Repetition for Character Development

Puntitas is feeling blog blank. This happens sometimes. She’s grateful because she’s not feeling blank about her job related writing and because she’s got ideas and eagerness to work on her own writing. But she hasn’t written in the blog because she hasn’t had many writerly thoughts.

Well, there was one. It’s a technique oriented observation from a book Puntitas read. She likes the trick and wants to use it herself in a piece of writing, possibly the next novel in the queue, the one she’ll start after she finishes everything that is on the hard drive now.

The novel I read is Broken, erotica or maybe porn. I’m not sure what the difference is. At any rate, it’s about a woman who meets with a stranger once a month to share lunch in a park. After several innocuous conversations, they fall into a pattern: he tells her about a sexual encounter he’s had that month.

The novel is complex. The woman is married, but she no longer has a physical relationship with her husband because he had a skiing accident five years before, and she doesn’t have much of a marriage because of the emotional after effects of the injuries. The meetings with the stranger give her a fantasy life, which only highlights the many ways her marriage isn’t what it once was.

The technique I want to borrow is this:

The stories about the stranger’s sexual encounters follow a sort of formula. They tell the reader how he meets his one-night-stand, how she comes on to him, what prompts him to make his first move, what kind of sex they have, and how the encounter ends. The details about him are consistent from story to story, minor behaviors blossoming into telling details, but new information is also added. The effect is that what begins as a stock character becomes … hmm … fully fleshed and that we get to know his appeal for the married woman listening to him, which means we get to know more about her as well. It’s a great technique because it allows him to become a meaningful character while the obvious energy and focus of the story is on the woman’s marital conflict.

It occurs to me that I have a short story that uses a variation of this technique. It contains several scenes in which the narrator is playing cards with her uncle and having a conversation about the same guest. This may be why I noticed it. But the book uses the technique to achieve a more sophisticated effect. I think too now that it would actually work well in my novella, which includes a couple of scenes that recur in variation.

Puntitas reads _The Proposition_ by J. Ivory, _Broken_ by M. Hart, and _The Serpent’s Tale_ by A. Franklin.

New Year, New Plans

I’ve been meaning to post long before now. I’ve got a rough entry about my adventures at the MLA convention to put up, and I’ve had a few thoughts about the new year to write down. I think I’ll focus on the latter today.

I’ve been keeping this blog for a little over a year. I think the first entry was in October of ’07. My goal was to make myself think about writing or actually do a little at least once a week. At the time, my approach to working on my poems, stories, and novels was earnest but haphazard. I had hope and faith in the blog’s ability to help me settle into a routine, but I also imagined that eventually I would run out of steam. Hence the pseudonym.

What has been amazing to me is that, over the course of a year or so, I have truly learned to think of myself as a writer. I have learned to invest in my writing, reading more books, attending plays, setting time aside to write, engaging in research activities that feed my work. I have finished two book length poetry manuscripts, and I have plans for both writing more poems and revising my fiction.

I haven’t done much of anything for the last month. Part of what’s happening is that I’ve wanted to rest and clear my head from the experience of writing the poetry books. I’m trying to make the shift from a highly detailed line oriented writing style to a style involving long series of expository passages and action sequences that need to be retained in the head and merged in the text.

Too, work has really picked up lately. I’m trying to get used to making time and finding the energy to write between appointments. More than that, I’m trying to figure out how to keep the writing from interfering with my work. I notice that, when I’m going through an intense writing phase, I have a harder time interpreting, my writing language (English) becoming obviously dominant. To compensate, I’ve decided to read more Spanish, one book or three academic articles a month, but I’m sure I can do other things as well.

This year’s plan is to get some of the short fiction published, to finish the novella, and to get the novel close to ready.

As I write this, I think the novel may be a quicker project. I’ve got one hundred fifty pages of material that needs little revision. It accounts for about three fourths of the novel. Based on very good workshop advice, the first bit of revision is to start the novel a few scenes before my current starting point. I’ve written ten pages of prenovel material so far and expect to write another ten or possibly fifteen more. I’ve also got a very detailed summary of what comes after the one-hundred-fifty-page core. The summary is twenty-two pages long. It may double in length when all is said and done, but I don’t expect it to grow much more than that.

What keeps me from working on it are two things. One is that I think I need to do more background reading on history and philosophy, the specific areas my protagonist is interested in, and the other is that I feel I need to travel to Barcelona to get more of the place details right. The story is set there, partly because I wrote the first draft shortly after taking a trip and partly because the location seemed to be a good way of isolating the protagonist and prompting her to think about ambivalence.

I’m having a similar problem with my novella, which I realized several years ago covers the same ground as the novel only with a different outcome. (One ends in despair; the other, in hope.) The novella is set in Mexico, in a reconstructed hacienda outside the city of San Luis Potosi. I don’t know enough about the history and geography of the region, so I’d really like to visit to explore.

