Fun with deeper meaning…or lack thereof.

Inspired by an image on Pinterest, I started thinking about DEEPER MEANING. Also known as that thing that teachers and critics do where they read a bit of writing and decide that everything means something else.

This whole way of analyzing writing gets on my nerves. Just a bit. SOMETIMES THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE, OK.

Take rain, for example. With literary analysis, rain means a multitude of things. The character feeling like she’s melting away. The erosion of everything she holds dear. The silent tears our hero is holding back. Rain is seen as representing everything from deep depression to the washing away of sins.

What about it representing, yaknow, WEATHER? And the fact that, eventually, it rains EVERYWHERE? Well. Except Arrakis. It doesn’t rain there. Not until after Leto messes up the whole ecosystem. Yeah. Anyway. Rain can just be rain. A sign that a planet hasn’t been totally messed up by a half-man, half-sandworm tyrant who is insanely good looking when played by James McAvoy. Ahem.

For the want of a civilization, a name was lost.

My summer project* was to finish Aqualee’s Hero.

This was my NaNo novel in 2009. I wrote 50,000 words in November, and then another 30,000 in December. By January, I hated it. I’d spent two months doing nothing but staring at these characters. I wanted to burn them all and scrap the whole concept. Fortunately, my friends have wiser heads** and told me to shove it in a box until I could stand to work with the thing again.

This didn’t happen, not exactly. Aqualee’s Hero has the privilege (or curse) to be part of my Guardian Wars universe. I started inventing this place somewhere between the ages of 12 and 14***, meaning that at this time, the universe is over ten years old.

Aqualee’s Hero was supposed to be a once-off, set two hundred years after the main storyline. Naturally, this did not happen. I have velociraptors in my head, remember? It turned into a bridging novel, connecting the first series to a new series.

Last February, I spent a week staying with a friend and went to work with her several days. I curled up in a giant plush chair, facing the two-story windows in the library at Georgia Tech, and plotted. I took my original Guardian Wars book and broke it into a series of four books, and the project exploded from there. In eight hours, I went from three novels to eleven, spanning half a millennium. Nice one, brain. Or velociraptors. Take your pick.

I am finally discovering why real authors hate editing so much. It is frustrating. You are essentially picking apart your baby and trying to turn it into something worthwhile. The oddest things, little things, things that didn’t seem at all important when you were actually writing the book, suddenly become massively important.

Like names.

I’m stuck on a single name.

When I created the Guardian Wars universe, I set up four star systems, each settled by a different branch of an alien race. Over the last ten years, I’ve accidentally created entire cultures, complete with mythologies and languages. I thought I was perfectly set up to finally WRITE these books.

And then I hit the name of the ship that my hero is on at the beginning of Aqualee’s Hero. I never named the ship while writing the book. It wasn’t important. Now I have decided that yes, it is important. You wouldn’t spend a year on a ship and never know the name.

It was at this point that I realized that while I had lovely three-dimensional pictures in my head of everything from Aqualee and Kerriana’asi…I’d somehow forgotten to create cultures for the other two planets. Well. I had created the cultures, back when I was 15. Do I remember the details now? Of course not. The ship whose name is turning into a giant problem? Comes from one of the two pencil-sketch planets. All of this means that I have to decide on ten thousand things from the planet’s culture before I can actually NAME THE STUPID SHIP.

And that, boys and girls, is why you should always keep notes.

 
 
 
*well, my project for the next three weeks. I have teaching-in-a-classroom-of-small-people starting on the 31st of January.

**or maybe just less crazy heads.

***12 was when I started reading Science Fiction, and by 14, the universe was well-established in my own head. Thus, timeline.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Stories are like childhood friends. Some days you’d be perfectly happy to cuddle up, get married, and spend the rest of your lives together. Other days, you want to take them by the shoulders and give them a good shaking until they start working properly.

They’re also a little bit alive. The majority of writers I know (and by ‘know’ I’m using the term loosely to include personal friends on the road to publication, correspondence with actual authors, blogs, and the like) have all bemoaned the fact that while they are trying to take the story from A to B, the story has chimed in and informed the author that, actually, it wants to go to Zenon with a side trip in Madland. The choice is then up to the author. Do I force the story to go the way I want it? Or do I let it go on its own mad journey and see where we end up?

