who is raped and beaten and forced to live on the streets and work as a prostitute.
Not as easy to grasp as a man who is down on his luck and works long hours in a job he detests.
Here I fail (although not entirely) because Corus' motivation and anguish are too unusual to easily share.

Corus loved and misses his mother and sister. His friends are similarly persecuted/alienated from society.
Aileen loves Selby and would do anything for her. Her friends are outcasts.
Travis wants to protect a young hooker and free her from her captivity and sleazy life. His friends are oddballs and outcasts. They share his despair.
Here I have some success.

How is humanity initially depicted?
The people Corus meet are depicted as irrational and rude and greedy and without dignity or morality and, in a few instances, violent.
In Monster, the people Aileen meet are abusive and violent and intolerant. They are from all walks of life and all, fundamentally, self-serving.
In Taxi Driver, Travis is angered by the pimps and murderers and scum of humanity on the sreets of New York.
So, again, I fail. To paint others as irrational or thoughtless has nowhere near the power as painting them as killers or rapists. Here we can see how plot exists to serve character: Both Aileen and Travis are thrown into situations where the worst of humanity can be experienced. I have seemingly crowbarred this stuff into my plot; I have forced myself into this situation by placing Corus in a lovely cottage and a job at a beautiful university.
Corus sees the worst of humanity in the city and on his commutes. I have an amount of success here, but nowhere near enough.

So where to go now?

The Commuters is going to need a major overhaul. It's a mahoosive job and likely an impossible one.
So I walk away for now.
I've been looking over my first two novels.
I rewrote the intro to my first novel - Tethered Light. The plot is sound, the characters are great fun, there's regular conflict and action and there's a countdown ... I got it to a pretty sturdy position. But the writing is filled with adverbs and tells - everywhere. Might not be such a big job tidying the first few chapters and polishing my new intro (which has multiple countdowns and seven - yes seven - plot cookies [almost as many as the opening to Raiders of the Lost Ark!]). They say that one should never return to one's first manuscript. I'm torn.
My second novel, An Angel's Canvas, opens well, and it is still out there with one agent. Again, some of the writing is weak, and I never wrote past chapter four. But I do have a 10,000 word chapter-by-chapter outline and the story is crammed full of cookies, twists and turns, reveals, reversals, and so on. Might be worth writing a little further into it and sending out.

The alternative is to start from scratch, and that idea is terrifying.
Didn't someone say that one only improves by making mistakes?