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Asking Robin more about the writing process
I shouldn’t be this tired. I feel like I must have just reinvented the wheel or something.* And I’m supposed to write a blog entry?**
However I did have an important bit of story delivery today. You can fake around the holes to some extent and for a while, especially if you can feel the main story dragging you on*** but eventually you do need to know certain things. In this case I have a war to direct.† And the particular consignment that arrived today had some fairly critical Background World Development stuff in it: I know this world fairly well at this point†† but I mainly know it as, ahem, I might know it. And I’m not a magician.††† Magic. Feh. If this were your standard swords, archery and leather armour with some chain war, I could just research the freller. As it is I have to wait for somebody to send me something. And you know how delivery companies are.
But I am reminded of some comments to the forum ten days or so ago, in response to The Cluelessness of Writers.
EMoon wrote: I have a character in peril. He may end up dead, or inhabited by a demonic presence, or suspected of same but not inhabited, or fine. I don’t know which it is. I have written all around the critical moments from other viewpoints. I have been inside his head to find out and…when I get near the critical moments there’s a blank . . . not one…single…person will share what’s actually happened. He’s important. . . . But they’re all in hiding from their writer. . . . thus I have to chase that fast-moving blurred shape down a very uninviting hole until I finally catch it and bring it up to the light, squirming in fright and biting my hands. . . .
Yes. Sometimes they bite. Sometimes you’re groping around in the dark and you know you’ve found something because it hurts. YOW YOU LITTLE RATBAG.‡
On the forum I answered: . . . I had one of those GOOD GODS OF COURSE moments out hurtling this morning–about some other story than PEG II of course, but it’s one that I even know the shape of . . . ‡‡ and there has been something Not Quite Right about it . . . which I think I now know. Where has it BEEN all this time? And what finally flushed it out where I could see it? (Actually . . . Pooka did the flushing. Which I hope means she IS in fact a force for good in this universe. There have been moments when I wonder. And I’m sure there will be MORE such moments.‡‡‡)
Aaron wrote: So I gather it is not always seeing new action that resolves these matters. Sometimes you realize you know something that you hadn’t realized you knew, perhaps because you asked yourself a different question. Do you also do detective work on the things you have seen? As if watching a mystery movie over again to see if you missed a clue?
Both ‘seeing’ and ‘action’ are mutable concepts.§ In this case it was more of a kaleidoscope turn: somebody moved the endpiece and all those same flecks and fragments fell into a new pattern. Eureka! Sometimes—as in this case—there is an almost physical jolt to it—like having something bite your hand in the dark.
Sometimes it is a kind of seeing that there’s been a cat curled up on the cushion all this time and it’s your own fault for thinking it was just a shadow—but cats are treacherous, and maybe it wasn’t there the last time you looked. –Don’t give me that fat purring sleepy-eyed thing.
I wouldn’t call it detective work, the way I do it, which sounds much too calm and rational. It’s more like looking for the car key (which is supposed to live in your pocket for just this reason) when you’re about to be late for an appointment, or trying to get your shoes tied while being cavorted on by a brace of happy hellhounds looking forward to their walk. It’s got to be here somewhere/aaaugh I can’t see what I’m doing if you’re licking my glasses. But going over and over stuff you already know—you think you know—you hope you know but you know you’ve missed something? Yes. Very much so.
Diane in MN quoted me: Meanwhile I’m well over halfway through PEG II and I still don’t know if Fazuur is a good guy or a bad guy. And this is starting seriously to get on my nerves.
And wrote: Do you find that this is a character who wants to grow as the story has grown? Given that you say he hasn’t been an important character yet, is he trying to become one? I can see that if you don’t know his ultimate role, he could really affect the arc of the story by becoming a bigger presence.
