Monthly Archives: January 2012

a world full of things that are happening elsewhere

I’ve become aware recently of a writing technique I’ve developed over the last couple of years. Its genesis was probably in my lessons with Sonia Orchard, who could always be counted on to say, “This is very general. I want a specific detail.” (As well as “What does this mean?” and “I don’t understand this at all.”)

Her constant search for more detail made sense to me when she put it like this: When you remember high school you don’t remember this general thing that comprises all your experiences. You remember specific things, and High School is attached to those things.

That made a lot of sense to me, so I started writing More Detail.

I started using sensory details from a character’s life to describe the current moment. For example, when my hero is suffering a panic attack, what he thinks is:

It wasn’t the squeezing, suffocating pain he had suffered before. It darted and flickered at his muscles, threatening at every moment to crash through him. He thought of the waves he had watched as a boy at Stonehaven. The stones had ground and shifted beneath his feet on the beach, their mottled grey an off-kilter reflection of the sky. He remembered the sea, huge and steely, muscling its way up, against the pull of gravity. Crashing back onto itself, pounding the foam knit across its surface.

The duchess had been wearing a pale pink coat and bonnet over a darker pink dress with small panniers. He remembered how her round, placid face had pinched, her lips unsure as she told Nanny not to let him so close to the water.

If he let the pain descend, it would kill him.

I think this was the passage where I first became aware of what I was doing. It’s not backstory – his memory isn’t moving the narrative along in a plot sense. It’s hard to articulate, but I think it’s this:

Humans learn to interpret their sense-experience as they grow up and gain points of reference. They (we) create a personal paradigm through which we understand everything else that happens to us.

By using snippets of memory from the character’s learning period (and the example I’ve given is quite a long one, it can just be a quick association), the fictional world becomes self-referential and immediately feels more real. Suddenly the part of the character’s life that we’re watching is not all that exists – we’re also made aware of everything that has made them, and of the complex and entirely subjective way they process the world.

This isn’t a technique I invented – I’m pretty sure it’s just another way of looking at the iceberg theory – but thinking about it from this angle works for me.

and then there was fan fiction

It took a long time for me to be okay with reading romance (trashy genre fiction with swooning water-coloured heroines on the cover). Then I went into defiance – head up when I checked the books out at a library, daring the librarian to judge me for it. Then I went into campaigning for the rest of my world to understand what a treasure trove my chosen genre really is.

Now I find myself at the beginning all over again…with fan fiction.

Even though I’ve struggled both internally and externally against the perceptions attached to a genre, fan fiction feels shameful. If romance is at the bottom of the genre pile in people’s estimation (and it is), then fan fiction sits in some murky water below it.

Cat gave me a Harry Potter fanfic to read, because it had a great example of the awful I love you that I was talking about all the time. So it wasn’t her favourite example of fanfic – she rated it 6 out of 10 – but that wasn’t the point.

The unintended side-effect was that I LOVED IT.

You may remember that I’ve been going through a distressing case of identity-crisis-inducing reading ennui. For the last couple of days I simply haven’t been able to stop reading.

I’m trying to pinpoint what is so great about it, but as I’m such a newcomer to the genre it’s all a bit hazy. Initially I really couldn’t understand why Harry Potter of all the books would generate more fan fiction than any other story out there (aside, of course, from the obvious fact of it being the most popular series of all time). It seemed to me like such a childish (and that’s not meant to be derogatory) story to have such an intense following.

But the whole point of Harry Potter fanfic, as I’ve discovered, is to invert the original story in ways that are unavoidably fascinating.

Maybe every story is made up of itself and, unspoken, its inverse. Going into the world that shadows it – that exists because it isn’t – feels somehow complex. Unlike the story that made it, it can’t exist on its own. It has to be made of facets, and possibility. It also seems to contain all the unanswerable yearning of the original which, as you may be able to guess, is irresistible to me.

There’s one author I’m particularly enjoying, and her Draco Malfoy is the most charming, charismatic, awful, insecure, amazing creation. I’ve often felt inadequate when writers talk about the books they re-read for inspiration. But this – when I am struggling to imbue a character with that something that makes them light on fire, I will re-read this.

Then there’s my new Kindle, which changes everything. It means I don’t have to approach these stories as Deemed Worthy of Publication and find them missing, or as a guilty pleasure I’ll kill my eyes with by reading off the computer.

It doesn’t have to be polished and thoughtful and structured and perfect. It can be an exciting idea, an adrenaline rush of potential, an over-the-top exploration of all the best bits with none of the rest.

And who says fiction can’t be like that?

the awful I love you

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now, you’ll be no stranger to the fact that reading the Lymond Chronicles changed the way I read, and write and think and – okay, look, it changed my life.

One of the many, many things it made clear to me was that withholding emotional catharsis is a powerful tool. That’s a whole post in itself, but a subset of it is turning “I love you” – which should be a moment of recognition and completion and, yes, catharsis – into something unpleasant.

In Lymond it takes this form: We spend five books following painfully after Lymond, the man who simply cannot lose control, ever, and at the end of book five we finally see him fall in love. (Here‘s another post I wrote about how spectacular it was to watch Lymond fall in love.)

