[Photo by Alan Bauer]
I want to share with you a little anecdote about one of the wild joys of writing a novel. But let’s put real life aside for a moment; let’s start with a hypothetical. Let’s say you’re writing a novel, as follows:
A certain set of events must happen at night, say, because… um… In order for something else — something absolutely critical — to happen, two characters must exchange their first kiss (or bite) under the light of a full moon, within the first twenty-four hours of the April 21 opening of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, in the restaurant atop the Space Needle.
Now, of course, Seattle is often rainy, and when it’s not rainy it’s often foggy. But suppose you resolve the weather question satisfactorily, and hence resolve the question of visibility from the top of the Space Needle. Was the moon even full that night? If so, what time was moonrise? Could a character in a nearby skyscraper observe the kiss (bite) through binoculars — then lower the binoculars, noticing that the moon is full… without having to turn around?
This didn’t happen to me recently, not exactly. None of the action in Seems to Fit occurs in Seattle, and in the scene in question — the one I think of as “the last, climactic chapter”* — no romantic (or romantically dental) activity takes place. The setting, although based on a real place, does not exist. The exact date isn’t even important.
So what was the problem?
Stuckness. I was stuck. For all the years since the first draft of the work-in-progress, I believed that I knew:
- the night on which these events happen (the exact date never appearing anywhere in the book, mind you — I just knew it);
- the timeline on the night during which these events happen;
- the weather (mostly clear at first, with clouds gradually building and then, finally, some flashes of lightning);
- what the characters are wearing (fairly lightweight formal wear); and
- the phase of the moon (full, naturally — both for the drama, y’know, and for the light it affords at least one character, and probably two)
Finally, I also believed that I knew the location in question, almost to the precise latitude and longitude. It’s not a real place, but it’s so close to a real place as to be almost indistinguishable from it. (You may remember my review from a couple months ago, of China Mieville’s The City & The City — with its two overlapping cities. Yeah. Like that.)
So I’m working on this chapter Saturday morning, and one of the characters stands outside at this location, on this evening, and he looks up, and he sees… What? Jeezus — what does he see?!?
“Breaking out in a cold sweat” verges on dead metaphor, but for the next five seconds it became for me neither dead nor metaphorical.
Well, that’s no problem (I finally told myself). I can turn to the Web!
The next two hours: up the flue. The weird thing was, the whole episode didn’t feel to me like self-indulgent, work-avoiding distraction; I know what that feels like. (Know it all too well, in fact.) No, this felt more like determination — single-mindedness. If I can’t get this right, the story will feel wrong.
And to answer the obvious question: no, I don’t read other peoples’ fiction with an eye to this sort of detail. (Note that I’m not talking about huge events. Unless someone is writing fake history, for example, it always will matter what the weather was like in New York City on the second Tuesday morning in September, 2011.)
If you write fiction, has anything like this happened to you? And if you write fiction or not, does this strike you as, uh, “normal”?
P.S. Re-reading this before posting, I just found myself wondering: “Is there a restaurant atop the Space Needle — or are you just taking it for granted???” Oh, I crack myself up. I really do. I also refuse to look for the answer to that question.
________________________
* The verbiage misleads. For one thing, a dénouement-style chapter appears after the scene in question — so this has never been the last chapter. For another, it’s no longer a single giant chapter (although it once was); it’s a series of short ones. But climactic? I sure as hell hope so! (The atmospheric conditions will also have been meticulously confirmed. Or ignored, as the case may be.)
DarcKnyt says
I don’t honestly know if I’ve tripped over something like that. I ran into something similar when trying to figure out under what conditions fog forms. I still haven’t resolved it though. I guess I should. :)
Nance says
Oh, dear. A discouraging word. If I know me, I’d obsess like that over every detail of every chapter, needing it to feel right. Right this minute, I’m glad it’s not me in this position. Nevertheless, I’m further prepared to value your novel when it’s available!
Cedra says
I’m not a writer–but I go through similarly obsessive little bouts when planning a (fictional) painting.