Oh, arc of the story, please, you’re going all rational again. The arc of the story is one of those hindsight things for me. Climaxes, for example—and all of PEGs I & II began with a climax that comes I think about halfway through PEG II—are merely the Really Exciting Bits that I don’t get to write unless I write all the stuff around them so they’ll be climactic enough. The pulling down of a mountain on someone’s head§§—which is where SWORD started—wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if it hadn’t taken over two hundred pages to get there. There are writers who plan extensively—there are even writers who follow their extensive plans—I’m not one of them. The nice way of describing my lack of method is to call it organic: I write as the thing grows. It grows longer as it goes through drafts, and there are always the bits you know, the bits you don’t know, the bits you wished you knew, and the bits that you think you know and don’t. Fazuur is a bit I wish I knew and don’t. The fact that it’s bothering me that I don’t know is probably significant—like one of those hunches fictional detectives get just before they uncover an important clue. But whether Fazuur has a significant role to play . . . ask me at the end of the third draft. When I’m handing it in to my editor. I should know by then. I hope.
* * *
*The elimination process that involves dragging all those things that aren’t wheels is really hard work. It was a very thorough elimination process. And my condition has been intensified by my being too stupid not to go to Colin’s bell practice tonight—which for arcane reasons, was held in his garage. No, really. He has a mini-ring, which is to say a bunch of bells the size of flower-pots hung upside down above the specially-soundproofed ceiling of his garage (and under the specially soundproofed roof of his garage: there are neighbours). And they (the bells) have (teeny) ropes with (teeny) sallies on them and everything. But because the bells are so small and the wheels they turn on are also so small, your stroke—which is dependent on the rope going round the wheel to spin the bell—is very short. So your bells are making their 360 degree turns forward and back really fast. Which means you are ringing whatever method you are ringing really fast. And I can’t handle the flighty little monsters, they keep going grand battement SPROING at me—and because they’re all so little they sound way too much alike, dingdingdingdingding, so picking out the sound of your own bell or the treble for guidance is not an option—let alone ring the wretched things at twice the usual proper-big-tower-bell speed.
They didn’t quite put me out on the kerb after practise for the dustbin men to take away tomorrow morning, but nearly.
** Remind me what that is again? I believe I do it every night? Is it anything like falling asleep in the bath?
*** Author as square wheel
† I was really hoping I wasn’t going to have to run any more wars. Two^ of the several Third Damar Novels have fairly comprehensive wars in them, which are among my reasons for not having got round to writing them. Damar seems to be a curiously bellicose place.
^ Probably three.
†† !!!!!!!! How do people survive writing series?????
††† In this world. There have been worlds I could do magic in. Ahem.
‡ I think I’ve mentioned here that there are, as there always are, stories that I don’t dare let loose my feverish grip on PEG II long enough even to write down rough outlines of^ hanging around TORMENTING me. One of them, which I know I’ve mentioned, presumably here because where else is there^^, is about a middle-aged soldier who unexpectedly survived the assassination attempt she knew was coming, and now has to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. While she’s escaping further would-be murderers, since it seems ungrateful to let them get her after all, various of her old colleagues catch her up and say ‘I’m coming too’. The king who wants her dead is not popular. She’s perhaps a little cranky^^^ about picking up an entourage. . . . And now there’s a baby. A what? Her feeling exactly. And mine. I strongly object to being kept awake nights by the screams of a fictional baby I’m not even writing about.
^ I belong to the philosophy that says that if it’s important, it’ll either stick around or come back. And if it comes back as something else, that’s okay too.
^^ The idea of multiple blogs—which, for example, EMoon herself keeps—is more horrible than vampires to me.
^^^ Now, where would that have come from
‡‡ Tam Lin, in case you’re interested. It’s a sort of . . . long short story. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Short stories are a little like wars. I know going in I’m in trouble. Although the first draft of this one exists, and it is a short story. Well, maybe a novella. . . .
‡‡‡ Er. Yes.
§ I want, irrationally, to call them verbs. Which is perhaps a minor metaphor for the peculiarity of the writing process.
§§ Please admire my lack of spoiler here, although I’d be surprised if there are any regular readers of this blog who don’t know THE BLUE SWORD.
Interview
It’s not even 4 pm yet. What am I doing posting? Makes me feel like the world is on backwards.
