Photosets like this are why I didn’t create a Pinterest account for the book I’m writing. There’s a limit to how unsettled I can make people.
(All of these are very relevant to what I’m currently writing.)
I wrote two thousand words of this today. Two thousand! That’s like… a third!
I have mixed feelings about this. I have laboured a little with this, and I don’t think it’s my strongest (in fact, between this and my first, I think this could use a lot of work), but while writing today I thought of a killer ending that I hope Joe will be proud of. I’m excited to write it. That’ll hopefully happen tomorrow. This is very dialogue-driven, and I think the challenge will be drawing out some description and slowing the pace a little (really, all of my stories could use this, but I find it tough to get this right on the first pass). And I want to work on the characterisation in this one - not of the peripheral characters, who I think are fairly well-defined, but the protagonist.
There’s an element of insecurity, here. There are three principal female characters in this book, and I am not ignorant of the fact that two of them are killers and one is a (first-person) love interest. This is a dark book - there is plenty of death beyond those two characters, and potential suicide, and drugs, and sexual deviancy (totally consensual, I should add - I am not going down that road), and all sorts. I think this is okay, as long as the people I’m writing are people first and foremost, and not totally defined by their actions. This applies for men, too, but I’m especially cognisant of it with women because writing from that perspective is unfamiliar territory. Unfamiliar because, last time I checked, I’m male, but also because my previous writing betrays a little gender disparity.
Tales From The End featured six explicitly-defined female characters.
One was a character’s mother.
One was a revenge piece about a girl called Sasha who’d decided that a charity skydive, where they’d first solicit donations of £150 each to jump out of an airplane and donate to a bullshit Christian charity as an afterthought, was a great idea. (The story was about a skydiving accident.)
One was a particle physicist called Mandy who wanted to give birth to a dead stork. She was really well-defined. (The previous sentence is a lie.)
One was the ghost of a fictional actress called Carol Lane, a cipher for Carole Lombard, who died in a plane crash in Goodsprings, Nevada in 1942. This would have been a good story, except for the fact that I subconsciously lifted way too much dialogue from Grim Fandango. Ironically, that story still haunts me.
One was a prostitute. Not a prostitute subject to the usual tired pimp-whore cliché, but a prostitute nevertheless. Best to leave that one alone.
One was a dentist’s wife. She was the editor of The Denver Post prior to a nuclear catastrophe that reduced her to a non-speaking, peripheral part.
Granted - there were a lot of characters who were first-person and not gender-specific, but for the sake of honesty I should say that I imagined men when I was writing the vast majority.
And, okay - the weird thing is, I’m actually proud of that book, casual sexism aside. It doesn’t openly disparage women so much as just not feature them, and that makes it safe to me - something I can look at fondly, rather than shake my head at less-than-impressive opinions (there’s plenty of that in previous work). This book, however, tries to define all of its characters a little more - put it partially down to length (Tales From The End was a collection of nearly thirty pieces of short fiction - this comes down to six, and is about twice as long), but also something approaching maturity. I am determined to get this right. I want to appeal to the universal, but I’d like to at least achieve that in part via specificity.
So. On my first pass, I want to concentrate primarily on characterisation. I can already think of ways that I want to alter the character in this. She’s too cool, and while that certainly needs to be kept constant in her outward appearance, I have no excuse for not broaching her inner thoughts when it’s first-person. Then, on my second, I’m going to broaden the world a little. Not just so it feels more alive, but so that the world that these characters inhabit backs up their actions - I want to give them contextual legitimacy.
I will be finishing this soon. I will be taking a break to blaze through Saints Row IV at the end of next week. I am fully aware of the fact that I might not attempt my last story until the beginning of September. There are a few hard work weeks ahead, including five eleven-hour shifts, and writing takes a level of mental fortitude that I’ve realised I don’t quite possess during a working week. Weekends like this reinvigorate me, but I need more recovery time occasionally.
So. There we go. Last update for this story. Oh, and that ending to this one. It’s a really good one. My jaw dropped when I thought of it, and if that doesn’t betray massive egotism I don’t know what does.
The last story’s going to be an emotional one. I’m still fleshing elements out, but there’s a narrative consistency to it that just ties everything together brilliantly. Hopefully. I can hope, can’t I?
Oh: one final note. This story, more than all of the others, presents the strongest case to change the title. It is so much more than just about a journalist. It doesn’t even feel fair to call her that.