Robert Polevoi's Blog
June 2, 2012
Thinking About Shakespeare - 2
The period between Shakespeare and ourselves is divided by a barrier as difficult understand as it is palpable. The past two centuries have seen conceptions of the human identity coalesce into the psychological. It would be foolish to define this term too strictly, but at its core it sees the individual as an atomic unit in pursuit of its own interests. Some interests, like food or sexual companionship, are ultimately biological and therefore common to us all. But other interests are more or less unique to different personalities, and thus define those personalities. The businessman or woman values financial success and acts in hope of gaining it. The artist seeks achievement in creative fields. But one way or another, something in our natures (maybe stimulated by outside influences) is "after something" in this life, and if the term psychology means anything, it means conceiving of all human actions as reflections of their underlying motives.
The modern fiction writer is expected to build characters around a core of motives, and the actor on the screen or stage expects to start with motivations when developing a role. That some characters may have evil motives instead of good ones is entirely acceptable to readers and audiences. But they will not accept the lack of motives -- or confused ones -- as this inherently destroys their notion of a "character" altogether.
Shakespeare, especially in his greatest characters, is bound to disappoint contemporary psychological expectations. Many generations of scholars (not to mention actors and directors) have twisted themselves up into knots to make a solid psychological being out of Hamlet or Macbeth or Iago. They dig into each little phrase and all its variants to conjure up the logic we expect in characters today, but which the playwright did not aspire to. When people speak the oft-repeated judgment that the Bard wrote "only great plays, and not good ones," they usually refer to the impossibility of getting our collective heads around his greatest characters through psychology. The motives of the Danish prince, the Scottish king and the Venetian criminal defy analysis. This is often treated as an opportunity for personal interpretation and creative latitude by actors and directors. But when we think that Shakespeare wrote directly for specific players in his day, and never likely thought about performance of his works beyond his lifetime, it hardly makes much sense to hold that he was purposely indefinite or confusing.
No, Shakespeare and his audience simply did not share our modern psychological perspective, and didn't seek to find it validated in his characters and action. This was still the age of allegory, informed by the morality and spirit of religion as developed through the Middle Ages. When we say that Iago is evil, we must mean it as a noun and not an adjective. Iago is evil is the same way that Satan is evil -- not as coloration but as essence. Thus it is foolish or unnecessary to ask precisely why the man is so despicable and cruel. In Iago's own reflections in his powerful asides and monologues, we only find confusion of his motives. In the same way, the Macbeths are not ambitious, but are ambition in itself. These are spiritual essences that minds of Shakespeare's day (and many centuries before) assumed as fundamentals in a universe of moral forces, in which each human life was nothing other than a passion play -- to finish up in Paradise or Hell.
It took me years to finally give up struggling for a psychological take on Shakespeare's characters. The Bard was unconcerned with what the distant readers of the future would perceive as psychological incongruities, or even failures to establish motives for much highly potent action. To speak boldly, there is no underlying and cohesive psychology beneath the character of Hamlet -- to take the very best example -- and no amount of effort will uncover it. There is, in fact, the very opposite. This character is the perfection of the youthful, brilliant Prince, in whom high birth, intelligence, great power, and even greater haughtiness all struggle, scene by scene, to make the most extraordinary of performances possible out of his condition. If he has anything that we could call a motive, it is to be as great an actor as he can be from the circumstances given him -- to be what we might call today a master of performance art -- and certainly a poet. Hamlet is intoxicated with himself, with his intelligence and creativity. Just as Shakespeare likely was.
The modern fiction writer is expected to build characters around a core of motives, and the actor on the screen or stage expects to start with motivations when developing a role. That some characters may have evil motives instead of good ones is entirely acceptable to readers and audiences. But they will not accept the lack of motives -- or confused ones -- as this inherently destroys their notion of a "character" altogether.
Shakespeare, especially in his greatest characters, is bound to disappoint contemporary psychological expectations. Many generations of scholars (not to mention actors and directors) have twisted themselves up into knots to make a solid psychological being out of Hamlet or Macbeth or Iago. They dig into each little phrase and all its variants to conjure up the logic we expect in characters today, but which the playwright did not aspire to. When people speak the oft-repeated judgment that the Bard wrote "only great plays, and not good ones," they usually refer to the impossibility of getting our collective heads around his greatest characters through psychology. The motives of the Danish prince, the Scottish king and the Venetian criminal defy analysis. This is often treated as an opportunity for personal interpretation and creative latitude by actors and directors. But when we think that Shakespeare wrote directly for specific players in his day, and never likely thought about performance of his works beyond his lifetime, it hardly makes much sense to hold that he was purposely indefinite or confusing.