However. Lucy, as she told me she would, hung her interview early so I will briefly drag my concentration away from PEG II and post the link. Here: http://scribblecitycentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/mythic-friday-interview-number-21-robin.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
I didn’t get it to her till slightly past the last minute thanks to the awkward timing of stomach flu, so we didn’t have a chance to confer. And I notice that my tendency to extreme typography didn’t make it through the email gremlin filter* when I sent my answers. Regular readers of this blog I feel however will have no difficulty reading unmarked emphases in for themselves.
And I promised you some Beguiling News, didn’t I? Mmmmm. . . .
Oh, who tells secrets at four o’clock in the afternoon? Flapdoodle. I’ll tell you later.**
* * *
* That’s filters of gremlins, you know, not filters to remove gremlins
** More mwa ha ha ha ha. Although in truth only a minority of you will be interested. But I’m interested.
The Cluelessness of Writers
One of the minor ratbaggeries of writing a second book—note I am resisting calling it a sequel: as I keep saying, over and over and over*, it’s the second part of the same story, there’s no ‘sequel’ about it—that takes up where a first book left off, is that I can’t post snippets of it without giving too much of the show away. But I was reading through some of the earlier bits of PEG II** with some of the stuff I’ve been writing about writing lately still rustling around in the back of my mind, and it occurred to me that I could post this bit as a demonstration of how little in control, and how traumatically clueless writers often are.
Anyone who either reads this blog or has read the cover copy for PEGASUS knows the set up: humans and pegasi share some landscape, but can only communicate through human magicians—or in some cases pegasi shamans, but that’s a lot rarer for various reasons. To try and support this clearly doomed alliance, where the two parties can’t frelling talk to each other, there is a ritual called ‘binding’, where members of royalty and a few more high-ranking families on both sides are ‘bound’, one human to one pegasus. There’s a (ahem) fairy tale that bound pairs can sometimes communicate better than unbound humans and pegasi—but it’s mostly a fairy tale. Until my heroine, Sylvi, comes along and finds that she can speak to her pegasus, Ebon. This causes a major uproar, especially among certain of the magicians, who see their power base being knocked out from under them.
Bound pairs have a Speaker assigned to them: a magician who will translate for them. In the following scene, the dramatis personae include Danacor, heir to the throne and Sylvi’s big brother; Andovan, one of the chief magicians, although magicianry is technically democratic; Erendica and Cral are advisors to the king, Lrrianay is the pegasus king, and Fazuur is the king’s (or kings’) Speaker. Oh, and there’s a war. . . .
* * *
The first battle, and the first real blood, came as a shock, although they had been expecting it—had known it to be inevitable. There had been skirmishes before, but soldiers had always patrolled for and killed taralians and norindours and the other dangerous things that came out of the wild lands. It had been possible merely to think that there were more skirmishes than usual, more dangerous invaders needing to be driven back or killed; and there was always risk, dealing with those invaders. . . .
The message came first by the royal homing bird, the tastock, bred to be docile, to have messages tied round its legs, and to fly home as quickly as it could. The domestic tastock was larger and stronger than the common carrier pigeon, and the flash of blue on the underside of its tail identified it further, and if it was very close you could see the small pale bandage of a message wrapped around one or both of its legs. In the very earliest days of Danacor riding out at the head of a regiment and wearing the Sword—before anyone was using the word ‘war’, at least not aloud, or in the king’s hearing—Sylvi had begun to watch the skies anxiously for the familiar shape of a homing tastock. She had moved the big table in her study nearer the window for a better view; when she raised her eyes from her work to rest them from close reading, she thought, she might as well be looking for something.
She had seen this one fly in. She had seen it because she could not concentrate, and was doing more staring than reading. Andovan had brought a report to her father the night before that something was happening—some discernable flare of energy and intent—was occurring on the northwestern boundary, which was where Danacor was; but he and his fellow magicians could not say what it was, only that it was strongly marked. Too strong to be a mere skirmish. . . .
