Goat Notes

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: A breakthrough!  I've finally teased apart the threads of the infamous Four Agenda Pile-Up at Garcastle.  Lord Evil now has something to do that is... worthy... of him; Relatively Okay Genius's masterstroke, disentangled with few changes from the former muddle, shows up as much more shocking and brilliant; and there is lively and desperate action to replace the worst passages of talking heads and ominous introspections.  The cost of all this is another chapter in the middle, provisionally dubbed Hell-Stalk.  That's the third, now.  Even at an optimistic estimate, I'm going to have to allow a month for this trio.  Depending on how the rest of the revision goes, the Easter deadline may still be attainable.

Coming to the end of the political critique now.  By this weekend, I want to have the revised structure it implies up and running.  The simpler critique of the Big Bad's thread, and the unpredictable process of trying to integrate Kate with Katy around Kit's pivotal untold story, will then conclude the structural issues, and set me free for the big new sections and deletions.  This will surely take me up to the beginning of March, when I can start the detail edits; after which, beta-reading, final polish, and submission I guess in mid-spring.

Quiet worldbuilding and fantasy for Chocolate and the Gods continues to lighten these sloggy hours, though it's not yet ready to be told directly.  Chocolate qua chocolate begins to seem an unexpectedly minor detail of its flavour.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: Making castles less EFPy and lords less idiotic since early yesterday evening. 

Garcastle was way top-heavy, and my always-shonky first move in the fall of Carrowglaze is pretty much officially a stumble.  I think I'm going to have to enlist at least one of the marginal, late-mentioned players in Langdale - the ones I'll here designate the Bookdrake, the Thresher, and the Great Gull - and have my heroes hitch a ride on those operations, established for purposes that run clean across their own.  The Knifewitch can't possibly carry that load without help, in the time she's got to work with.  I don't see how anybody could.

I now have to add some additional sense: some consistent and logical account of the long-standing grudges between the lords of Allingdale and Langdale.  To date they've pretty much been a plastic excuse for random things I've found necessary along the way.

About halfway through the political critique now.  Need to up my pace further.

Until I started this comb-through of Lord of the Rings, I'd forgotten just how much of this Tolkien manages to pack in. You can hardly turn around at any point in the first book without falling into another bout of it. The fact that this impression never particularly lingered until I went looking for it, suggests that it's very well integrated indeed.

If exposition by loremaster routes large numbers of secondary stories through a single master-node, peer-to-peer exposition distributes them widely amongst whichever nonspecialized characters are appropriate. The technique can be as direct as having characters walk offstage, and return with a more or less condensed description of what happened while the reader was following the main story; or as devious as having them tell a secondary tale which is only relevant at a slant, at just the point where the reader needs to hear it. Sometimes the story might be more important for what its matter or its manner says about the character, or about a way of looking at the world, than for any content of its own. Sometimes, though not in Tolkien, it affords a convenient way of lying to the reader without making the actual narration unreliable.

( Peer-to-peer exposition in Tolkien, and its several subtleties. )

( Reflections on p2p, with its uses and absences, in my first draft and going forward. )

General thought. Peer-to-peer exposition seems naturally best suited to broad-canvas stories with large, strongly-differentiated casts and well-distributed character agency. This certainly describes Lord of the Rings. Three Katherines is deliberately a far more parochial tale, but the landscape is deliberately denser; and Killer-Kate has that feeling of broadness to me in a way that Katy Elflocks doesn't, because its threads diverge and rejoin so much. Does anybody else find this connection between the feel of the story and the method of the exposition a natural one?

I've just run across some excellent posts on the subject of Mary Sue and her variously-named male equivalent - that Very Special Character, arising from the world of fanfic, who can scarcely be better described than in these words of blackholly's:

Spock gets a long-lost daughter with purple eyes who's an even better doctor than McCoy and when she arrives, Kirk instantly falls in love with her and makes her captain in his place. She takes them to the planet of the Sparkle Ponies where she defeats Khan with her beauty and that of her new glittery equine friends.

