Paksworld

Fossils and Blind Alleys.    Discovery writers (raises hand, waving wildly) are not filled constantly with the pure essence of creativity, and so spend some time trying to muscle the story into shape.   Intellect (invaluable in revision) with  its conscious logic replaces instinct (invaluable in primary creation)  with its unconscious logic.  Sometimes intellect and instinct agree.  Sometimes they don’t.   When they don’t, instinct is nearly always right…especially in terms of the deep logic of the plot, or “what really happened.”

Passages written under fully conscious intellectual control by a discovery writer are always suspect.   In my case, about 70% of these will turn out to be close to what really happened, and 30% will be dead wrong.    Dead wrong can mean “that never happened in any way shape or form”  or “that didn’t happen here, it happened later–you missed this whole very important chunk in between that illuminates past and future” or “interesting, but not really part of this story.”  Fossils are bits of earlier drafts that survive into the current draft where they’re  wrong (thanks to changes during revision.)

“Dead wrong” includes everything from phrases referring to other events to entire chapters.  Long stretches of coherent but dead wrong text are known as “blind alleys”  (by me.  Other writers may call them something else.)  I may spend days writing what seems to be primary story only to find out later…no.  It happened in the Deed, and I found another one yesterday.

Tiptoeing gingerly through the narrative to make this bit of writing craft clear without dropping spoilers…in this chapter I knew that Major Character A (viewpoint for the chapter) was going to get an important message, grant an important boon to someone, go on a journey in response to the important message, and find out about what might (or might not) be a conspiracy against a friend.   Back when I wrote it first, there were surrounding chunks I didn’t yet know, so I wrote what seemed logically likely to be in those chunks.    Some parts of this long section came in nice (but short) creative-mind bursts and others didn’t.

By the time I first did some revision work on this chapter, I’d written some of the surrounding chunks but not all, and revised it to conform to that–but I’d also written some of the surrounding chunks as “it must surely have happened this way” conscious logic, not “This happened” as handed out by the plot daemon.    Both the final plot-bomb and reaching the end of the book last Tuesday illuminated “what really happened” and made the papier-mache-ish patches visible.  As I worked my way toward this particular blind alley, it began to look blinder and blinder (actually, it’s more like a series of blind apparent hallways off a hall that really does go somewhere.)

Finding the real end of Book III meant cutting off everything beyond that (in time) and consigning it to a later book.   But what happens in this chapter is the foundation for what Character A does (and experiences)  in the cut-off part.   Even as I felt my way toward what really happened, based on the revisions up to that point (some of which involved other characters that Character A knows and interacts with) I realized that errors cascaded downstream…if the consequence of the boon were as stated in a section of the cut-off bit written in response to plot-daemon revelations (the plot daemon is always right, when I understand), then other things in this chapter had to change, too.   And if Character C does this other thing (which in fact happened and is totally right) then the apparent conspiracy against C would have a different slant.    A point of timing becomes crucial that I hadn’t thought was crucial.

And all this gobblygook means that Chapter 22 (as presently numbered)  has to be dissected very carefully, with precise sequencing in relation to things in other chapters.     Is A still where A was in this chapter when the brown stuff hits the rotating blades for C and another character?    Where is A at that point if not in the middle of it?   When does A find out?  What other chapters need to be searched for fossils of that earlier version?

I hope to have Chapter 22 sorted, and the likely location of fossils relating to it located and marked, by day’s end.   (No, this doesn’t mean I’m 2/3 done.   I’ve leapt ahead to an area suspected of needing major work.  And yup, it did.)