TRAVERSING Z

Reading

process, better.

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this story has converted me to the virtues of plotting.

i always believed in letting the story take free rein, leading you where it needed to go . . . but with 375,000 words written, with scenes great and small and still not at the end, i could feel myself losing focus.  too many threads started and forgotten, raised and dropped and raised again: it would take another 375k to wrap them all.

which is not to say they all must be wrapped.  part of the point of the story is to be a little more life-like than other such tales, and IRL people pass in and out of each other’s lives without resolution (remember, this is before google, before we can type a name and find out exactly what happened to the kid that sat next to us for one semester in algebra 1).  but too much of that and even i start to get irritated.  all my little pauls and jeans and adelaides, what will happen to you?

so i reverted to plotting.  mechanical, just three pages of “this happens and then this happens and then this happens”.  who dies, who lives, who’s zooming who . . . cheers to the 1980s for filling my head with such nonsensical song lyrics . . .

it felt stupid and annoying but it worked.  and i should remind myself that perhaps it took the 375k to make it work; i tried plotting it twice before and would trail off halfway through; perhaps it took all this writing to see everyone clearly enough that certain events would become foregone conclusions, others rendered impossible simply because of these particular personalities.  but it works, now: a skeleton to fit all this flesh onto, a direction to use when tightening.  things will get rearranged.  there is room now for two long stretchs where i can flex my descriptive muscles.  i have good, if rough, breaking points with which to end books one and two.

i was hoping the relief would let me sleep better last night; i haven’t really slept well since i began this project, save for a few key nights when a huge scene would finally be done.  but instead my mind was a riot of details yet again—if so-and-so is even more duplicitious than i first imagine, what does that entail for scene x? y? would they even bother doing z at all? and so on.

in other news, found a lovely edition of voltaire last night, a little pocket hardcover from the 1940s, printed in england . . . and on the back flap is an advertisement for the bbc extoling its virtues as a means to fight axis propaganda.  as much as the e-reader tempts me (all my books in one little form! easy highlighting and notetaking!), you can’t download that.

process and juxtaposition

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am trying not to freak out at the obscene size of my word count, far beyond anything viable for a first-time author.  trying to cut the narrative in half is not going to save me, i think.  i’ve been suffocating a few babies but there might have to be some wholesale slaughter happening, and man, that bites.  if richardson could write 1 million plus words about one woman’s rape, why can’t i write half a million about a dozen characters and their conflicts great and small?  self-publishing is laughable, the idea of serialization seems to have gone the way of dickens, and i am looking to be **** out of luck.

instead of shooting the horse now, though, i am still going to let the old nag do as she pleases.  once more into the breach, damn the torpedoes, raise high the roof beams, ask not what your country, etc. etc.

so back to work, which at this moment includes two little excerpts from letter 130 of liaisons, rosemonde to tourvel:

A man enjoys the pleasure he feels, a woman the pleasure she bestows.

And

[Men] have the support of public opinion which has drawn a distinction—for men only—between being unfaithful and being inconstant . . .

contrast with a line of valmont’s to merteuil, a few letters later:

First of all, for lots of women, pleasure is always just pleasure and nothing more; and with such women, whatever high-falutin title we may be given, we’re just ciphers, stand-ins whose only assets are our performance and the most vigorous man is always the best.

let it be recorded here for all posterity that magnus’ little speech about being a cipher, if it survives the slaughter, predates my reading of this letter.  i thought of it on my own, thank you very much! laclos, c’est moi.

but the contrast has been bopping around in my head all day, to the detriment of the day job; add to that this rather fabulous interview with china miéville (i have a crush on his brain):

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/unsolving-city-interview-with-china.html

and i’m thinking that at the very least some tightening of atmosphere is required.  whose paris are we seeing? it does not have to be everyone’s, and for the principals involved, their experience of the city is far more limited than i have been explicitly describing.  dark and thin and fluttery, dim lights in the windows by public decree (a precursor to streetlamps, at least per my limited research thus far), cold without feeling cold—

i need to see better, in this.

l’ami jean-jacques

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From the Prancing Half-Wits. Reading of reading and thinking of reading–as in the essay on Rousseau from The Great Cat Massacre  (dropped in the bath twice! Cue pun about wringing.)

As developed by Rolf Engelsing and other German scholars, this notion divides the development of reading into two phases.  From the Renaissance until 1750 approximately, Europeans read ‘intensively.’ They had access to very few books—the Bible, devotional works, an occasional chapbook or an almanac—and they read them over and over again, meditating on them inwardly or sharing them aloud with others in family and social gatherings (the Spinnstube and veillée).  In the second half of the eighteenth century, educated people began to read ‘extensively.’ They ran through a great deal of printed matter, especially novels and journals, the favorite genres in the reading clubs (Lesegesellschaften, cabinets littéraires) that proliferated everywhere in urban centers.  And they read each item only once, for amusement, then raced on to the next.

Rousseau a throwback to the “intensive” mode, by his own insistence.  Héloïse made readers so distraught as to be ill; their letters to J-J recounted fits of weeping, no matter their sex or age; its ideas of virtue and authenticity provoked huge upheavals, lives irrevocably altered. Readers made pilgrimages to him, offered themselves emotionally and sexually; they refused to believe the characters were only fiction; they were passionately transported in a way beyond even the earlier Richardson novels.  Darnton says:

Ranson and his contemporaries belonged to a peculiar species of reader, one that arose in the eighteenth century and that began to die out in the age of Madame Bovary.  The Rousseauistic readers of prerevolutionary France threw themselves into texts with a passion that we can barely imagine, that is as alien to us as the lust for plunder among the Norsemen . . . or the fear of demons among the Balinese.

This is part of my struggle now: how to even hint at such a mindset, much less capture fully the mind of an individual who can be moved to histrionics by a novel of sentimental love letters, for whom virtue is a vital, palpable concern.  To even go there? As difficult as it is to present such a person palatably, it also feels completely inauthentic (ha!) to try and animate such a character.  There is a reason why I felt almost physically repulsed at reading Clarissa—so frustrated, so annoyed, so wanting to reach back through time and just shake them all.