Last October, I suddenly lost all my files because of a) a new computer which lacked something all my others had had, a dedicated data disk and b) failure of the backup device I was using instead.\u00a0 This post is not about computer stuff and that’s all I’m going to say about it.<\/p>\n
This is about a different problem, how to recover a story that’s lost (whether the dog ate your homework, a tornado blew your house away, the basement flooded and that’s where your office was…), a story you were passionate about, when you cannot remember it word for word.\u00a0 The days of my remembering large chunks of my prose word for word are gone…too many concussions, too many total words written.<\/p>\n
First, there’s grieving for what’s lost, while quickly writing down the titles (and a 1-3 sentence sketch) of each thing not yet published somewhere that you want to recover.\u00a0 What I lost (among the rest) were all the Paksworld stories I wrote last summer, intended for the next and future short fiction collections.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If your mind and heart are full of grief for them, you can’t write them “new,” the way you need to if they’re to be good.\u00a0 That takes awhile–not a long while, but awhile–for each one.\u00a0 Then, as your mind clears of sorrow for what was lost, you can look at your little sketchy thing.\u00a0 In the case of the story I’m going to discuss here, I also had the published story that preceded it…I had broken a long story into two, because the long one would’ve been too long, and the lost one was the second. So I could re-read the first, and re-imagine what the second needed to be.\u00a0\u00a0 Then first-draft write the second, and edit to whatever seemed to work this time.<\/p>\n
It’s taken me this long, and the almost-completion of the second recovery (the first recovery had been partially work-shopped in a group I’m in, so the first 1800 words were recoverable from others)\u00a0 to fully grasp the process that’s working.\u00a0\u00a0 My actual writing process is almost automatic; I haven’t dissected it at this depth before, but it may be helpful to some of you, because everyone loses stuff they wish they hadn’t lost.\u00a0 I’ve known all along that for me, there is no distinction between character-centered and plot-centered fiction….without character, no story.\u00a0 Without plot, no story.\u00a0 They’re not only both needed, they’re entwined, as much as our body parts don’t function alone but in the milieu that’s a human body.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But last night, thinking about the last two scenes of this story after I went to bed, a couple of things on the engineering side of writing, the “how does that work?” side, came clear.<\/p>\n
How to analyze the fading memory of a story so that I could “freshen” the imagination to provide better drafting of the replacement story.\u00a0\u00a0 How to keep characters I remember from before from being wooden toys being moved on the stage by my memory of “what happened” when I want to re-create….not just re-write…them as living, organic beings.\u00a0 The previous day’s writing had done that for about 2000 words, without my noticing, but then things slowed down…not stuck, just slower, and apparently slowed enough for part of my mind to watch what it was doing.<\/p>\n
So, without “telling the story” and without names, here’s what emerged: two main characters, and two minor characters, with some other people on stage only as surfaces to bounce off of.\u00a0 The two main characters are a teenage boy and a young but mature man in his twenties. The two minor characters are a ruler (appears at the end of the play to hand down a judgment)\u00a0 and an eneny (hidden but obviously there’s *somebody*…revealed decades and three books later.)\u00a0\u00a0 No other published material covers this particular bit of history in the larger story-space, so the only possible conflicts with published material are in the memories of characters, and most of them are dead by then.\u00a0 No need to worry about that.\u00a0\u00a0 Many people change a lot between their mid-late teens and middle age anyway.\u00a0 I certainly did.<\/p>\n
The story published in DEEDS OF YOUTH ends with the teenage boy and the adult man having reached a good, though still unequal, relationship.\u00a0 The kid’s learned a lot, the man has learned some.\u00a0 The new story puts them into an emergency situation that tests both of them: the kid’s using his new knowledge and skills in normal circumstances, but will he hold it together in an emergency?\u00a0 The learning is new…how deep did it strike (and why?)\u00a0\u00a0 Teenagers like this have existed throughout human history: the privileged young inevitably think highly of themselves, imagine themselves to be greater than they are,\u00a0 and if not corrected in some way (which often doesn’t happen) turn into arrogant, narcissistic disasters for their society (like quite a few we can think of in the 21st century.)