Artistic Dreams

Steve Buchheit posts this from Kameron Hurley. And…it makes wheels turn.

The last thing I needed was another blog post to distract me from catching up. Thank you very much, Steve…

***

Maybe I can fold this sucker into a post about our retreat. Yeah. I’ll do that. First of all, from May 29 until June 4 I was at or in transit to/from a writing retreat in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. This is the third retreat I’ve done organized by roughly the same group of people, although I would say there’s some turnover in attendees every year. Miranda Suri has an excellent post on the retreat here, and most of this I agree with. I honestly don’t know if I’m going back or not next year, but the retreat was very good. It’s that I’m limiting myself to one next year. Mama’s gotta start making some home repairs to sell her house and move to Florida in a few years. Ten years can, in fact, get away from you like you wouldn’t believe, and I want to make sure that dream happens.

Anyway, here’s the lot of us in a formal picture from the retreat. I’d best put a cut in here, yes?

And in one of those more relaxed moments…

Look at all those happy writers! Or drinking writers. Depends on the picture.

***

It was a fine retreat. I’d been away from home a little long, what with Wiscon just before it, but in spite of that, I had a good time. This retreat did reveal to me a truth I have suspected for a long time: from critique to critique there are some common issues in all my fiction.

Here’s the sample dialogue

Alastair: This synopsis you’ve given us. It’s about 100,000 words, right? You plan this to be a couple of books.

Me: Um…this is one book.

Alastair: Really?

Similar to this bit of dialogue from Paradise Lost:

Mary (Robinette Kowal): What you have here could easily be 3 chapters…

Okay…so my writing may be a tad on the dense side.

***

This takes me right into Kameron Hurley’s post. You know what, I have writing talent. If I put my fingers on a keyboard, I can produce poetic sentences and gorgeous dialogue. These are my strengths. I can bewitch you into thinking I have a better story than I do because you are reading gorgeous sentences and you’re not thinking about the other issues until later. (You know, kind of like watching a J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek film. Ooooh, acting! Shiny. Wait. Red matter. WTF?)

But you will notice my faults. Pre-Taos?

1. My research let me show you it. I learned this. Now you will too. Whether it’s natural or not.

2. Ramble, ramble, ramble. This story spends too long on character interaction and dialogue that doesn’t necessarily invoke tension or move the story forward.

I’ve got these. I really have got these. I can plot a novel. Oh yeah. And I can tell what the reader needs and doesn’t need. What I don’t have yet, post-Taos?

1. Baking chocolate. Now that I can plot, I’m going to make an incredibly intricate plot and just dump it on you to the point that you are buried up to your neck. I need to slow down, stir in some milk and sugar, take some time for exposition, and make you some enjoyable seventy percent chocolate.

2. Insert tiger here. Remember, tension doesn’t mean blowing things up.

I think this is a logical pendulum swing from where I was. I always tell the students this will happen to them with working on sentences. And it does. They give up comma splices for fragments. This apparently might be my version of that.

***

What this means is there is more work for me to do. And damn it, I am a lazy writer. There. It’s out there. I am not a lazy person. But I am a lazy writer. I have talent, you see. Me and you and every other writer that’s graced a neo-pro workshop. But I don’t wanna do more hard work. I just did some hard work. I just made a lovely book I’m proud of. Why can’t I be sloppy and just write as I write and that’s all there is to it?

Because…well, that’s not pursuing artistic excellence. That’s crapping out. I think it’s okay to take a break, or even get some distance. But this is not going to get me a story that will drive people to really want to read it, and remember it, and love it and take it home, and maybe even read it again. As matters stand, writing based on talent alone would be gratifying to me and a small circle of people, but this is not what I want. I want the best writing I can do.

Here we are then. I am trying to see if I can write Poison of thy Flesh from Lucy’s suicide attempt to the big reveal of the Borgia family. Can I do that? Can I make a 70,000 word book just with that? That’s my new experiment. That means I need to combine the ability to create tension without inserting tigers, and letting the readers spend more time with characters that I need to make them care about. I need to embrace tactical dialogue and tension building, as well as the tigers of action.

It also means that the Klarion series will be more books than expected. Oh well. Still the same amount of story.

More work. More time invested. Movement towards my artistic dream. I’m still a lazy writer at heart, but you know, I’ll put Eye of the Tiger on the stereo, and we’ll make something happen.