Heh! But also not so much heh, because here are some good cases made in that very article and several others within the same conversation, to the effect that 'Mary Sue' has become a lazy and insidious way of dinging on female characters disliked by the reviewer - most especially, female characters written by women - in ways which are both unfair to said authors, and in danger of limiting the public supply of awesome female characters. All sorts of subtleties of the true and false Mary Sue Effects are explored in these discussions, and I highly recommend all of them. In chronological order:


You Can Stuff Your Mary Sue Where the Sun Don't Shine, by Zoë Marriot (Aug 1st 2011)

Ladies, Don't Let Anyone Tell You You're Not Awesome, by sarahtales (Aug 4th)

Ladies Ladies Ladies, by blackholly (Aug 7th)

I Know a Little Girl and Her Name Is Mary Mac: the Misuse of Mary Sue, by seanan_mcguire (Oct 11th)

What Would Mary Sue Do?, by Zoë Marriot (25th October)


Here is my head hitting the desk, repeatedly.

My only real addition to the debate concerns the case where the name's deserved. I think one good test for whether a character is a genuine Mary Sue/Marty Stu or not, is whether they have the defects proper to their virtues - or, indeed, the virtues of their defects. If what is wrong with them has nothing to do with what is right with them, except to serve as a foil for the sparkly shininess of it, this is a warning sign. And if their most salient flaw is wangst, and yet they are in no other way anything of a wanker, that is an enormous neon warning sign flashing DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER !

At the age of thirteen, I independently invented the concept of fanfic and the character - but not, alas, the concept! - of Marty Stu, as a side-effect of the dire worldwide shortage of new Pern books. To encounter him at the age of thirty as a known public nuisance was both a revelation and a sort of relief, not to mention a salutary reminder. But if his sister is now being seen more often in pieces of vaguely girl-cootied speculative fiction than the Virgin Mary has manifested in pieces of vaguely toasted bread, then it may be that the pair of them are coming to the end of their useful work as Awful Warnings.

Either that, or Marty is going to have to start pulling more of his own weight. Which one, eh?

First off, I'm killing that extended metaphor of complex composition as mapping its real and untold 'imaginary' stories to the mathematical complex plane. Nice provocation but useless visualization. I'll keep the term 'complex' for the use of untold or very partially told implicit stories as critical elements of a whole tale, until I've a better. This done...

I don't think like Tolkien and, enormously as I admire his work, I have no desire whatsoever to write like him. That job has already been done once, and by a master. But when looking for a masterclass in really complex composition, who I gonna call? Who else?

In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien uses just about every possible technique and level of story composition. Around the central narrative of The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King - which does exactly what it says on the tin - he works huge amounts of other matter, much of which one would not expect to work in a month of Sundays, to produce a whole enormously greater than the sum of its parts. Some of this is told directly, which does not so much concern me just here, and some of it is... not. His most audacious trick of all, the wrapping of that great story around the almost wholly hollow core of The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, makes a positive virtue of not telling a tale which suits neither his Muse nor the novel he is writing. To this I shall recur anon.

Here I want to look at the really weird things Tolkien does in the framing material.

( Historical treatment of Tolkien's world, its identification with our own, and the implicit story arising when one tells a fantastic tale from within its own setting. )


Next: Tolkien's use of reduction and exposition. "Alas!" said Gandalf...

How can anybody tell a tale without telling it?

The main techniques I know for telling the implicit imaginary tales, without which the explicit real tale is incomplete, are as follows: incluing, exposition, reduction, and re-ordering. This post is for identifying them and their functions in complex composition. Virtues, pitfalls, and examples will be examined anon.

The perfect limit of an imaginary tale is one which is told in effective silence - it is implied wholly in the context of the tale that is told, and no part of it is ever told for itself. Probably nobody ever pulls this off, but it might in any case be extremely difficult to notice when it was achieved. The technique which chiefly drives a composition in this direction, is to convey the matter of the imaginary parts by incluing. This excellent term of Jo Walton's describes worldbuilding by telling implication:

the process of scattering information seamlessly through the text, as opposed to stopping the story to impart the information.