A tastock coming home from the western border would go past her window, because for something that could fly over the palace roof this was the short cut to the mews. She had seen the small flying dot before it was possible to have any idea what it was; but it also flew as if it were following a straight line, which few birds did. She watched it, fascinated, sure she knew what it was; but she waited, as if it were some kind of game, and she had to count to a hundred, or wait for the shout of release, till it flew past her window. She saw the broad slate-brown wings and the flash of blue under the tail, and then she was running out of her rooms and down to stairs to her father’s office, an interested hound or two in her wake, to be there when someone from the mews brought the message.
“Tastock,” she said breathlessly, when her father answered “Come” to her rather pre-emptory knock on the door—she saw one of the footmen on the outer door turn to look at her as she burst through. Erendica was with the king, as were Cral—and Lrrianay and Fazuur.
“Fetch the queen,” said her father to the footman who had appeared in the door behind Sylvi.
“If you can find her,” said Cral. When the queen wasn’t out on patrol herself, she was taking up some of the slack of running the country left by the king’s necessary preoccupation with maps and soldiers. And she liked to see things with her own eyes when she could. She might be anywhere.
“She’ll be in the Great Court,” said the king. “I thought it as well she stay close today, in case there was news. I—I dreamed about the Sword last night.”
Everyone else in the room went very still. Except for the Sword, and the traditional folk charms the hedge-witches knew, magic was left to magicians. Everyone was a little afraid of the Sword.
So did I, thought Sylvi. I dreamed about the Sword. I couldn’t see who was carrying it—their horse was brown, but whether bay or chestnut I couldn’t tell; it was in open woodland, and the shadows fell strangely. Danny rides a chestnut. I could see that the creatures facing him—facing the Sword—didn’t want to get close to it, whoever was holding it. It glittered like it does when Dad touches it. I didn’t know it would do that when someone was really using it—was ready to use it—not just for a ritual—or when it’s hanging on the wall, like it was bored. I wonder if it gets bored?
For a moment again there was a long narrow twisting blue gleam seeming to hang in the air before her eyes. She blinked and it was gone. I didn’t sleep very well, she thought. It’s why I was gaping out the window a lot. And because I guess I knew there’d be a tastock today. Her eyes refocused on the room around her, and discovered Fazuur staring at her.
* * *
Here’s the clueless writer part: Fazuur, as the king’s Speaker, is a fairly important figure, although he hasn’t been an important character—so far. Magicians as a group are under some suspicion—and the chief villain of the piece is a magician, and it’s not necessarily clear who all is on his side. Meanwhile I’m well over halfway through PEG II and I still don’t know if Fazuur is a good guy or a bad guy. And this is starting seriously to get on my nerves.
PS: I’m also really ticked off about the tastock. The tastock is one of the casualties of my chopping PEGASUS into two books, and when I tidied up the end of PEG I I forgot about the dratted tastock, and mentioned carrier pigeons. Arrrgh.
* * *
* Now supported by you semi-lucky people who have already read it, and fallen over the cliff at the end.
** With a praiseworthy desire not to re-invent characters who already exist under other names. I keep wanting to spell the king’s best friend’s name Kral, for example. And the copyeditor to PEG I caught me trying to rename his pegasus. With the magic of technology at my beck and call I have begun trying to remember to select and TURN EYECATCHINGLY RED everybody’s names in PEG II—everybody but a dozen or so of the main characters which even I should be able to remember by now—but this requires that I remember to do it which when I’m in the white heat or even the dull-copper glow of getting words down on paper^ I frequently don’t remember.
^er—screen
More Ask Robins (also more bell ringing)
I’m just back from ringing at South Desuetude. I seem to be ringing six times this week—having warmed up for this Iditarod by ringing twice yesterday. Hmm. I’m not sure how this happened.* Despite the fact that I’m now being egged on by the likes of Southdowner and B_twin and Ajlr, I try to keep it down to three times a week. Four at the outside. Oh, well, arithmetic was never my strong point, and six is really a lot like three, right? It has a lot in common with three. They’re like soulmates. So it’s okay really.
Meanwhile I have both Fiona and Computer Men coming tomorrow and am feeling a trifle stressed at the prospect of all that adroit, laudable productivity, so I thought I’d organise my wandering mind this evening over a few Ask Robins.
Now that we know what mik-bars taste like, how about malak? As it is milky with spices, I’ve always imagined it to be something like chai, but I may be off-base.
