The Green Knight's Quest

(Don't look for the missing ones. I'm having major internet troubles which means what little bandwidth I get is used for important stuff, and right now, looking for interesting writing links to share doesn't qualify. I've got a couple of things in hand and hope to post regularly until the end of the month.)

First, a disclaimer. This post is about _me_ and my process. If you can write faster than I can right now - if you can _think_ faster - then more power to you.

I wanted to take a month off from my WIP because I had gained the impression that my process had changed; and I needed to test that with a new book - new world, new characters, new everything. And the way I work isn't the only way to get to where I want to be; but I am absolutely certain *that* I want to be there - and the books I love best are there, too.

The transition I am making it to write with more depth.

This goes back to one of the main issues with my writing. My natural layers are dialogue and internalisation - at one stage I was perfectly happy to write entirely scenes that contained nothing but those things, with maybe the odd stage direction when I needed a beat. This meant that a) I had to put in a lot of things in revision so readers had something to follow, and b) once I did that, I found that the result was still lacking depth, so I spent a lot of time in revision contemplating the consequences of the details I did put in. This was a long and wearying process and led to having to rewrite a lot of things.

The only reason why the Five Kingdoms aren't lacking depth is that I have spent a lot of time and a lot of words in them, and I've spend a lot of time with Valendon, who knows the place.

I can't invest that amount of time and effort into every new setting; and despite it, there's a lot about the Five Kingdoms that says 'generic European Renaissance, serial numbers filed off.' And so - with a slightly different slant and a completely different flavour of wizardry - is Ceri Loram, the world of the Quadrology. I'm not saying this is bad; I'm saying that going forward for the next fourty years of writing I want more variety, _different_ worlds and attitudes and cultures.

There's been a long, slow process during which I've learnt to _look_ more, to pause and examine what I was writing, to question my first and second assumptions. I _need_ to do this in order to get the setting right, so this is not negotiable - trying to write in layers hasn't worked for me, or rather it was a hell of a lot of work and frustrated me because I had to throw out many scenes that flowed perfectly well but didn't work once I added some details, because suddenly the details would have an effect. (One side effect of describing the setting is that I've become more aware not just of my lack of grounding, but of the possibilities of using different settings and having the characters interact with them. I know this is common advice - after all, this isn't theatre or film where settings have an inherent cost - but I hadn't internalised it. If most of the story takes place in a white room, there's not much difference between settings.


So that's me coming up from a long way behind and learning to see settings. And learning, furthermore, how to sketch them in words so the reader has grounding and the story takes place instead of having a painted backdrop and all that.

I have - in my opinion successfully - made the transition to interweave all layers in the first draft. This has made my first drafts excrutiatingly slow, and for now, that's just something I need to put up with. It's not just the Swamp Thing, it's _everything_ right now. (There's a tremendous payoff for me, and I hope payoff for the reader, so I'm happy with that. Eventually, I'd love to have words flowing better - it's beginning to come with the Swamp Thing, but with a new world, I'm literally back to zero.)

So that's the first point. It's a cognitive shift, and it is taking hard work - where are the character, what is the setting like, what are they doing, and instead of watching my mental film I am looking at it almost frame by frame. So of course it's slow.

When I started NaNo, I was trying to do some pre-planning. It's not an outline - outlines, for me, just create more clicheed stuff - but I attempted to grasp the shape of the story and where it would go and all of that.
I *thought* I was onto a good thing because - not being 'able' (read, wiling) to write, I was onto a good thing. because I spent considerable time working through the cosmology and getting a feeling for my setting and all of that.

And then I started writing and ran into all kinds of walls. Some of them are due to the constraints I've set myself - I am trying to write a) a murdery mystery (having never written one) and b) a multi-POV novel (having never written one of those, either. My normal procedure of following the character around and letting them tell me what's important in their life is failing abysmally, because what's important to them isn't necessarily important to the _story_. I'm not sure whether I want to keep one of my POV characters as a POV character - lots of interesting things happen to her, but the story might be just as well served if she simply tells them to the POV character I *shall* keep. She's also going to be a suspect. This kind of decision - do I go over the same ground twice from different perspectives ? - is new territory for me, and I expect to write a fair amount of words that won't make it into the final story.

(I also have the feeling that now woud be a good time to start that synopsis and to log the events, and then maybe think about who shall relate them. This might also be useful in order to find out what, and in what order, I need to write up. In order to write this, I need a better grasp of what's going on in several parts of the city and to a number of people. In fact, I know what needs to happen before the next scene - but it doesn't happen to either of the characters involved, so I need to find someone else into whose narrative I can slip it.)



It turns out that the magic ingredient wasn't to plan-before-writing, but the sitting down and thinking about things in great detail.

Yesterday was such a moment, and that's the main purpose of the post, to show the process and what difference it has made.

So. One of my characters - the one I'm not sure should be a POV - is getting bullied. Not sure by whom or why, but she's just complained about it. She mentioned a 'chores plan'.

A couple of years ago, I would have moved on from this. My new process involved stopping and examining it in the light of the things I know about it, and about the world.

And you don't _need_ that detail. All the story needs at that point to move forward is 'there's a plan and [character] gets allocated more work than everybody else.'

I sat down and worked out how that works, and it's _complex_. I worked out the data needs - it's got to be complicated enough that a casual observer would not work out that one novice gets more and dirtier jobs than the others (which also hints at the number of total novices). Then there's the material background - paper and wood are rare commodities, the writing system is Chinese-inspired which has an effect on literacy [and the plot]. Then I spent time thinking about the temple routine, how many people there had to be, and what they were doing all day, and how the idea of 'chores' fits in with the view of the world and with their cosmology.

I got all of that from one brief line. I could easily have written the next scene, but the resulting worldbuilding is much more grounded. And this isn't work that I could have done before I got to this scene - it came out of a character interaction, and I am much happier constructing - at least in the beginning - the world around the character's needs than fitting plot into an empty setting. I really don't _care_ what the temple is like, or how many monks it has - what I care about is the story; all the setting needs to do is fit in with it and support it.

I haven't quite worked out the final form of the chores board, but it involves three temple models (for the three parts of the day), glazed clay tokens in three colours (for three types of chores), and a complex system of who sets chores and who does them - but it works perfectly:

I now have a system that is unique, that isn't standard fantasyland fare, that ties in with what I know about culture and literacy and cosmology, and that does the trick of making it very difficult for anyone to a) gain a quick overview of how much work is assigned to any one person or b) who is behind setting those tasks because people are constantly looking at it and adding chores and taking off tokens when chores were done.



This kind of writing needs more leisure than I have at times, I can't do it in fifteen-minute increments, so this is very slow indeed. On the other hand, after worrying for a while that I might be writing a temple intrigue, I now know when and by whom the first victim will be found - fairly soon - so in a way, I feel I'm on track.

Right now, I've written about 4K words on this, (and more on everything else), but it is starting to feel like a viable novel idea and I'm looking forward to making the time to write it properly some day. I'll keep at it - I definitely want the murder and at least one more viewpoint - but come December, I'll give the Swamp Thing more attention again. Even though 4K does not look productive next to the 40K and 100+L some people have written, I'm extraordinarily happy with it. I'm meeting all of my goals other than wordcount, and wordcount is the least of my worries.