Austin Scott Collins's Blog: Upside-down, Inside-out, and Backwards, page 8

In Praise of Not Rushing

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
—Douglas Adams

I actually like deadlines, which is why I impose them upon myself. It gives me a nice sense of where I am with a project.

But like all my schedules, my writing schedule is flexible and subject to change. I tend to write in prolific bursts, as the mood strikes. Then I have long periods of mulling. I'm a great muller. I enjoy a good mull.

I'm not a Type A writer. I'm more like Type C. I find great creative inspiration in going for long walks and reading related, semi-related, or even totally unrelated books. (But is anything really totally unrelated to anything else? Too deep? OK, never mind.) I don't thrive in a lock-myself-in-a-room-with-a-computer sort of environment. That works for some writers, but I find forced writing reads like it's, well, forced. Ever read a book and think, "at the end, he was just tired of writing and decided to find a way to wrap it up"? I know I have. That's what happens when you try to force it. Well, that's what happens when I try to force it. Some people are energized by being under pressure to produce, just like some people are energized by competition, but those things don't do it for me.

I do a lot of "writing" while riding my motorcycle. Stuff comes to me, I stop, I text it to myself. Later, I cut and paste it into my manuscript. This weekend, I was out of town with my wife and didn't even have my phone with me. So I borrowed hers to text some ideas to myself.

Like all writers, I'm never completely satisfied with my own work, but when I do look at something I've written and feel a sense of pride and satisfaction because it came out more or less the way I wanted it to, I am always convinced that I couldn't possibly have done it in any less time. Often, I believe, the only way a chapter can evolve from adequate to sparkling is with a generous number of days or weeks of focused and/or unfocused contemplation.

Giveaway!

Who wants a free book? 28 days left!

In case you hadn't heard, I am giving away a FREE, CUSTOM-SIGNED copy of Dicing Time for Gladness.

Chances are, you have already participated in Goodreads book giveaways before, so you know what to do.

If you win, I promise to sign it however you request (um, within reason). If you want a limerick or a sonnet or a sketch of a a hamster wearing a tri-corner hat, no problem. You got it.

I am defining "signing" as the act of using a pen to make marks on the inside of a book. If you ask me to "sign" your copy by building a space elevator, for example, your request will be denied on technical grounds, plus a lack of carbon nanotubes.

If you're interested, just follow this link and click the "Enter to win" button.

http://www.austincollins.com/byme.htm

Please feel free to share the link, as well.

Historian, Historiographer or Storyteller?

When writing historical fiction, one treads a narrow and slippery path.

The "historical" component of the phrase requires at least some loose, vague adherence to a time period. The "fiction" part gives one a bit of leeway, but that is not a privilege that should be abused.

Historiography – the rigorous academic inquiry into the methodology of historical research as a professional discipline – is usually ignored in this eternal internal debate.

And that would be fine except for one thing: a lot of people get most of their sense of history from fiction.

I haven't yet found a credible study on this, but anecdotally we all know that if a famous movie has been made or a popular book has been written about an event or era, people are much more familiar with it. The opposite is equally and uncomfortably true: historical events of terrible importance and deep significance are frequently overlooked or forgotten because no Hollywood studio or New York publishing house turned them into a blockbuster or a bestseller. Even worse, a wildly inaccurate or misleading book or movie could (and does) permanently distort the perception of a profoundly meaningful moment in history.

This fact places a strange and unexpected burden upon the writer of historical fiction. Like any artist, he or she should be expected to ignore this burden and just produce art, but it's an interesting factor to consider anyway.

My own philosophy when it comes to this dilemma is to always honor the spirit of the time and attempt to capture the color and flavor of the greater zeitgeist to the best of my ability while telling the story I want to tell. I never mess with the big stuff unless altering history is a central premise of the book (as it is with the "Cyanide of the Masses" trilogy).

