I have been watching Doctor Who's S3 and got one of my rare hankerings to write proper fanfic, all short and contextual and everything. Because (a) Tennant's performance impressed me that much and (b) I can never resist meditations on mortality and identity.

The Cry of Man - S3x09, "Family of Blood". You all knew John Smith would have to bite it, that's not a spoiler. Off he goes. No warnings that I can think of.

Scratched that itch.

Chapter 11, A Harsh and Dreadful Thing, is available for your perusal in the usual location. [Read from the beginning.]

It feels good to be alive.

It's been what, a year? Almost? I got sidetracked by other writing projects, including one that was HUGE and came very near to completion, but I learned my lesson about serious collaboration with other writers (LESSON: Don't). It went kaboom, and while I'm still trying to gather up the fragments of it into something useful, I'm also ready to head back into this.

There are certain benefits to starting again after so long: my notes have been wiped from my HD twice over after computer problems, as have my crappy versions of chapters and my big File O' Mystery Meat where I put quotes and cut paragraphs that I love and so on. All that stuff can get to be stringy and tough with overcooking, so just as well that it's gone.

So this morning I'm rereading what I wrote and (largely) haven't reread for many months, with some interesting results. Mostly I notice how heavy I was hitting the homosexuality angle, although it wasn't intentional; I remember being a little bored with stories that did that, and worrying that it came out of nowhere when I wrote it in. But not so much. There is gay all the way through, just not the popular slashy kind.

As always, I wish I could go back over it and take the story in better, saner directions. I'm a little appalled at how much I piled onto the engine of the plot, but WE SHALL MANAGE SOMEHOW. I'm more excited by it than I thought I'd be. The project lives again; see you when I have a proper update.

I've been having a lot of trouble with this story. I wasn't sure how exactly I wanted/needed things to unfold, which is (partly) why this chapter took so long. After awhile, just the fact that it was difficult was becoming a problem, and I needed to just get it OUT and move on. It was either release this chapter as is or give up on writing this story.

So this chapter is ugly, like a boxcutter-and-ballpoint-pen tracheotomy is ugly. But it has saved the story's life. I can keep going now, hopefully with a bit more style and insouciance and such.

This is the weird thing about writing this way; you're not reading a first draft, but you're not reading something polished and completed either. If I were presenting you with something finished, I probably wouldn't talk about it so much -- I wouldn't spend as much time defending my intentions and explaining myself, and I'd just figure that if people didn't get it then I LOSE as the writer. And you might as well be a good loser. But we're a bit earlier on in the process, so I talk to you guys.

Chapter 10: Let the Watchman Count on Daybreak

Read from the beginning

I am also, foolishly, allowing RPing to soak up a considerable amount of writing time. It's an odd and unfamiliar way to tell stories, for me, and it's also strange to have other people effectively hanging over your shoulder and asking, in OOC brackets, why you're doing this and whether your character would know that and when another character should jump in.

I'm also bemused by the fact that sometimes it doesn't go anywhere. Whereas I would just abort a scene in which two characters aren't doing anything, in an RP people let it play out. The final product is not structured, may not have a unifying theme, and may in fact be boring for other people to read. But sometimes the loose, messy results of multiple RP sessions really are interesting.

Another weird and frustrating thing: you have no access to notes on characters other than your own! No other players know your internal rationales either! People don't always tell you the plot, or not all of it! Your character may, or may not, actually matter to the story!

It is all freaky. I'm enjoying it. I also feel bad about neglecting my real projects. I'm rather stuck on a plot point in THL at the moment, so I'm taking it on faith that work on one writing project always amplifies the others (this is true, I've found) and plot-knots resolve themselves in time.

So, y'know, give me some time.

(If you're actually interested, you can check out negability and my character, the teenage reincarnation of the Roman poet Juvenal. It's a fun RP.)

Man, this is why left-brained people shouldn't be allowed to do basically anything. Put them all in camps, I say. No, I have not thought this opinion through. That's not how I roll.