I hesitate to reveal the truth. I have been debating how best to describe it so that not everyone but a few hippie-drippies and food despots who think that carob is an acceptable replacement for chocolate will run away screaming.
Malak tastes like what grain coffee would taste like if grain coffee tasted good. Except that it certainly has caffeine** in it, which is maybe why it tastes good. But it has that deep dark bitter—good bitter—quality that both tea and coffee do in their different ways. And you can make it strong or less strong—like tea, coffee, and grain coffee—and you can put milk and sugar or honey and spices in it if you want to, like tea and coffee and grain coffee. I, of course, prefer it terrifyingly strong. There are also different kinds—like tea and coffee, etc.
I’ve meant to find out more about how and where it’s produced, but I haven’t got round to it yet. Have I told you that Perlith isn’t dead? He didn’t die in the battle in front of the city***. Aerin finds him some years later, working on a farm in the Hills, having lost his memory as a result of the fever from the Northern poison in the wounds he received in that battle. Anyway, he may be working on a malak plantation.
I’ve just finished “Fire”. Very nice, all of it.
Thank you!
Are there plans for novel based on “First Flight”, she asked wistfully?
Sigh. I wish. I badly want to know Ralas’ history, as well as what happens to Ern and Dag and Hereyta and Sippy and the rest. But I don’t do plans. I write what comes. I always know a lot more about a story than what gets written down, but in First Flight’s case while I can feel that it has a future, I don’t know much about it.
I do know another short-story’s worth of what happens to Miri and Flame. I hope I get a chance to write it down.† Meanwhile however I’m a trifle preoccupied by the fact that I still don’t know how PEG II ends. I keep reminding myself that I often don’t know how my books are going to end—and that drastic stuff may change right up through the final draft. But it’s a lot scarier somehow when book one is already out there. I’m just hoping all these frelling road markers saying, This way! This way, you moron!, know what they’re talking about.
But this more or less leads me to:
So since “there is no sequel for Sunshine”, would you tell us a bit more from what you know about Mel. Is he a sorcerer? Where and why did he get his tattoos? How does he feel about the lack of communication between himself and Sunshine. How much has he guessed of what Sunshine is not telling him. Is there any chance he and Sunshine could start talking to each other? If they really started talking to each other, would he be able to help Sunshine with her magic?
Um. No, I’m not going to answer any of this. These sorts of queries always make me scratch my head. I’ve said—often—that I’d love to write a sequel to SUNSHINE. If one ever arrives††. Why would I give away the good story material I am in possession of, when I may yet need it for a good story?
But yeah. I want to know more about Mel’s history too. I do know the answer to the sorcerer question, and about his tattoos, but no I’m not going to tell you. Which is actually your best hope that there might be another book with him in it some day, because Mel in my story-mind has that warm, live, twisty feeling of something there. Something that needs storytelling.
What are your feelings on the literary device of one story being told in separate books, each book written from the point of view of different characters within the story? Does the possibility exist for a Constantine novel–his backstory with or without his point of view of the events of Sunshine?
The literary device doesn’t appeal to me much. I’m pretty simple-minded at heart, and I’m interested in the story and the people in the story as something that feels whole, however much of it may be missing or left out. And I mostly want the telling of it to feel transparent—while I’m a big fan of style, and nothing throws me out of a story faster than sheer awful writing, as soon as the style starts calling attention to itself, the story loses me. Beautiful writing only remains beautiful so long as it doesn’t demand the reader stop and say, wow! What an amazing paragraph/scene/chapter! In hindsight I may want to reread something because it is ravishingly written, but when I’m reading a story I want the story, and I don’t want anything in the way. My idea of real style is when the story grows up all around you and you see and hear and smell it, and you’re no longer sitting in a chair (or lying in a hot bath) with a book in your hands.
