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| The African violet budding on my kitchen windowsill; these flowers, like my novel are growing but still hidden in their potential state. |
A couple weekends ago, I attended a half-day novel workshop
with Kij Johnson in San Antonio, and it was wonderful! Kij is a wellspring of writing
knowledge. The format of the workshop was inspiring. After going over some
general principles, each attendee presented a summary of our novel-in-progress,
then described the problem or difficulty we were facing. Kij offered specific, actionable
advice to each of us, then opened the conversation up so that we could all
brainstorm solutions for each other.
Just hearing the breadth of problems that a dozen writers
are wrestling with was weirdly inspiring. Maybe it was the simple affirmation
that most of us (certainly everyone in that room) struggle with this
complicated, wonderful, maddening thing called a novel.
Writing a novel is an endurance event. They are so much
larger in scope than a short story and truly different in kind. Short stories
can rely on, and often benefit from, leaving much unsaid, and encouraging the
reader to discover the meaning on her own. Alternatively, you can aim
directly at the target and that can work too. Novels, being longer, can be more
meandering, more inclusive, more complex. After spending so much time writing short stories, I’m
finding that a challenge.
I’m about a quarter of the way into my novel, Izzy Crow, which
means I have now arrived at the very beginning of the dreaded middle. Many elements of the events that
I so cavalierly put in the opening are now coming due. Because a novel is so
much bigger, I feel like I’m learning to juggle or spin a dozen plates, and I
can’t quite keep everything in the air yet.
After running my troubles through the patented Kij Johnson
wringer, I can see that I will have to trash my beloved first scene (kill your
darlings), but that decision allows me to re-envision the whole story in a way
that suggests more layers. So, I’ll be throwing some words out and repurposing
many more, but I believe I’ll have a deeper novel when I’m finished.
Kij Johnson teaches a two-week version of this workshop at
the Gunn Center for Study of Science Fiction. If you’ve been working on a novel and are not sure how to proceed, I
would highly recommend it. She’s taking applications right now!
In other business:
You can read my thoughts on the excellent Vestal Review at The Review Review.
Flash Fiction Online included my Diorama story included in their Annual Anthology along with over 30 other amazing flash fiction stories.
My story "Cattle Futures" is forthcoming in February at the lovely 99 Pine Street Literary Journal. I'm delighted that this story found such a lovely home. I will post a direct link as soon as it becomes available.
A spar can be the mast of a ship (also what two people do when they go through the motions of hand to hand combat – similar to the kind of motions she and the alien are relentlessly going through as well).
Johnson includes a couple lines of poetry, which I recognized as Shakespeare. At first I thought they might be taken from The Tempest. Thanks to the Internets it was easy to track down. They're from
Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
It's clear that the entire poem informs Johnson's story on many levels (more than I'm glossing here).
Looking at the sonnet, the only concrete images in it have to do with seafaring:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark (i.e. lighthouse)
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
And,
It is the star to every wandering bark (i.e. a small boat – something like a lifeboat…)
Here love is described as constant but also distant, untouchable. Like dead Gary or the idea of him or her last image of his body frozen in space.
The sonnet backs into its topic with a negative:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
And Johnson, begins by describing what the alien is not:
“The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal.”
The middle of the sonnet describes what love is (the pole star, a light house, unmoving and distant)
The final couplet is a strange negative statement, which is a little harder to parse. (Does it proclaim his love since the poem stands as proof that he did indeed write/love? Is it an admission that his feelings have changed and therefore are not constant and he is no longer in love? Is this a poem of illicit love to his male lover and the last couplet serves as a kind of plausible deniability?)
Regardless of how you read it, it’s the same negative positive negative binary pattern that’s all over Spar."
Check out Anaea's reading of this one here.
If you're trying to become a better writer consider "critiquing" the very best stories you can find. Come on over to the Craft Crucible and join the conversation!