I’ll probably have to make due without those trips, or I can try publishing some of the other stories to get the sort of job that will allow such travel. I’ll start by getting my passport in order. I think it expired three years ago.

Puntitas reads _Blind Spot_ by T. Persons and _One Thousand White Women_ by J. Fergus.

Visiting the NEA

My writerly act for the day was to visit the website of the National Endowment for the Arts to find out how one goes about getting a grant. I think I can apply for one in poetry (I’ve got a little over twenty pages of poetry publications because I’m a windy daughter of fodder), and I’ll think about doing that, but mostly the trip was about starting to make myself think like a professional writer.

I think my book of poems is close to done. I’ve got at least thirty, probably more like forty, pages of finished manuscript in my hard drive, and I’ve got another twenty or thirty pages of strong draft. I’m sure ten to fifteen of those draft pages can be worked into finished poems over the next couple of months, and with work being as slow as it is, I can probably focus on that without worrying about the time-money continuum. I won’t pledge that I’ll start sending out the manuscript by March (though such would be very nice) because … well, we know about my pledges.

Where I’d love to have lots of time and lots of money is on the novel or the novella. Keeping characters and details fresh in one’s head for that long takes a surprising amount of effort, especially when one has to keep getting up to do practical things like hold suspended utterances in one’s head or think about student papers. Also, I’d love to do some traveling to get the setting and some history right. My most immediate problem, however, is that, for a prose grant, the NEA wants a list of at least five short publications or one that is book-length. What I’ve decided is to put more energy into sending out my short stories so that I can apply next year. That means doing more revision, and yes, getting the poetry out of the way.

Puntitas reads _The Things They Carried_ by T. O’Brien.

All About Drama

This morning I finished reading The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a first novel about a father who gives his retarded daughter away while his wife is still unconscious from the delivery. I admired certain things about it, like the very real and very annoying tendency we all have to hear someone else’s truth and focus on ourselves. The novel’s characters all do that to a fault. One ordinarily self-contained person shares an honest thought or feeling, and the listener automatically says, “What about me? What about my drama?” I also thought The writer did a good job of capturing how we interpret other people’s actions in the framework of our own assumptions about them and about the way the world works. Someone says or does something with one intent. Other characters respond as if something else were meant.

But what was most compelling for me was the father. I was drawn by his motivation and fascinated by his guilt. I was so drawn to him, in fact, that I noticeably lost interest when I realized he would no longer be appearing, and when I became conscious of that loss of interest, I remembered a conversation I had with a friend of mine about how books with happy endings are less satisfying somehow than books that end sadly. I think that’s because happy endings are so much harder to write, happiness so often sounding like platitude, not reality.

For me, this book fell into platitude because I don’t believe that a mother who’s been mourning the death of her perfect daughter for twenty-five years simply accepts the retarded replacement, without wondering what she did wrong or why she was being punished or whichever of the lines from that script that the parents of children with disabilities act out before they learn to love the versions of themselves they never expected to give birth to. I especially don’t believe it from this set of characters—all self-absorbed in the extreme.

The book also gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own writing. The novel has too many little dramatic arcs and small unnecessary complications. For example, the father goes out of town to give a talk. He’s supposed to be gone over night, but instead, he disappears for three days. The family is in a panic and calls the police. When he does come home, he brings an unexpected guest. Later that afternoon, there’s an argument, and the eighteen-year-old son runs away from home, necessitating another call to the police, and the next day, the mother is frantic because she still has the guest in her home, an important business account to maintain, news of her sister’s cancer diagnosis to contend with, an extra marital affair to break off, and her son’s continued absence to worry over. That moment would have been as dramatic (or more) if complicating factors had been trimmed down to one or two problems. The marriage was going badly, so things would have been tense enough if the father had called to say he’d be staying away an extra day or two, then stayed away longer. His coming home with the guest, a character who’s presence doesn’t seem all that necessary to me, is complicating enough. The argument would have happened more or less as it did. And the son (instead of running away, stealing a neighbor’s car, and getting busted for shoplifting) could have just disappeared for a few hours and come home pissed or drunk and made more or less the same scene he had at central booking. The mother could have been just as frantic at the office the next day, stewing over the guest in her home and over the affair she’s breaking off, an important moment in her character’s development. My guess is that this excess of drama comes from an inexperienced writer’s fear that one problem is not serious enough to make the reader understand why a character does one thing or why the action takes a specific turn.

My novel, the literary one, and my novella are retellings of one another. The novella came first. When I wrote it, I didn’t think I’d write anything else, so I felt the need to cram it with every important scene I could think of and to fill it with drama and complications so as to compel the reader. When I wrote the novel, I discovered that some of the scenes in the novella actually belong in the longer work and that the two stories are too similar. At one point, I thought of them as being the same story only one when the protagonist is having a good day and the other when she’s having a bad day. Lately, I’ve discovered that they’re actually two different stories, but I’ll need to do a lot of work on the novella to draw that story out.

Puntitas reads _The Memory Keeper’s Daughter_ by K. Edwards.