Susan Fadellin's Blog, page 2

For the love of Language

I recently re-read Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ve re-read it about once a decade for the past four decades now, and each time I discover something new, something not fully appreciated before, and my admiration continues to grow. This time around, I read it for the language. It has been noted by others that what gives Tolkien’s Middle Earth such richness and depth is all the back stories woven into the tale, all the history and cosmology he created around his epic. But it’s more than just the world-building; there have been many variations and imitations by authors with imagination and the same love of detail that haven’t quite hit the mark – and the missing ingredient, I think, is the love of language. This time around, one of the overlooked gems I found was this sentence:

“The townlands were rich, with wide tilth and many orchards, and homesteads there were with oast and garner, fold and byre, and many rills rippling through the green from the highlands down to Anduin.”

I read that sentence, paused … and read it again. And then I hunted down four of the words in the dictionary, and translated it thus:

“The townlands were rich, with wide patches of cultivated land and many orchards, and homesteads there were with conical kilns for drying hops, malt or tobacco, and granaries, sheep pens and cattle barns, and many small brooks rippling through the green from the highlands down to Anduin.”

Granted my “translation” is a little stilted, but the point is about the language he uses – that’s where the richness lies, what resonates with age and meaning, even if you don’t stop to look up every word that has dropped out of common usage. Tolkien was a linguist, afterall, and in the end it’s all about the language – not only the languages he created for the peoples that inhabit Middle Earth, but the language he uses to tell us about them.

If you’ve thought this book over-hyped or over-rated, read it again for the language. And if you’ve never read it at all, read it now … for the love of language.

The Gray Time

The Gray Time: this is how I think of January. A time of wan sun through half-hearted clouds, a time of muted colors. It’s rare to see snow here in the southern hills of the Piedmont, although it’s cold enough that nature lies dormant – dry, yellow grass, russet brown leaves decaying to a black carpet on the ground, even the evergreens dull and dusky in the muffled light. Resolutions made at the bright and shiny end of the old year struggle to retain meaning and momentum in the swaddling, all-encompassing gray of seemingly endless January days. January is a month to seek comfort – in homemade soups, hot coffee, and the incongruous red splash of a cardinal at the bird feeder; a time for sleeping, but a time for dreaming too. Without the gray time, spring would lose its wonder. Modern psychology might label it seasonal affective disorder and seek to cure it with artificial sunlight, but sometimes it’s okay to be sad – if you know that it’s passing. The gray time is a time to take a deep breath and reflect. And maybe to look for the beauty waiting, curled and dreaming, beneath the gray skies.

Here be dragons

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within. – This is the Goodreads quote of the day by Ursula K. LeGuin. It made me think of what Tom Shippey had to say about J. R. R. Tolkien in The Road to Middle-Earth, which was that Tolkien’s love of words, his life-long study of philology, led him to believe that dragons had to be more than just symbolic.”A dragon is no idle fancy”, Tolkien wrote. And Shippey says of that, “All his instincts told him that dragons were like that ['true'] – widespread in Northern legend, found in related languages from Italy to Iceland, deeply embedded in ancient story. Could this mean nothing?”

We forget. We barely read, we have no sense of history beyond the narrow, selfish focus of our own lifetime, and we forget. And in the forgetting, we lose all wisdom, and, most perilously, a sense of wonder and possibility.

Here be dragons…. are yours on the inside?

Germination

I finished the first chapter of my next novel today – a cause for celebration because for me that signifies the story, and especially the characters, have taken root and unfurled that first green shoot that reaches for the sun. I wrote the opening sentence a long time ago, with only the broad story arc in mind. I am not an outline-r. I prefer to classify myself as character-driven. But even characters that have become like family need context. Writing that first chapter is slow going because I read and research and stare out the window drinking coffee and drive on auto-pilot to work while all the details crystallize and begin to fit together sentence by sentence. Openings are important. They need to entice you down the garden path. And to make it work, you need to know more than your reader, but not everything, not yet. That is one of the greatest joys of writing, for me at least – the anticipation of surprises and unexpected turns in a story that you only think you know.

Writing, like life, benefits from schedules but doesn’t adhere to them, can be cultivated but not contained, casting its errant and ephemeral seeds in the hope that some will take root and thrive.

Quality Writing Time and the Monday Morning Commute

These two activities shouldn’t occupy the same sentence, much less the same time frame, but oddly enough I’m finding it to be a consistent pattern. With the help of a pot of coffee and no weekend appointments, Saturdays are for blissfully indulgent, uninterrupted hours of writing. Sundays inevitably seem slated for revisions, reservations, and ruminations (and doing the chores neglected on Saturday). But when this perfect storm of a weekend happens, I’ve typically left work well behind in my thoughts by Monday morning. I crank up the music and set off on the road thinking about unconnected scenes and bits of character conversations in the same way I recall real memories and things I’ve heard and said. And immersed in listening to this inner dialogue, more pieces of the story fall into place as the sun filters through the exhaust fumes and the exits roll by. The mind-numbing repetition of the drive is redeemed when the perfect phrase seals a moment and reveals new avenues to explore.