- and here I'm considering its application to suggesting another story all of its own.  The linked posting discusses some of the benefits and limitations of this technique in general, and I'd say they apply doubly or triply when the inclued matter has the character of a tale.

The degenerate far end of the same spectrum is: the imaginary tale which is rotated completely into reality by telling it. Even considered purely of itself, this is not wholly a silly paradox. The distinction between the main tale and this shadow-crafting once admitted, the suggestion arises of telling the secondary tale in a different mode - as a nested tale, or in a different voice, or even in a different literary form interspersed with the main matter. But most complex compositions fall into the intermediate zones, where only part of the imaginary tale is actually made explicit - just as much, in fact, as serves a proper reading of the real one. The methods of achieving this partial telling are what I mean by exposition. Between exposition and incluing, all the imaginary components of the desired tale must be delivered.

Reduction is a multi-level process. At the first level, it is normal editing - the removal of all matter which is not, in fact, part of any of the real or the imaginary tale(s), nor yet of their coupling. But in complex composition, it has a second level - the distillation of the imaginary tale into two fractions, one which needs to be integrated into the real tale by exposition, and the other of which may only be implied by incluing. Finally, there is the issue that the real tale is the one which will receive by far the most scrutiny by the reader. A lot of the deep structure and rationale of the imaginary tale will be, necessarily, inaccessible. Therefore, though it must be retained by the author as construction lines until final publication, and is in this sense really part of the story, a much larger portion of it must eventually disappear into the Silence of the Story than is true for the real tale, to be interpreted by the reader according to their own lights. I call this the occulted portion of the tale, and the shadowiness of imaginary tales no doubt depends very much upon it.

Re-ordering here means not just telling the imaginary story out of chronological order - a technique equally applicable to the real story. It means revealing it in an order not governed by its own internal logic, but ordering the revelations along the narrative line of the real story, according to the logic of the overall complex composition. One of the effects of doing this is severely to disrupt the flow of the imaginary story considered as story, and to replace it with a current of the real story in which the imaginary one is being revealed. To the extent that this is successfully pulled off, I'd expect it to improve the flow and apparent unity of the overall tale.

I think I've learned a good bit by setting out my thoughts thus explicitly. This may explain why this issue of complexity is taking up more posts than I'd expected. Any other perspectives on the telling (and hearing) of explicit tales, would be most timely, and warmly welcomed at this point. There's a lot I still plainly have to get my head around.

Next stop: The Lord of the Rings, a masterpiece abounding in every kind of complex compositional technique - not all of which I wish to emulate.

In my last revision post, I discussed various ways of adding multiple complete or partial tales together, to compose a single work.  Along these lines, I sketched out the peculiar real structure of Three Katherines of Allingdale: a short subverted fairy-tale, The Deed of Katy Elflocks, whose themes are redeveloped and resolved in a long enchanted low fantasy, Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland.  The latter takes place in the twilight of its four great characters: Katy Elflocks, Kit Fox, Prince Lucas the Proud, and Golden Kate Alland.  Specifically, Kate takes place almost exactly thirty years after the events of Katy - at least, in the reference frame shared by Kate and Luke and the Wide World, which is the one that rules the overall story.

Yes, that is an enormous gap.  Moreover, it's not just a gap of time.  At the end of Katy, we had what looked like happy endings all round.  The start of Kate is one of the blackest wildest passages I've written: nobody knows what became of Katy (small surprise there), and all the other chief characters have lost practically everything, including in common opinion their lives.  This is not a normal story transition.  I could call it a deliberate inversion, pivoting on the legend of Katy, but that would be a dirty great lie.  The truth is, there is a huge hole in the middle years, because the story of them simply blew up on me.  This is not remotely the tale I set out to write.