I think the greatest compliment that could be paid to the author of a work of historical fiction is that someone somewhere is motivated to learn more about the reality behind the story, whether it's a quick check through Google or Wikipedia or a visit to a university library or state archive. To inflame someone's curiosity is a great achievement, and one of the best ways is to inspire someone to ask, "did that really happen?"

The Process

One question I get asked a lot (mainly by other writers) is: "what's your process?"

Every writer has a slightly different approach, except for a few who have an extremely different approach, such as receiving signals directly from outer space.

Some, for example, begin at the beginning and write straight through until they reach the end, then go back to the beginning again and start over, cleaning up the manuscript in the same order.

Others edit as they go, obsessively reworking each passage until it's close to perfect before moving on.

Some try to hit a certain page count per day. (I have a friend who is a successful and prolific novelist and she does this. She sits in a coffee shop and sets a page quota for the session.)

Some write improvisationally; they couldn't tell you where the story is going to go next.

Others create a well-defined plot structure and stick to it strictly, often starting with the resolution and then writing backwards. (I understand a lot of mysteries are, by necessity, assembled this way.)

My own process goes like this:

First, I create a one-sentence summary of the entire story. This helps get my mind focused on the project.

Second, I write one short paragraph that briefly encapsulates the action of each chapter.

Next, I begin expanding those chapter-paragraphs internally. One paragraph becomes three, three paragraphs become ten pages, ten pages become twenty pages. I do not do this in any particular sequence. As I do research and just let the ideas swirl freely, I get random bursts of inspiration, e.g., "this could go in chapter eight" or "what a perfect little detail to throw into chapter three somewhere." The dialog usually comes very fast and natural for me during this stage, but it's in isolated, stand-alone blasts.

After that comes the hardest part: the "Connect-the-dots" phase. All the pieces are there; I have to bridge the many gaps and replace cheats such as [insert physical description of thing] with an actual physical description. I have to exert the most effort where connecting the dots means navigating a curve or going around a corner. In my opinion and experience, a seamless transition is one of the hardest things to pull off well in fiction writing. It's like movie makeup or special effects: if you do it right, no one notices. This "Connect-the-Dots" phase takes by far the most time and is the least fun.

After all of the chapters have reached the point where you can read them and they make sense with no glaring holes, then I go back to the beginning and embark upon the task of editing, revising, proofreading and rewriting, rewriting, rewriting.

It's usually not until the very last round of rewrites, when I am making the smallest fine-tuning adjustments, that the prose really begins to come to life.

I finished my first novel manuscript when I was in high school, and now, several books later, I have found that my process has changed very little. The biggest difference is that I spend more time than ever rewriting.

In reality, writing is a messy activity, and I believe every author does a little bit of everything described above.

"How do you overcome writer's block?" is usually the follow-up question. That's simple: I read. Sometimes I read, take a nap, and then read some more. I am a great believer in the value of naps, and that's not limited to writing.

A Most Unusual Calling

Now that I am immersed up to my elbows in trying to get the second book in this series, Crass Casualty, finished and brought to market by my self-imposed deadline of November 2014, I find myself once again struck by what a strange job this is.

I'm not covering any new ground here; thousands of novelists have ruminated publicly on the profoundly personal nature of our unique occupation. It's the ideal creative outlet for introverts. To be successful, one must read, read, read (a solitary activity) and then lock oneself in a dark room for ten hours a day doing research (two hours), writing (two hours) and finally proofreading, editing, revising and re-revising (six hours).

On one hand, it is inexpressibly gratifying to drag something up from the deepest recesses of your mind and soul and manipulate it into a form that others outside the impregnable fortress of your brain can (hopefully) enjoy. It requires patience, discipline and a buoyantly irrational faith in yourself and your project. On the other hand, however, if your psyche were a garden with a fish pond, and self-doubts were fish, the act of writing a novel would be equivalent to feeding them a generous daily portion of highly nutritious pellets laced with growth hormones, causing them to mutate into sea monsters straight out of Greek mythology. Sometimes you just find yourself staring dolefully at the computer screen thinking, "this is literally the stupidest thing anyone has ever written in the history of any language."

