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maculategiraffeI am going out of town for the weekend-- should be back sometime Sunday-- just so y'all know. I may be able to check e-mail and LJ at the hostel where we're staying, but I'm not 100% sure.
(I'm also sick again. My throat hurts and I'm very light-headed and may have a fever. Grumble.)
But anyway, I wanted to write out something I was thinking about, about the writing process for "Lee."
I normally don't talk about my characters as "telling" me things-- not that I have anything against that phrasing when other people do it, but it doesn't generally occur to me to phrase something as "Yves finally told me X thing about himself" instead of just "I finally realized X thing about Yves." Cause, well, I don't know about your characters, but my characters' consciousness does not entail an awareness of my existence as such. So although I love them deeply and there are several metaphors I could employ for the author-character relationship, I generally do not think of them as "telling me things," except by accident when I am spying on them from portable bushes and cunningly disguised character-blinds.
But writing Lee, that's been like--
--okay, imagine being a therapist for an incredibly shy, withdrawn person, someone who doesn't even want to be in therapy, but he has to (because you, the therapist, also happen to be his employer, and also his mom, and also God), and for the first four months of weekly sessions he answers in monosyllables and stares out the window, and sometimes looks up really sharply at a certain question, but then lapses back into silence. And you love him so much, and it's driving you nuts that you can't get him to open up, but you understand and you know he's scared (as you should, because you're the one who made him that way) so you just wait, and give him time. And then all of a sudden, in session number seventeen, he starts talking. Very quietly, so you have to learn forward and listen hard, but non-stop, and it's just this flood, and there's so much there, and you're scrambling and scribbling desperately to get it all down and he's just… spilling. He's still quiet. But now he speaks.
It's not a precise analogy, but writing Lee has been incredibly exciting in that way. I edit and re-edit the scenes where he's just thinking about stuff, because I worry that I'm going on too long, that this stuff is not half as interesting to anyone who is not Lee's therapist/boss/mom/supreme being (and many thanks to those of you who do mention that you like those introspective bits, because it makes me feel way better about it). But I'm just so thrilled he's finally telling me these things. So to speak.
Thing is, now that patience and persistence have yielded such fruit with Lee-- and, for that matter, with Jer, though I always intended to see Jer through to here-- I'm really starting to regret giving Jesse such short shrift. It was a matter of lack of patience on my part, really-- Jesse was just so... fuckoffgeroffme, getting anything out of him was like pulling teeth. I know it's my own fault for creating a character with his particular damage, and I loved him as I love all my characters,* but he was very difficult for me. And now I look at Jesse's story and I'm like "I did not finish this story."
I mean, I finished the story I'd intended to write, which was really about Bran and Holden, and not Jesse at all (you may have noticed, in fact, that all the stories in this trilogy are actually about Bran and the development of his relationship with Holden), but I didn't finish Jesse's story. He was just always like "Later for this idyllic-domesticity noise, I got places to be"-- he didn't fit into my framework, and I decided, just as Holden did, that I didn't need to fix him, because he was just passing through. I used him for his insights and iconoclasm, to get Bran and Holden out of the fix they'd gotten themselves into, and then-- again like Holden-- I was like "here, you insufferable little brat, have a happy ending and get out of my hair."
My original intention-- as you can kind of see by the outline-- was to do something similar with Lee, but then, in addition to the whole Robin side of things, I realized I'd overplayed my hand. Lee was so broken, and fucked up, and out of it, that I couldn't hustle him in and out of the story the way I did Jesse-- I had to let him take his own time, and Lord in heaven did he take his sweet time. But it was worth it. For me, anyway.
And now I regret not having given Jesse the same chance: to tell his own story, in his own time.
So um.
As for the question of what's next, after I finish "Lee."
Well. We'll see. I've got to finish "Lee," first.
*Which is partly why I currently refuse to develop Dunaev as a character. I'd have to start loving him then, and ugh.
(I'm also sick again. My throat hurts and I'm very light-headed and may have a fever. Grumble.)
But anyway, I wanted to write out something I was thinking about, about the writing process for "Lee."
I normally don't talk about my characters as "telling" me things-- not that I have anything against that phrasing when other people do it, but it doesn't generally occur to me to phrase something as "Yves finally told me X thing about himself" instead of just "I finally realized X thing about Yves." Cause, well, I don't know about your characters, but my characters' consciousness does not entail an awareness of my existence as such. So although I love them deeply and there are several metaphors I could employ for the author-character relationship, I generally do not think of them as "telling me things," except by accident when I am spying on them from portable bushes and cunningly disguised character-blinds.
But writing Lee, that's been like--
--okay, imagine being a therapist for an incredibly shy, withdrawn person, someone who doesn't even want to be in therapy, but he has to (because you, the therapist, also happen to be his employer, and also his mom, and also God), and for the first four months of weekly sessions he answers in monosyllables and stares out the window, and sometimes looks up really sharply at a certain question, but then lapses back into silence. And you love him so much, and it's driving you nuts that you can't get him to open up, but you understand and you know he's scared (as you should, because you're the one who made him that way) so you just wait, and give him time. And then all of a sudden, in session number seventeen, he starts talking. Very quietly, so you have to learn forward and listen hard, but non-stop, and it's just this flood, and there's so much there, and you're scrambling and scribbling desperately to get it all down and he's just… spilling. He's still quiet. But now he speaks.
It's not a precise analogy, but writing Lee has been incredibly exciting in that way. I edit and re-edit the scenes where he's just thinking about stuff, because I worry that I'm going on too long, that this stuff is not half as interesting to anyone who is not Lee's therapist/boss/mom/supreme being (and many thanks to those of you who do mention that you like those introspective bits, because it makes me feel way better about it). But I'm just so thrilled he's finally telling me these things. So to speak.
Thing is, now that patience and persistence have yielded such fruit with Lee-- and, for that matter, with Jer, though I always intended to see Jer through to here-- I'm really starting to regret giving Jesse such short shrift. It was a matter of lack of patience on my part, really-- Jesse was just so... fuckoffgeroffme, getting anything out of him was like pulling teeth. I know it's my own fault for creating a character with his particular damage, and I loved him as I love all my characters,* but he was very difficult for me. And now I look at Jesse's story and I'm like "I did not finish this story."
I mean, I finished the story I'd intended to write, which was really about Bran and Holden, and not Jesse at all (you may have noticed, in fact, that all the stories in this trilogy are actually about Bran and the development of his relationship with Holden), but I didn't finish Jesse's story. He was just always like "Later for this idyllic-domesticity noise, I got places to be"-- he didn't fit into my framework, and I decided, just as Holden did, that I didn't need to fix him, because he was just passing through. I used him for his insights and iconoclasm, to get Bran and Holden out of the fix they'd gotten themselves into, and then-- again like Holden-- I was like "here, you insufferable little brat, have a happy ending and get out of my hair."
My original intention-- as you can kind of see by the outline-- was to do something similar with Lee, but then, in addition to the whole Robin side of things, I realized I'd overplayed my hand. Lee was so broken, and fucked up, and out of it, that I couldn't hustle him in and out of the story the way I did Jesse-- I had to let him take his own time, and Lord in heaven did he take his sweet time. But it was worth it. For me, anyway.
And now I regret not having given Jesse the same chance: to tell his own story, in his own time.
So um.
As for the question of what's next, after I finish "Lee."
Well. We'll see. I've got to finish "Lee," first.
*Which is partly why I currently refuse to develop Dunaev as a character. I'd have to start loving him then, and ugh.