No, Shakespeare and his audience simply did not share our modern psychological perspective, and didn't seek to find it validated in his characters and action. This was still the age of allegory, informed by the morality and spirit of religion as developed through the Middle Ages. When we say that Iago is evil, we must mean it as a noun and not an adjective. Iago is evil is the same way that Satan is evil -- not as coloration but as essence. Thus it is foolish or unnecessary to ask precisely why the man is so despicable and cruel. In Iago's own reflections in his powerful asides and monologues, we only find confusion of his motives. In the same way, the Macbeths are not ambitious, but are ambition in itself. These are spiritual essences that minds of Shakespeare's day (and many centuries before) assumed as fundamentals in a universe of moral forces, in which each human life was nothing other than a passion play -- to finish up in Paradise or Hell.
It took me years to finally give up struggling for a psychological take on Shakespeare's characters. The Bard was unconcerned with what the distant readers of the future would perceive as psychological incongruities, or even failures to establish motives for much highly potent action. To speak boldly, there is no underlying and cohesive psychology beneath the character of Hamlet -- to take the very best example -- and no amount of effort will uncover it. There is, in fact, the very opposite. This character is the perfection of the youthful, brilliant Prince, in whom high birth, intelligence, great power, and even greater haughtiness all struggle, scene by scene, to make the most extraordinary of performances possible out of his condition. If he has anything that we could call a motive, it is to be as great an actor as he can be from the circumstances given him -- to be what we might call today a master of performance art -- and certainly a poet. Hamlet is intoxicated with himself, with his intelligence and creativity. Just as Shakespeare likely was.
May 26, 2012
Writing the Big Novel - 4 (short personal observations)
I began Port Royal with a typical variety of symbolic characters that might naturally support my general intentions for the story. There had to be a buccaneer, of course, since that was the essential -- in fact, there had to be a number of important ones. There had to be strong women filling all the major female slots. A prostitute, a sugar plantation heiress, a slave woman. And lastly there were all the "usual suspects" for such a period and setting -- a colonial governor, one or more plantation owners, and an ambitious political hot-head. These started life as merely shells, and I would measure my success by how much all these empty names evolved into persuasive human beings.
I went about defining all these characters at first by trying to imagine them in ever more detail, while hoping that I'd stumble on a moral core for each. But I rapidly discovered that, though real people in the world are individuals, strong characters in fiction might not best be built up from their several separate foundations. Rather, I soon found that I made more substantial progress by defining "blocks" of characters to be defined integrally around each basic conflict or each complex of relationships.
Think of the classic Yin-Yang symbol of the Tao. You have a single circle with two interlocking parts. The black defined by what's not white, the white by what's not black. To take the simplest example, where two people were connected in the story by a sexual relationship, I found it more productive to consider the relationship itself as the fundamental unit, and to shape the characters within so as to mutually support it. More complex, but even more productive, I defined key military and political conflicts first (such as between the allied leaders of the privateering expedition) and let their characters crystallize or precipitate out, something like the way the figures of an ancient Grecian freeze emerge congruently together, filling space up in a complementary manner. This method often forced large changes to my first conceptions of a character, sometimes even flipping roles around within a conflict as I stumbled on a cleaner fit.
The larger characters who find themselves in many independent conflicts or alignments are thus assembled out of many faces. Sometimes I felt pressure to make overall adjustments so as to reconcile a single character from its multiple relationships. But, to my surprise, I found myself more willing to accept apparent incongruities as I found they often made the larger character the more persuasive -- inherently multifaceted. And sometimes it was simply not desirable to alter conflicts (or a given figure's role within a conflict) to improve the psychological integrity of any single character.
I went about defining all these characters at first by trying to imagine them in ever more detail, while hoping that I'd stumble on a moral core for each. But I rapidly discovered that, though real people in the world are individuals, strong characters in fiction might not best be built up from their several separate foundations. Rather, I soon found that I made more substantial progress by defining "blocks" of characters to be defined integrally around each basic conflict or each complex of relationships.
