Four Spaces

[ivyblossom]

Once again, I need to preface this by saying I have no idea what I'm talking about. Not one single idea. I just bumble around in the dark and once in a while I imagine that I have an idea about what's in front of me. But it's probably just the result of too many pringles. So take all this with a grain of salt.

I've been thinking about this one for a while.

In order to tell one story, I've determined that I need four spaces. These spaces are sometimes physical (or digital), but sometimes they're metaphorical. In order for something to grow, be cultivated, and, you know, "cook", you need to have a space to put it in. If you want it to grow in particular ways (say, if you're like me and it doesn't all spring fully-formed from your skull), you need to give the story different kinds of spaces to grow in. So far I have identified four separate spaces that have proved useful to me. Insofar as I know what I'm talking about which, again, is questionable.

1. Meta Blather
I've said this before, but let me reiterate: I find that I need to talk about the story for a while first. Scene by scene, characters, little details, the whole thing. No restrictions whatsoever. Just a sea of words. Not actual writing per se. Nothing that could be copy/pasted (or, in my case, copied out). In fact, this space barely allows for that. In this space, the narrator is really me, and the story is a construction. There is room there for things to happen in other ways, for characters to be out of character. Thinking about it this way helps me to avoid getting locked into one idea, or from thinking about a character only one way. Because it's not a fnished space, it's a dynamic space. truepenny recently expressed so beautifully, it's important to know what every character's motivation is, even if you don't ever express that in the text. As she said,

Making them behave out of character is a kind of deliberate humiliation--and doing it unintentionally is almost worse, because it signals very clearly that I didn't care enough to pay attention to them, to understand what they would and would not do. And characters deserve that kind of dignity, that integrity.

That post really spoke to me, and made me think about meta space and how I'm currently using it. I really can't keep multiple characters in my head at once. I can keep parts of them in my head, but not every piece of them, not all the time. Not every moment of a character, over months, over years; not his backstory and his future all at once, along with his particular reaction in the time and place of a particular scene. For me, it's all uncertain until I write it down (and even sometimes uncertain after that). Writing down ideas about a character, fleshing out his backstory and trailing him along into his future, helps me to place him in a scene a little easier. I've already planted the ideas about his character, I've let it stew a little, so when I go to write him in a scene I have a better grasp of him. He has some history in my head. The same is true for scenes, or settings, or plot elements. I think I'm going to end up spending a lot more time considering meta space, because the more I look at it the more important it seems. I think this is one of the most wonderful things about fandom; it's one great big giant meta blather space. Since I have no more fandom and my characters only live in my own head (well, okay, in joyouschild's head and boniblithe's head too), I keep my meta blather (mostly) in my moleskine.

2. Reference
At the very beginning of my current project, I had no idea how to begin. I had a few ideas, but no structure. So the first thing I did was went looking for a piece of software that would let me just store ideas. I wanted something beyond a notebook or a word document. I wanted something that expected to be a set of shorter ideas; basically, digital cue cards. I found Idea Knot, which does what I needed it to do. It lets me create custom "groups" of ideas, and I can put one idea in multiple groups. So that helps me get rid of the structure of a page or a word doc.

I use this space for constructing a plot, but the longer I use it the more I realize that it's better characterized as a reference tool. I'm creating my own reference source to refer back to later on, while I'm deep in the writing; reference for the events and the order they're going in, but also for the characters, details, background, politics, and so forth. The meta blather contains a lot of that too, but that's a lot more more fluid than this; the reference space is more of a repository of ideas I'm more or less committed to using. Ideas that have passed through the first kiln and are ready for the next one. They may be rearranged or altered, but they're a bit more mature than what's going on in the meta stage.

When I first started working on this project, I spent about two or three months working on my reference source. Even about halfway through I felt like I had too much stuff, and it took a while before it started to congeal into some sort of form. It was a bit scary, to be honest with you. But in retrospect, it was all leading somewhere, and to this day I can't really write anything without having the reference open. Now it's like a safety blanket; all the major ideas are in there, the chapter summaries, the character sketches (I even wrote out the answers to ten questions to ask your characters, and that was more useful than I expected), everything.

3. The Stage
This is the obvious space. The manuscript itself. I used to think this was the whole thing; that if you were working on a story this is where you were. I was always that girl who didn't believe in outlines. Yeah, I've eaten my words now; now I have so many outlines I probably have five times more text outside of the stage than on it. And you know, i don't see that changing when (if?) I ever get finished with the story I'm currently working on. I think these things are necessary. For me at least.

With my meta blather on going (I have yet to stop metablathering, 8 chapters in), and my reference source doesn't feel complete yet either. I go back and forth; sometimes I don't add to the reference source for weeks. But then, like the last week or so, I only add to the reference source, leaving the stage completely alone until I know a whole other set of facts.

