The long road to clarity…
This is being written at Samovar Tea Lounge in the Castro (thanks to some hijacked wi-fi access, thanks to whomever you are), which is where I tend to work when I’m not working at home, usually on days where the beautiful weather outside gets a gravitational pull on me that continually makes me wonder why I am staying in the house all day. Rather than just abandon things, I just go remote, taking a laptop/paper/pens where I can work and drink some delightful tea in the process for a few hours.
Whenever I work here, there is usually some breakthrough, which is probably connected with my desire to flee the apartment having something to do with some "block" with the novel. Not a writer’s block, as it is already written, but just something preventing me from giving the current chapter the love it needs.
A breakthrough with the current chapter just happened and, as per usual, it seems stupid and obvious in hindsight. But, then again, what doesn’t?
In order to avoid this in the future, I am once again writing it down as a means of reinforcement. And, hey, if this stuff can help someone else, even better…
So, the current issue with this chapter had been about flow. It just seemed to be too… random, too tangential, it needed something to bring it together and give it some degree of focus.
The chapter is about a character named Angie. The main character uses Angie to transition into his backstory, since the protagonist of this book is horrible at providing information to the reader, so all of his backstory needs to be "tricked" out of him somewhat.
It seemed simple enough, using the present day interactions with Angie to ground the scene and to pull the narrative in and out of flashback, in much the same way the "Rules of Fight Club" are used to add backstory and keep things planted in the present as soon as a rule is once again presented.
But, for some reason, it wasn’t working. No matter how many times I tightened the text, it just lacked cohesion. It wasn’t coming together to become a chapter; it was just a loosely connected series of anecdotes. The whole was never becoming bigger than the sum of its parts.
So, armed with a printout, a notepad, and (just in case) my laptop, I headed to Samovar and tried a new oolong. I still prefer my black teas, but it was getting too late in the day to inject that much caffeine into my system.
Reading through the printout, I documented the action of each paragraph, which is just tedium. But when I started reading those notes over again, a pattern I didn’t see before started emerging.
From my perspective, Angie was always the spine of the chapter and everything else was a flashback/anecdote that shot off of the main Angie narrative. But, it turns out, that was the flaw in my thinking.
The first reference to Angie is that it distracts the main character from his workout. Some of the Angie passages pull his focus from his workout, and serve as a means of transitioning to the other information that needs to be conveyed in this chapter. However, other Angie sections seemed to be transitioning out of those passages and getting things back to the "present-day" workout.
So, basically, the spine of the story isn’t Angie, but the lead character doing his present-day workout. Angie is a transitional device to and from the present-day workout to the supplemental information/backstory.
Once I sorted that out, I went back and coded each paragraph as to when it would have to occur to uphold the logic of the story, whether it could only be known by the protagonist in the present day, whether it is information about the past that needed no knowledge of the present, and then whether it was Angie transitioning to the past, or Angie transitioning to the present.
Now, the whole chapter has clarity. And many of the trouble spots are glaringly obvious as to why they were tripping me up. Sometimes Angie would be transitioning to the present, followed by information about the past or vice-versa.
That made perfect sense, though, when the thinking was that Angie was the spine of the chapter, rather than a transitional device.
But, once again, no use dwelling on things like this, or how much time it took to sort out. The good news is the riddle of Angie is solved, and the chapter will be reworked tonight and put to bed by tomorrow.
Onward!
