Nothing definite yet, of course. (It won’t be definite until I wash my hands of the last galley edit, ha.) But I think Seems to Fit ends as follows:
Woot.
What We Owe Our Characters
In about four hours’ work today on Seems to Fit, I wrote just about two thousand words. Which was neither bad nor exceptional, and just fine — not least, because it brings me within perhaps a thousand words (but probably less) of The End.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the structure of this last portion of the book:
- It departs from the structure of earlier drafts. For most of their length, they had consisted of a rotation of chapters, each from the point of view of a single character. But what I have always thought of as The Climactic Scene filled one enormous chapter, broken up into sections — one character per section, with some characters getting more than one section apiece. The Climactic Scene was followed by a chapter of denouement.
- Here in this draft, The Climactic Scene has been blown apart into — I don’t know — maybe ten or a dozen fragments: very very short chapters with (I hope) a sort of rising urgency. The action is much the same (and also much different, because I’ve now got an additional character in the mix: an active antagonist). But also, some of these short chapters are broken into sections: one character’s POV apiece. I’m hoping the effect will be that of, well, not chaos exactly, but of (y’know) Jesus Mary and Joseph there’s a lot going on…! We’ll see about that.
- But also in this draft there is not a denouement. More precisely, there are two of the things. The first (which I just completed) draws things to a close for every character but one. The second (coming up) will tie up the loose ends for the remaining character, as well as for the book as a whole.
This last-bulleted feature of the book’s construction feels unconventional to me. And — who knows? — I mean, on the one hand perhaps messing with convention just gives Agent X, Editor Y, and/or Reader Z one more potential reason not to bother committing to Seems to Fit. Which could even be the fatal reason, right?
So shouldn’t I play it safe, follow the “rules” (at least as I imagine them) and combine the two denouements into one?
The Whole Sweet World Is a Garden
[Video: Rowlf and Fozzie collaborate, after a fashion — and much to their surprise — on an instrumental version of “In an English Country Garden“]
From whiskey river:
The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there.
It might be good to open our eyes and see.
(Thomas Merton [source])
Fiction and (Overly) Real Life
[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?
Paying Attention to What You Want
From Seems to Fit:
“For this one time,” [Bonnie] said aloud, “I want us each to think about the same question, one question, while we do this. We don’t have to say anything out loud, and we don’t have to spend more than ten minutes doing it, I don’t think—”
George: “Wait! Brandy first, question second.” He raised his glass, uttered a single syllable: “Al.”
“Al,” they all repeated, and downed their shots.
The three men downed their shots, that is. Not Bonnie. She didn’t want the shock of the liquor to bring on a second wave of laughter, and she wanted to ensure she could ask the question straightforwardly and without qualifying or explaining it. Bonnie sipped at hers, and put the glass back down on the table.
“Now,” she said. “Now we touch hands — that’s right, almost like a séance, good. And now we close our eyes, all the way Larry, no peeking. That’s right. This is just us, each of us, answering the question for ourselves.”
“So what’s the question?” said Larry.
“Just this: why?” Bonnie said. “Why am I — each of us — why would I do this thing… put so much at risk? Not what’s in it for Al, either. What’s in it for me. For each of us, inside our own heads, that’s the question for each of us: Why would I do this?” A pause to let it sink in. She closed her own eyes. “Okay? All clear? Go.”
—
Why would I do this? thought Pierce.
The question resisted focus. He could not think of a single argument, a single fact that would convince him to pursue such a strange, reckless course of action…
A recent post on one of Nathan Bransford’s forums asked the question directly, with the title “What Do You Write For?” INTERN asked it, customarily obliquely, in her post of a couple weeks ago (“chain of (publishing) fools”) and in one a couple weeks before that (“exhaustion hunting the great spotted WIP-alump”).
And it often percolates between the lines at Marta’s writing in the water blog, sometimes bubbling to the surface — as in an entry of last week (“This is a sign by the side of the road”). A couple days ago she offered this trailer of an award-winning documentary:
Marta asked:
Would you write if every word stayed in the room with you until you died and left them behind?
Which pretty much lays it out there in stark terms, eh?
[Read more…]
Unexpectedly Needed, or Not Needed At All
[Video: classic moment from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre]
From whiskey river:
We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs — people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin “Dear Sire,” and congratulate us on the handsomeness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.
(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything [source])
…and:
Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
(Jorge Luis Borges [source])
Paying Attention to the Click
Nearly every writer, I imagine — maybe we can even dispense with the nearly? — has favorite words. It’s certainly true of me. Some of them are words I just like the sound of. Some of them have meanings just too right: I can’t help reaching for those words whenever I set to writing or talking about a favorite topic.When I’m editing something I’ve written, one of the toughest jobs is ridding the text of these pets, which after the second or third occurrence on a page start to jut out at me like snaggleteeth just begging to be attacked by a cosmetic dentist.
But I’ve also got favorite words which I’ve never used. Words which I’ve been hoarding, waiting to be spent at just the right moment, in just the right piece…
This is about one of those words.
Making the Trip
[Trailer for Adaptation (2002), starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper
and featuring a whole lot of other favorite, familiar faces]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book (the archives):
Human beings can’t live without the illusion of meaning, the apprehension of confluence, the endless debate concerning the fault in the stars or in ourselves. The writer is just the messenger, the moving target. Inside culture, the writer is the talking self. Through history, the writing that lasts is the whisper of conscience. The guild of writers is essentially a medieval guild existing in a continual Dark Age, shaman, monks, witches, nuns, working in isolation, playing with fire.