I've also discovered that the stage gets layered. I thought I was the sort of person who just wrote in one go (that was how I did fanfiction anyway, and looking back, boy is that obvious. Ever want to see a non-existent ending? Go look at some of my fanfiction. I just stopped, I didn't write endings!). What I've discovered lately is that I tend to write dialogue first, and then chunks of action, and then even larger chunks of description. And then, long afterward, I write in reactions. How about that. I can't let any characters react until days, weeks, or months later. Introspection seems to be my last stage. I'm currently putting placeholders in my manuscript for the introspective/reaction scenes. Everything is going to get longer in editing because of this layered approach. I'm not saying I like it, but I'm noticing that I'm doing it. Maybe this is something I need another space to fix? I don't know!

4. Alt Scenes
Here's something I've only come to embrace recently. For a long time I behaved as if I only had so many words in me; I could only write so much in my lifetime, so I had to make every word count. What's the point of writing something that's never going to appear anywhere? Perhaps this is why I balked at the idea of outlines and summaries. I wanted to get to the juicy bits, the important bits. But I've done a 360 on that one. Now I probably write way too much extra stuff. And hence the alternate scenes.

I've found it very interesting to write alternate scenes, though mostly they're extra scenes. I have developed a rule about these; because they are explicitly not meant to go onto the stage, I write them from a different perspective than my stage text. For instance; my current project is (boringly) a third person limited narrator. For alt scenes, I write in first person. (I could write them in second person too, just to satisfy my own glee for writing in second person, but you see what I mean.) Sometimes I write literal alt scenes, stuff that just happens not to go on the stage, but actually happens behind the scenes. (Stuff that would ordinarily be classed as NC-17, or whatever the kids are calling it nowadays, I would probably write as an alt scene just for the satisfaction of having written it.) But I've also written lots of scenes that don't fit into the story as I end up writing it at all, and these are what I think are most valuable. The test runs.

Sometimes, particularly early on in the story, I find myself concerned over particular issues. In my case, I worried about certain relevations, or certain ethical situations, or how characters will react in scenarios I imagine coming up. I resisted exploring these at first, again, feeling that I should spend my time on "productive" writing rather than admitedly "useless" stuff. But after a while I started writing them, and in the process I learned a lot about the characters. I'm lucky enough to have beta readers who are willing to look at the alt scenes and give me feedback on them, too. Not necessarily the style, but the ideas, the reactions. I think alt scenes are a narrative version of the meta blather, but it makes me feel closer to the characters. It feels like a trial run. It's a way, as truepenny pointed out, to retain the dignity of the characters by letting them on a back stage first.

I've spent a lot of time at work talking about software and metaphor; finding the metaphor of the software you're trying to learn is half the battle to using it well. What does it think it is? If you know what software thinks it is, you'll be able to better take a stab at guessing not only how to use it, but what it can do. What I've come to understand recently is that I need to think about those metaphors in my own writing as well; the tyranny of the .doc is a real thing. If I put something on a word doc, that means something different than my scrawled blather in my moleskine or the alt scenes I keep in my plotting software. That blank page in Word makes me feel like whatever goes on there is permanent; there's something very bold and certain about it. It was a neat idea to make Word actually look like you were typing directly onto a piece of paper, but I find that metaphor restrictive; it's too easy to picture it just like that. I was amazed at how differently I felt when I stopped using Word to write and started using Avenir. This is a piece of software that presumes that you're working on something, and lets you add annotations. Just that shift in metaphor helped me to feel a little more relaxed about the writing process. For the first time (the first time EVER), I feel like I'm witing a draft. I add notes inside the documents, I leave spaces for scenes to come. I go back and add annotations to the passages I want to edit, or bookmark spaces where additional scenes will go in (as soon as I figure out what exactly those scenes will be about). My software helps me create a new metaphor.

I had no idea, when I started back to writing back in 2001, that I had so many ideas in my head that needed to be dismantled. I learn more about writing every day.

Maybe one day I'll feel that I can stop with the disclaimers. But that's not going to be anytime soon.

Comments

[clayre.livejournal.com]

So glad you posted this. My stories always come to me in scenes and that's why thus far I haven't written anything that I haven't been compelled to. (For class, since I obviously didn't want to flunk school.) It's frustrating, because it's all so hard to get straight.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know what you mean. The organization is a skill to hone just as much as the actual writing is, it seems to me. I've certainly spent more time on the organization than the actual writing, which may be obvious by the end, I dunno. But personally I'm impressed by software that anticipates the idea of random scenes coming to you, because I can't tell you how exciting it was when I could start slotting random scenes into some kind of order and seeing a story emerge that I didn't pressure into existence.

I guess this whole post is a rant about Word, isn't it. Not really fair, but I found that moving away from it and into something that was more accepting of disorder really helped my process. (So far.)