In critique group this morning, I found myself twice explaining things in terms of social and pack behavior. (Both stories had characters whose roles in society were fairly unclear to the reader.) "We need to know their roles to know how to interpret their responses to events in the story."

This is both true and disturbing. The characters were human. Why did it matter to me what they did for a living? Whether they had authority over other characters? But it did, and it was an anxious itch in my brain while I was reading.

Of course, some of this thought process was affected by my adventures avec Will this week. Still, humans are social creatures, and we care about these things even when the humans we are thinking of are fictional.

Brainstorming Amazing Edison

From a very helpful IM exchange with John this evening:

J: each stage, you think you have reached Henry's true core

M: right!

J: only to realize the view is limited by Alice's understanding to that moment

M: yeah

M: exACTly

M: which is how humans are

M: look at the ex-family situation

M: today i know it

M: and last week i knew it

M: and they are not the same answer

J: right

M: and it is not because i have changed

M: or they have

M: but because the complicated mix of knowledge and reality has changed

J: yessss

M: i'm cutting and pasting THAT

J: what you want (we want)

J: is a reality that IS the narrative (i think) and that stretches and grows and changes with all the elements of narrative (scene, plot, etc., and esp POV) --- with half-questions and half-answers woven throughout, that spring from the curiosity and needs and pain of the characters, not from the writer's interest in telling a story.

At the local writers group last Tuesday, we talked about plotting and ideas and fleshing out those ideas, and I "drew" a little picture on my notebook page to "illustrate" what I was saying, which was basically this: if the world I am writing about is the size of a piece of graph paper, then my story method is often to pick one of those squares and write about it. But it is more than just the one square. It is not a random square, for one thing. Part of the fun for me, the challenge, is to pick THE square that illuminates the story the most precisely. The square that shows the blood spatter from the bullet -- not the gun, not the getaway car, but the pattern of the repercussions that will be amplified forever after.

I tend to do this when I blog, too, without necessarily realizing it. The yellow Corvette? That was Sunday. It was the little square of the big page that was our weekend. Greg bought his new wife a bright yellow Corvette convertible. Is that a story? Is it a problem? A solution? It is a trigger, for me, to think through all the decisions that I/we have made, the mistakes, the successes, the path we walk now.

It is a little square. A bright little square, but really a very small one indeed.

Just now: a rejection for "Manassas Magic", from IGMS -- form rejection. Form rejections are particularly hard on the soul, I think. (Although... I suppose they are better than "What on earth are you thinking? Writing involves TALENT, you idiot! Go get a real job!" Which is what I'm usually assuming the editors are writing in response to my work. Optimism is the writer's best friend.)

So breathe and send it out again.

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."

- Elmore Leonard

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

- Ray Bradbury

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

- Philip K. Dick

I change my vote twice a day.