November 10, 2009

Ugly Truths in Storytelling

 

An hour ago I was lying comfortably on a sofa covered in hellhounds* and reading an interesting review**.  I am now lying prostrate on the floor moaning woe, woe***.  I hacked my way through to the end of PEGASUS again today—no, restrain your cheers, there’s plenty left to do in the next five† days, I have a list.  I don’t have time to go through it word for word again;  this is the ‘okay, I’ll think about that later’ list, and the ‘must shoehorn this in somewhere’ list.  This latter especially pertains to the stuff I left out because I know the story.  I assume this happens to other writers††:  stuff that seems perfectly obvious to you is not necessarily perfectly obvious to readers who haven’t been living, breathing, sweating and bleeding the story for the last x years.  Merrilee gave me one nasty shock of this sort last week ††† and now Peter—my own husband‡—has given me another one.  ARRRRRGH.  And this is aside from the stuff that was already on my list.

            But Peter’s is a little different.  It’s still to do with the stuff that readers don’t know, but it specifically pertains to my cliffhanger ending.‡‡  His bitterly  unwelcome point, which‡‡‡ alas I must acknowledge as some miniscule trifling weeny bit valid, is that a cliffhanger end of a chapter, or even a part—PEGASUS was originally§ a two-parter, and PEG I now ends with the end of part one—is a significantly different beast from a cliffhanger end of a book.  When the reader can turn the page and keep going you can get away both with more pure flimflam as well as with telling them stuff in the order that suits you, ie after you’ve pushed them over the edge of the ravine rather than before.  You can’t get away with nearly as much of either of these writerly abracadabras when the book ends and the reader gets to sit there thinking about what they’ve been told and what they haven’t. §§

            Frell. 

            Five days. . . . §§§ 

* * *

 * Darkness is much more willing to be a lapdog in cold weather 

** http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/07/enchanted-stories-byatt-book-review   I like Tatar;  I’ve got both her Andersen and her Grimm books.^    Although I don’t understand Tatar declaring that children do not identify with characters in books—this does not seem to me the sort of thing Byatt^^ would get wrong—when I was a kid I pretty much wouldn’t read a book if I couldn’t find someone to identify with, and in my powerful desire to read stories I developed a wonderfully strong and adaptable ability to identify with whichever character I found the most interesting.  Who was almost always a bloke.^^^  If I hadn’t been an identifying-with sort of reader, I might not have grown up to be Robin McKinley, Spinner of Tales of Wild Women.  I might be a glassblower.  I might work for a bank.  I might be counting penguins in Antarctica.^^^^  I might be happy and serene.^^^^^ 

^ Yo, Peter+, you were asking if there were any books I wanted? 

+ Who gave me the Andersen without prompting 

^^ Whose THE CHILDREN’S BOOK is one of those holding down the other side of my bed, but since I found out that Almost Everybody Dies I’ve been looking at it rather warily. 

^^^ This was my thing for Beauty and the Beast.  It was pretty much the only fairy tale I read, growing up in the 50s, where I wanted to identify with the girl. 

^^^^ Speaking of cold 

^^^^^  Snork. That’s even less likely than the bank. 

*** Well, okay, so typing woe, woe.  And I’m not actually lying on the floor either.  Lying on the floor and moaning would absolutely be too much for hellhound self-restraint, which is, as we know, not their long suit.  I was posting something this morning^ when some madman stopped to say hello to them and exclaim over their beauty and charm.  I was busy sticking the envelope through the slot for the first five seconds or so of this meeting so Chaos was already manifesting himself in marked and radical form.  The madman didn’t mind.  He must raise man-eating tigers or something.  How old are they? he said.  Three years, I said, perhaps ruefully.   You mean they’re . . . grown? he said in amazement. 

            Sigh.

 ^ An order for next year’s The [Bell] Ringing World diary, if you want to know.  It’s the little pocket-sized one that lives in my knapsack.  It’s also a whole third again thicker than it needs to be because it has pages and pages of infinitesimally unreadable shorthand of bell methods and other even more crucial items of information you certainly want at your fingertips on a daily basis like First Peals and Record Lengths (over 10,000 changes)+.  This alone takes six pages. 

+ About half of which are on handbells.  Handbells are a tiny minority of specialised nutters within the larger, slightly less nutso tower bell community.  But half of the truly-out-there-nutter super-peals are on handbells?  Hmmmmmmmmmm. 

† AAAAAAUGH 

†† I hope it happens to other writers . . . I don’t want to be dropping balls/plates/oranges/other jugglable things all by myself. 

††† What do you mean why does the heroine turn into a giant Opuntia spinosissima and the hero into a Python reticulatus?  Don’t you know anything about the Pegasus myth? 

‡ My husband and my agent are conspiring against me!  Woe, woe! 

‡‡ My editor said something similar.  My editor and my husband are conspiring against me!    

‡‡‡ Woe, woe!     

§ Yes, like SUNSHINE was originally a short story that ended at the end of part one 

§§ Peter can make it up to me to some minor extent by writing that guest blog^ on his trip to St Andrews that he promised, now that he’s finished ruining PEGASUS for me. 

^ A Further Experiment in the Efficacy of Public Nagging 

§§§ At least I didn’t come away from my voice lesson today looking for a railing to impale myself on.  Although I probably will^ as soon as I do my additional homework, which is to listen to Janet Baker—or Marilyn Horne—singing Che Faro and pay attention.  I can pretty much play the Horne in my head at will^^, but I don’t want to, or I’ll start looking for pointy railings.^^^  Blondel is merciless.  Think about what you’re singing, he says.  ‘What will I do without my Eurydice?^^^^ Where will I go?  Oh, God, answer!’  I want some passion, he says.

            Do you want passion or do you want the notes? I respond with spirit.  You can have one or the other. 

            So I have to listen to someone doing it with passion.  Maybe I could just go in there next week and scream, Agents!  Husbands!  Editors!  Oh Dio!  Rispondi!  Rispondi! 

^ need to start looking, etc 

^^ Complete with the hissy sound of an old LP worn to death by a needle that should have been changed several hundred plays ago, only student and immediate post-student budgets don’t run to stereo needles 

^^^ I’m very grateful that Blondel’s neighbourhood doesn’t go in for iron fencing. 

^^^^ Who’s dead, for those of you who aren’t up on this myth either.

November 10, 2009 | Filed Under critters, music, my books 

comments

Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. -- Gustave Flaubert