November's almost over, and though you may feel neglected - all five of you - I have not been lazy in the writing department. I have been plugging away furiously, attempting to meet the 50,000 word goal over at NaNoWriMo. I finished today - not because I hit 50,000, but because I finished the book. Well, "finished." The first draft is done. There's a lot of work to be done, but I'm ready to let people read it. I need to find a balance between people who will read and offer constructive advice, versus those who will read it and tell me what a great job I did. I mean, I want the compliments - don't get me wrong - but it will be more valuable to have a critical eye towards what I can improve on. There's stuff I know can be improved on certainly, and other things I have ignored up to this point. Granted, I haven't really read it through myself all the way yet, but that will come.
Meanwhile, to try and reach the 50,000 goal, I did a little P. S. That's what this is. If you're interested in reading the actual book, let me know and I'll get it on Google Docs or something like that for you. The condition is that you need to be willing to be constructively honest with me, 'k?
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As of this version, the book is
at about 38,000 words. The challenge for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing
Month) is to get to 50,000 words. I could tell early on that I wouldn’t have
enough to fill that quota, and it doesn’t make sense to put in a dream sequence
where one doesn’t belong just to have more words, so I’ll start filling up some
of the word count here. I suppose I could be satisfied with the idea of writing
a book, a very rough draft of a book, in less than a month, but by golly, I’ve
written a book in a month! I want credit from the organizing website for doing
so! Even if it only means getting a badge I can post (with pride!) on my blog
or something. So I’m putting some thoughts down here. I want to capture what
this meant, and some of my thought process, and maybe even what I’ve learned.
Oh, I know this isn’t a perfect
book. Far from it. I know there are edits that need to be made, evidenced by
the highlighted parts indicating entire sections that need to be reworked,
rewritten, or just plain ol’ written. Published? Don’t make me laugh. Well, do
make me laugh - go ahead. I like
laughing. I just can’t write comedy, apparently. And that’s one of the parts of
this “book” that will get fixed. I had to put that as a placeholder so that I
could myself permission to carry on and not get stuck.
I didn’t know when I first
started this that it was going to turn into a love story. I knew I wanted to do
a fairy tale, because some of my favorite authors have done treatments of
traditional fairy tales. Or at least, some of my favorite stories and/or books
lately have been treatments of fairy tales, and those authors have since turned
into some of my favorites. You know, like Gail Carson Levine. My sister
recently introduced me to Charles DeLint, via one of his “Jack” books, which is
where I got the idea of having Jack be a recurring character, a cross-over from
the human world, into the faerie realm.
The master of fairy tales
though, and the most original ones, is Neil Gaiman. It was him who gave a talk
not too long ago about the importance of libraries – one of my fondest memories
of my childhood. Within the text of that lecture, he says, “fiction …opens a
door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in
control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no
mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also
give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give
you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and
knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.”
He says a lot of great things,
but that one really resonated with me, because I had been thinking about
doorways a lot before undertaking this little adventure. I asked a friend of
mine, in fact, if she believed in magic.
I’m not talking about a Magic Castle sleight of hand
artist or illusionist, but magic magic. Harry Potter magic. The
stuff-great-kids’-books-are made-of magic.
If fiction is based somewhat in reality,
I think there may be such a thing as magic. Rather, there must be such a thing
as magic, if you follow that logic thread. I suppose that argument could go the
other way too for things that I’m not sure are real, like vampires or
werewolves or faeries, unless you take the approach that they’re based on
real-life monsters, of which there are plenty. Not
faeries – those are based on butterflies and crickets and hummingbirds. Mostly
hummingbirds, I think. Not crickets – I take that back. (Also, I do not like
crickets. Never having met a fairy, I'm not entirely sure I like them either. )
But back to magic. I suppose miracles of the biblical sort could be
considered magic, because it’s something that can’t be explained with science
or logic, but my intent isn’t to downgrade miracles either. It’s a fine line,
this idea’s border. I could be a crazy person, or I could be the one adult in a kids’ book that
believes magic is real.
Obviously I’m still working on this idea, and haven’t
come anywhere near coalescing a coherent thought. I think this may be
preliminary thoughts for NaNoWriMo. Hmm. But it IS one of those things you
don’t talk about with just anybody. Is it just a trick in literature to get
children/young adults to believe beyond a real-world capacity? To stretch
imaginations? Or is there something to it?
So yes, that’s where my thoughts were leading up to this
grand month of November. Oh, her answer,
in case you’re interested, was this:
Magic - I'm not sure you really want to be
coming to a person who already has an extremely tenuous grasp on reality for
confirmation of your sanity, but since you asked - um, duh. Doesn't everyone
believe in magic? Never mind I just answered my own question. No, they don't.
