Torturing a Metaphor

Blank notepad on a wooden surface. Top view

I wanted to write about the blank page I face every morning, but I was afraid it would devolve into some inspiration glurge about how every day is a blank page that we write on, and we have the choice of what to write on it every day. A little cliche for me to start the morning with.

Every day is not a blank page. It’s another page in a never-ending story, complete with themes, plots, and foreshadowing. The theme for this week has been “People at work do nice things”, which has been almost magical. One of the plots has been “Lauren is starting to write again, but slowly.” We often do not see the shape of the story except in retrospect, which makes the metaphor very limited.

I don’t like the page as a metaphor for life, unless it’s one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, where your life branches when you commit to a certain activity. With unlimited choices, there are infinite branches. Sometimes the plot doesn’t make sense, even in retrospect.

I’ve tortured this metaphor enough. Time to write the story of my day.

Knowledge Base and Writing

There is a phrase among writers: ‘Write what you know’. The cop focuses on the precinct, the Parisian on Paris, and the college professor (like me) on college campuses because we have the details in mind.

The above examples all focus on settings. I want to focus more on the knowledge base — where plot points and themes are informed by knowledge of a specific area. For example, I have some basic background in disaster management. I teach disaster psychology and case management. I know how people do triage in a mass casualty event because I have had CERT training. Because of my training in disaster mental health, I can spot the psychological symptoms of acute and post-traumatic stress. (I want to emphasize that I am not a therapist or counselor, and that I can’t treat people with these disorders.)

I have written two books where mass casualty events come into play. One is Apocalypse, where an impending battle threatens to cause the loss of all the women of the world. Characters looking at that possibility project how they will react, with both despair and resiliency. In my most recent book, Carrying Light, two mass casualty events happen. Characters have to deal with emergency response, which includes the sobering truth that responders will have to leave some people to die. Acute stress reactions figure in both books.

When I use my knowledge, it provides more than just background knowledge and convincing details. It helps set the plot and the theme of the books. Plot points include recovering from working a mass casualty event; and themes include the toll that extreme circumstances take on those experiencing it. Writing what we know should, in my opinion, shape our stories to add to the realism of what’s presented.

Now, the issue of fantasy needing some basis in reality, or at least a consistent rule book, is an essay for another day.

How I started writing novels

Well, I finally wrote/revised for three and a half hours yesterday, fueled by copious amounts of coffee. I didn’t accomplish that much word-wise — maybe 1500 words at most. But I think I’m getting closer with Gaia’s Hands. Lots of work to go, though.

Gaia’s Hands is my first novel. It’s always been a problem child of a story. When I wrote it, I had no intention of writing a novel. I had written a short story based on a dream I had about an encounter between myself and a younger man. (If you think the dream had to do with the fact I was approaching my 50th birthday, you’d be right. And the dream was far more bizarre than anything I wrote from it.)

I wanted to know more about the dream, so I started doing a Gestalt dream analysis method where one tells the story from the viewpoint of the different characters, and even the important inanimate objects of the story. (I didn’t go that far). During this set of writing exercises, a story developed. And then another.

After the third story that developed from the dream, my husband Richard looked at me and said, “You’ve got all these stories. Why don’t you write a novel?”

I had never written a novel before because I think in terms of short stories — small plots with big twists, big themes. Novels have big twisty plots, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to plot those. I wrote Gaia’s Hands anyhow. Its original name was Magic and Realism, and it was heavy in theme and extremely light in plot. It was basically a love story, and although I have nothing against love stories, the characters did little more than hang out together.

And then I wrote more novels, some of which collapsed into each other (For example, Magic and Realism became Gaia’s Hands, and then it subsumed another novel during the same time period called Gaia’s Eyes and that’s the novel I’m currently re-editing) and somehow I got better at writing big twisty plots.

It’s been a lot of hard work editing and re-editing, and then getting help editing from a developmental editor and re-editing, but I’ve learned my goal has shifted from getting published to getting good, then getting published. I don’t want to grow to regret anything I’ve published.

I guess now I can call myself not only a writer, but an author, because I have devoted myself to growth. And it literally, cliche notwithstanding, started with a dream.