I used to believe every word of these methods, because I had no confidence in my own ability to plot. I still don't consider plotting my greatest strength, but I'm better. That's mostly because it has finally gotten through my head that:

(a) rigorous, airtight plotting like this guy promotes is not necessary for every sort of story. Look at motherfucking Hamlet. Is it meticulously plotted? Not really. Will even seems to have forgotten some crucial story details between the first and fifth acts. He certainly could do intricate plotting, as the comedies show. It just wasn't necessary for Hamlet, because the external events are not really why the story is good. So who the fuck cares how Hamlet got back from England? Pirates, what the hell. You know you're still going to stick around to see what this brilliant crazy hot tortured Danish prince is going to do, and more importantly, what he's going to THINK, what he's going to SAY. Plot is not story. Plot is story's bitch.

(b) there are broken stories and then there are BROKEN stories. This physicist nerd rightly points out that you can easily waste tons of time on a meandering draft before you figure out that the story is just fucked. But. There is a point right in the middle of a difficult plot where the thing seems impossibly tangled, and that point is when you really do have to stick it out. Aphanes certainly can't be accused of having a convoluted plot, but in the middle of it I was convinced that I couldn't fix it, couldn't write a convincing ending for it. But the unconscious will work this stuff out, and with a sudden pop everything falls into place and you don't see what was so difficult about it. And your unconscious cannot do this sort of work before you've started the draft. Fuck you, it just can't. Characters act completely different in outlines than they do in drafts. They promise to behave and do logical things and be very respectable, and you're all, "Okay, if you're sure the NYTBR will like you, then I guess we'll do this thing." Then before you know it they're pulling ridiculous shit and you send them to a party with their best friends and they start strangling each other and your outline is useless.

So the upshot of all that is that if you don't start off on the page with the real people and the real story, you don't give your brain a chance to solve those unsolvable problems. I used to reject stories just on the basis of, "Oh, I love this, but I can't make a coherent plot out of it. So I won't start writing it."

Sometimes you do invest the time and you find out that the story really was fucked. I have been writing terminally broken stories since I was 14 so I know whereof I speak. This is just tough titties and you'll have to hope you can reuse the characters/situations/sex scenes in something else. Usually you can.

In summary: plot is for geeks and story is easy. It happens all the time.

I had to break one giant ream of action into two chapters, even though I usually prefer to have them all much the same length (this lets me pretend I am Dickens, all getting paid a penny a word and published serially). So today we have Chapter 9, Under the Microscope [way to put the wrong link in, ed.], and in a week or two you should have another shortish chapter.

Words OpenOffice didn't know:
keepaway
BJ's
disruptors
philia

Words I'm surprised it did know:
Manichee

[Read from the beginnning.]

stjeandedieu is where I'll be posting notes, meta, and other fic-related stuff that I don't want to lose and which might interest fans and/or other writers. I've had enough of rooting through my HD looking for a document that I (a) deleted in a fit of byte-parsimoniousness, (b) actually wrote on a different computer, (c) only dreamed that I wrote in the first place, (d) wrote on a napkin and neglected to transcribe. I'm committed to being a little bit more organised, and having people looking over my shoulder helps. That said, a lot of stuff will be private and the rest will be friends-locked.

The writing process is absolutely fascinating to me, and I'd join in a minute if some other writer I liked did this, so I'm going to try not to be too apologetic about it.

Dammit, I can't find the metafandom link whence the discussion started, but a week or two ago (I am always behind) people were talking about scene length and chapter length. [EDIT: Found it! here] This is always interesting stuff [to me, anyway] because writing on the Internet is such a very different animal from writing on paper. Open your favourite contemporary novel sometime and count the following:

words in a line
lines on a page
pages in a chapter

Average and multiply. You'll be shocked, I think, if you grew up writing online. Way back in the late nineties I remember articles on Zeldman/ALA talking about how reading on the computer strains your eyes or something and so you have to be concise and have lovely clear typography. Eight years later this sounds a bit like medieval science, but the fact is that people just write less to a piece that has its genesis in the online world. Wee babbies who've read more fic than I have Dickens will bug their eyes out after they do the word count exercise, and wonder, "What on earth are they WRITING, to fill that many words? What am I not seeing?"