\u00a0 One of the standard growth patterns is the spoiled brat; they come in all levels of intelligence, all levels of physical ability, all levels of talent, including charistma, but their main identity is “over-entitled.”\u00a0 These are the ones whose family lawyers tell the court “But he comes from a good family…think of his future career…” when he rapes a girl or drives drunk and kills someone. \u00a0 Daddy may be a CEO of a company, or own a couple of car dealerships, or sit in the legislature…but excuses will be made, until (if) something smacks the kid with reality and he changes.\u00a0 If he does.\u00a0 And if he does change earlier, under the influence of the right adults, that change may crumble under too great a strain.\u00a0 Or he may hold it together, live up to the new self he was slowly accreting, and become his best (or at least better) self.<\/p>\n
The other major character already has become a man of great capacity, with the help of a good mentor–though born into privilege, he had it snatched away in the crime that killed one parent and landed him in a very, very bad situation for most of his childhood.\u00a0 Can an abused child recover?\u00a0 Yes, with the right kind of help.\u00a0 Which he got. \u00a0 But socially, professionally, he’s still in a precarious situation, living in a world where birth and inheritance matter more than character, where he is judged\u00a0 on his rank (low) and money\u00a0 (low-ish)\u00a0 and he was brought in to advise men who are rich and aristocratic–who consider men like him barefly above house-servant, if that.\u00a0 He’s\u00a0 vulnerable,\u00a0 like the hotshot young consultant brought into a company to complete a project others thought they didn’t need help with.\u00a0 Can he overcome their resentment when apparent disaster strikes, or will he be swept away, disgraced, his nascent career destroyed?\u00a0 Will his prior relationship with the teenager help him or not?<\/p>\n
It doesn’t matter what genre this story is; the characters fit into many places, many times.\u00a0 They are “generic” in that sense, which can sound boring…but actually gives me great scope for individualizing them.\u00a0 What I need to do, as the re-writer of their stories (for both find a place in the books that come later in that setting)\u00a0 is find a way to bring them completely alive in my head, so that I can “first-draft” the new story with all the parts of the mind involved in first-drafting working.\u00a0\u00a0 And that means giving their characters another look.\u00a0 Finding something new in them, something that connected, however tenuously, with their characters later as well as their characters before.<\/p>\n
Looked at that way, the problem can be solved.\u00a0 At least, WriterMind is in a terrier mood, digging around in their character roots.\u00a0 One gold nugget has already shown up.\u00a0\u00a0 I knew the boy was somewhat under the influence of another nobleman’s slightly older son–the older boy, at the urging of his own father, egging him on in his disrespect of the other MC main character.\u00a0 None of that was shown in the previous story, but it was deep logic for it.\u00a0 Subtly, the older boy also convinced the younger that he was too lax with people, that he needed to be more forceful because he wasn’t as tall as the older boy or as good looking.\u00a0 The older boy didn’t appear at all in the previous version.\u00a0 It will take only one brief appearance and a few words to set that up.\u00a0 As for the older main character, he can be a shade less certain that the kid he was working with has learned deeply enough to be reliable in an emergency.\u00a0 Again, a brief interaction, a word with his assistant.\u00a0 I think that’s enough to enlist the part of my brain that I have never been able to force.<\/p>\n
When it’s done it will be a different story than the one I wrote last summer…very similar, but not the same.\u00a0\u00a0 And if this analysis works, it will be as good (or, if I’m very lucky, better.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last October, I suddenly lost all my files because of a) a new computer which lacked something all my others had had, a dedicated data disk and b) failure of the backup device I was using instead.\u00a0 This post is not about computer stuff and that’s all I’m going to say about it. This is Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,10,25],"tags":[20,7,26],"class_list":["post-1564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories","category-the-writing-life","category-writers-toolkit","tag-characters","tag-the-writing-life","tag-tools-for-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1564"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1565,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1564\/revisions\/1565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}