This, finally, seems like the one condition under which he can let go – and after five books, the tension in him is unbearable. We spend most of book six watching he and Philippa go through a painful dance around each other. At this point, it’s a delicious kind of pain. They yearn for each other, and they cannot have each other, and for whatever reason it’s a state that’s so much more enjoyable in literature than in real life.

Then Philippa realises how Lymond feels, and she pushes him. It is so obvious to her, that this means they can be together. As the reader, we’re egging her on. Push him! Push him until he has to let go!  But, stunningly, when she pushes him until he’s completely bare to her it only makes things between them worse.

I just want to highlight how amazing this is. You have two characters, and you strip away every external hindrance to them being together, and you strip away any misunderstanding between them – and they are still complex enough to resist catharsis.

It’s also a huge, unforeseeable blow to the reader, who has been conditioned by all other fiction to expect catharsis when every defence is torn down.

Oh, and it gets worse.

Because of circumstances outside of Lymond’s control, he and Philippa end up together. They go to the French countryside, and ensconce themselves in his estate. At this point every other character is shut out – as is the reader. We hear the gossip that other characters hear – and when those characters finally lose out to curiosity and go to visit Lymond and Philippa, we see what they see.

It’s kind of like a horror show, at the very moment everyone’s finally gotten what they wanted.

Lymond and Philippa are of one mind – they communicate without speech, they are always, always with each other. But they never touch. And they hardly speak. And there is something indefinably, totally wrong.

Another blow to the chest.

Another great example of the awful I love you: In the Buffy episode ‘Lie To Me’, Buffy has seen Angel hanging around the evil vampire Drusilla. When she finally confronts him about it, the conversation is angry – it’s about not knowing who to trust, and the lies people tell each other.

Out of nowhere Angel asks Buffy, “Do you love me?” It’s the first time the question’s been raised between them, and it’s not tender or careful. Angel asks it, because he needs to know where they stand before he tells Buffy about the worst atrocity he ever committed: driving an innocent girl mad by killing her family one by one, then turning her into a vampire (Drusilla).

An admission of love makes a person about as vulnerable as they can be. You can love someone as much as you like, in secret – but it’s the speaking of it that changes things. So as a writer, that moment is a potent tool.

In these examples it hasn’t simply been used to make someone look a bit villainous, or heartless. That wouldn’t impress me. It makes someone the most vulnerable they can be, and it uses that fact to twist a knife in the reader.

Happily Ever After

Watching so much Joss Whedon-created tv recently, I have, naturally, been thinking about the nature of happy endings.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Joss doesn’t exactly believe in things ending well. Actually, the earth gets saved from a couple of apocalypses a year, so I should qualify that by saying that he doesn’t believe in relationships ending well.

“The Thin Red Line” was probably the most controversial Buffy episode in this sense, and the A.V. Club’s review has some interesting discussion in the comments. One comment that made me start thinking was along these lines: Every relationship eventually ends in either misery or death.

How depressing. But, I guess, true.

And considering that Buffy is largely metaphorical, I think this aspect of love fits effortlessly into the larger picture of the show. The war against evil is never going to be won or lost. It simply is. And you simply keep striving. When you enter into relationship you are going up against impossible odds – misery or death. And you simply keep striving.

Of course, exploring this doesn’t necessarily have to be soul-crushingly depressing.

Happily Ever After is key to the romance genre. Obviously. But it’s no longer an ideal moment at which all of life is suspended, forever. It’s more commonly a moment at which the lovers have strength and faith and trust in each other to head into an unknown future together.  The journey of the book is each character becoming a person who can support and stick with the other through anything.

We acknowledge that life is not going to end at Happily Ever After – but we have faith that they’ll make it. To death, that is. (Never forget this is war.)

Probably the best exploration of a strong relationship on tv is Mr and Mrs Coach in Friday Night Lights. We’re never asked to worry that their marriage will end – but they are endlessly fascinating to watch. And not a little inspiring. Theirs is the daily battle against the odds, and though it can get tough, by god are they winning.

I’ve been thinking about how it’s possible to keep a couple so interesting without threatening their relationship, and this’s what I’ve come up with: Most of the drama we see them deal with is external to their relationship. This means that they’re not static, but instead of battling each other they’re supporting each other against external drama. And if you’ve ever been in a relationship, you know that’s not as easy as it sounds. But it sure is interesting to watch.

You know that one point on which you and your partner simply do not see eye-to-eye? We also watch them navigating those fundamental disagreements – attempting to balance being true to themselves and supporting the person they’ve vowed to support. It’s a paradox that’s only really possible because a human being is so complex. Again, interesting to watch.

But even with the changing emphasis of a happy ending – when that moment of perfect understanding is reached in a romance novel, there’s completion. It’s the moment that finishes the book inside you, and allows you to let it go. It’s the thing we continue to imagine will happen when we fall in love in real life, and never does.

Joss Whedon’s romances simply will not let me go. And I think it’s because they refuse to resolve themselves. They are not finished, and never will be. It’s the thing that happens when we fall in love in real life, despite all our expectations. There are moments of perfect contentment, and it can be unutterably exhausting, but it will never stop. Until misery or death.

(Okay, that’s an entirely depressing place to finish! So let me take a highlighter to my subtext: it’s not the ending that’s happy – it’s the being brave enough to go to war.)