Because the weird part is that a fic of 2,000 words really does feel long and luxurious. And a short story of the same length will be a bit more like a Tofutti Cutie--very nice, but not particularly satisfying. On paper you rather want the entire banana split.

Writers have known for a long time that what feels interminable to us is just a paragraph that the reader probably skims in a second. Writing speeches is hell for the same reason. While James Joyce apocryphally struggled with seven words, the reader is trolling along at a good clip in search of the lede, the hott sexings, the prettiest simile.

So the answer is this: fandom is made up of writers, who toiled over their drabbles for a WHOLE MATH PERIOD, and these writers are also readers who devoured the source material for the hott sexings.

I'm not inclined to say that this is all awesome and indicative of an exciting new form, perfect and jewel-like as some ancient Zen thing where you use a single raisin to [FILL THIS BIT IN LATER -ed.] We are Westerners and when we see a fic that is 87 words long we treat it as disposable. If we want to write something good, we need to put the time in and say more than we think we're saying.

------------

In a less didactic vein, one of my favourite things in fiction is the extended narrative-in-dialogue. (This probably has some name of its own, but I'm a philosophy/Classics major now so I don't know it.) Yes, it's unrealistic--no one ever gets through a long story in real life without interruptions, forgetting the important parts, going off on tangents, or leaving out the unimportant but delightful details. The Victorians abused this device terribly. I don't care.

My top dialogue narratives:
- Reuven's father talking about the Baal Shem Tov in The Chosen. I don't know why this one springs first to mind, but it does. Chaim Potok is just that good. Reuven's gentle, professorial father drinking glasses of tea and talking about the Hasidim, about a terrible genius, about religious fervour, and asking his son repeatedly if he's boring him--you could read just that section and you would have the entire novel in miniature.

- Frankenstein's monster describing his life. I'm not one of those people who sympathises much with the monster--I felt for Dr Frankenstein himself, the tortured creator, who learned ethics too late. But the improbable Victorian zaniness of the articulate monster and the little melodrama of the blind old man and his daughter is fabulous.

- Mr Enfield's story of encountering Mr Hyde, at the very beginning of Stevenson's novel. I had to get the book to look up the name of the storyteller, but the tale itself is what I always think of when I think about what made Victorian novels good, when they were good. That door under its "blind forehead of discoloured wall" and Hyde's trampling of the little girl, which immediately and brutally remove all the romance and glamour from the idea of an evil man. Movie adaptations have never understood that, of course. Did any of them even show that scene? I can't remember right now, which probably means they didn't. It would be hard to forget a scene where a grown man tramples a little girl. "It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see."

[I think I mention those two novels in almost every book list I make. I should write a gooey entry sometime about why those creaky old monster novels are so much better than The Mill on the Floss or Gravity's Rainbow or any of that shit.]

{{Also, for the record, they're very short novels--The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is really just a novella. So I'm not saying that fans need to churn out tomes of hundreds of pages, necessarily.}}

Anyway, yes, I did just write one of these into Heart's Landscape, an 1,100 word story in a 2,500 word scene. So word counts and stylised dialogue are on my mind.

_________________________
Oh man, read this stuff. This will open your eyes, if you've never thought very much about how Writers Write When They Are Not Writers Who Write Just For the Sake of Writing But Also For Money. The kind of people who call it "content", I mean.

The long-awaited Chapter 8, Snakes and Ladders, is done. Don't blame me, blame capitalism and Tim Horton (God rest his soul).

Words OpenOffice didn't know:
hypomanic
schoolbuses
tabarnaq
tahini

[Read from the beginning]

Yeah, it ends on a lame little cliffhanger. Not even worth mentioning, except that I usually have more closure at the ends of chapters than that.