Seems to Fit – Page 6

Call Me Unreliable

March 9, 2009 by John 8 Comments

My fairly regular posting schedule here at RAMH — averaging a post a day — is about to run off the rails.

This is a good thing, as it happens. See, I’m just about ready to start spending my morning writing sessions in writing, all over again, the book I refer to as my Work In Progress. Since August or so, I’ve been plowing through the three earlier drafts (written over the course of almost 15 years) — getting my head wrapped around the characters, and the twisty plot, and the background (real) history and how the WIP’s story line weaves in and out of it, and… and… and…

Now the time has come to put aside the tools of critical reader, of careful researcher (if you will) into the mysteries of a story much of which I’d forgotten. It’s time to face again a blank screen, tremble just a bit, and start hammering at the keyboard.

I’ll still be posting here, from time to time. In the first place, I’ve still got something like a couple dozen draft posts in the pipeline (including one to appear later today), and plenty of ideas for others. And, for sure, I’ll continue to post the Friday whiskey river-driven meditations. For those of you with blogs of your own, I’ll still be stopping by to lob comments over your transoms. And for those of you on Facebook (and, to a lesser extent, on Twitter), I’ll still be around there as well.

Finally, I’ve done this kind of thing often enough that I know I will need distraction every now and then.

But, well, duty beckons. :)

*Glan Rhondda**

March 2, 2009 by John 5 Comments

In 1990, having finished the first (the blitz) draft of Crossed Wires — during whose composition I read mysteries almost exclusively — I stopped at a bookstore in South Jersey, hungry for something to read. My appetite of the moment was for a book, any book, which I’d been curious about for years but had never read. I wanted something substantial, preferably not overpowering (no Finnegan’s Wake, please). A classic, but one which I could carry in a hip pocket.

I departed the store with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

Many have had a similar chance encounter with the tales of King Arthur, and like me have said to themselves, “Hmm…,” and then gone on to investigate something more of the story, which leads them to more, and then even further to other related back alleys of myth and literature. The hobby seems so innocent at first, just a pleasant diversion — deluded (as such hapless folk are) into thinking it’s all “just” the story of Knights of Old, the Round Table, the Holy Grail, Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot…

Finally they emerge at the far end (if they ever do) blinking, as though they’ve just spent a week spelunking and emerged at high noon in the desert. (High noon, right. It wouldn’t much surprise us to be greeted by Gary Cooper, wielding a broadsword instead of a revolver: that’s how surrealistic the experience can feel.)

Suddenly they know more than they ever imagined knowing about odd stuff like metallurgy, pre-Roman Britain, the odd and quite mysterious turnings and mergings of one legend into another, medieval French Romances, ecclesiastical rumor and history, and… Wales.

[Read more…]

Aging Gracefully, and Otherwise

November 15, 2008 by John 8 Comments

The Methuselah Tree, White Mountains CA: oldest known living tree (4800+ years old) At least in the drafts I’ve done so far, the work-in-progress, Grail, uses a rotating point of view from mostly elderly characters. Because I’m not elderly yet myself (though I will be if I don’t work on it faster!), and knock on wood still fairly healthy, it’s tricky to tell the stories from inside the heads of people whose experiences I can’t yet report first-hand.

Not that I’m looking forward to any of these psychological and physical experiences, but I’m forced to wonder: What does it feel like to have a stroke or heart attack, to start losing one’s memory, or to fall, be unable to get up, and have no little LifeCall pendant to summon aid? How does it feel to long for the company of not just one or two, but a lot of people who’ve passed on before you? How easy or difficult is it to shed preconceived notions you’ve clung to for sixty or seventy years — do you even know you still cling to them?

(The hardest characters to write are the ones you’ve never experienced from the inside. Which is why most writers start out with protagonists of the same sex and cultural background as the authors’ own, of no greater age. Disaffected adolescents, anybody?)

In the course of looking around for information — anecdotal as well as scientific and medical — about the experience of growing old, I came across an article on Slate from this past May, headlined Forever Young; the subtitle spells it out for us: Books and Web sites about how to avoid getting old, or at least looking old. The author, Emily Yoffe, describes a “two-prong strategy for trying to stop time. The first is to find the right combination of food, exercise, supplements, and medical interventions to extend your life into triple digits.”

[Read more…]

Paying Attention to History

November 9, 2008 by John 1 Comment

If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta kinda like about writing? Oh, well, all right, yes I do post — but less often! — about tech stuff, and politics, and art and photography and poetry…

When working on a large-scale project like a book, similarly, I sometimes wander off the main road, suddenly absorbed in distractions of landscape and weather and architecture.

Oddly, this sometimes works to the advantage of the book in question (although, all right all right fine, it sometimes does not — and probably just as oddly).

[Read more…]

Paying Attention to Setting

September 27, 2008 by John 6 Comments

Taino, Dominican Republic (photo by Dr. Lynne Guitar)

A few weeks ago, I read a blog entry somewhere about the claim (phrased variously) that the setting in a given work “becomes like [or even is] a character itself.” It drove the blogger crazy, because setting and character (in his/her opinion) have so little in common. Whatever my other reactions to the rant, it got me thinking about setting. About whether I’d ever really paid much attention (due or otherwise) to place in my fiction.

I didn’t think I’d ignored setting; in fact I’d mentioned in a comment somewhere else, shortly before, that I knew of a brief passage in Merry-Go-Round in which I’d described an old hotel in a way which — yes — almost made it seem, in retrospect, like a character. But I couldn’t think of any examples where I’d done much more than (say) list the geographical features of a town, the layout of a room.

Eventually I filed the question away, and forgot about it.

I’ve mentioned before, here on RAMH, that I’ve been spending several weeks going back to look at the book which (as the cliche goes) I think I may be meant to write. The working title, which I’m not completely satisfied with but use because I’ve got to refer to it somehow for chrissake, is Grail. (Don’t be misled by that title, though. This isn’t a medieval romance or historical novel. Events for the most part occur in the mid-1980s.)

I’ve taken it through 2½ drafts so far (the first in 1991). In this pass, I’m just recording in a word-processing document certain key events and character traits from the drafted version(s), so I can look at Grail‘s whole structure with fresh eyes, away from the words in which it’s cast. This is based at least in part on the theory that I’ve learned a lot about writing in the last 17 years (more or less), and therefore will probably want not just to edit a fresh draft of the book but honest-to-God rewrite the thing, from scratch.

So anyway, I’m going through the text earlier today, transcribing information, and I came to a chapter whose events are described in flashback.

It’s a memory of a character named Albert (Al) Castle who is — to the extent anyone is — the central figure in the book. The time is May, 1945. Corporal Castle, Seventh Army, USA, is in Germany. And he goes out for a walk– a walk that will change his life.

And that’s when I came across the specific passage to which I link below. I don’t make any claims to this as an example of setting-as-character; but I’ve gotta say, I was surprised by how much attention I’d paid to setting here.

(By the way, the photos on that page are just meant to be illustrative. They don’t depict exactly where this action takes place — in one case, not even roughly the same time.)

[Link to Grail: Excerpt]