Breaking it up into a bunch of different characters’ versions, in sections or separate volumes, is usually way too calculatedly look-at-me! for this reader. I haven’t read many of these books because I know my attitude is bad. One that got a huge amount of critical and popular success a few years ago bored me to tears because it was so in love with its own cleverness. Which is another thing I don’t like about them, when it’s all about the unreliable narrator. Unreliable narrators when they’re a genuine part of the story—and arguably every book told in first person is partly about its unreliable narrator, and this would definitely include SUNSHINE if you’re choosing to look at it that way—are fine, and you-the-reader get to have opinions about both the character and the story she tells. But I don’t want to keep doing this over and over. What am I, a judge? Just tell me the story and go away, okay?
Mind you, this is just me.††† But no, I don’t much like multiple tellings. And while as a writer whose stories often like playing games with my head‡ I try not to make categorical statements that I will be made to eat later on, I think it’s highly unlikely I’d find myself writing a story from Con’s point of view.
Oh, gods, what is that cackling noise. A sort of goblin-laughter kind of noise. . . .
* * *
* Although Niall was involved. Well, of course. I knew last Wednesday would give him ideas. And one of his ideas is more handbells tomorrow at his house. I said yes partly because it will help take my mind off no voice lesson for the second week in a row—and the miserable prospect of my last-ever lesson with Blondel next Tuesday. I still have the cherub’s phone number in my hip-pocket paper notebook^ but I haven’t tried ringing it yet.
^ No, not in Apocalypse. That would make it serious, if I put his number in Apocalypse.
** Or equivalent. I’ll have to ask someone. It’s the sort of thing Jack Dedham might know.
*** At the end of THE HERO AND THE CROWN, for those of you who haven’t read it, and are floundering.
† She gets a boyfriend.
†† And I still startle at the sort of whistling noise that might be the sound of a large paper packet^ popping into existence in this world and zooming for my door. Mind you, most of its contents are all the rules and conditions in pages and pages of tiny print and subclauses and you still have to write the story. But it means you can. And the Story Council are total ratbags. I’ve taken delivery on both the new short story about Miri and a totally rogue one about a beat-up middle-aged army commander who narrowly escapes an assassination attempt—her king thinks she and her rag-bag regiment are both too popular and too loyal to each other—which she knew was coming, and, having escaped by unexpected means, has to figure out what to do with the rest of her frelling life. One of these days the whistling noise could still be the sequel to SUNSHINE. Damar, at this point, just has to get in the queue.
^ The Story Council is so retro
††† I’m not even hugely fond of different narrators telling a single story once, although there are plenty of good ones out there. Hey, DRACULA, for example.
‡ See: still don’t know how PEG II ends
Ask Robin on a Monday
So I rang a very nice touch of Stedman Doubles tonight at Old Eden where the calls were all in weird places (which is something that happens with frelling Stedman*) and I had to perform both cats’ ears and coathangers** and I did it all*** and I feel all flushed with success.† And this morning wasn’t half bad either.†† So while I’m feeling as if I have the answers to everything††† I thought I’d tackle an Ask Robin.
My question is about characters’ names. I’ve tried writing some fantasy stories, so I know how hard it can be to come up with new, mythical-sounding names. But when you do it, there seems to be a system to the names. What I mean is that although the names are completely made up, groups of names fit the cultures/countries they are in. I’m thinking particularly of the Damar names, where the names all fit the Damarian culture and linguistic sound, even though the culture and the names are all fictional. Do you have a system for coming up with names? I heard from one writer that he takes common names and re-invents their spelling so that they look exotic. Do you do anything like that? Or do they just come to you?
At least some of the answer to this is somewhere on the web site, but I can’t find it. I would have sworn it was in the FAQ under one of those general writery questions, but . . . I can’t find it. Arrgh. So if this looks kind of familiar to you and you can find it . . . will you please tell me where it is?
I’m also amused that the asker says ‘groups of names fit the cultures/countries they are in’. Yaay. Success. One of the biggest, hairiest challenges about writing fantasy or science fiction is making your ‘imaginary’ countries and creatures feel real, feel like a consistent whole—or an inconsistent one, for that matter, the way the sometimes-more-and-sometimes-less consensual reality we live in here is so often drastically inconsistent.
