Quod scripsi, scripsi.

Or was it pots on the stove?  Irons on the stove, for all you bachelors out there…the point is, there seems to be a fairly even split between writers who work obsessively on a single project until it’s done (or being sent out for editing, or otherwise out of the writer’s hand for weeks at a time) and the ones who have a half a dozen things going on at any given time, plus another half a dozen or so “this would be cool” ideas scribbled down somewhere.

I’m the latter; I think that’s probably obvious at this point.  I do try to be good about keeping the finished projects out and seeking publication rather than letting them sit on my desktop, but I bounce around the unfinished ones a bit.  Not as much as some people I’ve talked to — I read one (published and successful) author’s essay about working on a different project every day of the week — but enough that, even though there’s already too much on my plate (stove, fire, whatever), it’s never a bad thing when something new pops into my head.  The fairy story is definitely my main focus right now, but every once in a while I need to take some time off from it to let the ideas kick around a little bit, and it’s good to have something new to be working on, rather than going over the same stories-seeking-publication again and obsessing about why they were rejected last time.

This is one of the things that popped into my head, and is now in the queue of “things to work on when there’s time.”  I’ll write a few more notes below the original, scribbled-down summary I wrote about a week ago:

–

Notes on “Worlds Apart” (working title) — an idea for a novel in four books

Mon. 8 March 2010

Not a fully formed idea yet, but the basic thinking here:  the story of a successful pulp author’s personal life, told in four interwoven books:  his massively-successful third book in a fantasy series; the fourth book as ghost-written by the webmaster of a fanfic site who becomes his lover after meeting him at a convention; a new, non-genre novel that he works on while she does the majority of the work on Book Four; and the actual novel of his life, their relationship, the relationship that it destroys, etc.

To make that clearer for myself — each chapter comes from one of four books, none of which except the last (call it “The Frame”) gets told in full:

Book Three of the “Swords and Sorcery” (or whatever) series, a completed and highly-successful novel that bumped the author up from a rising star in the fantasy market to the Hot New Thing with legions of screaming fans.

Book Four of S&S, which is being primarily written by the former manager of (and frequent contributor to) a fanfiction site dedicated to the author’s world.  She became his lover after meeting him at a fantasy convention.

A non-fantasy novel being written by the author while the fanfiction writer puts together Book Four.  Call it “The Work.”

And, finally, The Frame, the novel that encompasses the other three and tells the story of the author’s miserable personal life, creative frustrations, and sexual neuroses.  Smaller than the rest.

–

Characters

The Author — short but athletically-built with a sharp-if-conservative dress sense, he deals well with the press and the public, and is able to deal with nerds without being much of one himself.  He’s a “rock star” of the convention circuit and literature-focused media, full of witty anecdotes and not a lot of substance.  Internally, he’s sexually repressed to the point of impotence, frustrated with his inability to write anything “good” (but still in love with the money and public recognition he gets for his “bad” stuff), and generally miserable.

The Ghostwriter — is a genuinely kind and loving person who starts off infatuated but winds up actually in love with The Author, though she probably comes to hate him by the end.  Initially she only approaches him because of a schoolgirl crush and too much to drink, but what starts off as an e-mail and instant messenger-based flirtation following a one-night stand turns into a genuine relationship, and, eventually, an agreement to ghost-write his fourth book while he focuses on “real literature.”  They are physically separate for most of the novel.

The Sister — isn’t actually The Author’s sister, but they lived next-door for the first eighteen years of their lives, and always had a brother-sister kind of relationship, which they at one point violated with a couple weeks of disastrous sex and romance.  She functions as his primary caretaker and friend, since she hates other people nearly as much as him, though she works in a much more “normal” corporate/legal job of some sort.  They share a very large house inhabited by only the two of them and their guests, lovers, and one-night stands, and often go weeks without seeing one another.  He downplays his relationship with The Ghostwriter to her, for reasons he isn’t even sure about himself, but winds up feeling justified when she’s furious after little clues finally add up to her figuring the whole thing out.  Of course, she’s mostly angry because he felt like he had to hide it, but they’re bad at communicating…

–

The Point

Fundamentally, it’s a novel about all authors being liars.  The Author is the best with written words of the three, but the least able to express himself; the Ghostwriter is a bland but pleasant writer and a bland but pleasant person who, because she was never very original to begin with, lets herself get talked into an unoriginal and subservient role in real life as well; the Sister is the most clear-headed and rational of the lot, but goes the longest without any understanding of the reality of her situation.  None of them are happy when they have to come to terms with anyone else’s perception of things.  Wherever it ends, it isn’t happily.

Why the Four Books

What the two writer characters produce should be the primary understanding the reader has of their characters.  Book Three of S&S can be powerful, charismatic, and sweeping — all the things that The Author is in public.  Book Four is a dedicated imitation, but plagued by sentimentality and a little bit more wishful thinking — it’s probably the one that critics will say “jumped the shark” when it comes out, partially because of some unconvincing romantic content.  The Work is bitter, awkward, and full of contradictions, but much more sincere, and The Frame exists to tell the behind-the-scene story in as brief and uncompromising terms as possible..  Each chapter of The Frame could focus on one of the three characters, and then back to one of the internal works for a couple chapters before popping out again to see what another of the Three Stooges are up to.  As a whole, it should be disjointed, echoy, and a little bit schizophrenic, just like the protagonists and their world.

–

So that’s what I wrote the other night; I touched a few punctuation things up, but otherwise left it as an example of what I’ll scribble down when a brand new book/story/whatever idea comes into my head.  “Comes into my head” makes it sound more sudden than it really is; something like this will often be kicking around in my head as little fragments of ideas for weeks before it comes together into a written form like this.  And that’s about as much outlining as I ever do; once I have something like this, I start writing.  And I often start writing without even this much; the fairy story was nothing more than a single character concept, a strong feeling for the kind of language I wanted to use, and an excitement about a world with no hard-and-fast rules to play around in.

But as far as the above goes — it obviously runs the risk of being one of those navel-gazing “novels about novelists” that make for bad first novels; it may well be an idea that doesn’t get used for years.  I’ll do some writing and see how it goes.  The key, I think, will be keeping The Frame as minimalist as possible and letting the other three books speak for the characters as much as possible; I’m not sure what to do for The Sister, who doesn’t have a written form for the readers to get to know her in.  Which might be okay; she’s going to be a sort of awkwardly-marginalized third to The Author and The Ghostwriter’s romance, so it may work out for her to be pushed off to one side in the structure as well.

The obvious influence here is the idea of epistolary novels, which theoretically use the same technique of presenting the characters through their written words rather than their speech and actions; having a more traditionally-narrated Frame in there will, I think, let me get away from the epistolary novel’s bad habit of featuring intensely-descriptive letters that no one would ever write.  Since Book Three, Book Four, and The Work aren’t there to advance the plot, they can be very distanced from the mechanics of advancing it, with only the occasional art-imitating-life mirroring or in-joke that The Author or The Ghostwriter slips in to tie them to The Frame.

We shall see!  But there’s a post for today, and bright and early too — we all know I’m too disorganized to always do the same sort of post every Monday, a different sort of post every Wednesday, and something else on Fridays, but I do think I’ll try to be more regular with these sorts of “things I’m working on or thinking about working on” posts, and maybe do weekly wrap-ups on Fridays too?  As the lead of the paragraph says, we shall see.