But I certainly do, at least from a certain point of view. And I think more
people should because, come on. You already said, we're a church full of people
who believe in things like parting the red sea and walking on water. I think if
anybody should have a pretty high tolerance for the out of the ordinary/strange/fantastical,
it should be members of the church.
I too would like to think that if one day
some children came to me and said, we found a portal to another dimension in yo
ur closet, my answer would be, 'fantastic; let's leave now.' I think if I live
my whole life without ever once encountering a dinosaur or a time machine or a
secret underground world, I'm going to be severely disappointed. Maybe my books
have just given me unrealistically high expectations of what life is supposed
to be like, but at least if I can't live it I can still read about it.
Tying magic in with books also makes me
think of a speech Neil Gaiman gave a few days ago. He said, among other
generally brilliant things, because he's Neil Gaiman and saying brilliant things
is what he does, that "truth is not in what happens but in what it tells
us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth."
Or, to put it another way, "Of course
it's all happening in your head. But why on earth does that mean it's not real?"
I have been mildly obsessed with the idea of archetypes for a long time
now - like how every culture passes down the same couple of types of stories
over and over again, about parents and children and heroes and caves and
monsters and light and all kinds of lovely stuff. And it's all just different
symbols being used to say the same things. So I think you're right about
werewolves and fairies and what have you - there's truth, and then there's
fact, and all the stories are based on fact, or some version of a fact, and the
facts get used to say true things about people and life. It's like in Doctor
Who, or Indiana Jones - they go and investigate some weird thing, and the
townspeople will be like, oh, well, there's this legend that nobody really
believes except some old lady out in the woods. But the story goes like
this...and then they tell the story and then of course whatever weird thing
that's happening is exactly what happened in the story. And then the
townspeople are like, ohhhh, so werewolves are real. Huh. OK then. And then
they become the crazy old people out in the woods telling stories to their
children. It's kind of how life works. (Or at least how stories work, which is
much better.) I just like to think that I'm in on the joke.
That’s how this started. I wanted to explore the ideas of doorways into
magical lands. Probably because more than anything, I want to find a doorway
into a magical land. I want it to be there, and accessible, without the pain
and hassle of air travel, of dealing with TSA agents, and the high cost of
airplane tickets. For now, books are it. I hold out hope that, though, I’ll
open a closet door and see a removable panel hidden there that reveals a
pathway to somewhere else. Or that one day I’ll discover a pull-down stairway
that goes to an attic in my own house. And in this scenario, I never knew that
attic was there, but you climb the stairs, and the attic isn’t just a thing
that transverses the house, but is a place. A place of … magic, intrigue,
mystery.
(I have that dream, by the way. Frequently. I also have the dream that
I’m a kid again, and in my dad’s shop, and I press the button made from paper
that my sister made and put on the wall. Because when you press that button,
and go through the black revolving door that allows access to the photographic
dark room, you can go wherever you want. True story – that button made of paper
and the revolving door really did exist in my childhood. My sister made it, and
my dad indulged us by letting us put it on the wall. And every time we went to
visit him in his shop, that raggedy piece of paper was still on the wall, ready
for us to push, so that we could then go to any place we wanted. Any place our
minds would let us, that is.)
(The Neil Gaiman talk, by the way, was delivered on October 14, 2013 in
London at the Barbican., if you’re interested in looking it up in its entirety
yourself. It’s quite good.) Neil Gaiman also quotes Albert Einstein thusly: “If
you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want
them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
I didn’t think about that when I chose to do a fairy tale treatment. I
thought about my limitations. There are many, but this one specifically I
thought was the one most likely to hold me back from writing a book, and that
is, I don’t have any story ideas. I’ve tried writing fiction before, with
disastrous results. I’ve had the beginnings of ideas, but then don’t know what
to do with after that. And I certainly don’t know how it ends. I know the beginnings
of things, but not the middle or ends, and that doesn’t make for a very good
story. So I figured if I could leverage a fairy tale, embellish details, place
it in a context familiar to me, I’d be able to overcome that obstacle. After
all, I like writing. I’m good at it. I think. It remains to be seen if I’m good
at this type of writing.
And that’s something I’ve learned from this. (This is all about me, if
you couldn’t tell. But I warned you about that at the beginning.) It’s been a
good exercise. Just write, write, write. Focus on the story, get the words
down, see where it goes. And I started to see what authors mean when they talk
about how the characters in their books take over and have a mind of their own.
It’s like those people come to life and are telling the author what to write,
rather than the writer giving the characters the story. It’s an interesting
feeling. I imagine it’s kind of like acting – you have to really get yourself
into the character to portray it accurately and truly. With this writing
process, this fiction writing, I just kept asking myself if I was being true to
the character. And even though I didn’t start with a written outline or full
character sketch of each person, I had those ideas in my mind when I started.