Think of the classic Yin-Yang symbol of the Tao. You have a single circle with two interlocking parts. The black defined by what's not white, the white by what's not black. To take the simplest example, where two people were connected in the story by a sexual relationship, I found it more productive to consider the relationship itself as the fundamental unit, and to shape the characters within so as to mutually support it. More complex, but even more productive, I defined key military and political conflicts first (such as between the allied leaders of the privateering expedition) and let their characters crystallize or precipitate out, something like the way the figures of an ancient Grecian freeze emerge congruently together, filling space up in a complementary manner. This method often forced large changes to my first conceptions of a character, sometimes even flipping roles around within a conflict as I stumbled on a cleaner fit.
The larger characters who find themselves in many independent conflicts or alignments are thus assembled out of many faces. Sometimes I felt pressure to make overall adjustments so as to reconcile a single character from its multiple relationships. But, to my surprise, I found myself more willing to accept apparent incongruities as I found they often made the larger character the more persuasive -- inherently multifaceted. And sometimes it was simply not desirable to alter conflicts (or a given figure's role within a conflict) to improve the psychological integrity of any single character.
May 21, 2012
Thinking About Shakespeare - 1
In these posts concerning Shakespeare, I would like to invite commentary, but only of serious or thoughtful turn, and organized around a current theme or topic -- and thus would rather manage through this blog than a discussion group, where threads are easily disrupted and noise erodes the quality of conversation.
Little worthwhile can be said about Shakespeare that hasn't been already said a million times. But we can talk productively and (I hope) entertainingly about our own relationships to Shakespeare's work -- mostly his plays, but also his poetry. I can't think of any better exercise or recreation for the passionate reader than crystallizing one's own thoughts about the Shakespeare experience. That experience necessarily includes both reading these great plays and watching them performed -- perhaps even performing them yourself if you're an actor. The goal here is to share different personal approaches to Shakespeare, commencing with my own. And we will see whether we can attract any kind of crowd to join through comments on these posts.
Let me start with one particularly salient observation -- from my standpoint, to be sure.
Shakespeare's plays lack the stage directions and descriptions common to the modern drama -- much less the critical action language that so strongly drives the motion picture screenplay. There are no author adverbs interwoven through the dialog to indicate a character is speaking (for example) "ironically" or "despondently." Literally everything about the moment and its dramatic and emotional tenor -- even its comedic impact -- must be intuited directly from the written record of the player's speech.
We know, of course, that all these plays, being performed under Shakespeare's personal direction by actors that were often anticipated in the writing of the part, did not require any written annotations for their original performances. If anyone had questions about the nuance or substance of a moment, they could consult the Bard himself. But all subsequent generations have faced the loss of this peculiar advantage and been compelled to rely solely on their own resources in bringing scenes to life, on the stage or in their own imagination.
The stage (or screen) has many of its own requirements, and oftentimes it seems the words are largely musical-type cues for a particular passion to be painted by the actor. But silent readers of the plays, realizing everything between the porches of their ears, abide entirely within a universe of language. No other author so entirely demands the reader shouldering so much of the entertainment load, and to my mind, the largest trouble people have with Shakespeare (past the point of mastering some Tudor-era language) is the effort it requires -- the effort of an actor, which was (after all) the first intended reader. Instead of passively consuming entertainment as we ordinarily expect to do, we are asked to put the show on by ourselves -- and given the extraordinary breadth of Shakespere's oeuvre, this damn near means imagining the entire spectrum of human inner life.
This is Shakespeare's greatest virtue, as I see it. Percy Shelley held that poetry (to use his word, though we might well say "fiction") was the greatest of all moral forces because it leveraged our imaginations to gain insights into other human beings -- insights that might naturally develop into sympathies. In Shelley's view, universal love (such as taught by the religions)depended largely on the power of story to expand the range of our experience to assimilate the inner lives of other individuals. If this is so -- and there is much that can be said for it -- then nothing can compare with reading Shakespeare's plays to stretch the range of our experience to empathize with all humanity, individual by individual.