When I decided to extend Katy Elflocks to novel length, the characters and situations it had left me with practically did the job for me.  The Grand Arc sprang up fully-formed inside a bare couple of weeks.  The structure was at that time so simple: three sequential movements, of roughly equal length with a bit extra in the middle, which I called and thought of as a triptych.  First Katy's song of a summer, short and sweet and fierce, the statement; then ten years after, Kit's story of a fall, expansive and wickedly farcical until it knotted into grand tragedy, the development; then twenty years on yet, Kate's winter's tale, of middle length and bitterest edge and dearest redemption, the resolution.  (I did not then think of it as music.)  This would have been a slightly unusual structure, yet simple enough, and little concerned with matters outside itself.  The tale really told would have been more or less the whole tale.  This, like everything I've discussed up to this point, I call a real composition.

It didn't really happen.

The Story of the Fall proved pure trouble from the word go.  The first problem to arise was multiplicity.  Kit's disaster has never been, and still is not, a single story to me.  It's an utterly Kittish thing: a mess, a thing of shreds and patches, a villainous juggling-act by a perverse genius trying really hard to leave all her stupid villainous shit behind her, and constantly tripping over the great big clown jackboots of her stupid heroic entitled husband, whom she has doomed herself to love beyond restraint or reason.  I've tried more times than I can think of to make the Kingdom side of this circus into one story, and it really isn't.  Kit just makes brilliant shit up at random, iterates, and deals with the ever-escalating consequences until her equally brilliant antagonist - Claire the Crafty, Luke's arch-diplomat elder sister - returns out of the blue, to smash her regime like a rotten pumpkin from every direction at once.  This is the way they and Luke are, and that is the only way it can possibly be.  It has every quality of a great story, except for being structured as one. 

So I moved quickly on to the other perspective on the story: that of cool, devious Claire, who is not herself a particularly good person, but who for the sake of the realm has attached herself unshakeably to somebody both good and useful.  Claire, The Rescuer of Realms, does have a proper story, and then some  - the tale of how she retook the Kingdom for its widowed queen and her unborn son, which necessarily involved playing a lot of hands of adventurer's poker without initially having any cards at all.  It's a rollicking, riotous story.  I set to it at once.  It fell very promptly to pieces, because it is a story around Kit and Luke that doesn't have Kit and Luke in it, which fills it with fifteen infodumps and sucks the life out of it like sixteen lampreys.  Mark how the issue of a story with a big doughnut hole in it has been dogging me from an early date!

Okay.  This is Three Katherines of Allingdale, after all!

I then reasoned that what I needed to do was to intertwine the two separate tales, telling both around each other, so that they filled each other's deficiencies and made one story.  This is still a story which might be told.  I call it Crown of Foxfires.  It is big.  It is sprawling and ramifying.  It is most definitely a stout novel all by itself.  And as I got some way into it, I began to see with sinking heart that there was another problem with it.  It was no longer any part of the same story as Katy and Kate at all.  It was just something that happened in between them.

Katy and Kate are about the clash between nobles and peasants on the wild hungry marges of Elfland.  Foxfires is about high politics among the courts of the powerful, even though Claire and Kit both 'cheat' by seeking strength amongst certain of the disenfranchised and despised, wherever it works for them.  The common-born queen is New Money, not Old Toil.  The tone is different, the interest is different, and so is the texture.  Perhaps the three Katherines' tales could still be made into one monster doorstop that would work, but I don't here  see how.  So - how to tell end and end, without in the interval telling the middle?

My answer here is simply to make a unity of end and end, and indeed not to tell the anomalous middle at all - at least, not as part of the same story.  The relation of the two ends, I've already described.  But their relation to the untold yet necessarily present story between, the imaginary story between those really told, is another thing again.  It holds dangers and requires techniques of its own.  I'm calling the technique of integrating a critical untold story into a told one complex composition, echoing the way in which complex numbers are built of both real and imaginary components.

The greatest exponent of this technique I know is Tolkien, and I'll be looking critically at his approach to it in my next posting, as I work on my own.  I should be more than grateful for any other examples, either of admirable success or painful failure, that come to anybody's mind.

"Little book, what are you?"

Three Katherines of Allingdale is my book - a single work, a unity, one made thing in itself. But, looking at and listening to it, my first question is: what kind of single thing is that?