Ah. I will show you what I did have written down before I started:
Difficult choice- impossible choice- Garden
of Eden type something. The owner of the palatial gardens is named (Kim). She
likes glitter. She sings some of her sentences because she knows how ridiculous
everything she says or requests is.
Girl stumbles ... Magically, unexpectedly,
into a spacious garden. Woman there offers refuge. The choice- choose a gift of
whatever she wants, or return immediately to her world.
Sylvia is very independent. The same
qualities that her boyfriend was attracted to are the ones he's complaining
about. She's been struggling with ... Job? Career? Boyfriend?
Meet four women-
Daphne- too talkative Greek bay tree
Cynthia- too eager to please Greek moon
goddess
Iris- too pretty Greek the rainbow
Phylida- too sharp-witted Greek a green
bough
Sylvia's choice- quiet spirit. Latin from
the forest
Returns to her home, feels no different,
even after the adventures she's been on. The exception is that she feels
completely indifferent to her boyfriend. In fact, he is almost repulsive
to her now. Her boss is still crazy, but she feels immune to that now.
And she meets...someone who looks familiar,
not because she needs a someone, but because she's been on adventures with him
already. Because they're already friends.
Yup, that’s all I had. Not a lot. I referred to it a lot to refresh my
memory about the different fairy princesses – their names and qualities. Other
than that, once I had that idea in my mind, the rest of it just took form as I
put fingers to keyboard.
So a couple of notes about my notes. (Still only at 40,000 words. Don’t
worry – this won’t take another 10,000 words.)
Kim, Sylvia’s friend from work, is based on my tap dance teacher. She has
the most joy for life and living and having fun of any adult I have ever met.
She often says that she is a child in an adult’s body. And in spite of her
childlike attributes, she’s very responsible. She fascinates me, and I haven’t
known her for very long, but I knew she had a place in this story somehow. I
think she needs a bigger one somehow, and that’s one of the things that will
get fixed in subsequent drafts.
I changed Phyllida’s name to Adele, because I wasn’t sure how to
pronounce Phyllida. Probably just how it looks, but it isn’t a name that’s
readily recognizable in a modern-day context. Adele means “happy,” or “joyful,”
as I was trying to convey the idea of her humor. And I obviously need to do
some more work around Adele/Phyllida’s home and its environs. I struggled with
that character the most. At one point, I even considered combining her with
Daphne, the talkative one, since the effects the two have on others are similar.
That may still happen; we’ll see.
So yeah, the names matter, but the characters tell you that themselves.
And Sylvia is autobiographical, or a lot of her is, at least. And that’s
the beauty of taking a fairy tale that was written more than a hundred years
ago – you have the liberty to do a lot of fun things. And in the absence of
being able to think of fun things, stick with what you know. That’s the one
thing I remember from that one creative writing class I took a million years
ago in college. But it’s also one of the areas that has the most room for
change. For instance, I’m not sure now if it makes sense for Sylvia to have the
same aches and pains I do. At first I imagined her being my age – a single
woman in her 40s. But she’s probably closer to being in her late 20s, and
that’s okay too. That’s how old I am mentally. But it also means running
doesn’t hurt her the same way it does me.
Speaking of the age thing, I don’t know who would read this book. I know
a lot of women my age, or around my age, read books that are intended for a
younger audience, simply because the content is clean and they don’t want to
read smut. I don’t want to read smut either, let alone write it. But I also
didn’t want to write another book where the protagonist is a young teenager.
It’s not real. And even though this is a fairy tale, it’s meant to be real.
There’s nothing more real than a woman in her 20s, or 30s, or 40s still
figuring out this mystery called life. I know that because that is my life.
Each day is a new mystery, something new to figure out – either about myself
and how I perceive the world, or react to people around me – or about other
people and their perceptions. Writing fiction, (loosely paraphrasing Neil
Gaiman again), or fiction itself, teaches us more about ourselves than any
other medium. It teaches us how to relate to people, and even how to empathize.
So if you’ve enjoyed any layer of this story, I’m glad. I’ll keep working and
getting better, I promise.
Someday, one of my books may be the portal to a magic world you’re
looking for.
Final note, I promise – the fairy tale I got this from is called “The
Fairy’s Wish.” I found out about it from a marvelous book called, “Beyond the
Glass Slipper: Ten Neglected Fairy Tales to Fall in Love With,” by Kate Wolford.
The version of “The Fairy’s Wish” she cites as being from Andrew Lang’s “The
Green Fairy Book,” 1892.
