digging
Cool whitish overcast has returned after our one-day blip of sun. Rain falls in sporadic handfuls of drops.
Morning notes: Hillel the Elder, Rubicon.
Then: on with notes for chapter 17. Yesterday I wrote 1,600 words of notes. Today 1,100. At times this stage of the writing process, preparing for a chapter, feels like my least favorite. It's a bit like feeling along a high concrete wall, looking for any kind of a crack or hidden door or suggestion of a way through. Feel here, try there. Nope. Keep looking.
It's not quite like that, of course. Ideas burble up, I answer my questions with plausible suggestions. How do I know when I've hit it? Sometimes there is a visceral spark--a feeling of interest in something I've just thought of. I had that a couple of days ago when I thought about the assistant to Sosigenes the astronomer: a new character whose traits were already being formed by the scene itself. Sometimes these are false alarms.
There seemed to be many such when Warren and I were doing The Odyssey. I remember sitting in this very office in my basement, the two of us thinking, often halfheartedly, of ideas to deal with a problem in front of us. One of us would get an idea and perk up--actually lifting his head, like a dog that's just heard something outside. We'd look at the idea, try to like it, but then usually would see why it didn't work or didn't really serve our purpose, or that it was really just a variation of an idea that we'd already rejected. The new idea was thrown on the scrapheap with the rest. Heads back down, moping through our day.
High-quality ideas usually come from digging. They are a byproduct of thinking, out-and-out cogitation. Maybe that's why I use the interrogation form for my notes. Questions force you to provide answers to specific things. This requires either thinking, or research, or both. Some questions have no clear answer, but I ask them anyway. Here's a paragraph from today's notes:
A question like this draws the mind (my mind anyway) up short. That can be a productive place.
Looking at a paragraph like that, you might wonder, "What the hell has that got to do with making a story?"
Good question. Maybe nothing--it's just the way my mind works. Theme is important to me--very important. Every story is saying something, asserting something, and every scene within it too. As soon as a writer has chosen a setting and characters and a situation, the zone of the theme has been marked out. These things have attracted the writer because of the theme with which they are pregnant. In a certain sense, a story is the delivery, maternity-style, of the theme, which is the baby born at the end.
I like ideas, so I create characters to whom ideas are important as well. My characters think; they reflect on their experience. So they need a vocabulary of ideas, and so does my story.
So a question about Plato's Ideas is, for me, not out of place. I often include thematic, philosophical, and spiritual material in my story notes. If nothing else, they energize and excite me. They can help me decide on an attitude for a character. Today, finding that Sosigenes was not yielding, I turned back to Alexander. With a sinking feeling, and yet also with hope, I returned to the recent trauma in his life, and tried to walk through in slow motion what he might be thinking and feeling afterward. What attitude would he take? How would he feel about his religion in the wake of disaster?
It's spadework. It's digging. What specific thoughts would he have? How would he explain his situation to himself? Where would he grope for answers? Thinking of these things is work (try it!). That's why I've resisted and procrastinated.
But some ideas started coming, like groundwater oozing up from the hole. He feels guilt--but what has he done wrong? He's been a bad boy, in some sense. His thirst for knowledge has made him impious--God has punished him. And yet--
And so on.
Had to knock off early to get to an appointment with a notary public to finalize my application for compensation from Shell Oil for the faulty polybutylene plumbing installed in our house.
Morning notes: Hillel the Elder, Rubicon.
Then: on with notes for chapter 17. Yesterday I wrote 1,600 words of notes. Today 1,100. At times this stage of the writing process, preparing for a chapter, feels like my least favorite. It's a bit like feeling along a high concrete wall, looking for any kind of a crack or hidden door or suggestion of a way through. Feel here, try there. Nope. Keep looking.
It's not quite like that, of course. Ideas burble up, I answer my questions with plausible suggestions. How do I know when I've hit it? Sometimes there is a visceral spark--a feeling of interest in something I've just thought of. I had that a couple of days ago when I thought about the assistant to Sosigenes the astronomer: a new character whose traits were already being formed by the scene itself. Sometimes these are false alarms.
There seemed to be many such when Warren and I were doing The Odyssey. I remember sitting in this very office in my basement, the two of us thinking, often halfheartedly, of ideas to deal with a problem in front of us. One of us would get an idea and perk up--actually lifting his head, like a dog that's just heard something outside. We'd look at the idea, try to like it, but then usually would see why it didn't work or didn't really serve our purpose, or that it was really just a variation of an idea that we'd already rejected. The new idea was thrown on the scrapheap with the rest. Heads back down, moping through our day.
High-quality ideas usually come from digging. They are a byproduct of thinking, out-and-out cogitation. Maybe that's why I use the interrogation form for my notes. Questions force you to provide answers to specific things. This requires either thinking, or research, or both. Some questions have no clear answer, but I ask them anyway. Here's a paragraph from today's notes:
But the issue of numbers racing off the end of the scale, beyond what is countable in reality, suggests that the mindscape is fundamentally different from the physical cosmos. Plato's realm of the Ideas?
A question like this draws the mind (my mind anyway) up short. That can be a productive place.
Looking at a paragraph like that, you might wonder, "What the hell has that got to do with making a story?"
Good question. Maybe nothing--it's just the way my mind works. Theme is important to me--very important. Every story is saying something, asserting something, and every scene within it too. As soon as a writer has chosen a setting and characters and a situation, the zone of the theme has been marked out. These things have attracted the writer because of the theme with which they are pregnant. In a certain sense, a story is the delivery, maternity-style, of the theme, which is the baby born at the end.
I like ideas, so I create characters to whom ideas are important as well. My characters think; they reflect on their experience. So they need a vocabulary of ideas, and so does my story.
So a question about Plato's Ideas is, for me, not out of place. I often include thematic, philosophical, and spiritual material in my story notes. If nothing else, they energize and excite me. They can help me decide on an attitude for a character. Today, finding that Sosigenes was not yielding, I turned back to Alexander. With a sinking feeling, and yet also with hope, I returned to the recent trauma in his life, and tried to walk through in slow motion what he might be thinking and feeling afterward. What attitude would he take? How would he feel about his religion in the wake of disaster?
It's spadework. It's digging. What specific thoughts would he have? How would he explain his situation to himself? Where would he grope for answers? Thinking of these things is work (try it!). That's why I've resisted and procrastinated.
But some ideas started coming, like groundwater oozing up from the hole. He feels guilt--but what has he done wrong? He's been a bad boy, in some sense. His thirst for knowledge has made him impious--God has punished him. And yet--
And so on.
Had to knock off early to get to an appointment with a notary public to finalize my application for compensation from Shell Oil for the faulty polybutylene plumbing installed in our house.
Labels: The Odyssey
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