Once again it’s time for a Sherlock Holmes quote that turns out to be about writing: “it is of the highest importance to the art of detection to be able to determine, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital.” (from The Reigate Puzzle).
Back in the first year of this blog, I discussed Orson Scott Card’s theory that you can build a story around four things: setting, puzzle, character or event. The thing is, while a short story may involve a single one of the four, novels frequently require two or more.
Southern Discomfort for instance, is primarily a character story. Maria Esposito starts out burdened with guilt over a past tragedy, closed off from everyone and unable to do a job she loves, nursing. The book ends with her free of guilt, reconnected with the world and going to work for Doctors Without Borders. However it’s also a book about the setting, Pharisee County, Georgia.
For 300 years Pharisee’s residents have benefited from having Olwen and Aubric, two elves, guiding things from behind the scene. When the book starts, Aubric’s been murdered and everything is unstable: the forces of nature have become unmoored, Olwen’s still a target for the killer and Pharisee’s social structure risks becoming unmoored. By the end of the book stability has been restored, but not the status quo: things are changing, for better or worse. In a sense, Pharisee gets its own character arc.
But I could also make the case it’s an event story. It starts with Pharisee under attack, ends with the threat eliminated. As Holmes says, knowing which of these plot elements is incidental, which is vital is essential to finding my way through the maze of possible story choices.
I’m applying the same analysis to Let No Man Put Asunder as I review the first draft and think about the second Which of Card’s four elements is incidental, which the heart (for all Card’s loathsome politics, I still find his analysis useful).
It’s definitely not “about” the setting in the way Southern Discomfort is. It does have character arcs for protagonists Paul and Mandy. It’s also very much an “event” story: something happens in the first chapter that throws their world out of kilter, then they spend the rest of the book struggling to right the ship. But there’s a puzzle element as Mandy and Paul have to figure out why this weirdness has engulfed them.
With a puzzle story you start by posing a question, then end by answering it. I don’t think that’s where Asunder is 
going. While “why is this happening?” is a constant refrain throughout the story, the real focus is “how can we stay alive and free long enough to find out?” That’s much more about events; as I said last month, it’s very much in the “menace” genre where a lurking threat constantly imperils everyone (as in some of Lester Dent’s fiction).
Menace stories can be mysteries. The Doc Savage novel The Squeaking Goblin has a menace — the eponymous villain’s constant attacks on the Raymond family — but the focus is as much on why, and who the villain is, as it is on stopping him. In the typical Fu Manchu novel, by contrast, Sir Dennis Nayland Smith and his allies know who the villain is and what he wants; the challenge is stopping him.
While I’ve been thinking about the book primarily as a mystery — Paul and Mandy don’t know who the Community of All are or what the Community wants with them — I suspect it will play better if I treat it as event more than mystery. That would allow me to reveal more of what’s going on sooner, rather than holding for a big reveal at the climax. As Alfred Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut, resolving the mystery before the end keeps the audience focused on whatever you want the climax to be about instead of guessing about the reveal.
It’s also more event than character story. Mandy and Paul do have personal problems they’re dealing with but those problems don’t propel the plot — the threat from the Community’s killers does. That said, the story definitely needs stronger character arcs: Paul has a decent one in the first draft but Mandy doesn’t. The first draft ends with the downfall of the bad guys, then Mandy and Paul wrapping up their personal shit. I think that works and will probably remain but the details need to change.
Once I have the beginning and the end I can work on the arc in between. As I said in that previous post, the plot of the first draft doesn’t progress or arc, it just moves them across the game board. That won’t do.
Hopefully these insights will help as I start replotting.
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When he’s too rowdy, we put him back in the cage on the floor, sometimes with me joining him. The thing is, his back will go out again if he jumps enough or climbs enough stairs so we’re determined to avoid that and postpone the next incident as long as possible. The cage stops him from jumping off the couch, or more likely on and off, on and off ..
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Sleep helped a lot too. I had some really bad nights but it got to the point my body decided to sleep late — that’s rare — and I felt much better for it (who’d have guessed?). With TYG keeping the dogs occupied much of the week, it was also easier for me to find time to exercise.
Over at Atomic Junk Shop I discussed encountering old tropes 
Oh, and the Durham Writers MeetUp Group — my specfic writing group is under their umbrella — is in need of a new admin, so I volunteered. It doesn’t sound like too much work; I’m waiting for the current administrator to get back to me about what I need to do to take over. Wish me luck.
February, however, has started off pretty well. I was determined to get some creative work done this week so I focused on rereading my first draft of Let No Man Put Asunder. It’s pretty good for one of my first drafts, with character arcs and story arc moving along well. I got about 30,000 words in; if I’m write, it’s after this chapter that things run a lot less smoothly. Still, I’m satisfied I haven’t been wasting my time. I also reread the feedback from my writing group and noted where I agreed with their criticisms, which I usually do. Fortunately there’s nothing they said that isn’t fixable, like a sense in one chapter the stakes aren’t high enough.
Plushie’s still in his cage all of next week but I’m determined to get things done. Wish me luck, and have a great weekend.
“In this type of story,” Blessingame said, “some person or thing hangs a veil of horror over the characters in this story; we never know when this menace will strike but we do know it will continue to commit depredations until the hero does his stuff and overcomes it in the final climax.” An editor Murray quotes says the figure can be a mystery until the climax or, as in Dracula or Fu Manchu, the heroes know who he is but still can’t stop him from striking.
Dent applied this approach in a number of Doc Savage yarns. in 
Clearly it’s a trope that still works. Which brings me to its presence in my own work. 
In short, nothing terribly spectacular, but wrapping up Asunder after a couple of months when the work was just crawling feels very good. To end the post, here’s Wisp, somewhat more of a climber since we moved her indoors.
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As usual, I’m devoting the last day of the year to a review of my year’s performance. As I wrote 
Plus while I really enjoy being back in journalism, writing articles for 
I finished the section of Savage Adventures I wanted done for this month, including double-checking details I wasn’t clear about in The Pharaoh’s Ghost.
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According to 
To see if I can get a handle on the answer I’ve started reading books with an eye to finding comps: Southern fantasy, rural fantasy, small town fantasy, intrusion fantasy. The first of which was Caitlin Kiernan’s ALABASTER, which I first read 
Wednesday, I noticed that while the thermostat was set to 72, the temperature on the house, as shown on the thermostat, was 67. Given the temperature outside was going into the high 20s that night, this seemed like a bad thing.
And the other about the debut of the Daily Bugle’s city editor, 
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