More detail! More words!

I am in the middle of what will amount to the thirdish and finalish draft of my novel, tentatively titled A Book of Ferryman's Heralds. What is most interesting to me about it, aside from how there seems somehow to be those weird "character" things and "story" things and even some "plot" things is that the third draft is already as long as the second draft. That would seem logical, except that the story is halfway as far in, and this draft has taken less than half the time to write. It's a fascinating thing to contemplate. While I feel that I haven't gotten as far, since the events I wrote today aren't even to the story's technical "midpoint"--an important storytelling term I learned recently--at the same time I feel like I've gotten much further. I think these are the reasons:

1) I'm using twice as many words. That doesn't mean I'm throwing in a lot of "gasps" and adjectives, which is what it could mean. What it means is that I'm taking my time to be thorough in describing things. I did not, as I usually do, rush through and assume that my brilliant images will communicate psychically, my concepts and designs will be clear even though there's no reason they should make sense. Rather I take my sweet time with all the little pieces and use sufficient words and time to describe how they all look, smell, sound, and fit together. Every moment can last a lifetime.

2) I'm giving my characters space to contemplate and to expand on their situations. In the past, I've always assumed that my characters would take care of themselves. I tended to write quite cinematically, just describing what it would look like people did and I'd assume that readers could keep up. That would work all right in the movie version when my characters are acted out as well as they are in my mind, with all the emotional states sort of dancing across their faces. My descriptive powers are not yet where they need to be to keep up with my imagined acting skills, however. And besides, I'm writing a mythologically inclined fantasy. Putting in poetic thought process lends itself to the storytelling.

3) I'm including damn subplots. I've always left subplots out of the novel proper, assuming that the hints and vagueness with which the main characters treated the subplots would be sufficient for the story. Subplots often feel less interesting to me than main plots. But when I started to explain the actions of my main characters to myself during my world-building kick recently I realized that the subplots I needed were really good and very interesting. In exploring my subplots I've managed to discover that my novel as it is can be a good conduit for me to expostulate and explore something I really like, which is various classical story structures. If I imagine character X as the main character, my novel is a classical tragedy--if character Y is the lead it becomes a stereotypical Hero's Journey with a personal touch--and the rest. I now enjoy subplots.

Those are the main reasons. I explain the doubling in words briefly as an increase in thoroughness.

Why I'm explaining: The way I see it, care and thorough treatment are often lacking in creative endeavours. Sometimes we meet writers with a proclivity toward intentional fantasy bloat, and we should not err in their direction. However, if you find that your attempts at novels often seem to stop on page twenty-four, and you don't know how the story goes from there, you may be leaving out half of what needs to be said. I suggest relishing the moments.

And some sweet tunes.

Why Kids Are Rude, the 21st Century by the Chili Peppers

I believe that it's a defensible statement to say that kids these days--meaning me especially--are more rude than kids ever have been. We conduct ourselves with the confidence of a people who live in an unshakable world. We might screw up our own lives, we seem to think, but that won't affect too much, so why worry about it? As a result we treat our elders with less awe than we ever have. Our elders are as they have always been better educated, more experienced, possessing greater qualifications. As in all ages before, the generations that precede the youth built the world as it is, its badness and all its greatness. As ever, our parents, teachers, grandparents, bosses, and all those old folks deserve our respect. Unlike ever before my generation acts per capita with less decorum than any other period. Refinement is falling away. We are rude kids.

It's a truth I think, if taken objectively. We are rude kids. As with many behaviors, something motivates our lack of refinement. There is a reason for how we seem to be so awfully ungrateful and inconsiderate. It's different, I have discovered from my research, than the motivation behind what they called the "Me" generation during the '70s. Hippies had a pretense of rebuilding what they saw as a broken system. It is the wont of every generation to rebuild the world as they see fit. Accepting this sociological fact simplifies things. In the '70s there was a mood of pacific revolution--all you knucking need is cucking love, let it be and all that jazz. The difference here between my generation and the flower power kiddos has everything to do with attitude. Gone seems to be all sense of amorphous "we need to do something!" Do what? we ask. "I don't know. Something!" That's gone.

Don't be growing some sense of hope that my generation has any idea what we're doing either. We have no idea. Almost less, maybe, because we're a bunch of coffee addicted sillies living a cushy life. We have a different idiom, though. The paradigm of amorphous passivity has been superceded by many different frames of thought and it has now taken a frame of situational skepticism. We are not a generation of doubters and we are not a generation of vaguely shifting take-what-we're-fed either. We've found some strange balance between the two. If given a proposition we almost always trust it and question it at the same time based on different circumstances, for instance what authority feeds us the information, what priod knowledge we have, our mood and the weather, if we're hungry and other physical factors, our upbringing. We might be a rude generation but in some ways we are more respectful than ever because we have actually learned from the past. We don't doubt everything, we don't hate everything, nor do we accept or love it all. Things, people, must prove themselves to us. Usually we will approach new situations without strong disposition. Maybe we'll be a little wary of things we think may go wrong or excited about things we've experienced that have gone right in the past. In general, though, we arrive and observe and wait for the situation to prove itself to us. That goes double for people. Sure we come across as rude. We're often neutral, waiting for newly met elders to invent themselves to us one way or the other. If you win our dismay then we will not feel it necessary to hide it. But if you win our respect we can be more loyal than the rising stars.

There are a lot of contributing factors to this and I think I'll write about them in a few days.

Tah.