We're Puzzle Pieces from Clay

I thought the muse finally came back

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 02:58:05 GMT

I want to write. My fingers are itching to type, but no story, no inspiration is coming to me. Not even fanfiction.

I joined hpgw_ficafest's 6th wave to get me started, but after writing the initial dialogue exchange between Lily and Ginny--a scene that might not even make the final draft--I'm lost. I lost the fic's direction; I lost the flow of the narrative; I lost everything.

It's like going back to square one.

I felt the same way after reading the first chapter of Endlessly The Chick Lit. Although I could blame the actual break in reading chapter one and attempting to write chapter two with the need to get some sleep, but I still couldn't continue writing the following night.

It's like the muse came back for one night and left again for another vacation, leaving me alone, unproductive, and useless for a long period of time.

X-posted

Guy de Maupassant's "Love: Three Pages from a Hunter's Diary"

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 06:19:44 GMT

This was the point-of-view exercise I did in my Fiction Writing class. We need to rewrite Guy de Maupassant's "Love: Three Pages from a Hunter's Diary" (or "Love: Three pages from a Sportsman's Book" in other translations) in the third person. The story originally has a first person narrator. This should be your guide in doing your assignment.

An English translation of the Maupassant original is here; I didn't get my copy from an online source so this one would do for the purposes of comparision.

Love
Three Pages from a Hunter’s Diary

“Passion’s drama: Man kills wife, himself.”

The words catch Philippe Giroux’s eyes among the other headlines of the day’s paper. A crime of passion, Philippe says to himself, together until death. He must have really loved her. He takes a sip of his coffee, folded the newspaper up, and read through their story.

The couple does not interest Philippe, however; it is not the man and the wife that hold Philippe’s attention. They do not matter to Philippe; their love does. It isn’t because it astonishes him, softens him, or makes him think how wonderful love is, but because it makes him recall a memory—a distant recollection of a hunting adventure from his youth where Love appeared to him like how the Cross appeared to the early Christians.

Philippe stands up from the table and goes inside his study, walking along the wooden shelves where he keeps the several hardbound notebooks, which served as his diary throughout the years. He runs a finger along their spines, stopping on the one with a red cover. He takes it out from the self, sits down on the armchair by the fire, opens the notebook, and reads that adventure.

Philippe was born liking to hunt to feed his instincts, which were like that of a primitive man, yet he was still ruled by the instincts and intellect of a civilized being. Shooting is his passion, yet the sight of blood on a wounded animal affects him so much that his heart seems to have stopped.

Five years ago, Philippe was invited by one of his cousins, Karl de Rauville, to shoot ducks on the marshes at daybreak.

Karl was a jolly fellow of forty, a hefty and bearded redhead, a country gentleman, an amiable semi-brute with a happy disposition and Gallic wit that made even mediocrity agreeable. He lived in a half farmhouse, half chateau manor situated in a broad valley through which a river ran. The hills were covered with old manorial woods where magnificent trees still remained, and where the rarest feathered game could still be found in that part of France.

There were large meadows that were watered by trenches and separated by hedges in the valley and a river that expanded into a vast marsh, which was the best shooting ground Philippe had ever seen. Karl regarded it with care and kept it as a preserve. Through the rushes that covered it made it rustling and rough; narrow passages had been cut where the flat-bottomed boats passed along the dead water, brushing up against the reeds and making the swift fish take refuge in the weeds, and the pointed black headed wild fowls dive suddenly.

Philippe also deeply loved the water: of the sea, though too vast, full of movement, and impossible to hold; of the rivers above the marshes, so beautiful where an unknown world of aquatic animals resides. For Philippe, the marsh was an entire world in itself—a different world that had its own life, settled inhabitants and passing travelers, own voices, noises, and mystery. Nothing was more impressive, more disquieting, and more terrifying than a fen. The low rustling of the rushes, the wisps of light, the silence of the calm nights, the mist hanging over the surface, and the slight and gentle splashing of the water seemed to be more terrifying for him than the cannons and weapons of war of men. Philippe regarded the marshes as like those terrible countries everyone feared and holding dangerous secrets.

Philippe arrived at Karl’s house in the evening. It was freezing hard it could split the stones. They had dined in one of the larger rooms of Karl’s house, whose sideboards, walls, and ceiling were covered with stuffed birds, hawks, herons, owls, nightjars, buzzards, tiercels, vultures, and falcons—a strong indication that Karl is also fond of hunting.

They were sitting across from each other on the table and Philippe couldn’t help but notice how his cousin looked like a peculiar animal from a cold country with the sealskin jacket he was wearing. And with the dozens of stuffed birds that decorated the room, Karl seemed to have transformed the dining room into this cold and weird country. Philippe stifled a laugh at the thought and listened to his cousin as he told Philippe their plans for the night.

They were to start, Karl said, at half past three in the morning so they could arrive at the place he had chosen as their watching-place at half past four. Karl told Philippe that he had a house built with lumps of ice that will shelter them from the cold wind that would sure to greet them in the morning.

