No novels

[chipotle]

For whatever reason, today I’m finding my head filled with abandoned novels. My abandoned novels, that is.

There’s three I can think of off-hand. One is (in)famous in small circles, a science fiction novel called In Our Image. Another is an untitled fantasy story in a world of dragons and humans, started during National Novel Writing Month a few years ago. The third is yet another science fiction novel, set more in the far future, whose only public face so far has been a short piece for “Rabbit Hole Day” (also a few years back).

Actually, I could count other even more dimly remembered ones from my far past. The short story “Only With Thine Eyes” was originally intended to lead into a novel. (At times I suspect it, Image and the far future one referenced above are all failed attempts at grappling with the same theme, but I’m not positive of that.) All the way back in high school I was working on a dreadful fantasy novel which I think might be my longest incomplete work to date: I think it hit around 40,000 words. And I suspect I’m missing a couple other ones in there that never got past scribbled notes. If so, the chances are good they’re no longer with me at all—I don’t think I have any word processing files that go back earlier than the mid-’90s, when I was using Nota Bene (whose file format is thankfully just marked-up ASCII, not too dissimilar from HTML).

I’ve long wondered at my inability to actually pull off novel-length pieces. I’m comfortable enough with the novella length; my recent stories of 3-5,000 words are unusually short for me. Yet actually developing a full novel has never worked out for me.

Today I had a possible insight, as I was going back over Image and yet again lamenting my problems with telling Tara’s story. The problem may be that I’m not following the advice I give others about storytelling: stop world-building.

This is difficult to follow for people who’ve grown up with science fiction and fantasy, especially if you played a lot of role-playing games, which are often all about the world-building. If you played D&D in the ’80s, the chances are you knew at least knew one Dungeon Master who had hundreds of pages of maps and histories and ethnographic studies and political analyses of his own fantasy world. (Maybe you were that Dungeon Master.) You wanted to have a rich and “complete” world for the players to explore, and that meant knowing lots and lots and lots of crap that probably they’d only scratch the surface of unless the adventuring in that world went on for decades.

RPGs condition us to think of authors as Game Masters—there are even RPGs that refer to GMs as “Storytellers,” right? But the thing is, storytelling doesn’t actually work that way, because you know where the characters are going. You actually only need the part of the world built that they’re in. If the characters are never going to that fantastic trade city on the other side of the continent, you only need to know as much about it as affects the story. That might be as little as the city’s name. It might be as little as, well, nothing at all.

I understand that writing about the histories of these lands may be a whole lot of fun. They can be really cool! But if they don’t even ephemerally influence the story about your characters, they’re not relevant. This is, like it or not, an inescapable truth. I have met more than a few writers in various fandoms over the years who never actually write the novel they’re creating their great universe for. They know everything about that universe, let me tell you.

Except a good story to tell in it.

So. I think the problem I’ve had with more than one of these is that I don’t really know the story that I want to tell. In Our Image is Tara’s story, at least at first, but does it stay Tara’s story? The implications are clearly that her story will have a profound influence on the whole society around her, but how wide-angle a lens do I want on that, and where does the story actually end? (I’ve been accused of “not writing endings” on occasion, usually by people who, I suspect, are upset that there’s clearly more that could be told past where I stopped. Yet there’s always more that could be told past where one stops.) The dragon novel set up a few interesting characters—both dragon and human—but ultimately I really didn’t have much idea why the characters were in conflict, what the stakes were. And the far future novel with the bioengineered wolf girl? Holy crap. I got thousands of words of notes about the setting and about sweeping political conflicts, but I’m not sure I even know the main character’s name, much less what her motivations are or just what she’s embroiled in besides, uh, something involving those sweeping political conflicts.

Does knowing this problem—assuming my analysis is correct—help me solve it? I’m not sure about it. Frankly, I shouldn’t try to solve it quite yet anyway; I have to resume work on A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood version 2 before seeing if any of these are resurrectable. But I think if I do go back to any of them—or, God help me, get another idea for a novel-length work—I’m going to try to keep the scope pretty tightly focused on the main characters, and try to avoid learning things about their world that ultimately aren’t going to help me tell their stories.

