Hello and welcome, I suppose, though there is a welcome page somewhere. This is an inaugural post in what I hope will be series of posts about, generally speaking, my writing, world building, and other, loosely-associated things.
These are generally off the cuff. But, honestly, so is most of this stuff - that’s part of what makes it fun. Needless to say, I wouldn’t take any of this as advice, exemplar, or dictum. I just like this stuff and my liking of stuff can sometimes have the air of method but it’s really just loosey-goosey, this is what happened here, not a place of honor stuff.
And speaking of advice, exemplar, and dictums…
The original title of the original file of the original story-that-would-become Kostas is titled ‘never finish’ (dot odt, I think… I can’t recall but it may have gone back to my WordPerfect days). It more or less, quite seriously, ‘came to me in a dream’, which doesn’t make it more valid or good - my dreams can be vivid shit - but did make it compelling, as it was so complete. Not the plot (fuck me, it’s never the plot), but the concept. The concept is essentially a bundle of tropes, so that makes sense, but still: very vivid, very compelling. Very much not what I wanted to write or what I was writing at the time or what I imagined myself being comfortable with writing in the future. But too much to not write it down so I did and thought maybe it would exorcise itself from my skull.
It did not.
And there was an inherent challenge in it that I should have realized would be too provoking to ignore.
Anyway, many permutations of it and life later, I thought, yeah, fuck it, let’s try to actually publish it. You wrote it, it’s novel length (absurdly over that, actually), let’s do it.
There’s a lot of writing advice out there, and a lot of publishing advice, and they’re two different things. And the thing about publishing is that you’re asking the carnies for tips on how to win the carnival games (Nothing against carnival folk or publishing people, both are lovely). Obviously my advice and perspective there isn’t useful, but I did come around to the idea that it wasn’t doing anything to actually build my skills in the ways I wanted them built and the prize was actually quite shit (fun shit? possibly! fun games? sometimes! Worth it? YMMV). Lots of things are like that.
One of the first things I did was get a friend to read the manuscript. My first venture out of the safely anonymized and largely self-selecting audience the stories had online, and an incredible risk, in my eyes. One I knew I had to be ready to take, for sure, but nonetheless.
If not the first sentence, then somewhere in the first paragraph or so, I used a perfectly cromulent word. I don’t remember what it was - it’s fallen out of the text since then, but some real Victorian doozy of a descriptor. A real word, natch, but a humdinger of English vocabulary. The suggestion to remove that word - which I resisted, it was the right word, you see - was the only thing my friend had to say. After that, my friend redirected to watching a piece of media they particularly enjoyed and had wanted to show me, and the meeting ended (as did any interest in that piece of media, an unfortunate side effect of how underwhelmingly terrible this first venture had gone).
In terms of writing critiques for the ages, this doesn’t even chart, but it did solidify something for me in the sea of crap (it’s not all crap) advice for writers I was swimming in at the moment.
The readers are either on board, or they’re not, and the sooner you can let them figure that out, the better. That’s what a whole chunk of writing advice out there is trying to get you to do. All this stuff about ‘no prologues’ (I have a prologue), ‘start in the middle of excitement, action’, ‘draw the reader in’ etc etc, is not becuase the advice works somehow, but because it gets people to that ‘on board or not’ question faster, and for the most part, the aim of published writing is to get people on board.
And, look, there’s a lot of good reasons to do that, and it can absolutely be good, productive, non-cynical advice. But if they’re not on board, fuck ‘em (that is very much not what the writing advice is leading you to).
That is, I realized, that this was the story. That didn’t mean it was some of kind pure muse-puke being fed to me baby-bird-like, or unchangeable - after all, the ‘right’ word did eventually fall out, though I think I held onto it for a bit out of sheer stubbornness, and the first chapter of Kostas is, indeed, a fine distillation of dropping readers in the middle of the action - but, you’ll also notice, that almost nothing like that happens again until the climax of the story.
There is totally a mass-market publishable version of this story in there, a version that might’ve kept my friend’s attention for more than a milisecond, but that wasn’t what I had done or what I was interested in doing with it. You can win a game of horseshoes in your backyard and fuck up the ringtoss at the fair. I was interested in using Kostas to learn about writing and get better at it. It was, essentially, a challenge to myself (had been, from the get-go, to write in a genre I was neither comfortable with nor writing in at the time, but which I had this idea for). What the first chapter (or prologue, actually, because there’s a prologue, y’all) had to do was not get the readers on board, but let them figure out if they could withstand the story for the long haul. Because it’s not a military action story, it’s melodrama in uniform. That perfectly cromulent word was perfectly cromulent. It didn’t make it to the final drafts because it wasn’t elegant.
I wrote the prologue after, read a bunch of self-serious horseshittery about ‘any submission with a prologue I throw in the trash’ and did what I was going to do anyway (and probably ended up in the trash!)
And all of this is in reflection of finally re-reading this thing for the first time in a few years and going ‘oh holy fuck, did you overdo this?’ I mean, damn. “Regret was a luxury of peace, and Cole knew they warred still” - who talks like that? Holy shit. “He did not carry the burden of preferring humility” - well, actually, that’s a good bit of characterization. There is no ‘blessed are the humble’ here.
Actually, no, I did write it that way on purpose.
That opening image, of the bloody leaves - it’s exagerration. We’re not talking shell warfare here. People aren’t getting annihilated by artillery. It’s psychological. It’s the peak of a peak of absorbing, personal, ever-present violence. It’s how it feels, and has felt for so long it’s like nature, and this arrogant creature is of it, and it’s all coming headlong to an end, and like a cat overshooting its bowl he’s about to faceplant into a wall.
The audience needs to get really hard into it at the highest pitch and feel it abruptly end. And if you can’t withstand “the mist rising” and “ponderous leaves” and “Cole knew they warred still” you’re not going to like the story. Because the major emotional moments hinge on high melodrama, and you’ve got to at least be into it a little. So while hopefully there’s some narrative variety (there’s got to be, the fucker in interminably long), the first chapter puts on display the key kinds of things the reader will need to put up with to get into it. And maybe they won’t, and it’ll be a classic wallbanger (though for the sake of your digital devices, I hope not), but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Anyway, it’s also serial fiction - that’s why it’s so long - and not a novel, and maybe that’s what I’ll talk about next time, since I’ve opted to re-post it in that way to try to review the story’s best sides, so to speak. Or maybe I’ll just post a bunch of pictures of temperate broadleaf forest biomes and talk about trees. who knows.