It’s hard enough when one is composing a scene with non-specific landmarks. I get lost in obsessive deliberations about whether the shadows of two characters are cast in the correct directions based on the light source. And once I’ve established that to my satisfaction, I look at the forest that is thirty feet beyond…and have to confirm whether the light source I’ve assigned is consistent for those trees. What time of day would it have to be, for the sunlight to be coming from that direction? Does the sky I’ve created reflect the ambiance of that time of day? Does the atmospheric interference accurately reflect the distance between the figures and the landmarks?
And it just gets more complicated if the painting is of a specific place. If I’m painting Sandia Peak and I can see the Manzanos in the background, I’m facing south; and since I’m painting them in snow, the event must be taking place within the ambit of a certain season; so then the question arises: could the shadows I’ve so lovingly rendered even be cast that direction in the first place, at that time of year, at that time of day? And if so, how long would those shadows have to be, given that it’s winter? And and and and and….!
It really can be maddening, if one lets it. So I am sympathetic, sir.
John says
All: great responses. Especially since only one of the comments (so far) comes from someone who writes fiction!
I’m reading a book now — sort of a self-help/inspirational/keep-going book for people who are (or believe themselves to be :)) creative. Just came across this germane passage, in a section about editing and revising as you go along:
(from The War of Art (not a typo!), by Steven Pressfield)
(And as an aside: the architecture of our psyches — love that.)
John says
Darc: Yes, I think you DO need to figure that out. And when you do, please tell me — I don’t have time to research it myself, and I’m already worrying about it. Ha!
John says
Nance: But see, in your (former) profession you didn’t obsess to the nth degree over the equivalent of that sort of thing, right? I mean, like, you would (I guess) obsess about it to a point, but eventually realize that you had to move on. And you would hardly interrupt a counseling session to say, Sorry. I need to pause for two hours’ research to be sure that what I just told you was correct.
Er, you wouldn’t, right?
Like most psychological quirks, I think, obsession can be either a roadblock to progress, or a tool of the gods. It’s premature to say what it was in this case. :)
John says
Cedra: Like Nance, I think, you need to stop saying things like “I’m not a writer.” Your comments and your blog say, at most, that you’ve simply chosen not to self-identify as a writer!
I love the reminder that writers aren’t the only manipulators of reality into something which didn’t previously exist. You know Pool, the painting about which you most recently blogged? Perfect example. What’s that thing at the bottom of the water? (Rhetorical question, btw.) Maybe it is a fictional creation, maybe it isn’t; it doesn’t matter right now. Because after all, this post of mine isn’t about what we’ve made up; it’s about what we don’t make up — the believable context into which we insert these fictional creations of ours.
In Pool‘s case, as in (apparently) much of your work, there’s this little tension going on in the viewer’s head. You set up a context — the near-photographic verisimilitude of the setting — and then you place in it some mystery: some object, some spatial relationship or proportion, whose verisimilitude we can’t really be sure of. It looks as real as the setting, but disorients (even unnerves) us at the same time. If you didn’t get details like light and shadow just exactly so, the vague sense of, well, alien-ness wouldn’t affect us.
Jayne says
It’s fiction so I don’t think you should sweat the small stuff (oh how I was tempted to look up a less cliche way to say that!)… like what one was wearing, etc. But I do think it’s important for the reader to feel grounded, to know the setting, time, place… even if that is all fictional, the reader needs to see/feel where the characters are, and have that sense of time.
Of course if we’re talking about vampires, it could be anywhere, any time, or nowhere at all. But definitely at night. And foggy is good. ;)
marta says
I’ve set most of my stories all in the same fictional town. I have a map (sort of. More of a mappish sort of thingy) in my head about where things are and such. And sometimes I find the characters need to be at the lake. Or on a bridge over a canal. And then I have to think about five thousand things and remember them should that lake or bridge show up in another story that I haven’t even thought of yet. And make sure I haven’t wiped a neighborhood from a previous story.Usually this involves me imagining the town floating over my desk and I move my hands around as if I’m tracing roads and neighborhood, etc. And I mutter things like, “Well if this is over here and they went this way, then this should be there…no..wait.”
But it is great when you figure it out.