Comments

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

While I largely agree, particularly to the extent of 'don't let your worldbuilding get in the way of your novel', one thing I should note is that the books that really seem to capture me are the ones in which the world *is* (or at least feels like) one of the central characters; Ursula LeGuin's Almost Coming Home (which is hardly a novel at all, in a way) springs to mind, as do Charles DeLint's Newford stories (though it may be telling that the notion has always worked better for me in his shorts than his novels), or various others under the broad 'urban fantasy' heading. Even some of the best comic-book writing (Sandman, Robinson's Starman, etc) works on this principle, though admittedly they have it easier in some ways: brush strokes that paint a world much broader and more detailed than the story ever gets to tell. I think the trick is, to come back full circle, to make sure that you're using it for your storytelling rather than as an excuse not to do it, and it's certainly a fine line between the two.

[hyniof.livejournal.com]

For me:

A story starts with a Person in a Place with a Problem. Any or all of these three may change as the story progresses--that's why going back and rewriting the first bits so they'll more logically lead to the last bits is called "re-vision"--but I need to know them all equally well before I can even start typing.

For instance, while I haven't looked at those old issues of Yarf with In Our Image in them for quite a while, in my admittedly faulty memory, the main character--the Person--was the human guy. Tara was part of the Problem, coming into the Person's life and upending it.

I'm glad you're still at work integrating Gift of Fire and The Lighthouse, though. They're in very good shape for revisioning--again, as I recall--and tell a very effective story. As the late lamented Algis Budrys used to tell me, "Just keep going."

Mike

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard that thought expressed quite that clearly before ("a person in a place with a problem") -- that's a very good way of looking at it.

You're right in that for In Our Image, Kevin (the human guy who finds Tara) is the Person and Tara is the Problem; if I ever revisit the novel (which would make the third attempt!) I may play around with looking at it as Kevin's story more than Tara's, just as "A Gift of Fire" -- at least the first story -- is Mika's story rather than Revar's.

As for "Gift" specifically, this won't be the first revision, but the previous ones have been comparatively pretty minor. Part of the challenge is finding out how to fix weaknesses I can see now (too many things rely on coincidence or characters acting, well, a little stupid, frankly) without making people who remember the first version of the story fondly think I've screwed it all up. :)

[hyniof.livejournal.com]

...just as "A Gift of Fire" -- at least the first story -- is Mika's story rather than Revar's.

That's one of the:

Next steps in my whole concept of story structure, actually. All stories are in 5 acts, y'see, and the 1st act establishes the Person, the Place and the Problem. The 2nd act has the Person trying to Solve the Problem--and Failing. In that failure, though, the Person learns that the Problem isn't what he or she thought it was but is rather something larger...

I could go on and on about this--story structure's one of my favorite obsessions :) --but Revar coming into Mika's life is part of this Evolution of the Problem. In this case, it's even better 'cause it's an Evolution of the Person, Mika and Revar becoming joint main characters as the story progresses even to the point where, in the climax at the end of act 3, the focus literally shifts from him to her--

Anyway, I'll stop now. Like I said before, I'm glad to see you back working on stuff.

Mike

[typographer.livejournal.com]

Though I wind up with piles and piles of notes on my worlds (whether gaming or writing), the world-building doesn't usually get in my way. That might be because almost all my stories start out as a conversation I hear in my head, so the place where the story is occurring is something I sometimes figure out very late in the process.

On the other hand, I can waste countless hours writing long conversations between characters that go nowhere. *shrug*

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

... almost all my stories start out as a conversation I hear in my head, so the place where the story is occurring is something I sometimes figure out very late in the process.

That's probably a major key -- by that point you're not going to inadvertently distract yourself with the world-building instead of the storytelling.

I think for gaming world-building can be more valuable; you never really know what your players are going to do, so all those notes become important when you find yourself having to improvise what happens when they choose approach #4 out of the three possible ways to attack the Grand Problem of that particular adventure. :)