In the simplest possible sense, the answer would be: this is a story, and there is nothing outside the story, and now the story is done, a glorious solitaire. William Morris's The Well at the World's End - a tale to which I shall return later - is such a story.

Way over towards the other end of the scale, we have: this is a story, and it is a segment of a greater story, though it may be complete in itself and for now. Diane Duane's The Door into Fire is an example on the self-contained end - it would still have been a good story if none of the rest of The Tale of the Five had been written. Its two sequels are less self-contained, in that each depends for effect on familiarity with what has gone previously - but each has an ending of its own, and an ending of a greater arc that includes its predecessors. Since the concluding story has now been on ice for thirty years or so, we see that this level of unity is sometimes a very good thing for the reader, indeed.

Going out beyond that point, we reach works which have less unity yet. First, the pure instalments of a larger story, in which each book is only one chunk of a serial which has certain convenient stopping-points. The three volumes of The Lord of the Rings are an example (and the six books could each have been). Lastly in the most degenerate case, we see a few things on the shelves which are not even serials, but only manageable slicings of one single tale or serial instalment. Tad Williams's To Green Angel Tower, vols 1 and 2, will serve us here.

What sort of unity has Three Katherines?

It created its setting and all the tales in it - it depends on no other work.  It closes, with one important reservation which I shall call the Kitty Clause, all the narrative arcs I wanted to close - it demands, and probably ought to have, no direct sequel.  So it must stand as a book, and a tale unto itself.

Is it a true solitaire?  No, and for two reasons.  Firstly, it's a story with an expansive setting, like Middle-Earth or Earthsea.  The 'Kateverse' (which its people call simply 'Earth' or 'the world') deliberately has lots of implications and characters spilling over the edges of the tale, and strongly invites the telling of associated stories which share a setting and a timeline with Three Katherines.  Whether these get written or not is largely beside the point: the point is that the world is not hermetically sealed off for the book's use.  I'll explore the direct implications of this anon.

Secondly, it's a composite of two sequentially told stories, and bears a peculiar relation to an untold one.  This strongly constrains what I can do with the structure, and points to one major potential pitfall - the Kitty Clause again.  To this highest level of structure, and what it means for the telling, I shall turn next.

Any other insights how books can be more or less self-complete, that I seem to have missed here?

230 words this morning of a scene I hadn't the hardiness for yesterday after work - wherefore I fled to put the last coat of varnish on the new door instead, and pursue its various sequels.

This passage is actually part of a celebration, and done with goodwill on all parts.  But it's a mediaevaloid country custom, in a hard and dangerous place, albeit an unusually kind and free community.  When I saw how roughly the mock battle for the New Year was going to play out  ("She wouldn't know she'd won if she'd not spent blood nor tears on it," says the canny seamstress-witch Ciss Cross-Stitch in the back of my head, advising the Founder of Fairfields as to why it isn't always sensible to persuade people to behave sensibly), all my sensibilities both old-fashioned and new-fangled positively cringed.  Even my court-reared characters winced.

Which suggests to me that I have at least something right about the tone.  If a community of medieval peasant-pioneers on the ragged edge of Elfland thought and acted inside my modern comfort zone, I would certainly be getting them wrong.

Of course, too far outside the consensus modern comfort zone, and that's a potential problem for the reader.

What I'm trying to do, whether this particular scene survives the final cut or not, is to conjure a place in some ways rawly uncomfortable, and in others warm and welcoming - so that the whole should be seamless, and at best dearly desirable for the reader to visit, or at worst wholeheartedly believable in the way it speaks to my tumbleweed protagonists of 'home'.

Elsewhere, I am still being wormed, and Edward Lessingham has just turned up with wood and tools and interminably described ornamentation to fix up his half-cocked frame story.

Fictional characters are peculiarly susceptible to funny turns in which they do something quite unlike themselves, in order to stumble in the nick of time onto the Plot Train to their next narrative destination. Whilst blogging about something else today, I found I needed a snappy phrase for this affliction.

I do believe I have just found it.