News: The Fathomless Abyss

Gads, that sounds like a pompous start to pontification. But I wanted to talk about something that I often say in class. It’s something Connie Willis told my Clarion West class, and which I repeat, but don’t explain as thoroughly as I should, because it’s so clear in my head.

But words are imprecise things, and so I’m a-gonna do what we used to call “unpacking” back in grad school and even provide some useful examples.

What did Connie say? She said, “Good fiction teaches us what it means to be human.” As good f&sf writers, I would argue that we might change “human” to “self-aware being,” but that is picking nits.

So what does that mean? It means we’re all faced with this common problem: life. And we want to know what we’re supposed to do, and what we can get away with, and what to do about all that hardcoded primate behavior that keeps popping up from time to time, and stuff like that. Sometimes the message features a universal human, sometimes it is a human shaped by particular circumstances, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc. It’s why we like to read fiction. It’s why we like gossip. We want to know what other human beings do.

And here’s why this is important: Sometimes thinking about what a story is trying to say is a good way to complete, rewrite, or sharpen it. Doing this at one of those stages can move a story from good to excellent. Do I start a story knowing the message? Hell no. It emerges (hopefully). Sometimes I have to coax it out of its hiding place in the prose. Sometimes I have to go in with a club.

But what are some examples of messages? This is my blog and so I am going to be lazy and pull examples from my own work. Here’s some easy ones:

• Worm Within – Sometimes people go crazy and can’t trust their own perceptions.
• Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know – Sometimes we take our cues to appear a certain way from other people and it’s not usually a survival trait.
• Bus Ride to Mars – What’s this dying thing all about and will stories carry us through?
• Lost in Drowsy Dreams – Jealousy leads to sad moments.
• The Immortality Game – Daydreaming and wishing about the past is a futile and sometimes narcissistic activity.
• Love Resurrected – You don’t always get what you want in love and sometimes if you do, you will regret it.
• Clockwork Fairies – Differing viewpoints of the world can present difficulties in love
• Ms. Liberty Gets A Haircut – Feminism is complicated.
• And the current piece I’m finishing up – Addiction will twist your life in strange ways.

Can you do this with every story? Maybe. There’s some of mine that I’d have a hard time doing this with, but I don’t know whether the problem is my own blinders, a lack on the part of the story, or just something that happens sometime.

Thoughts? How easy is it for you to figure out what your stories want to say? And when you find that out, what do you do with it?

(And shouts out to my peep Ann Leckie, who also edits the fine online fiction magazine Giganotasaurus, on the book deal!! Go Ann, you rock!!)

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

So my promise to myself is that the sequel to Beasts of Tabat, Hearts of Tabat, will be DONE by November 14th, which is my birthday, and which I plan to spend with Skyrim and a nice sativa (legal here in the marvelous land of WA) and not one ounce of work throughout the day as a thank you to me for working my butt off the last six weeks and getting this DONE.

The book is scheduled to be released at Emerald City Comicon next year, so you may see why the time pressure has stepped up in intensity. I told myself I’d get it done this year, and I have, along with a whole bunch of stories, not one but two collections, the update of Creating an Online Presence for Writers, a bajillion trips, and opening the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, including cool new classes from Rachel Swirsky and Juliette Wade, so I feel darn good about how much I got accomplished this year despite SFWA’s demanding maw chewing up my time on a consistent basis.

I thought, however, it would be useful perhaps for people grappling with novels to see what the last bits of work involve. I’ve been incorporating edits from the hardcopy manuscript but still have lots and lots of comments in the e-copy to address. In the process of adding those, I was able to look at the manuscript from a high-enough level that I could sort out all the chronology (oh dear GODDESS please let that statement be true, because that’s been the biggest pain in the rear so far) and make sure that everything made sense, that storylines were resolved, and that all the hidden plotlines got bubbled up in a meaningful way.

I’m adding in a few stray scenes that got dropped somehow, and then I’ll do the following passes (this is taken from the TODO list currently hovering at the beginning of the manuscript in Scrivener).

I’ll get through as many of these today as I can, but at some point I’ll have to print it out, because I want to take it on the road with me. I’m headed to a conference on nonprofit storytelling (ha) on Wednesday and back on the 13th, which is a complication I really wish I hadn’t introduced into my life, along with a class I’m teaching on the 12th (ditto the regret for the timing, but it’ll be a fun class), which is one reason I deserve a little Skyrim next Monday.

Anyway, here’s the todo list that I’ve been making as I went through and added my edits in:

Do a search on:
“¢ One of, not for the first, little, square
“¢ Penny-wides (penny)
“¢ Swam, abandon, tilt
(These are words I’ve noticed I use a lot, and I want to make sure they’re not over-used or consistent.)

Points that need to be checked or addressed:
Position of Temples on Beasts
Is Lucy set up as a name?
Are there too many duplicate things, like Lucy getting dismissed twice, multiple fights with Eloquence, etc? Outline events and examine.

Echoes:
Terra-cotta trade god dolls
Riot and Duke’s Occasion

Passes that need to be made:
“¢ Titles and capitalization
“¢ Read through each person’s story and map out times against BoT
“¢ Mapping pass – streets align
“¢ Trade God pass, check all the names against morphology
“¢ Names – consistent Bannister/Faustino, Serafina/whatserface, Marta/Ruhua, all of Elo/Obed’s sisters
“¢ Thought patterns (x 4)
“¢ (spoiler removed) clues
“¢ Mother references from Elo and Obed
“¢ Motivation for Lucy’s (spoiler removed)
“¢ Passes on significant locations: the stables, Sebastiano’s bedroom, Adelina’s, College of Mages, Great Hive chamber, the press, Adelina’s office, Letha’s stillroom, Silvercloth breakfast room, Murga’s tent
“¢ Possible redundancies: Adelina’s hiding of the press, Dryad forest and furnace, orange paper, election explanation, Sphinx

With the passes, I’m going through looking at a specific aspect, usually. For example, looking at each time a particular location occurs in order to make sure there are no contradictions and that the successive iterations build on each other rather than being redundant. That was the biggest flaw (IMO) of Beasts’s multiple drafts, a legacy of how many agents and editors wanted changes to the point where the book got rewritten a dozen times.

So we’ll see. I think this is a better book than the first one, which is reassuring, but there is always that perhaps I am deluding myself and this is just a manuscript with all work and no play makes Cat a dull girl repeated over and over again feeling lurking in the back of my head when I get to this stage.

Now, back to work.

#sfwapro