Little worthwhile can be said about Shakespeare that hasn't been already said a million times. But we can talk productively and (I hope) entertainingly about our own relationships to Shakespeare's work -- mostly his plays, but also his poetry. I can't think of any better exercise or recreation for the passionate reader than crystallizing one's own thoughts about the Shakespeare experience. That experience necessarily includes both reading these great plays and watching them performed -- perhaps even performing them yourself if you're an actor. The goal here is to share different personal approaches to Shakespeare, commencing with my own. And we will see whether we can attract any kind of crowd to join through comments on these posts.
Let me start with one particularly salient observation -- from my standpoint, to be sure.
Shakespeare's plays lack the stage directions and descriptions common to the modern drama -- much less the critical action language that so strongly drives the motion picture screenplay. There are no author adverbs interwoven through the dialog to indicate a character is speaking (for example) "ironically" or "despondently." Literally everything about the moment and its dramatic and emotional tenor -- even its comedic impact -- must be intuited directly from the written record of the player's speech.
We know, of course, that all these plays, being performed under Shakespeare's personal direction by actors that were often anticipated in the writing of the part, did not require any written annotations for their original performances. If anyone had questions about the nuance or substance of a moment, they could consult the Bard himself. But all subsequent generations have faced the loss of this peculiar advantage and been compelled to rely solely on their own resources in bringing scenes to life, on the stage or in their own imagination.
The stage (or screen) has many of its own requirements, and oftentimes it seems the words are largely musical-type cues for a particular passion to be painted by the actor. But silent readers of the plays, realizing everything between the porches of their ears, abide entirely within a universe of language. No other author so entirely demands the reader shouldering so much of the entertainment load, and to my mind, the largest trouble people have with Shakespeare (past the point of mastering some Tudor-era language) is the effort it requires -- the effort of an actor, which was (after all) the first intended reader. Instead of passively consuming entertainment as we ordinarily expect to do, we are asked to put the show on by ourselves -- and given the extraordinary breadth of Shakespere's oeuvre, this damn near means imagining the entire spectrum of human inner life.
This is Shakespeare's greatest virtue, as I see it. Percy Shelley held that poetry (to use his word, though we might well say "fiction") was the greatest of all moral forces because it leveraged our imaginations to gain insights into other human beings -- insights that might naturally develop into sympathies. In Shelley's view, universal love (such as taught by the religions)depended largely on the power of story to expand the range of our experience to assimilate the inner lives of other individuals. If this is so -- and there is much that can be said for it -- then nothing can compare with reading Shakespeare's plays to stretch the range of our experience to empathize with all humanity, individual by individual.
May 20, 2012
Writing the Big Novel - 3 (short personal observations)
An enormous element of the appeal of jazz music (and of rock music, too, to the extent that it is improvisational) is the excitement of live risk-taking. A player sucks up inspiration for a start in some direction -- composing on the fly -- and then relies on taste, intuition and talent to bring the phrase or passage home with impact and conclusion. There's nothing quite as dissatisfying as a lame or indecisive finish to a chorus that first took flight with boldness or innovation, and the player who has to pick it up from there has been handed a sorry sack of shit.
Almost the entire period in which I wrote Port Royal -- actively wrote, with all the research and strategic thinking finished -- I was learning to rely more and more a jazz-like model of performance. The word performance here is key. I had spent a number of years trying to write screenplays, and completed four or five of them, including one of the core Port Royal story. The screenplay can't help but teach the novelist about dialog and dramatic movement. Less obvious, but far more significant, was that writing screenplays forced me to imagine myself as the director and all of actors in live action, as it were. I learned to feel the cutting instant of the present moment, when the past breaks into the future with living spontaneity. This was so exhausting that it frankly took most of the pleasure out of writing, but I could see that it was working and refused to give it up. And so writing became performance. Acting in real time. At least the task was now clear to me as it had never been before. I had to understand the characters, the developing story and (above all) the flavor of the moment as completely as possible -- and then rely on intuition the bring the evolving reality to life in a concentrated push in the future, almost like rushing toward a wall to break right through it.
An enormous benefit was that I no longer had to fear that consequences were becoming predictable or that I was unconsciously telegraphing outcomes -- because even I didn't know what was going to happen next! This made the secretive and lonely process of writing much more interesting, and even exciting -- albeit at some meaningful cost in occasional depression and emotional exhaustion.