John says
Jayne: Not often, but every now and then, I’ll be reading a novel containing a scene whose real-world counterpart I just happen to know about. Maybe it’s technological, or maybe it’s about Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, some odd little area of expertise I have. (I don’t have deep expertise about anything. :)) And the author will get one tiny little thing wrong — so wrong that the entire story falls apart because of it. And I’ll think: Oboy. Somebody’s got egg on his or her face right now!
(We’re all snobs about something.)
As I said, I don’t go hunting for that sort of thing. But when I come across it, I can’t ignore it. And I can’t help wondering about the various other points of intersection between fiction and the real world — how close they are. The fact that I do that, more than anything I think, is why I’m (sometimes) so neurotic about it in my own writing. I picture myself reading my own book and thinking, “Holy cats! How did I get THAT wrong?!?”
John says
marta: I think you know I did an actual map of the town where most of the WIP’s action takes place. And one of these days, I may reveal the Google Maps that I’ve made of a couple of the book’s locales, with place markers for fictional buildings and geographic features superimposed on the real landscapes, together with text boxes containing various notes, links to Web pages, and so on.
If I didn’t do that sort of thing, I’m 100% sure I’d have many of those “no, wait…” moments!
(Just this morning, I was editing a section in which a character is aboard a motor home, which is parked and not running, with his dog. I’d written the first page of the section a few days ago and mentioned that he gave the dog a Milk-Bone. There’s a flashback scene occurring elsewhere, and then the action returns to the same moment in the motor home; I wrote that yesterday. In the return to the motor home, I had the dog munching on the big bowl of kibble which the guy had just given him. Whoops.)
whaddayamean says
in a word: YES.
for good and for ill.
John says
whaddayamean: WHEW.
John says
P.S. whaddayamean: I know — dumb joke. Couldn’t help it.
Anyhow, yes, “for good and for ill.” I think it’s kind of like answering yes if someone asks, “Is English your only language?” It doesn’t have to be a problem, if so, and you could do worse with another language plugged in there. But being able to answer “yes, but…” and then going on to list an exception or two says a lot about your chances in the world.
Froog says
I have reservations about your OCD tendencies, JES. If you find these research quests personally satisfying – as you obviously do – well, that’s just dandy. And this research creates a mental environment where you feel comfortable writing, that seems in some way facilitating? Well and good.
However, I can’t help wondering if it’s not a rather inefficient use of resources, especially time. If you didn’t let yourself get sidetracked with this anxiety over minutiae – for hours or days at a time – might you not have finished the darned book years ago??
Even worse, I fret that there’s a serious problem inherent in making essential to your writing process something that – it seems to me – is often completely otiose to the writing itself. I fear you may be prone to the vice of over-describing…. and you are going to have to spend agonising weeks, months, years editing out much of this background detail that you have so lovingly worked out.
Moonlight, for example, isn’t dramatic – it’s trite. And what difference does a full moon make? Unless you’re writing something like a werewolf story, where it’s a core convention, I’d prefer to avoid it altogether. (Also – on a nitpicky note! – is there any such thing as a ‘full moon’ anyway? It occurs for a vanishing instant of time: the moon is in fact always just a little bit before or beyond the full. I suppose it’s only at or above 99.9% for 30 or 40 minutes at a time – and that’s often during the day, or when it’s below the horizon, or behind a cloud. Most of us, even the most avid watchers of the night sky, have probably never seen a moon beyond, say, 99%; and a moon that full only a few times in our lives. Is your obsessive quest for detail now going to lead you into astronomical records and minute mathematical calculations to ascertain exactly how full the moon was at this precise moment… on this unspecified night, at this fictitious latitude, from this imagined point of view??)
Cedra’s example is rather different. If you’re a realist painter, getting the details right is fundamental to the impact of the work. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his Blink, we humans have a phenomenal capacity for subconsciously processing the tiniest pieces of visual information and drawing sweeping conclusions from them. It’s not just that the light has to be consistent within the environment of the painting. Even with an imagined landscape, we have a sense of whether the light seems right for the season, the apparent latitude, perhaps even for the compass direction we feel we are facing. I suppose that sense is even stronger where the painting is of a real landscape, or based on one, and is a place with which we may have some familiarity; but I think it applies to some extent even to ‘Martian’ landscapes. So, attention to details of this sort is the essence of what a painter like Cedra is doing. With writing fiction, it’s really not.