Writing is an intrinsically bizarre process. It requires insanely private musing and introspection, yielding a result that is then thrust out into the world. Essentially, one sits alone and speaks to an unseen multitude in one's head. There is a very fine line between writing and insanity.

It takes a peculiar type of masochistic courage. As David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas) put it, when you “show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.” That's why when a kind stranger gives my book a five-star rating and a favorable review, I want to buy a plane ticket, rent a car, drive to his or her house and give him or her a thank-you hug. I can hardly imagine anything more validating. The point is, I love my readers. I'm grateful to each and every one of you.

Creative Minds vs. Real Life

My very good friend Kristen (seriously, one of the coolest people I know) posted a link to this item on The Guardian's Web site:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/20...

It's a review of Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work: How Artists Work by Mason Currey and it explores six "key rules."

It's all quite interesting, but I'd like to take a moment to consider #2 in particular.

In advocating keeping the day job, the author of the article, Oliver Burkeman, points out (correctly, I think) that "limited time focuses the mind, and the self-discipline required to show up for a job seeps back into the processes of art," reminding us that Wallace Stevens (an insurance executive who also happened to be a poet) claimed that "it introduces discipline and regularity into one's life."

I sort of agree with that, but I'd like to point out another important aspect of being a creative-person-with-a-real-job.

There is a huge difference between writing commercial genre fiction and writing as a hobby to satisfy a personal urge. I'm just a regular working man with an ordinary day job, so I have a lot of creative freedom in terms of telling the story I want to tell, the way I want to tell it. Basically, I can write the kind of novels I would want to read.

Publishers want a sure thing; they want an established, pre-defined audience to whom to market a product. As a hobby writer, I'm free from that pressure. If I never make a dollar, it doesn't matter. But I can scratch the itch without artistic compromises. If other people enjoy my work, wonderful! If not, it's still an intellectually, psychologically and emotionally fulfilling endeavor.

Writers are often asked some variation on the question, "would you still write if you never had to work again?" I think the obvious answer is usually an emphatic and unhesitating "yes!" because (a) a lot of very financially successful writers have made more money than their descendants can ever spend, yet they continue to churn it out, don't they? And (b) people like me, who don't technically have to write at all (aside from the writing and editing I do at work, obviously), still write for our own reasons. We do it because it's what we do.

In the words of Isaac Asimov, "if the doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster."

Because the NSA Already Knows What You Like Anyway

Fellow Goodreaders, there is not much that Neil Gaiman and I have in common except that we both have a very cool wife (not the same one) and we both have a Facebook author page. This is mine:

https://www.facebook.com/AustinScottC...

Be one of the first 100 to "Like" my page and I can guarantee that everyone else who "Likes" it after that will have a higher number than you, sequentially speaking, and therefore shall be deserving only of your scorn.

BONUS: You can say, "I was into A.S.C. before he was cool. Seriously, like, way, way before."

Deconstructing DTfG

At its heart, Dicing Time for Gladness is about the conflict between the Old World – embodied in such characters as Josiah Blumfield (Constance's father) and City Councilman Hautious Sugging – and the New World – represented primarily by Victoria da Vinci and secondarily by intrepid, crusading muckraker/reformer/social activist Margaret Brady-Clemens (modeled on such actual historical figures as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens).

The Old World, stubbornly entrenched and resistant to change, is confronted by the brave, optimistic vision of the future offered by the New World. (This mirrors the struggle related to the fading aristocratic order and the emerging democratic order in Europe around the same time, which is why I take them to France in the second book, Crass Casualty.) I also wanted to explore two alternative avenues manifested within that outlook: Victoria's almost ludicrously sunny progressivism vs. the Nietzschean Will-to-Power espoused by the her villainous arch-rival Greta Greaves, which also foreshadows Ayn Rand and the Cold War doctrine of peace through strength. Both Greta and Victoria personally reject Church-based morality (although Greta is more than eager to exploit it when it suits her agenda). Victoria, however, follows a philosophical path that uses a utopianist blend of logic and metaphysics as the basis for just ethical behavior, while Greta pursues a course of rational self-interest which echoes Machiavelli.

