Story structure is hard work

The last couple of months...

I've been spending what writing time I have on my fourth children's fantasy, so blogging has gone a bit on the back-burner.

The biggest difficulty with this latest book is not only that I'm doing it on my own without the help of my usual co-writer, but that for ages there was a big hole (and I'm talking ginormous) where there should have been the bulk of the story.

The First Act, as you might call it, was mostly fine. In fact it was fine through versions 1, 2 and 3 each of which took a different tack, with a different main character as the focus.

But the Second Act? So so. And the Third? Practically non-existent, except that I had a minuscule idea about how it would finish. Probably.

Because structure is always a bugbear for me, I have to work really hard at it, and I have a brain that says, Nah, let's just give up on that for today, when I've only just sat down to write.

So what made the difference? 


I enlisted some help. First I went back to a book written by Libbie Hawker - Take Off Your Pants! - which I'd read before and hadn't felt was quite as helpful as I'd hoped. However, I persisted with it this time, since it's primarily about structuring, and made some real progress.

Hawker doesn't work to a three act structure particularly; it took me a while to realise that she's focusing on character arc as her main structural approach. Nevertheless it proved useful, because it made me focus on where my main character was going to go as she journeyed through the book.

Then I turned to an old favourite: Blake Snyder's Save the Cat, with its fifteen 'beats' that point out the way in which many movies (and a number of novels) are structured to give the viewer/reader the greatest satisfaction.

Snyder is more of a three act structure man, which is fine. I needed that in conjunction with Hawker's character arc approach.

Now the thing is...

Both these books helped enormously this time round - aided by the fact that I was determined I wasn't going to be beat.

But I need to say that neither of them quite mention the fact that you really have to know quite a lot about your story before you try to work out things like character arcs and fifteen beats.

In spite of the way it reads in the books, you can't actually start out by sitting down and just doing a synopsis. At least I can't. I have to have piles of stuff written in order to know who the characters are, and in order to figure out at least something of what the story is actually about.

Consequently I now have a large bunch of separate files: various incomplete drafts, piles and piles of notes (to the point that no matter how hard I try I can't quite get them in any sort of order) and all sorts of notes on top of notes. What this process does is give me ideas enough to move forward on a synopsis. It stops me from believing that what I've written first time round is going to be enough, and that I need to keep digging deeper and deeper and asking Why until I'm blue in the face.

One result has been that the two main male characters in version one became one main male character in version two who eventually became the sidekick to the female main character - in the current version. Other characters came and went; whole scenes ended up in the bottom of the pile; fantastic plot moments were abandoned.

And then came Janice Hardy...

I pulled together the Hawker and Snyder synopses (such as they were, still incomplete). And then discovered a third book which I hadn't read before: Janice Hardy's Plotting Your Novel [also published as Planning Your Novel].

Hardy provides us with a series of workshops, taking you right back to the beginning, the place where I'd been months before when I was writing drafts and notes galore. You can skip some of the workshops, or you can - as I did - force yourself to answer the questions she provides, and see if there are other things that you should consider. (If it sounds like hard work, it is, but it was also satisfying because of the sense of progress.)

So now I had three 'assistants' on the case, and in spite of my brain threatening overload, I also had an increased sense of where the story was going. And wonder of wonders, as I pulled the various synopses together, I began to see that big hole that had been such a bugbear filling up at last with real content.

The job isn't finished yet. But I now have a real sense that completing a decent synopsis is possible. And once that's on the page, the real - and enjoyable - part of the writing can begin.

To be continued...

130 pages into The Luminaries, and...

I'm a 130 pages into The Luminaries and am tossing up whether I want to spend another longish patch of my (reading) life on the rest of it. The character who opened the book has made no further appearance for getting on for a 100 pages, or so, and the character who took over from him, (Balfour) ostensibly telling his story with interruptions, somehow managed to tell a story long enough to last the entire night, and yet little real time passed.

At present two more characters have appeared, and are discussing yet another facet of the mystery that pervades the book, but I'm a bit lost as to what the mystery is actually all about because each new character adds another mystery to the original one, and I'm losing track of what belongs where. This would be okay, perhaps, if there was only another 100 pages to go, but at this rate I'll sink deep in the mire of mysteries without being able to make sense of a thing. Perseverance may help, I guess. I'm a bit concerned to read in one of the reviews that some of the mystery elements are left hanging loose by the end. That doesn't grab me, if I've waded through 800 pages, and find not enough explanation. Perhaps Catton is hoping I'll have forgotten about these loose ends by the end. I remember in the first of Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland St series that there was a very odd little patch where he seemed to be interested in a man walking around on the outside of a building (the details have grown a big vague), and the action seemed to be connected to one of the main characters. But then this aspect of the story was dropped completely, and never heard about again. No one mentioned it in passing even.