Most fiction does not specify its locale, or uses locales that are at least partly made up; and it doesn’t specify the dates of events, certainly not the exact hour and minute. Where you’re trying to create a realistic narrative, and are incorporating elements of real history, yes, there is an expectation that you’ll be as faithful as you can be to the relevant details of those real historical elements. As you say, almost everyone will remember what the weather was like in the north-eastern States – and, probably, wherever in the world they happened to be themselves – on the morning of 9/11; and if you depart from reality in details like that, it’s going to jar with a reader. But most details of this kind remain unimportant – because no-one (well, apart from the rare obsessive compulsive like you; and you can’t write only for yourself!) will notice or care.
If you’re filling your quasi-‘real’ world with fictional people (and fictional towns, fictional companies, fictional coffee shops, etc.), you’re already departing a long way from reality; and, on the ‘butterfly effect’ principle, the number of impacts this might have on the real people and events around them is incalculable. Even if a reader notices notices an incidental detail that seems not to fit with the reality of a place or time, he or she is going to dismiss it as unimportant: this isn’t the real world, this is a world like the real world that the writer has made up. The ‘factual error’ might well be the result of ignorance or inattention rather than conscious artifice; and you – we, most people – might prefer in many cases that the author had taken the trouble to keep closer to the actual facts. But, really, it doesn’t matter. Did any of the officers on The Titanic shoot a passenger or commit suicide? Did anyone save themself by clinging to a trunk in the water? In Cameron’s film, they did. It might grate a little with some people, but we put up with it – because it’s fiction.
Most background detail of the kind you’re talking about is utterly expendable anyway. I prefer not to sketch in detail unless it’s absolutely fundamental to how something in the plot works. Is it, really? If detail is merely evocative of atmosphere or character, I think you should leave as much space as possible for the readers to fill out the picture with their own imaginations. If a distant observer sees two people kissing at night, it’s enough to say what kind of light source enabled him to do that – the moon, a streetlamp, a passing car? We don’t need to know the phase of the moon, the colour of the light, the make of the car.
John says
Froog: Well, for starters, the phase of the moon has practical implications for the story, not just aesthetic ones. As I said, “for the light it affords at least one character, and probably two” — one character must make his way across a stretch of unfamiliar, potentially difficult terrain at around midnight, with no artificial lighting, looking for a specific, well, target let’s say. Absent a full moon, and/or clear skies, I’d need (do need) to come up with an alternate light source.
You’re right that — even given a supposed “need” for certain atmospheric conditions — no one but I will ever really care on what date all this happens. Nowhere does the book spell out an exact date, just gives a year and month (qualified as “early” in the month).
That said, I’ve got six characters’ timelines to weave together, spanning the course of several months. Some of the time they’re in one another’s company; some of the time they’re only with one or two others; and some of the time they’re alone. For my management purposes, let’s call them, it’s absolutely critical for me that I have specific dates (and even times) in mind — otherwise I’d never, ever be able to be sure that character X is where character Y needs him or her to be because character Z demands certain things of Y just then. On paper it may just be yesterday, tomorrow, a week ago, last night at around seven, and so on. But it’s no stretch to imagine smart readers saying to themselves, “Wait — THIS can’t happen NOW, can it?!?” I’m not writing just for smart readers, but oh yes, I’d love to have them on my side, too.
So: that I have many if not all the specifics available in my head and/or background notes is, I think, very important to the reader’s experience in ways that the reader will never know about.
(A successful novelist I know once told me (paraphrased): The book doesn’t need to include every possible detail about your characters’ back stories, the setting, and the action. But you, the author, need to understand it all well enough that if a reader were to ask you a question about any of it, you’d be able without much thought to answer with confidence. That impressed me deeply. It was only one person’s opinion, of course, but it spoke to me in a way that mere advice seldom does.)
I promise you that all the fruits and by-products of my OCD won’t be on the page.
How long it will take for me to finish-finish the book — I could do a whole blog post on that. Of course it’s important to me that I finish sometime, and sooner would be much better than later. But really? It’s at or close to the bottom of the list of things driving me about Seems to Fit, of which there are many. You may be surprised that getting every detail factually correct (on paper OR in my head) is about that far down among my priorities, too. (Hence, the decision a long while ago not to adhere slavishly to the conventional Questing-Knight storylines, just to use what’s convenient.)