By the latter half of the book I had developed a certain routine. I began to craft problems, or rather Houdini-like entrapments in which I counted on myself to solve a seemingly intractable situation under the pressure of the instant. The more that I developed confidence in this approach, the more I was addicted to it, as it felt precisely like a jazz performance, relying wholly on the blessings of the moment to pull me through. But this meant indulging in a far greater risk. A 600-page novel with at least three contrapuntal narratives and many significant characters has got so much going on that any spontaneous development threatens to send ramifying shock waves through the story, breaking logical chains or creating unintended contradictions. No amount of analysis and intellectual effort could be sufficient assurance that I was not somehow damaging the story or some characters, or perhaps foreclosing more important opportunities down the road.
The bottom line is that I did not let it stop me. I realized that my method was forcing me to rely, even more than I had already intended, on subconscious and intuitive resources to tell me when a local inspiration might be too risky or costly -- and even more -- to encourage me to let the characters and story evolve with minimal conscious direction.
Did it work? (Remember, I'm taking about trashing years of concentrated effort and financial risk on what might be just a mere artistic whim.) All I can say was that, as the finished text was being read by friends and then edited, I did not hear the kind of complaints I had feared beyond a very minor level. I wasn't being told "he couldn't say that if he'd already done that earlier" or similar such warnings. Whatever other problems or weaknesses in the finished product, the willingness to improvise deeply and consequentially "on the fly" did not compromise the logical aspects of a rather complex narrative.
Almost the entire period in which I wrote Port Royal -- actively wrote, with all the research and strategic thinking finished -- I was learning to rely more and more a jazz-like model of performance. The word performance here is key. I had spent a number of years trying to write screenplays, and completed four or five of them, including one of the core Port Royal story. The screenplay can't help but teach the novelist about dialog and dramatic movement. Less obvious, but far more significant, was that writing screenplays forced me to imagine myself as the director and all of actors in live action, as it were. I learned to feel the cutting instant of the present moment, when the past breaks into the future with living spontaneity. This was so exhausting that it frankly took most of the pleasure out of writing, but I could see that it was working and refused to give it up. And so writing became performance. Acting in real time. At least the task was now clear to me as it had never been before. I had to understand the characters, the developing story and (above all) the flavor of the moment as completely as possible -- and then rely on intuition the bring the evolving reality to life in a concentrated push in the future, almost like rushing toward a wall to break right through it.
An enormous benefit was that I no longer had to fear that consequences were becoming predictable or that I was unconsciously telegraphing outcomes -- because even I didn't know what was going to happen next! This made the secretive and lonely process of writing much more interesting, and even exciting -- albeit at some meaningful cost in occasional depression and emotional exhaustion.
By the latter half of the book I had developed a certain routine. I began to craft problems, or rather Houdini-like entrapments in which I counted on myself to solve a seemingly intractable situation under the pressure of the instant. The more that I developed confidence in this approach, the more I was addicted to it, as it felt precisely like a jazz performance, relying wholly on the blessings of the moment to pull me through. But this meant indulging in a far greater risk. A 600-page novel with at least three contrapuntal narratives and many significant characters has got so much going on that any spontaneous development threatens to send ramifying shock waves through the story, breaking logical chains or creating unintended contradictions. No amount of analysis and intellectual effort could be sufficient assurance that I was not somehow damaging the story or some characters, or perhaps foreclosing more important opportunities down the road.
The bottom line is that I did not let it stop me. I realized that my method was forcing me to rely, even more than I had already intended, on subconscious and intuitive resources to tell me when a local inspiration might be too risky or costly -- and even more -- to encourage me to let the characters and story evolve with minimal conscious direction.
Did it work? (Remember, I'm taking about trashing years of concentrated effort and financial risk on what might be just a mere artistic whim.) All I can say was that, as the finished text was being read by friends and then edited, I did not hear the kind of complaints I had feared beyond a very minor level. I wasn't being told "he couldn't say that if he'd already done that earlier" or similar such warnings. Whatever other problems or weaknesses in the finished product, the willingness to improvise deeply and consequentially "on the fly" did not compromise the logical aspects of a rather complex narrative.
May 18, 2012
Writing the Big Novel - 2 (short personal observations)
The great pleasure of the big novel for the reader is the sense of surrender that arises from deep immersion in an environment too large and rich to be addressed objectively or intellecutally. Once firmly inside the big novel, the reader operates on those emotional and subconscious resources that make a great imaginative experience possible.