I’m currently 15,000 words from finishing my 5th NaNo novel. The other four years* I started with an idea, usually along the lines of a place or a person or a situation. One of my favorites was, “What would happen if I put Hansel and Gretel in space? And added zombies and cyborgs and the Three Bears as giant ninja aliens?”

This year, however, I started with A Plan. Now, plans are dangeroussss things. Prone to biting you in the butt. Much like velociraptors. If you have An Idea, you are free to go where ever the evil (yet oh so delicious) little story gremlins decide to take you. With A Plan, however, you are linked to a specific footpath.

Footpaths, as any person who has gone hiking in a nature place will know, are prone to offshoots, detours, and winding roundabout ways of getting somewhere. However, in the end, you do eventually get to your destination. Sometimes with blisters and a sunburn, sometimes with photographs that are so pretty they’ll make you cry, but, yes, you do get there.

But what about when you plop a great big building in the middle of your pretty little nature place? Or populate it with flesh-eating sunflowers? Or add in a few armies? What happens to your footpath then?

That, essentially**, is what I have done this year. I started out with A Plan. My character was going on a Quest to find his One True Love so he could come home and Rule the Kingdom. It was intended to be riddled with fantasy clichés. It was supposed to be an enjoyable break to celebrate finishing my second year of studying to be a teacher.

Did this happen? No, of course not. That lasted for all of 3,000 words.

Then I added a villainess who was more smart than evil. After all, she didn’t want blood in her morning coffee, as it makes the coffee taste funny.

I stuck in a whole subplot about dragons, building on my ideas from my very first NaNo novel, back from 2005, the last year I spent any real time working on fantasy rather than science fiction.

Eventually, the original “prince going on a quest to find his one true love” plot had completely vanished, except as a reason why my prince left his kingdom, opening the way for my villainess to stick herself on the throne. Now I have a giant complicated mess with three separate storylines intersecting and breeding. I swear they’re breeding.

*and I’m only counting the years I’ve reached the 50,000 word mark. There are two unfinished attempts at NaNo that skulk in the bottom of my hard drive.

**maybe not essentially. Metaphorically? Rachel-is-batty-ily?

Fun with deeper meaning…or lack thereof.

Inspired by an image on Pinterest, I started thinking about DEEPER MEANING. Also known as that thing that teachers and critics do where they read a bit of writing and decide that everything means something else.

This whole way of analyzing writing gets on my nerves. Just a bit. SOMETIMES THINGS ARE JUST THE WAY THEY ARE, OK.

Take rain, for example. With literary analysis, rain means a multitude of things. The character feeling like she’s melting away. The erosion of everything she holds dear. The silent tears our hero is holding back. Rain is seen as representing everything from deep depression to the washing away of sins.

What about it representing, yaknow, WEATHER? And the fact that, eventually, it rains EVERYWHERE? Well. Except Arrakis. It doesn’t rain there. Not until after Leto messes up the whole ecosystem. Yeah. Anyway. Rain can just be rain. A sign that a planet hasn’t been totally messed up by a half-man, half-sandworm tyrant who is insanely good looking when played by James McAvoy. Ahem.

For the want of a civilization, a name was lost.

My summer project* was to finish Aqualee’s Hero.

This was my NaNo novel in 2009. I wrote 50,000 words in November, and then another 30,000 in December. By January, I hated it. I’d spent two months doing nothing but staring at these characters. I wanted to burn them all and scrap the whole concept. Fortunately, my friends have wiser heads** and told me to shove it in a box until I could stand to work with the thing again.

This didn’t happen, not exactly. Aqualee’s Hero has the privilege (or curse) to be part of my Guardian Wars universe. I started inventing this place somewhere between the ages of 12 and 14***, meaning that at this time, the universe is over ten years old.

Aqualee’s Hero was supposed to be a once-off, set two hundred years after the main storyline. Naturally, this did not happen. I have velociraptors in my head, remember? It turned into a bridging novel, connecting the first series to a new series.

Last February, I spent a week staying with a friend and went to work with her several days. I curled up in a giant plush chair, facing the two-story windows in the library at Georgia Tech, and plotted. I took my original Guardian Wars book and broke it into a series of four books, and the project exploded from there. In eight hours, I went from three novels to eleven, spanning half a millennium. Nice one, brain. Or velociraptors. Take your pick.

