Messy Mashups
Shares this week: Laura Winter, The Stolen Lives
So after an entire month yapping about Un Lun Dun, it’s time to talk about writing of my own, and what I’m working on, and how it’s going.
I’m about a third of the way done with a first draft of The Dancer’s Tale, which is part 3 of volume 4 of Swords In Darkness (part 1 is The Lady of Darkness; part 2 is The Chapterhouse of Elith). I’ve also been working, slowly and painfully, on Chapterhouse, of which I’ve had a working draft for most of a year, but which I don’t seem to be able to finish. What’s the trouble?
First of all, the general point. The three parts of volume 4 (for which I don’t have a decent title yet…) are all essentially spins on different modes of fantasy writing.
The Lady of Darkness is a reformulation of H. Rider Haggard’s classic novel She, which arguably invented the fantasy trope of finding a lost city and trying to make sense of its bizarre and fantastical culture and inhabitants. My aim was not just to go back to the start of the genre, but also to undermine the basic chauvinism and racism of the original. The racism is easy enough to chuck, but She is probably the most chauvinistic novel I’ve ever read, and that chauvinism is fundamental to the novel’s structure. So The Lady of Darkness isn’t just a rewrite but a total overhaul.
The Dancer’s Tale looks at fantasy in relation to fairy tales, casting progressively farther afield from the usual sources of Euro-American fantasy. I begin with a brief Grimm-style tale, move into a longer Irish-style one, then to the 1001 Nights and finally The Journey to the West (Xiyouji). So instead of reframing fairy-tale events in novelistic prose, it’s a novel composed of tales.
As for The Chapterhouse of Elith, it’s a mashup of fantasy with detective-espionage fiction.
I’ve gotten stuck with Chapterhouse bceause, with all three parts of the book, I want to take the deep style and structure of the source-material seriously, but espionage fiction and fantasy don’t mesh comfortably. Sure, you can do fantasy James Bond easily enough, but on the whole Bond has nothing to do with espionage. My inspiration is John Le Carré, which makes the mashup tricky.
Le Carré is a wonderful novelist, irrespective of the espionage thing, because his novels revolve around complex, flawed people. His world is painted in a palette of subtle grays, but more importantly his characters are just people who happen to be involved (professionally or otherwise) in the world of espionage. Most of their motivations aren’t dictated by the spy plots at hand, but by the far messier and more complicated intricacies of their lives. Office politics commonly mean more than official aims.
Following a pattern found in a lot of Le Carré’s earlier work, I set up Chapterhouse as largely a series of conversations between Avren, acting as the counterespionage investigator, and the various women who run the Elith Chapterhouse. All of them are suspects, because there is a crime under investigation, but they’re also Avren’s only way of finding out what’s happened, how, and why. Basic detective stuff, in other words.
The problem, I found, is that espionage fiction depends enormously on shared assumptions. To take one strong example, spy fiction always assumes that the ultimate failure, the worst case scenario, is that open war breaks out. Nobody says this much, unless the threat is nuclear armageddon, but it’s the underlying principle of the whole thing. In fantasy, however, the statement “all-out warfare began” is sort of like “it started raining” in its ordinariness. So you have espionage without purpose: why bother sneaking around stealing information when you could just charge in with swords drawn? There is of course wartime espionage, but that misses a great deal of what, for me, makes Le Carré so interesting to read.
The result is that there’s an enormous amount of exposition necessary, and we all know what a pain that can be. The reader has to understand not only that abject failure on Avren’s part could lead to war, but also that war would be disastrous, something everybody desperately wants to avoid. It’s important that diplomatic fictions and surfaces be preserved, not because they’re real or true but because they help avoid unpleasantness—which in turn could potentially lead to war.
On the whole, I think I’ve done okay with this, but there is one crucial conversation that has kicked my butt. (For a long time I didn’t realize that it was this one conversation causing the problem, and I read back and forth and tinkered throughout, which of course took even more time.) It occurs right near the beginning, and marks the beginning of Avren’s investigation (the previous chapters being setup in the Chapterhouse, Avren getting tasked, Avren’s arrival, etc.). If the reader gets stuck or lost, they’ll probably never pick up the threads.
I can’t say that I’ve entirely solved these problems, but I’ll tell you what I did. I made a list of important personal points, things that Chief Sister Medbego reveals about herself and her feelings in the course of the conversation. I had another list of plot and background points, but I’d pretty much covered those in the first draft. The crucial thing was this other list: Medbego is angry; Medbego is stiff; etc. I wrote down a sentence or two for each about why each of these things (which doesn’t always have a single or simple answer). And then I went through looking for places that I could signal them—and also looking for things in the text that seemed to give a conflicting signal. As I did this, I worried that the whole thing would get simplistic (one feeling = one signal), but the situation is messy enough and the plot elements intricate enough that it didn’t happen.
I’ve got the chapter out to a trusted reader, and we’ll see how successful I’ve been. All going well, I’ll be able to put the final polish on this conversation—and the whole book—and have it out by Halloween or shortly thereafter. Finally!
As always, thanks for reading.