Civilization tends to advance not in a linear way but rather through a series of painful, paroxysmal lurches – frequently sideways or even backwards. Constance, in this context, embodies the era, drawn with a conflicted mixture of enthusiasm and hesitation out of the Old World and into the New, only to find that the latter is not ready for people like Victoria and herself.

On an even larger scale, I wanted to capture the generational zeitgeist; post-Civil War, pre-World War I America was not unlike a troubled teenager getting ready to move out for the first time, trying to decide what to do with her life, excited but scared, not sure whether to cling to the familiar and comforting or boldly venture into the great uncharted unknown.

Ultimately, the destruction of the New Stratford Proscenium Theatre symbolizes the violence with which new ideas are often rejected.

A number of historians have expressed variations on the opinion that the Civil War was really the final convulsion of the American Revolution: the colonists shook off the bonds of the British Empire but never resolved the one question at the core of their own greatest internal division. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850 and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry were all part of a long-simmering tension, an uneasy interlude between the first peace (the Treaty of Paris) and the real conclusion of the conflict (at Appomattox Court House). That's a spectacular oversimplification of an extremely complex issue, of course – and many would argue vehemently and not without justification that the questions of state sovereignty and civil rights are still very much unsettled – but I do see Lee's surrender as the end of American adolescence in an important sense. So here we are, a nation awkwardly stumbling into quasi-adulthood in a world newly reshaped by the Industrial Revolution. Where do we go from here?

How It All Began

Dicing Time for Gladness is unusual in that its origin can be traced to a single moment. It was Monday, March 8th, 2010, and my wife Trish and I were driving north on US 1 on our way back from a long weekend in Key West. We had just stopped to sample “The World's Greatest Key Lime Pie” at Manny & Isa's Kitchen in Islamorada. As we were leaving, she casually suggested that I write a story that combined steampunk with burlesque. It seemed like a pretty good idea, so I grabbed a napkin out of the glove compartment – she was driving – and started to brainstorm character names. Victoria da Vinci was the first one I came up with, followed by Constance Blumfield / May Bloom.

And thus did what would eventually become Dicing Time for Gladness originate. It started as a rough 20-page short story that opened in Chicago and ended in Paris with an epilogue set in the Jazz Age.

I had recently finished reading Devil in the White City by Erik Larson as well as Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott, so the late 1890s in general and Chicago in particular emerged early as a clear choice for the setting. Victoria’s gold-rush backstory owes a great deal to the wonderful book Good Time Girls by Lael Morgan. Mary Roach’s fabulously entertaining book Spook contains a lot of information about the spiritualist craze that began in the 1840s and reached its frenzied apex in the 1870s, and this was very helpful in developing the character of “The Uncanny, Uncageable” Fiona Phinea (whom we meet in the second book). Victoria’s early “air-show,” Duke Spué Mynöd’s Flying Dolls, and the manner in which Righty became involved with it, was strongly inspired by the true story of Charles Broadwick’s World Famous Aeronauts, and here I drew heavily upon the excellent book Tiny Broadwick: The First Lady of Parachuting by Elizabeth Whitley Roberson. The brilliant Rereading Sex by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz was very helpful in seeking an understanding of Victorian-era American politics and culture.

The manuscript expanded logarithmically as I continued to work on it, and it soon became apparent that I was dealing with a novel. As it grew, I realized it actually wanted to be three novels – Dicing Time for Gladness, set almost entirely in Chicago in 1899, Crass Casualty, set mostly in Paris the following year, and finally Hate’s Profiting, which picks up in the aftermath of World War I.