I am finally discovering why real authors hate editing so much. It is frustrating. You are essentially picking apart your baby and trying to turn it into something worthwhile. The oddest things, little things, things that didn’t seem at all important when you were actually writing the book, suddenly become massively important.

Like names.

I’m stuck on a single name.

When I created the Guardian Wars universe, I set up four star systems, each settled by a different branch of an alien race. Over the last ten years, I’ve accidentally created entire cultures, complete with mythologies and languages. I thought I was perfectly set up to finally WRITE these books.

And then I hit the name of the ship that my hero is on at the beginning of Aqualee’s Hero. I never named the ship while writing the book. It wasn’t important. Now I have decided that yes, it is important. You wouldn’t spend a year on a ship and never know the name.

It was at this point that I realized that while I had lovely three-dimensional pictures in my head of everything from Aqualee and Kerriana’asi…I’d somehow forgotten to create cultures for the other two planets. Well. I had created the cultures, back when I was 15. Do I remember the details now? Of course not. The ship whose name is turning into a giant problem? Comes from one of the two pencil-sketch planets. All of this means that I have to decide on ten thousand things from the planet’s culture before I can actually NAME THE STUPID SHIP.

And that, boys and girls, is why you should always keep notes.

 
 
 
*well, my project for the next three weeks. I have teaching-in-a-classroom-of-small-people starting on the 31st of January.

**or maybe just less crazy heads.

***12 was when I started reading Science Fiction, and by 14, the universe was well-established in my own head. Thus, timeline.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Stories are like childhood friends. Some days you’d be perfectly happy to cuddle up, get married, and spend the rest of your lives together. Other days, you want to take them by the shoulders and give them a good shaking until they start working properly.

They’re also a little bit alive. The majority of writers I know (and by ‘know’ I’m using the term loosely to include personal friends on the road to publication, correspondence with actual authors, blogs, and the like) have all bemoaned the fact that while they are trying to take the story from A to B, the story has chimed in and informed the author that, actually, it wants to go to Zenon with a side trip in Madland. The choice is then up to the author. Do I force the story to go the way I want it? Or do I let it go on its own mad journey and see where we end up?

I’m currently 15,000 words from finishing my 5th NaNo novel. The other four years* I started with an idea, usually along the lines of a place or a person or a situation. One of my favorites was, “What would happen if I put Hansel and Gretel in space? And added zombies and cyborgs and the Three Bears as giant ninja aliens?”

This year, however, I started with A Plan. Now, plans are dangeroussss things. Prone to biting you in the butt. Much like velociraptors. If you have An Idea, you are free to go where ever the evil (yet oh so delicious) little story gremlins decide to take you. With A Plan, however, you are linked to a specific footpath.

Footpaths, as any person who has gone hiking in a nature place will know, are prone to offshoots, detours, and winding roundabout ways of getting somewhere. However, in the end, you do eventually get to your destination. Sometimes with blisters and a sunburn, sometimes with photographs that are so pretty they’ll make you cry, but, yes, you do get there.

But what about when you plop a great big building in the middle of your pretty little nature place? Or populate it with flesh-eating sunflowers? Or add in a few armies? What happens to your footpath then?

That, essentially**, is what I have done this year. I started out with A Plan. My character was going on a Quest to find his One True Love so he could come home and Rule the Kingdom. It was intended to be riddled with fantasy clichés. It was supposed to be an enjoyable break to celebrate finishing my second year of studying to be a teacher.

Did this happen? No, of course not. That lasted for all of 3,000 words.

Then I added a villainess who was more smart than evil. After all, she didn’t want blood in her morning coffee, as it makes the coffee taste funny.

I stuck in a whole subplot about dragons, building on my ideas from my very first NaNo novel, back from 2005, the last year I spent any real time working on fantasy rather than science fiction.

Eventually, the original “prince going on a quest to find his one true love” plot had completely vanished, except as a reason why my prince left his kingdom, opening the way for my villainess to stick herself on the throne. Now I have a giant complicated mess with three separate storylines intersecting and breeding. I swear they’re breeding.

*and I’m only counting the years I’ve reached the 50,000 word mark. There are two unfinished attempts at NaNo that skulk in the bottom of my hard drive.

**maybe not essentially. Metaphorically? Rachel-is-batty-ily?