Dissecting Gaia’s Hands and Learning Nothing Yet.

Maybe Gaia’s Hands wasn’t the best book to enter to Kindle Scout.

I’ve proofread it, demolished it, paired it with another book, trimmed that back so that I have two instead of four main characters, re- and re-proofed it, and still when I look at it I wonder if it’s a solid novel.

I’ve never known what to do with it. I love its plot lines — discovering one’s mystical abilities, a convincingly menacing pattern of harassment to one of the main characters, a taboo May-December romance (taboo because the woman is older than the man). I adore its characters — a talented botany professor, a precocious young poet, his best friend the surly engineer, the refined yet hangdog lab assistant Ernie, enigmatic waitress Annie, and even the smooth dean and hostile department chair Jeanne has to face.

But I’ve never known what to do with the book. The scenes almost come off as vignettes, with the connections between strands unapparent at first. The plot is subtle, not as action-packed. The characters carry it, but I always wonder if the book starts too slowly. I edit it again and feel something’s not quite there, I don’t know what the “something” is. With all the improvement I’ve done in writing for the past six years, there’s something in Gaia’s Hands too quirky for prime time.

Gaia’s Hands strikes me as a YA, except the male protagonist is too old at 20, the female protagonist is way too old at 50, and there’s not enough angst. (For all the harm Twilight did to women’s expectations of men — it’s okay to be a stalker? Really? — it did angst exceedingly well. And it sold.)

I look at Gaia’s Hands and feel like it’s missing something. Despite my greater level of experience, my writing skills, better knowledge of writing dynamics — my writing is missing something, and I can’t tell what. Maybe my style, my “voice” isn’t acceptable. I don’t know, but I wish I could figure it out.

Themes — the implied content

How does a story’s plot differ from a story’s theme?
The plot describes the action of a story while the theme describes its soul.

Although themes aren’t the same as plots, plots incorporate themes. A theme of “Family is important”, for example, must feature a plot in which facing adversity makes the family stronger. A theme of “We make our own family” may have a plot in which four unrelated people experience adversity and develop close ties as a result. If the plot doesn’t carry the theme, the theme never escapes the writer’s brain.

Some themes are universal and archetypal. A professor named Joseph Campbell spoke on a universal theme called “The hero’s journey” in a book called The Hero of a Thousand Faces. (Women scholars have argued his Hero is inevitably masculine, and I agree). The hero’s journey consists of leaving home in a naive state, facing a danger, feeling insecure about meeting the danger, failing at meeting the danger, discovering his strength, and overcoming the danger. In other words, growing up. Choosing good over evil is also a universal theme, and if you’ve read any of the Harry Potter books, you’re familiar with the theme. Fairy tales have great archetypal themes — reread them!

Some themes are shaped by our times. One of my common themes is “Acceptance of the Other,” whether they’re a different color, race, nationality, love preference, or species (there are non-human humanoids involved). This theme might not have been possible three hundred years ago. One theme of my current book is “We should choose our own destinies,” again not possible in the time of Calvinistic Determinism. Another is the previously mentioned “We make our own family” (or, in the movie Lilo and Stitch, “Ohana”) .

Some themes are shaped by our culture. The ancient Greeks viewed Eros, or passionate love, as a chaotic force that induced destructive behavior in its victims. How would they have reacted to the “happily ever after” of today’s romance novels?

One of the secrets of themes is that they should not be announced. Stories in which a character explicitly ties up the action by reviewing the theme with other characters — I am reminded of one of the staples of my childhood, ABC After School Specials on TV. “Johnnie, I told you not to open the door to strangers!” (Also, “Johnnie, I told you not to invite the drug dealer in for pizza!”) Your readers will find the themes, even subconsciously, when they feel themselves identify with them.

Themes, rather than plots, may be the way you perceive the world. If someone asks you what the book is about and you say, “It’s about a battle off the coast of Antarctica”, you’re a plot person. If you answer, “it’s about survival in the Antarctic during wartime,” you’re a theme person (see the difference?)

By the way, I’m a theme person. (My book is about a young person who discovers people who share her uncanny talent. Plot people grumble at descriptions like this — but what HAPPENS?)