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Nov. 9th, 2007 05:18 pmThis morning I was working out where I should stand on the cliff. I'd already worked out I have to jump off, probably later today.
The trick today is standing on a cliff at all when a twitch of a headache refuses to fade and when my body is limed with fatigue. I had so many small catch-up things to do (and my plumber came and things are fixed!) that when my brain came into gear it was thinking about writing. I kept on telling it "It's the Middle Ages right now, you know. Or even culinary history. You have a paper to name. Be proud of your half-born chorizo-free child) except that my mind was firmly on fiction. Welded to it.
I spent the whole morning trying to work out the implications of different authorial stances. Sounds pretentious, except I was doing it through the veil of my recent Buffy/Angelfest. Where the producer/director/writers of a TV series stand in relationship to their characters decides what nuances and direction are open to the characters. Simple, innit?
Except that I've been so caught up in the current obsession with point of view that I had lost something I tried to resolve a while ago. Too many explanations of how writers should write conflate the point of view we use to write from with the actual stance a writer takes in regard to their novel.
What set me off again was one of the novels I read last week. It is well-written and dynamic and full of wonder. Its point of view is really clear and nicely done - points of view change according to which character is in the foreground and colours this rather well. The big flaw in the novel is that the writer didn't think enough about his/her own viewpoint. She/he doesn't like his/her own chracters and so the underlying tone of the book is cold and even slightly cruel. We're in a lab, watching rats being dissected, and all because an author hasn't thought about how she/he enters a discourse with his/her own work.
My own fiction has been on hold while I worked this out. It was too important to get wrong. Now - maybe - I've worked out not only that I'm standing on a particular cliff, but that I need to jump off. I can't look from a distance for this piece. I have to be part of my characters' lives and to care about them. This time it's difficult, too, because some of these people I would not invite to dinner. One would push me off that cliff to launch her own career and wouldn't even look to see if I crashed at the bottom. It's not up to my characters to make me fly, though. It's up to me. And when I fly, they fly along with me because we're bonded.
Never get a migraine alongside a virus: these are the results. When these niggling aches diminish a bit more, I will find that cliff.
The trick today is standing on a cliff at all when a twitch of a headache refuses to fade and when my body is limed with fatigue. I had so many small catch-up things to do (and my plumber came and things are fixed!) that when my brain came into gear it was thinking about writing. I kept on telling it "It's the Middle Ages right now, you know. Or even culinary history. You have a paper to name. Be proud of your half-born chorizo-free child) except that my mind was firmly on fiction. Welded to it.
I spent the whole morning trying to work out the implications of different authorial stances. Sounds pretentious, except I was doing it through the veil of my recent Buffy/Angelfest. Where the producer/director/writers of a TV series stand in relationship to their characters decides what nuances and direction are open to the characters. Simple, innit?
Except that I've been so caught up in the current obsession with point of view that I had lost something I tried to resolve a while ago. Too many explanations of how writers should write conflate the point of view we use to write from with the actual stance a writer takes in regard to their novel.
What set me off again was one of the novels I read last week. It is well-written and dynamic and full of wonder. Its point of view is really clear and nicely done - points of view change according to which character is in the foreground and colours this rather well. The big flaw in the novel is that the writer didn't think enough about his/her own viewpoint. She/he doesn't like his/her own chracters and so the underlying tone of the book is cold and even slightly cruel. We're in a lab, watching rats being dissected, and all because an author hasn't thought about how she/he enters a discourse with his/her own work.
My own fiction has been on hold while I worked this out. It was too important to get wrong. Now - maybe - I've worked out not only that I'm standing on a particular cliff, but that I need to jump off. I can't look from a distance for this piece. I have to be part of my characters' lives and to care about them. This time it's difficult, too, because some of these people I would not invite to dinner. One would push me off that cliff to launch her own career and wouldn't even look to see if I crashed at the bottom. It's not up to my characters to make me fly, though. It's up to me. And when I fly, they fly along with me because we're bonded.
Never get a migraine alongside a virus: these are the results. When these niggling aches diminish a bit more, I will find that cliff.