Yet getting there is challenging. It may take all of the first 200 pages -- or more -- to build the substructure supporting all the main characters and basic narrative branches. Asking the reader to put up with this foundational effort on the promise of a future reward is difficult, and there can never be simple answers to such fundamental artistic problems. To speak of "balancing" is merely conclusory. You need to hook the reader into the various characters (or character groups) and their associated narratives without moving too far down any single path. And you must bridge the different faces of the novel in a manner that feels natural and not opportunistic.
You are striving toward a moment where the story is fully on its legs -- at which the reader doesn't need to learn any further basic information. In the case of period or specialized settings, this means more than assimilating all the important characters and story elements, and the author's hardest foundational task may be introducing the norms of an unfamilar place or period or profession. No one wants a lecture, but attempts to work this kind of data into character dialog and thinking stand always in danger of artificiality. You are unavoidably toying with the risk of leaving readers clueless (and therefore ill at ease) as they confront matter they can't yet understand. They are most likely to indulge you in this insecurity if the dramatic context is holding them. You want your reader to pick up the necessary background by immersion, relying strongly on intuition -- allowing context to support guesswork as much as possible.
A serious advantage of the well-known author is that readers are more likely to be willing to accept a thoroughly meticulous build-up. The new author takes a bigger risk of losing readers who don't feel the story has fully grabbed them inthe first few pages. One answer is finding ways to grab them emotionally before the narrative or characters can engage them. At best, it should anticipate some major emotional premise and introduce a kind of feeling that the book promises to deliver throughout, with increasing precision and impact. Often this will be some internal conflict in a major character or between two major characters. The details of the conflict needn't matter at the start -- but smell of it should be strong and clear and representative of the long-run reading experience.
Note also that laying a strong foundation is as critical to the author as to the reader. It permits the writer to enjoy the greatest lattitude for improvisation, spontaneity and exploration, which are the life and breath of the business. And, of course, the author's pleasure translates naturally into reader pleasure.
Yet getting there is challenging. It may take all of the first 200 pages -- or more -- to build the substructure supporting all the main characters and basic narrative branches. Asking the reader to put up with this foundational effort on the promise of a future reward is difficult, and there can never be simple answers to such fundamental artistic problems. To speak of "balancing" is merely conclusory. You need to hook the reader into the various characters (or character groups) and their associated narratives without moving too far down any single path. And you must bridge the different faces of the novel in a manner that feels natural and not opportunistic.
You are striving toward a moment where the story is fully on its legs -- at which the reader doesn't need to learn any further basic information. In the case of period or specialized settings, this means more than assimilating all the important characters and story elements, and the author's hardest foundational task may be introducing the norms of an unfamilar place or period or profession. No one wants a lecture, but attempts to work this kind of data into character dialog and thinking stand always in danger of artificiality. You are unavoidably toying with the risk of leaving readers clueless (and therefore ill at ease) as they confront matter they can't yet understand. They are most likely to indulge you in this insecurity if the dramatic context is holding them. You want your reader to pick up the necessary background by immersion, relying strongly on intuition -- allowing context to support guesswork as much as possible.
A serious advantage of the well-known author is that readers are more likely to be willing to accept a thoroughly meticulous build-up. The new author takes a bigger risk of losing readers who don't feel the story has fully grabbed them inthe first few pages. One answer is finding ways to grab them emotionally before the narrative or characters can engage them. At best, it should anticipate some major emotional premise and introduce a kind of feeling that the book promises to deliver throughout, with increasing precision and impact. Often this will be some internal conflict in a major character or between two major characters. The details of the conflict needn't matter at the start -- but smell of it should be strong and clear and representative of the long-run reading experience.
Note also that laying a strong foundation is as critical to the author as to the reader. It permits the writer to enjoy the greatest lattitude for improvisation, spontaneity and exploration, which are the life and breath of the business. And, of course, the author's pleasure translates naturally into reader pleasure.
May 11, 2012
Writing the Big Novel - 1 (short personal observations)
When I say "big novel," I don't mean popular or successful. I mean a certain critical size and scope. A big novel is generally longer than 500 pages, and often much longer.
From the reader's standpoint, the big novel is an experience they can surrender to and get lost in - an experience in which they lose track of progress toward a close. That reader experience is priceless.
