It's beginning to feel somewhat like writing (hummed to the tune of "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas")

Yesterday morning first thing, I had to take a subway ride from one end of the city to the other. I forgot to print out the character sketch forms to bring with me, but I had the piece of foolscap on which I had printed out the address information about where I was going. I began making notes on it about one of the characters, and the ideas just kept coming. The notes blossomed into connections amongst characters and events, and ideas for how the world of the story works. Elements of the story are starting to click with other elements, and my characters are developing the quirks, contradictions, and unconscious fears and wants that will keep me fascinated by them. I filled both sides of the sheet of paper. Such a relief, because until I have the infrastructure that makes each element resonate with at least one other, I don't have a story. And time's getting short. But this is a big move forward.

When I got back home, I scanned both sides of the sheet of paper and saved them as digital files offsite. Last night and today, I'm transcribing the text of the hard copy into my writing programme. That way I'll have three copies in three separate places and formats. Later today, I'm going to rewrite one small but key element in a scene I wrote a few days ago, and that'll put one more piece of the puzzle in place. This is when the writing can feel exciting to me, rather than the Sisyphean task that it most often feels like.

A few years ago, I perceived that my stories felt stronger and more satisfying to me when most of the key elements showed up twice. I mean something more complex than that, but I sense it as shape and motion, and I haven't yet hit upon a way to adequately describe it. Lessee: the two (or more) occurrences of the same element need to be separated by verbiage, i.e. the first shows up roughly near the beginning of the novel, and the second roughly near the end. It's good if the second occurrence makes the reader suddenly flash back to the first occurrence, see it and other aspects of the novel in a new light, and have an 'aha!' moment about something key to the novel. I try to make it so that the reader can connect the dots and the picture takes clearer shape with each connection they're able to make. I guess I'm saying that the first occurrence sets the thread of an element into the weave of the story, and the final one ties it in. Or ties it off, or something. But when I was beginning to write fiction, although I got the information "tie off most of your plot threads" over and over, and although it made sense on a conceptual level, it was a cold knowledge. It finally het up and got exciting for me when I could sense it kinetically, body-deep. At first it was mostly haphazard. At some point I'd remember an attention-getting element that I had put into the story near its beginning, and if I hadn't done something with it before the story ended, I'd find something for it to do. No use creating something tasty, only to have it use up its work day by sitting in the lunch room, bored out of its skull, twiddling its thumbs. Usually it's pretty easy to find something for that plot element to do; something neat to resolve a troublesome aspect of the story that I'd been trying to bury under the rug and hope no-one would notice. Because (it eventually occurred to me), if it didn't have some good work to contribute to the project of bringing the story home, then why was it there? God, I'm starting to sound like lines from a Yoda monologue when I talk about this. Feel the Force, Luke. In other words, start recognizing that the moment when I lift my light saber and swing it at your butt is probably going to have a result at the other end of the swing if you don't take steps to intervene.

In any case, I can now do a lot of the connecting the thigh bone to the knee bone actively instead of by accident. I don't tie off every plot thread; leaving some unfinished business gives the feeling that the characters go on living their lives and working their shit out after you close the book. It helps the story feel "real." I just worked that out this moment, seconds before I wrote it down.

I played a bit with unfinished business with The New Moon's Arms. As usual, I left some less key plot threads without definite resolutions. But there is also one major plot thread where I deliberately made the resolution hit a small note, rather than a big one. The protagonist figures out the answer to a big mystery by inference from something someone says, realises that her biggest fear about this mystery is not so, and, relieved, immediately goes on to the more pressing issues in front of her. I didn't make the mystery an active part of the climax scene, although it is in there. It's interesting to see how different readers respond to that. Some read it as me inexplicably dropping plot threads. Some don't seem concerned about it one way or t'other. Some, like hot knives through butter, apparently deduced the answers to most of the mysteries before you could say, 'mammalian diving reflex.' Though their reactions to how I resolved them vary.

Long post. I blame it on two nights of insomnia. But while I'm feeling garrulous, I may as well go and work on that novel...