The Missus, I know, looks forward to my return from the place I’ve been in my head for all this time. She looks forward to the weeknight when I can stay up — can relax rather than getting anxious and squirrely about getting to bed because I’ve got to get up early to write. It’s been something like three years, after all, with interruptions only for vacations, holidays, emergencies, and such. Even though she knows I’ll be evasive, and she knows the answer anyhow, she can’t help asking sometimes: “How close to finished are you?” “Normal” life calls to me — ditto, I hope, another story or two or three.
But Seems to Fit will be done in its own time… given that since the first draft, I’ve been able to work on it only a few hours a day (with a loooong gap during which I wasn’t writing fiction much or at all). Yeah, I have to spend an unplanned hour or two, now and then, to calm my jitters. But the jitters, paradoxically, come from a fear that I’ll rush to completion NOW, now that I’ve been so (literally) careful so far.
I love my story. Not too much: it’s not holy writ. But I love it enough to let its creation unfold as it will.
John says
P.S. Thank you for putting so much thought and time and interest into that comment, Froog.
Froog says
Sorry to have goaded you into replying on the weekend – when I know you usually just write. And glad you didn’t take my remarks too much amiss.
I think, if you have a character blundering about in a field in the middle of the night, the clearness of the weather is more of an issue than how full the moon is. The stars can be almost as bright as the moon on a really clear night; and you get a lot of ambient light from nearby towns even on not-so-clear nights (perhaps even more so on cloudy nights: streetlights reflected from clouds and such). You have to be a long way away from anything for a dark night to be really dark these days! (I speak from the experience of having done a lot of all night orienteering exercises and such with the army in my late teens, and having been surprised how rarely I felt the need of a torch.) Extreme under-writers might suggest that even specifying moonlight is a tad unnecessary: if you make it clear your character can see somehow, your readers are going to have to trust you on that – they can guess how this might be possible. If it must be moonlight, the fullness or otherwise of the moon isn’t that important. And a writer is allowed to make up his own weather at least 95% of the time.
The only time I get vexed with consistency/plausibility issues is usually with thrillers, where the writer wants too much to happen in a short space of time. I hate it when the inner critic is screaming But he couldn’t possibly have got down from the 18th floor to the street already, even if the elevator was there waiting for him!
I fondly recall a BBC TV play from the ’80s with Miranda Richardson and Bob Peck called After Pilkington. It was set in Oxford, at the time I was a student there (I saw a few scenes being filmed, in fact). There was one fairly long sequence where one character trailed another (I suppose it was Bob, after Miranda) for quite a distance through the city centre. There were a number of edits: it wasn’t real time, or a single take. But if followed the geography of the city faithfully – along Merton Street, into Oriel Square, past the Bear pub and the Museum into St Aldate’s. People who didn’t know Oxford well wouldn’t have noticed or cared. But I found it staggeringly impressive and welcome – after years of watching other shows (Inspector Morse was a particularly egregious offender) where characters would exit a lightly fictionalised but very recognisable pub or restaurant or college…. on to a decidedly non-adjacent street.
So, I sympathise with the urge. I just worry that you might be overdoing it at times.
I hope you’re having a productive weekend – with more time writing that studying the tide charts.
John says
Froog: Well, I will say that the earlier comment fell into the box in my head labeled Feedback to Sleep On Before Responding To. :)
I have this scientific-sounding theory, based on absolutely no science at all — it does include two made-up statistics, though! — which goes something like this:
99% of the arguments and disagreements between individuals are attributable to differences in the definitions of words. Find those differences, isolate the conflicting definitions, and you resolve 100% of those disputes.
(Maybe it’s not so much a theory as a life’s principle. Anyway…)
In this exchange, you and I have considered a post, by me, about a book. The post, to me, can be summed up: “Something which happened to me as I worked on the writing of one passage; isn’t this an interesting something?” To you, perhaps, the post centers around: “John’s book; won’t this be interesting?” If that’s within a whisker of your response, I understand, sympathize with, and agree with you (statistic incoming!) 99%.