When the first illuminated manuscripts were created, few people could read. Now that people are bombarded with image and information and the World Wide Web is an open vein, few people can read. Reading with sustained attention, reading for understanding, reading to cut through random meaninglessness — such reading becomes a subversive act. The writer’s first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language. Ego enters in, but writing is far too hard and solitary to be sustained by ego. The writer is compelled to write. The writer writes for love. The writer lives in spiritual debt to language, the gold key in the palm of meaning. Awake, asleep, in every moment of being, the writer stands at the gate.
The gate may open.
The gate may not.
Regardless, the writer can see straight through it.
(Jayne Anne Phillips)
Writing is one of the most easy, pain-free, and happy ways to pass the time in all the arts. For example, right now I am sitting in my rose garden and typing on my new computer. Each rose represents a story, so I’m never at a loss for what to write. I just look deep into the heart of the rose and read its story and write it down through typing, which I enjoy anyway. I could be typing kjfiu joew. mv jiw and would enjoy it as much as typing words that actually make sense. I simply relish the movement of my fingers on the keys. Sometimes, it is true, agony visits the head of a writer. At these moments, I stop writing and relax with a coffee at my favorite restaurant, knowing that words can be changed, rethought, fiddled with, and, of course, ultimately denied. Painters don’t have that luxury. If they go to a coffee shop, their paint dries into a hard mass.
(Steve Martin, “Writing Is Easy!” [source])
Midweek Music Break: “Froggy Bottom”
Almost every chapter in Seems to Fit revolves around a single one of the main characters, even when others are present. It’s a little complicated to move from one character’s head to another’s, in the space of a few days, so I’ve developed some little gimmicks to simplify it for myself.
One of these gimmicks: I listen to that character’s music as I work on his or her scenes.
Yeah — each has his or her own playlist. One favors classical; one, easy-listening music from the 1950s-60s; one, New Age… Two of the characters prefer Big Band jazz from the 1920s through 1940s, but even they have their differences of opinion: one votes for smooooth, even syrupy, and the other for raucous and energetic, even unhinged.
I was working on a chapter from the point of view of one of those latter two guys, his playlist rolling in my headphones, when I suddenly had to look away from the word processor to ask: What the heck is that? Understand, now: these playlists consist of music I own. I’m not using an “Internet radio station” to generate them on the fly; I’ve heard all these songs, many times. But on this occasion a particular number jumped out at me.
That number is called “Froggy Bottom,” and the recording comes from the soundtrack of Robert Altman’s 1996 film Kansas City. Altman grew up in that city. The excellent summary of the film at the Senses of Cinema site points out that the film — superficially (and satisfactorily) about politics, gangsters, and other features of the period which Altman may have remembered — is, at a deeper level, about much else:These sorts of things are what half the movie is about. The other half is a dream memory of Kansas City jazz. The philosophic, vicious monologist gangster Seldom Seen [played by Harry Belafonte] runs a club in which his space for crime business is contiguous with the musicians’ performance space, and it is his indulgence to have the musicians playing 24 hours a day for his pleasure (like Duke Ellington keeping his orchestra together when it wasn’t profitable). The jazz creeps into the film bit by bit. The music numbers get longer. The music intrudes itself into the other scenes. The music becomes its own story as some of the best jazz musicians of the 1990s play in period costume their version of music 60 years old… At the end of this film, there is only the music.
As for “Froggy Bottom” itself, and the rest of the soundtrack, it is of that era and that place, not commissioned for the film. The song was written by Mary Lou Williams, who was something of an anomaly as a member of various big bands… but not as a singer (the conventional slot for women performers). Rather, Williams was a ferociously talented pianist and songwriter, who remained active well into the 1980s. (The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers says she penned “more than 350 compositions.”)
This isn’t Williams in this selection from the Kansas City soundtrack, however. As the Senses of Cinema review above says, the original Kansas City performers were played by modern jazz musicians. The part of Mary Lou Williams was played by Geri Allen — herself a woman of no small accomplishment, and a master of the jazz keyboard in her own right.
If you’d like to compare the version below with the “real thing,” at least one recording has made its way to YouTube: Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy (!), with Mary Lou Williams herself on piano.
Here’s “Froggy Bottom,” featuring Geri Allen on the keyboard, David “Fathead” Newman on alto sax, and Mark Whitfield on guitar (as well as other personnel I haven’t yet identified):
_________________P.S. See Soul on Soul, Tammy Lynn Kermodle’s biography of Mary Lou Williams, for an analysis of Williams’s style arranging and compositional styles — especially as demonstrated in “Froggy Bottom” and another piece, “Mess-a-Stomp.”
Paying Attention to, Well, Everything
[Image: photograph, Rock of Ages #15, by Edward Burtynsky: “Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991.” Click image for larger view.]
This Paying Attention series of posts has recorded, intermittently, one or another aspect of writing (mostly) the novel which I’m now calling Seems to Fit. Every now and then I remember something important which I’ve forgotten, in the flush of creation (or re-creation); and I want to “bookmark” it, so to speak, lest I forget it again. (By “it,” I don’t mean a fact or a plot point. I mean something about the writing or the writing process itself.)
I’d laugh to think of these as “writing tips,” because I have no idea if they’re important to anyone else — or (if so) just how important. (And yes, I know — I often use the second person in them: You need to do this and that, and so on. Just talking to myself, see?)
But it’s been a while since the previous Paying Attention post, and I’ve almost completely shut off the tap of posts about Seems to Fit in general. In part, this stems from what’s going on in the book at the moment: each main character gets his or her own “final” chapter in preparation for the book’s gigantic next-to-last one; so in these chapters — which I’ve been working on for two-three months — I’m sort of saying good-bye to these people, in a book that I’ve lived with, one way or another, for twenty years. (Do not assume from that sentence, btw, that I’m bumping them off.) So to me it feels like an extended private moment, between them and me.
In a larger sense, though, my silence about Seems to Fit flows from something which I think has distinguished my blogging from my writing of fiction: carefulness.