Then there's the astrological stuff, which apparently gives considerable structure to The Luminaries, and has been commended by some reviewers (I've been reading more reviews of the book today than the book itself, trying to see if it's worth continuing on). So far I haven't figured out how the astrological stuff makes any difference to the story as a whole, though one particular reviewer seemed to have it all worked out. (Don't ask me who...I'd have to go back and find it again.) The same reviewer lauded the idea that each successive section of the book should be half the size of the previous one, and while this may have something to say about the book as a whole I can't quite see that it adds anything to the story. When I was first trying to write novels I used to think it was great to have some such structure behind everything, either because someone else had done it, or because it proved my literary worth and would no doubt impress publishers. In fact these things usually got in the way of actually writing the book. Now Eleanor Catton may have much better motives for what she's done - being a much more intelligent writer than I am (she has to be: she's written a complex 830 page book for starters, something I couldn't conceive of attempting, and has invented epigrammatic sayings which give the appearance of deep thought about the human condition) - but I'm struggling a little to see the point. Maybe, again, if I persevere, I will.

Then there's the way in which she describes people's personalities, sometimes at length. (She describes a lot of things - clothes, rooms, the state of Hokitika - and describes them well.)  This works up to a point, but as many contemporary writers have found, characters tell us far more about themselves when they speak, and when they react to other characters, than when they're described. As soon as you start describing a character, not just their clothing and build, but their state of mind, I find I switch off - I want to discover the character for myself, and you have to have a very good reason to tell me lots of stuff about a character. If it's not immediately relative to the scene he or she is in, then I'll forget it before I've turned the page. This doesn't just apply to Catton's writing - it applies to any novelist who wants to give me a page of descriptive stuff before letting the character open their mouth. One of the reviewers says that as the book goes on, Catton describes less and less and gives us fewer and fewer of her epigrammatic statements about life. So perhaps I need to get through the first 360 pages before I'll discover a change of pace.

Some of the best writing in the book so far has been between Balfour and his politician friend, and then between Balfour and the clergyman. There's some cut and thrust at this point (still some epigrams and some descriptive interior stuff, but not quite so much), and at this stage it felt as though the book was moving forward. But other dialogues seem to falter, because we can't quite see the relevance. The dialogue between Balfour and the Maori, Tauwhare, seems included mainly to make a point about race relations, and however fascinating it may be, would Balfour really stand out in the pouring rain in order to have the conversation? Yes, it does add a bit of knowledge about the deceased person, Crosbie Wells, so maybe there's some point to it. I'm sure there's some point...

Well, I've kind of convinced myself to continue, and since somehow I managed to get a copy from the Library not that long after the book was published, perhaps I should make the effort.....

Update: I never finished this book. In fact I don't think I went back to it again, having better things to do with my life. The Book Editor of the Otago Daily Times, on the other hand, read the thing twice!

Barnaby Rudge

I've now finished Barnaby Rudge, my first celebration of Charles Dickens' bicentenary year. I see that the paperback version runs to 730 pages - I was reading it on Kindle, and must admit there were times when it seemed just a little long.

I'd never read this particular Dickens title before, so I was pleasantly surprised, considering that somewhere along the line I'd gained the impression that it was one of his lesser books. The first half is lighter in tone, the second, which takes place five years later, is considerably darker. The book is well-known for being about the Gordon riots of 1780, but the riots don't come into it (and nor does Gordon) until the second half where they take up a great deal of the space, and involve most of the characters from the first half in some way or other. (And some other new characters, including Gordon himself.)

The first half of the book is a delight, inhabited by a world of typical Dickens characters, and full of his wonderful humour and insight into human beings. There's a reasonably substantial plot and mystery which connect most of the people in some way or other, and some of the aspects of these aren't resolved or clarified until late in the book. The Gordon riots aren't perhaps integral to the book as a whole, even though they form a substantial portion of it. Nevertheless Dickens writes with considerable knowledge of the events, and there a numerous anecdotes that date from the writings of the time that he includes in his story, and he manages to plunge his main characters into the events with a reasonable ease, though there are a substantial number of coincidental meetings in this half.

The story was originally named after Gabriel Varden, the locksmith (his daughter is Dolly Varden, after whom a place in Wellington used to be named; I think it now has had its original Maori name restored to it).  However, at some point the book was named after another character, Barnaby Rudge. Barnaby is one of Dickens' sentimental characters; he's regarded as an 'idiot', 'stupid', 'lacking in sense' by different characters, and is something of a free spirit, not bound by the norms of ordinary society. However, Dickens sometimes allows him to reflect on things in a way that isn't consistent with his behaviour or his dialogue in other places, and this makes him less than believable. Barnaby is an interesting creation, but the book could possibly have existed without him; he vanishes from the pages for a huge chunk of it, and though he's involved in the riots, it's as an disinterested party. And he's let off being hanged without any real explanation at all. He has a pet raven called Grip. Grip sometimes seems more interesting than Barnaby.