Karl rubbed his hands. “I have never known such a frost,” he said, “it is already twelve degrees below zero at six o’ clock in the evening.”

Philippe couldn’t agree more. It was indeed the coldest end of autumn they’ve had in years.

Karl and Philippe headed to bed after they had finished dinner, as they have a long day ahead of them.

Philippe was woken up by Karl at three o’ clock the following morning. He put on his sheepskin before going down, finding his cousin dressed in bearskin. They had a quick breakfast of two cups of scalding coffee and glasses of liqueur brandy, before they left the house accompanied by a gamekeeper and their dogs, Plongeon and Pierrot.

Philippe shivered the moment he got outside. It was one of those nights on which everything seemed to be frozen with the cold. The fierce cold air seemed to pierce them, no warm breeze to move it that it remained motionless, making it more sharp, more biting that freezes the trees, kills the animals that even the small birds become stiff once they fall on the hard ground.

Philippe glanced up and noticed the moon in her last quarter which seemed to be fainting—it looked so weak and unable to wane and was paralyzed by the hard cold weather. For Philippe, the moon shed a cold, mournful light across the sky that night.

Karl and Philippe walked side by side, backs bent, hands in their pockets, and guns under their arms. They wrapped their boots in wool in order for them to walk on the frozen river without slipping. Philippe noticed at the white vapor that their dogs’ breath made as they trudged on, walking through the marsh without a sound.

After minutes of walking, they reached the edge of the marsh and entered the lanes of dry rushes, which ran through the low forest.

As they were walking through the rushes, their elbows touching the long ribbon-like leaves leaving a slight noise behind them, Philippe was suddenly seized by the powerful emotion that the marsh had caused him to feel for the very first time. It wasn’t like the ones he had felt before, not the same excitement and life, but dead—dead from the cold, and walking through the dried rushes magnified the feeling. It seemed like everything had lost its life.

Upon reaching the bend, Philippe saw the ice-hut that would serve as their shelter. He went in and wrapped his rug around his body to warm himself since it was still nearly an hour before the wandering birds would awake. Philippe rolled onto his back and stared at the misshapen moon, which, in his eyes, seemed to have four horns because of the reflection of the transparent walls of the ice-hut. He was transfixed by it for a few moments before Philippe started to cough.

Karl must have heard this coughs because he went to Philippe’s side, his face showing great conern.

“No matter if we do not kill much today,” Karl said. “I do not want to you catch cold; we will light a fire.” Karl then turned around and told the gamekeeper to cut some rushes to make a fire.

When the gamekeeper came back, they put the pile of woods in the middle of the ice-hut right under the hole in the middle of the roof to let out the smoke. Philippe sat in front of the newly lit fire, watching the red flames rose up to the crystal blocks that started to melt as the flames touch them, making the whole hut seemed to be sweating. Philippe continued to watch, transfixed, when Karl called him from outside.

“Come and look here!” Karl said.

Philippe stood up and went out of the hut. “What is it?”

Karl pointed back to their hut, and Philippe’s eyes widened with astonishment as he turned around. The cone-shaped hut looked like an enormous, glittering diamond with a heart of fire that was planted in the middle of the frozen water of the marsh. And inside were the two fantastic forms of their dogs warming in the fire. Once again, Philippe started at the astounding figures, fascinated.

But a strange cry—a lost and wandering cry—made Philippe turn his attention away from the figures. He looked up and saw a flock of wild birds. Philippe felt his heart beat faster, his blood rushing with adrenaline.

“Put out the fire,” Karl said. “It’s getting daylight.”

The sky was indeed beginning to show the first signs of light as the flight of ducks pass by like a streak of color in the sky.

Suddenly, Philippe saw a stream of light bursting into the night. Karl had already fired, and in a matter of seconds, the two dogs were running into the woods picking up the dead bodies of the birds. Philippe joined his cousin, aiming and firing rapidly as soon as the shadow of a flying flock appeared above the rushes. Though out of breath, Pierrot and Plongeon happily retrieved the birds, whose eyes still occasionally looked at their killers.

Minutes had passed and the sun had fully risen; the sky was already bright blue. Philippe and Karl had decided to halt their hunting and go back to Karl’s house when two birds glided rapidly over their heads. Philippe took his aim and fired at one of them, and it fell immediately at his feet. It was a teal with a silver breast. And then a voice was carried in the wind—a voice of a bird. It was a short, heart-rending lament.

Philippe looked up and saw the bird that had been spared flying round above their heads, looking for its companion whom Philippe had shot dead and was holding in his hands.

Karl was back on his knees, his gun on his shoulder, watching and aiming at the bird until it was within shot. “You’ve killed the duck,” he said, “and the drake will not fly away.”

The bird did not fly away. It continued to circle over Philippe’s and Karl’s heads, crying its lament over its dead companion. Philippe had almost felt like his heart had been pierced; never had any cries of suffering pained him as much as the lament of the bird desperately seeking for its mate.

Occasionally, the bird seemed like it would fly ahead and continue the journey alone but it would seem that it couldn’t make up its mind and returned to the sky above Karl and Philippe to find its mate.