Sometimes I think that I should have a tape recorder on hand, because I do forget these epiphanies from time to time. A couple of emails are all that it takes to tarnish the brightest of moods. But I think, in the end, the truest words are never forgotten, and I suspect the replayed rambling of my voice would only dispel the magic of the Monday morning commute. By Monday evening, most of the glow has faded, and although there are other moments of inspiration as the rest of the week drags by, it’s never quite the same.

Quality writing time … at seventy miles per hour in five lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. I wonder what Jules Verne would think of that.

Humid thoughts

The word for the day is: damp. Too many days of rain damp. Summer-heated, supersaturated air from the Gulf damp. Sheen of sweat on skin damp. Deep-green, crazed-insect chorus damp. Mold in the corners, mushrooms in the shade damp. Sluggish thoughts and soggy wit damp. The air-conditioner only makes it cold damp.

And in the desert, they run misters to try to imitate this damp. Crazy.

Where the music takes me

I grabbed a dusty, old cd out of the rack one morning last week. Looking for a change of pace to shake me out of the rut of the long commute, I picked up John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain, which I haven’t listened to in years. And as the bright notes of the banjo were joined by the playful wail of the bluegrass fiddle, the morning sun breaking across the 10-lane interstate became instead the sun rising on a folk festival forty years past. Beams of sunlight lance sideways through the deep green shade of the trees, sparkling like gold with the moisture in the summer air as the stage goes up and tents unfurl around the field. The smell of fresh bread and bacon hangs in the air, and people move in tie-dye and denim, embroidered cotton and long skirts. And the music, before the crowds have arrived and the formal performances have started, is everywhere … sweet and sad and joyful and heart-rending all at once, like life itself.

Solstice

On the longest day of the year, only the dog and I are out and about at sunset. The buzz saw of cicadas singing is all that disturbs the humid stillness of the air. The day is still marked on calendars, but I suspect only a few astronomers and latter-day pagans take heed of it, two far-flung poles on the belief spectrum. My heart goes out to both; someone should care, whatever the reason. I’m at a loss, myself, of what to do besides note it’s passing on this glowing screen.

Indulgences and Inspirations

My weekend morning ritual is to make coffee and sit in an old chair in this southerly-facing room while I decide what to do with my precious “free” time. There is a never-ending list of chores and errands that pile up on the weekend like run-off from a hard rain at the bottom of a hill, and usually my choices are based on balancing the most urgent against the longest neglected. But sometimes, as on this weekend, I cannot face all the shoulds and oughts, which include not only all the mundane chores and errands, but also the personal goals I set for myself, like finishing a book to participate in a discussion group, or to review and comment on the many blogs and posts I never seem to have enough time to follow. Sometimes  I reach for a book on the shelf that I have read before, like dialing an old friend, or paging through a photo album full of memories. With so many, many books waiting to be read, it feels like a guilty indulgence.

This weekend, it was Gate of Ivrel by C. J. Cherryh. I have read the series this book starts maybe 5 or 6 times over the course of the years. I don’t count anymore. Nhi Vanye i Chya remains one of my favorite characters of all time. It’s one of Cherryh’s earlier series, and I don’t think she loves this character as much as I do. It is her Foreigner series (also good) that she keeps returning to, but Vanye – honorable to a fault, loyal despite his doubts, brave in the face of his fears – has always been my definition of a hero. I’ve recommended this series any number of times, though I haven’t found anyone who enjoys it as much as I do.

So, an indulgence, although one that always inspires me to go back to my own work. Another page written, and another idea for the background that holds the weave together … it’s more than worth the indulgence, and the self-imposed guilt over all the things I should have done.

An author’s peculiar relationship with characters

Ageless, Emma thought, watching them. As if the innumerable years of their lives had merely distilled and refined the essence of who they were. She couldn’t imagine a creation that didn’t contain them, or a future where they didn’t travel together – the Huntress and her gentler sister of the forest, the Smith and the flamboyant Herald … and the Lord of Fire they followed in unshakable loyalty, Lyr.

The quote above is from my soon-to-be published second novel, The Asfari’s Homecoming, and it is a  passage where I, as the author, am speaking most clearly in my own voice. You would think, from one perspective, that an author is always speaking in their own voice. But for those authors who are truly character-driven, the characters take on lives of their own. They speak for themselves, after a while, and resist efforts to bind them to plots and purposes that don’t fit what they have become. A character-driven author listens first, and then writes. And in time, the characters become as close as family, with all the same emotional bonds. You share their triumphs and their failings, their loves and hates; you laugh and cry with them.

(I hope I’m not only speaking for myself, here. Could be, I’m just plain crazy.)

At any rate, I had only wanted to tell a good story with the first novel. And then the characters insisted that I couldn’t just leave it there. With the third book, which I’m currently working on, I wanted to move in another direction and far into the future … but they are there as well.

She couldn’t imagine a creation that didn’t contain them, or a future where they didn’t travel together…

I know, Emma. I feel the same way.