Dickens' sentimentality is evident in several other places, for instance in the later scenes between the young lovers, Joe and Dolly - the authorial interruptions in this section make the reader a little queasy. And he dwells on some characters at length when describing their inner feelings - particularly Barnaby's mother (a woman with a dark secret, the sort of dark secret that can never be revealed until the very end), and the murderer (who happens to be Barnaby's father, it turns out).  Dickens seems to have been reading Crime and Punishment when it comes to describing the murderer - he's one of those characters who dwells and dwells on his crime but can never bring himself to repentance, though there's no good reason given why he shouldn't. (In fact, Barnaby Rudge was written more than a decade before Dostoevesky's book.)

But these flaws aside, there are some wonderful things in this book, and it's certainly no lightweight in the Dickens canon.  The plot isn't up to much, but with Dickens, do we really care too much about the plot?  Apart from the wide range of characters, there are the superb descriptions of the riots themselves. These are described in considerable detail, and make for grim reading at times.  How much of it stems from Dickens himself and how much of it is material he culled together from other sources is hard to tell. Whatever the case, he writes with a journalistic verve in these sections.

However, any Dickens book ultimately stands or falls because of the characters (in fact, few of them actually fall at all), and Dickens provides us with plenty of wonderful characters here, even if they're not as well-known as characters from his other books. John Willet, the innkeeper at the Maypole, is an extraordinary creation: a man so full of his own wisdom that he can barely hear anyone else's, and a man who takes an inordinate amount of time to say or think anything.  His charming son, Joe, is one of Dickens' stock heroes, but actually makes a much more interesting son to his father than he does a hero. In fact he vanishes from a great chunk of the book, along with his counterpart hero, Edward Chester.

Gabriel Varden is a Dickens saint, and consequently never a terribly interesting character because he isn't true in the way the 'unsaintly' characters are. (Most authors have difficulty creating a saintly character).  However, he is more interesting in the first half of the book than the second, where the characters get rather swamped by the riots. His wife, on the other hand, and her appalling servant, Miggs, are two full-in-your-face characters. We never quite believe it when Mrs Varden becomes good after the riots and after Varden has proved a hero, but Dickens doesn't make the same mistake with Miggs. Miggs gets worse, if anything, and any possible sympathy we might ever have had with her is soundly trounced by the time the book ends.

The nastier characters are a mixed bunch: Hugh is the bastard son of Lord John Chester, we eventually discover. Hugh is a wild, violent gypsy of a man (he has gypsy blood) and he goes from being a shadowy, disturbing background character to being a man eminently suited for battle - except that he chooses the wrong side to fight for, and the wrong cause. His offsider in the second half of the book is Dennis (that's his surname), who's one of the London hangmen, and who delights in the idea of 'working off' people. He comes to meet the noose himself, and turns into the most frantic coward at the idea.  Since he's actually a character who contributes nothing to the structure of the book, but merely appears out of nowhere and takes up the room that 'belongs' to him somehow, he's quite some creation for all that.

Simon Tappertit, who begins as Gabriel Varden's apprentice and goes onto become the leader of an ill-fated gang of insurrectionist apprentices, is an odd creation. Full of his own self in the first half, and convinced he will marry his boss's daughter (while Miggs is convinced he's in love with her), he seems to be coming into his own in the second half, except that Dickens has decided that his villainy should be 'rewarded', and Simon meets a disastrous end, not dying, but losing the legs he so admires (his own legs, that is!)

Perhaps the most villainous character is John Chester. When we first meet him, he seems to be the good character to Geoffrey Haredale's 'bad' character. However, Dickens has crafted Chester in such away that we soon discover his true nature, and reverse our original opinions of him and Haredale. (Haredale is the brother of the man who was murdered years before the story begins.) Chester is self-admiring, and aims always to look his best, but far more than this is his way of twisting the minds of lesser men to his own ends, and doing it all with a smile on his face and fulsome words on his tongue.  He meets his end via Haredale's sword, but somehow this is an anticlimax: a much more remarkable end seems to be looming for him throughout the book.

Finally, there is Lord George Gordon. How much of the character here is Dickens' creation, and how much is true to history, is hard to tell. Dickens presents him as a man capable of rabble-rousing, but unwilling to lead the rabble once they're roused. He will hive off into a corner until the trouble is over. He appears as a weak man, boosted by the supposed admiration of yet another baddie, Gashford (a man connected in the book's history with both Haredale and Chester). He is shown to be someone who seems to believe in his cause, and yet isn't willing to be responsible for what his cause brings about. And in a couple of scenes he seems happy to set men at odds without any sense of the consequences for those concerned. He's a minor character in the book, but an influential one.

Well, that was an interesting read...now onto something a little shorter!

What education can & can't do

In the Wellington paper, the Dominion Post, there's a weekly segment relating to the education of a particular well-known person. EPMU national secretary and Labour Party president, Andrew Little, was the man this week, and I liked a couple of things he said:

Although your formal education teaches some knowledge and understanding, as well as technical skills, it cannot teach values, personality, character and other things that matter in life.

and...

Study is a good starting point for whatever discipline you're preparing for or just for developing an inquiring mind, but that's all it is. It isn't a substitute for life's other passions or the creative spirit.