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mallorys_cameraThe other noteworthy thing that happened yesterday – well. “Happened” is too intentional a word. Let’s just say coincided with yesterday – is that I am now precisely at the halfway point of my novel, both in word count (60,000) and in terms of plot machinations as outlined in the voluminous (40 pages) treatment I assembled before I actually sat down to write.
I’ve been resisting rewriting. It’s been quite the temptation. I told myself I’d give in when I got to the halfway point.
The supernatural elements have to be ramped up. The point of writing the novel, of course, was to give myself a kind of lifeline in this part of my life that otherwise seems to have no other narrative save hanging on and surviving, but it’s not really worth writing unless it has some commercial possibilities, is it? I’m not a writer who writes to express myself, or else why would I keep an embarrassing journal online? I write to communicate.
The most marketable hook is the supernatural element. I invented a new supernatural character, and gave her an ancient Chinese pedigree: the Shenti. She’s half succubus/half time traveler, a vengeful old woman who’s trying to right the wrongs in her past by conscripting people into her dreams of the past.
The other marketable hook is the characters, who are “real” – the writer John Steinbeck, the cultural anthropologist Joseph “Follow Your Bliss” Campbell, who in the winter of 1932 actually did live next door to each other. Campbell fell in love with Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol. In real life, according to diary entries and letters, they may have participated in some supernatural-tinged encounter in Coral de Tierra.
Not sure how accurate or recognizable the Steinbeck/Campbell portraits are. I did use biographical materials, but only to the extent that they advanced the storyline. I’ve turned Steinbeck into a proud, socially awkward, brooding loner, and Campbell into a privileged prep school boy.
I suppose the third potentially commercial hook is that the novel is about those Chinese fishing villages that lined the coast between Carmel and Watsonville, and then were all burned out in 1906 or thereabouts.
I also threw in an exciting National Treasure sidebar about stolen Treasury coin punches that disappear during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. You know. Just in case Nicolas Cage wants to play John Steinbeck in the movie.
Who reads novels anymore?
Absolutely no one, the occasional blockbuster Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or Harry Potter phenomenon notwithstanding.
So it does not escape me here that I’ve hitched my star to an essentially dead art form. But I do what I do because I’m under a kind of fairy spell. I write obsessively for the same reason that severely autistic individuals like to pound their heads into walls, I suppose.
So. Rewrite: More supernatural. More sex. More… tension. Plot tension is a fucking hard one for me.
I write very close into my characters and some of that is going to have to be lopped off. This isn’t a literary novel, after all.
I’ll spend a month or so rewriting – getting rid of inconsistencies, expanding what needs to be expanded, contracting what needs to be contracted, adding what needs to be added. And then I’ll begin lurching forward again. I’d hoped to be done with the damn thing completely by June when I can leave, but that seems unlikely, doesn’t it?
Novel doesn’t have a name yet which is odd for me. Titles usually come to me first.
I’ve been resisting rewriting. It’s been quite the temptation. I told myself I’d give in when I got to the halfway point.
The supernatural elements have to be ramped up. The point of writing the novel, of course, was to give myself a kind of lifeline in this part of my life that otherwise seems to have no other narrative save hanging on and surviving, but it’s not really worth writing unless it has some commercial possibilities, is it? I’m not a writer who writes to express myself, or else why would I keep an embarrassing journal online? I write to communicate.
The most marketable hook is the supernatural element. I invented a new supernatural character, and gave her an ancient Chinese pedigree: the Shenti. She’s half succubus/half time traveler, a vengeful old woman who’s trying to right the wrongs in her past by conscripting people into her dreams of the past.
The other marketable hook is the characters, who are “real” – the writer John Steinbeck, the cultural anthropologist Joseph “Follow Your Bliss” Campbell, who in the winter of 1932 actually did live next door to each other. Campbell fell in love with Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol. In real life, according to diary entries and letters, they may have participated in some supernatural-tinged encounter in Coral de Tierra.
Not sure how accurate or recognizable the Steinbeck/Campbell portraits are. I did use biographical materials, but only to the extent that they advanced the storyline. I’ve turned Steinbeck into a proud, socially awkward, brooding loner, and Campbell into a privileged prep school boy.
I suppose the third potentially commercial hook is that the novel is about those Chinese fishing villages that lined the coast between Carmel and Watsonville, and then were all burned out in 1906 or thereabouts.
I also threw in an exciting National Treasure sidebar about stolen Treasury coin punches that disappear during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. You know. Just in case Nicolas Cage wants to play John Steinbeck in the movie.
Who reads novels anymore?
Absolutely no one, the occasional blockbuster Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or Harry Potter phenomenon notwithstanding.
So it does not escape me here that I’ve hitched my star to an essentially dead art form. But I do what I do because I’m under a kind of fairy spell. I write obsessively for the same reason that severely autistic individuals like to pound their heads into walls, I suppose.
So. Rewrite: More supernatural. More sex. More… tension. Plot tension is a fucking hard one for me.
I write very close into my characters and some of that is going to have to be lopped off. This isn’t a literary novel, after all.
I’ll spend a month or so rewriting – getting rid of inconsistencies, expanding what needs to be expanded, contracting what needs to be contracted, adding what needs to be added. And then I’ll begin lurching forward again. I’d hoped to be done with the damn thing completely by June when I can leave, but that seems unlikely, doesn’t it?
Novel doesn’t have a name yet which is odd for me. Titles usually come to me first.
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Date: 2012-01-10 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 05:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2012-01-10 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 08:21 pm (UTC)Not true in genre fiction. This is a fantasy/magical realism novel.
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Date: 2012-01-10 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 08:23 pm (UTC)Serious question.
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Date: 2012-01-10 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 08:25 pm (UTC)Thank you! :-)
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Date: 2012-01-10 11:26 pm (UTC)Wasn't there some rivalry with the Italian fishers that burned all those Chinese villages?
Didn't know that about Campbell/Steinbeck.
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Date: 2012-01-10 11:38 pm (UTC)Yep.
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Date: 2012-01-11 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-11 04:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-11 08:57 am (UTC)I still read, but just like Anais said, the internet has led to me reading a lot less than say ten years ago. I like historical novels and criminal fiction, and time-traveling elemets fascinate me as long as they don't follow the story-line of "young woman buys cottage in a picturesque English village and starts to dream/hallucinate about things that hapened to another woman in that place hundreds of years ago". The time-traveling element has to be original.
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Date: 2012-01-12 02:53 pm (UTC)