From the author's standpoint, the big novel is also a surrender. The story must be so big that it cannot be grasped as an object and understood at a conscious level. It can only be written once the writer has so assimilated all of the ideas and emotions that go into it that he or she can write spontaneously on a sentence-to-sentence, page-to-page basis, while yet preserving an overall coherence and integrity that comes from a firm subconscious base. I personally throw away most of my notes and outlines once I'm ready for the task, as these would only trap me and keep me from operating intuitively in the moment of writing each sentence. Ideas developed during the growth process have served their purposes and are generally no longer needed once writing begins.
In short, to write the big novel, the author creates himself or herself as the person capable of the task. Once the author of the specific book has been created, that author is free to write with the improvisational energy needed to keep the telling alive, moment to moment. Because the reader experiences the story moment to moment, from within -- not top-down from above.
From the reader's standpoint, the big novel is an experience they can surrender to and get lost in - an experience in which they lose track of progress toward a close. That reader experience is priceless.
From the author's standpoint, the big novel is also a surrender. The story must be so big that it cannot be grasped as an object and understood at a conscious level. It can only be written once the writer has so assimilated all of the ideas and emotions that go into it that he or she can write spontaneously on a sentence-to-sentence, page-to-page basis, while yet preserving an overall coherence and integrity that comes from a firm subconscious base. I personally throw away most of my notes and outlines once I'm ready for the task, as these would only trap me and keep me from operating intuitively in the moment of writing each sentence. Ideas developed during the growth process have served their purposes and are generally no longer needed once writing begins.
In short, to write the big novel, the author creates himself or herself as the person capable of the task. Once the author of the specific book has been created, that author is free to write with the improvisational energy needed to keep the telling alive, moment to moment. Because the reader experiences the story moment to moment, from within -- not top-down from above.
New PORT ROYAL Giveaway!
I screwed up!
I announced a giveaway to end on May 15 (see prior post), only to discover that I had mistakenly scheduled it to end a week earlier.
And then I was shocked to discover how many people had submitted -- maybe three times what I had expected.
So I just started another giveaway. SIX more copies of Port Royal available and you have all the way to June 11, 2012 to register.
So REGISTER HERE.
I announced a giveaway to end on May 15 (see prior post), only to discover that I had mistakenly scheduled it to end a week earlier.
And then I was shocked to discover how many people had submitted -- maybe three times what I had expected.
So I just started another giveaway. SIX more copies of Port Royal available and you have all the way to June 11, 2012 to register.
So REGISTER HERE.
April 24, 2012
Two FREE Shorts -- Fun, Fast, and just a little serious
Just for Goodreads folks, I've made available a couple of 50 page pieces that you may find memorable. Read them complete online or download the .epub files for free. Readers of PORT ROYAL may be surprised by an entirely different reading experience - fast and casual, but with just little bit to think about.
PRACTICAL ALCHEMY - Half contemporary fairy tale. Half classical romantic comedy. A sophisticated New York art consultant stumbles on apparent proof of alchemy while traveling in Europe, attracting the suspicions of an elderly professor and his lovely daughter. When she follows him back home with a charade to pry his secret, the situation turns complex because – although the man knows what she's up to – both find themselves the victims of the chemistry of mutual attraction.
DEATH VALLEY - A botched suicide attempt in the magnificent Death Valley desert leads to tragi-comical confusions and extraordinary personal transformations as the characters – the attempted suicide, his wife, his business partner and a romantic, lonely woman – discover sudden, temporary liberation from unsatisfactory lives.
PRACTICAL ALCHEMY - Half contemporary fairy tale. Half classical romantic comedy. A sophisticated New York art consultant stumbles on apparent proof of alchemy while traveling in Europe, attracting the suspicions of an elderly professor and his lovely daughter. When she follows him back home with a charade to pry his secret, the situation turns complex because – although the man knows what she's up to – both find themselves the victims of the chemistry of mutual attraction.
DEATH VALLEY - A botched suicide attempt in the magnificent Death Valley desert leads to tragi-comical confusions and extraordinary personal transformations as the characters – the attempted suicide, his wife, his business partner and a romantic, lonely woman – discover sudden, temporary liberation from unsatisfactory lives.
Port Royal Giveaway through May 15
You've got through May 15, 2012 to register for one of six copies of this saga, bringing back to life the classic era of the buccaneers. Check out the lengthy preview here on Goodreads or on Amazon. Six copies should mean you have a very decent chance to win.