Oh, and also, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I wouldn’t get much writing done yesterday. Beneath my feet as I worked, an annual garage sale was going on — with all the, um, unwonted Saturday-morning interaction that involved. Ha.
Froog says
Ah, the statistical theory – 60% of the time it works every time. (Paul Rudd in Anchorman)
For me – surprise, surprise – a cinema analogy came to mind. I’m sure you know the famous story about Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier working together on Marathon Man? Hoffman, in thrall to The Method, is supposed to have prepared for the gruelling kidnap & torture sequence, where his character goes for nearly 24 hours without any sleep, by actually going 24 hours without any sleep. Olivier, it is said, was aghast to discover this, and advised him, “Oh my dear boy, why don’t you try acting? It’s so much easier!”
I think something similar applies to writing fiction (most of the time, at any rate); artistic licence, and all that. Your world should be plausible and self-consistent, but it only has to be consistent with the real world in major details that everyone – or a significant number of people – is going to know: what the weather was like on the morning of 9/11, or how long it takes to get San Diego to San Francisco by bus, or what day the World Series was decided in a given year, etc.
My throwaway quip about tide tables got me to thinking this: If an author wants two lovers to take a midnight walk – by moonlight – on the beach…. he just does it. He doesn’t check the tide tables to make sure the beach will be there at that time – and neither does anyone else (except JES, maybe?). He doesn’t need to check the astronomical tables to see how full the moon would be on a particular day either. The only thing he needs to do is take care that he doesn’t have his characters experience another full moon only two weeks later – that people are going to notice!
Jayne says
@John –
Ah, John – See, this is when the emotional quality of narrative is really important. Of course it’s always important, as well as the density/specificty of detail, but it’s the resonance and semblance of truth that I believe is most important–it’s what permits the reader to willingly suspend disbelief, and that sustained suspension of disbelief, as Coleridge said, will nullify any logistical error. (As long as you’re not violating any existing rules you’ve set up in your own story, save for a few savants, logistics will not trip up the reader. ) But you already know all this…
For me, it’s the time issue that’s the tyrrant. I’m always amazed by writers who successfully skew/blurr time. I always think of Anna Kavan’s short “Julia and the Bazooka” which runs circles through time. It’s so well done that it’s impossible to question. ;)
John says
Froog: Perhaps now is the time to mention a post here from a couple years ago, in responding to which you raised a few questions about the beer which I’d created for Seems to Fit — fermenting it in glass, bottling it in earthenware, and brewing the prototype for it (a Welsh beer) in London.
Those comments back then didn’t upset me or anything — I think your incisiveness of mind was one of the things about you which first appealed to me. And your comments on this post don’t upset me either. Still, I think you may be unconsciously making a point for me, which is that different readers bring to a given book different expectations, different backgrounds, different orientations to the material — and there’s a very good chance that each reader will care (and know) enough about different details… and, of course, different writers will as well.
For one fairly obvious example: if someone living in the real town on which my fictional town is based reads Seems to Fit, he or she probably wouldn’t care if I said that Point X is “a couple blocks south” of Point Y, and (in general) wouldn’t care about my knowing that it rained in the evening of Date Z. But if I said that some character turned off the main drag and drove ten blocks before hitting the river, alarm bells would go off. (Even subconscious ones, as you mention.)
…and, in any case, all of this talk about what the final version of the manuscript will or won’t be like is so much talking through our hats, since we don’t have that final version to examine! :)
John says
Jayne: I’m sure you know of the continuum, which goes by different names, used to characterize whether writers (particularly of something like historical fiction, say) (a) conduct their research on an ad-hoc basis, or (b) prefer to soak up as many period and other details as possible before they even sit down to write.
In general, I tend towards the latter. This is one advantage about setting big chunks of the WIP in a fictionalized version of a real place, because — even without knowing it — I ‘ve been soaking up its details my entire life. These details include the truthfulness of the depiction as much as its factuality (word choice a little shaky there!).
“Julia and the Bazooka” (as well as KAvan herself) was a completely new one on me. (It’s discussed — at least in passing — at many sites, though.) I haven’t been able to find an electronic version anywhere so may have to spring for the dead-trees version. Thanks for the recommendation!