But much of Damar is a fairly unified culture—as are Balsinland and Rhiandomeer in PEGASUS—and so the names, the rituals and traditions, the habits and history, need to feel as if they hang together: they need to look and smell and taste and sound right. What an appalling prospect. I am so grateful I’m not making this stuff up.
Now I have said in the FAQ that I don’t make this stuff up: it’s more like it happens to me. This is not to say it’s easy; it isn’t.‡ First there’s the trying to take notes in the whirlwind aspect: even if you manage to hang onto your notebook‡‡ you may be picked up and thrown several hundred or several thousand miles off-course . . . possibly even into the wrong frelling story. Well, what you think is the wrong frelling story. There is also a good bit of Helen Keller at the water-pump: you know there’s a world out there, and there’s this new person who keeps following you around and won’t leave you alone, but what is she trying to tell you?
But if you’re a storyteller and this is your story, you’ll eventually make the connections you need to make, and start looking and listening and feeling around in the dark for the stuff you need to know. I literally‡‡‡ see and hear a lot of the background to a story—mostly in way too dazzling detail—and which frequently doesn’t fit together, and then I have to try to figure out why it doesn’t fit together, or skip that bit as beyond me.§ I hear most of the major characters’ names—and when I’m lucky, most of the minor ones’ too—by the simple expedient of hanging around listening to them talking to each other. Eventually they’ll call each other by name. I heard Ebon’s name just the way it happened to Sylvi: They really don’t tell you anything, do they? I’ve known you were Sylvi forever. My name is Ebon. Sylvi’s own name bothered me for months—I was sure (I was almost sure) I was hearing it right, but there was still something wrong. It wasn’t till I heard her spoken to in some formal ritual or other—and I don’t even remember which one—that I found out it was short for Sylviianel, and then I felt a lot better.
Occasionally I cannot, cannot, cannot hear someone’s name, and then I do have to try to make it up, based on what fragments or nicknames§§ I am hearing, and what I have by then learnt about the language. But I hate this. I’m always sure I’m wrong.
My jaw drops at ‘I heard from one writer that he takes common names and re-invents their spelling so that they look exotic.’ My reaction is totally ewwww. But every writer is different. If I found myself doing that I’d be certain I was in the wrong story and start looking around for a whirlwind to catapult me somewhere else. But this is only the way I work; if that’s what works for him, and he gets good stories out of it, then that’s all that matters.
Good stories are what matter. Write that down.
* * *
* It has to do with the fact that the treble, which in most methods has an easier path through the maze, moves just like all the other working bells, which in Stedman is a very maze-like track indeed.
** Sic. It has to do with what the line looks like on the page. Cats’ ears actually do look like a kid’s drawing of a cat’s ears. Coathangers don’t look anything like coathangers.
*** We will not get into the total frelling mess I made of ringing the four to Very Little Bob. The four squats in the middle of the pattern making thirds and fourths while the other five bells do fancy dances around her. The point is supposed to be that it will teach me what thirds and fourths feel like, which will help my Cambridge, which has lots of thirds and fourths in it. Wrong. It just felt like a really really bad bit of Cambridge that went on and on.
† The hellhounds even ate dinner again. Gaah. Last night we had some lamb mince left over so I put it in their supper. Aaaugh! What is this! What are you doing to us! Death! Poison! Betrayal! Goblins! Darkness eventually got over it. Chaos didn’t. Next generation of domestic fauna it’s goldfish. Plastic goldfish.
†† We had a special service for some saint or other at Old Eden. I spent most of it on the five, which, of all Old Eden’s possessed-by-demons bells, is the worst. But we were only ringing simple stuff so no one noticed that the five and I were locked in an epic battle for mastery. This is almost as great a triumph as a touch of Stedman Doubles.
††† Possibly even how PEG II ends. I said possibly.
‡ Ringing the fifth bell at Old Eden is a doddle in comparison.
‡‡ Or your laptop
‡‡‡ If ‘literally’ bothers you, feel free to choose your own adverb. ‘Madly’ might do. Or ‘obstinately’.
§ Note: sigh. It happens. Or anyway it happens to me.
§§ ‘Yo! Dumbhead!’