“Leave her on the ground,” Karl told Philippe. “He will eventually come within shot.”

Philippe did as what he was told. And it wasn’t long before the other bird came flying near them, careless of the danger it might face and with only finding its mate on its mind.

A loud fire echoed throughout the marsh. Philippe saw something black fall onto the ground and heard the rustling noise among the rushes. Within seconds, Perriot came running towards Philippe, the dead bird on its mouth.

Philippe put them into the same game-bag, both were already dead cold, and returned to Paris the same evening.

Why fan fiction is easier to write

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 04:29:27 GMT

For the past few days now I've been slaving and torturing myself with my character sketches for my chick lit project. (Yes, I'm serious this time; I won't abandon this one no matter what.) And a character sketch is one of the first hurdles one could encounter in the writing process. Why? Because this is the stage wherein you get to know your character. If you fail in this part, chances are there will be flaws in your story.

I used to hate this process because I need to know every single detail about my character. I'm not just talking about the character's name, eye color, height, weight, physical deformities, age, birthday, and background--it's more than that. Way more than that. I remember the sample character sketch sheet my undergrad thesis mentor gave us in my writing class; there was a part there where you need to enumerate the things you'll find inside the character's bag or what kind of clothes and accessories the character wears. You know those slumbook questions where you are asked to name your favorite color, film, books, your ambition and motto? Yeah, those kinds of stuff. Sounds trivial and insignificant, I know, but these things can do wonders really because the more you know about your character, the better you'll be able to write about him/her.

And of course, I don't want to make a very flat and boring character who's perfect in every way. Nobody wants to read about a perfect person because such does not exist in real life. And then there's the conscious effort to make each and every character different because if all your characters are the same, your story will be really boring.

It is a lot of work. A character sketch alone can take months. And then there's structuring of your plot before you go to the actual writing. No wonder I gave up that NaNoWriMo project last year. I didn't know my characters well enough yet; they weren't ready to leave their incubation shell yet.

And no matter how much I want to start writing the story now, I know I couldn't. My characters aren't alive yet. I'm still developing my main characters' voice. I'd probably end up revising what I have written. Either that or Dennis and Marielle would sound very much like Harry and Ginny, and although the plot was first conceived for an H/G fic, I still want to make it a bit different to make it fit for the contemporary setting here.

And this is the reason why fan fiction is easier to write. The characters are already alive and standing there in front of you, fully clothed, fully fleshed out. You don't need to get to know their personalities, background, their family histories, their world; someone else--the author--had already done that job for you. Their world is ready for you to inhabit. You just have to make the characters move. You just have to put them in a situation and watch their reaction. You have already skipped the first step. You can go on with plotting and writing.

Reposted from my other LJ, Aug. 30, 2006

More "On Writing"

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 07:56:15 GMT

Quotes from Stephen King's On Writing that one should always remember.

"...Stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position." (p77)

"Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation." (p128)

"...While to write adverb is human, to write he said or she said is divine." (p128)

-- Note to self: Do not--and I really mean, DO NOT--forget about this. He is right, you know.

"Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader...forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all." (p134)

"Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?" (p134)

"Don't wait for the muse. As I've said, he's* a hardheaded guy who's not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering...Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you're going to be every day from nine 'til noon or seven 'til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he'll start showing up , chomping his cigar and making his magic." (p157)

* Stephen King said that his muse is male, but mine's female and she certainly doesn't smoke cigar, so yeah. And now I know how to handle my muse who always run amok.

"What would be very wrong, I think is to turn away from what you know and like...in favor of things you believe will impress your friends, relatives, and writing colleagues." (p159)

"The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of if isn't very interesting." (p227)

King's On Writing might have been the most sensible book about writing a novel I've read (apart from Mario Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist) because King talks about the novel and writing the way he knows how. Yes, he did touch on the basic elements like character, plot, etc., but he talked about these things based on his experiences as a writer. There is some truth to it since it worked for him. (Though what had worked for him may not work for you.)

Though I do not like his novels and there were a handful of things that I disagree with Mr. King, I can't deny that I had learned so many things from him, especially the adverb part. I'm such an adverb-happy person.

Fiction is not the author's autobiography

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 06:53:21 GMT

"All stories are rooted in the lives of those who write them; experience is the source from which fiction flows. But that doesn't mean, of course, that novels are always thinly disguised biographies of their authors; rather than in every fiction, even in the most freely imagined, it is possible to uncover a starting point, a secret node viscerally linked to the experiences of the writer."

- Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist.

And I DO agree with Vargas Llosa because writers write about what they know. However, it doesn't follow that you're undergoing the same troubles and problems your character is experiencing. It might have the same situation, but it is still fiction -- an imaginary world, the world the writer's mind had created. Therefore, not the "real" world.*

Writers are all liars, anyway. Great liars, in fact, because they make people believe in their lies. But then I don't think those who are not writers can understand this.

* I put real in quotations because writers create the world that is seemingly real. I say seemingly real, because it is not the exact copy of the real world we live in, but only a believable copy. Your story should have a degree of believability and plausability before the reader gets immersed in your story.