Originally, the focus of the entire plot was Victoria herself. Constance soon emerged as the preeminent reference point as the project evolved, however, acting as a surrogate for the reader, offering a perspective through which the truth behind the Daughters of Aphrodite can be discovered in stages. Details originally included in the opening exposition migrated to the end to become reveals. As a narrative device, Constance also came to represent the Soul of the Age, torn between the Old World and the New World. Ultimately, that became the central theme of the first book: Constance was emblematic of the United States itself. (But that’s a subject for another blog post.)

The title of all three novels and the name of Victoria’s aerostat are all references to a Thomas Hardy sonnet called “Hap,” published one year before the events of Dicing Time for Gladness. It ponders themes of nihilism and randomness in a cold, harsh, indifferent universe. It seemed like the kind of thing Victoria would have liked.

Perhaps ironically, the word “burlesque” is never actually spoken in any of the books. Even though the word did exist in that era, its connotative flavor was very different at that time, and generally conjured up images of musical theater, raunchy comedy, acrobats, magicians, jugglers, political satire and other such elements, often with an exotic dancer as the final act. (The focus didn’t shift towards striptease as the primary attraction until the 1920s, with the Golden Age of Burlesque peaking in the 1930s.) I felt like Victoria probably wouldn’t have described her show using that term in 1899, so I left it out.

The first installment, Dicing Time for Gladness, was published three years and eight months after Trish proposed the concept. She was my essential, indispensable source of support throughout the process. I never could have done it without her.

Out of Time, Out of Place

Dicing Time for Gladness doesn’t just involve anachronisms or use anachronisms to drive the plot; is a story entirely about anachronisms. Although based (rather loosely) on an actual historical period in America, it remains, at its core, fantasy. Dicing Time for Gladness asks the question: what if the autogiro (called the “helixpteron” by Victoria) and – more outrageously – a practical, working gas-turbine engine had been conceived and constructed just before the turn of the century . . . and by a woman, no less? (In real life, the autogiro was invented by Juan de la Cierva in 1923. Steam-powered turbine engines had been around for hundreds of years, but they did not become a feasible means of propulsion until the 1930s, using jet fuel.)

What happens when technology arrives too soon, before society is ready to accept it? What happens when a woman comes into the fullness of her own powers in an age dominated by men? What happens when an unwelcome, threatening outsider is the source of vital innovation? What if Nikola Tesla had been a woman? What if Glenn Curtiss had been a woman? We know today that whether you have two X chromosomes or one X and one Y has nothing whatsoever to do with how good your ideas are. In 19th-century America, however, this was not yet widely believed. Females who stepped outside of accepted gender roles were subject to scorn and ridicule – or worse. These questions provide the author with fertile fields to cultivate.

Side note: the airship – a mainstay of Victorian science fiction – did already exist in 1899, although the Purblind Doomster was far more technically sophisticated and far more lavishly appointed than real airships of the day, which were still relatively primitive. Victoria’s ship presages the great zeppelins, the first of which was launched in 1900, and which would reach their greatest glory in the 1930s.

In general, I tried to strike a reasonable balance between period accuracy and keeping the narrative tight and brisk; I included real historical details only where I felt it was important to establish a tone. When a conflict existed between factual accuracy and plot continuity, I always prioritized the story. Chicago in 1899 is intended to function only as a broad context for the narrative. I made no effort to be meticulous about minutiae. If I had wanted to write a piece of academically rigorous non-fiction, I would have, but this is not that book. I took extravagant liberties wherever it suited me as an author or served to advance the action. It’s a rich compound of legitimate research and my favorite writing technique: Just Making Stuff Up.

That having been said, I’m pleased with the way the era permeates and resonates through the story. I’m having fun working on the second book in the series, Crass Casualty. Although only a few months have passed, the mood and spirit of France in 1900 is very different, and the contrast gives me a lot of rich and interesting background elements to play with as an author.