Reading: The Dragon Reborn, Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time, Book 3)
Redraft: Chapter 6 of 31
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As you can see from recent updates to the wordmeter, I wanted to push myself to commit to at least 1000 new words a day for the rest of the summer. It's a tactic Stephen King suggests in his On Writing, with a warning--from personal experience, no less--that not coming up with those words each and every day have a tendency to make a story go stale, so that you'll have to spend extra time trying to get back into the flow of things. As I've been floundering around, redrafting the preliminary chapters, I've learned on my own just how much King's warning rings true. Thus, damning all other demands on my time, I've resolved to commit to the 1000-words-per-diem requirement, at least for the duration of the summer.
Which may still be biting off more than I can chew, as you'll see below.
*
You see, as I've been making my way through Chapter 5 and now into the beginning of Chapter 6, I realize that I need a clearer vision of my story's milieu, and a firmer hold on the characters I'm introducing at this juncture. There is an elegance to the milieus and minor character development in my favorite books that is sorely lacking in mine, and I suspect the reason may be simple: I haven't thought things through well enough. It's a falling that links up with my weakness in developing settings, one that I'm slowly overcoming, though slowly be the operative word.
After wrestling with my 1000-word goal on Sunday for six to eight hours, I finally relented on Monday and returned to Chapters 3-4 for revamps. By early Tuesday morning, I had made some headway cleaning up the plot progression, and I felt compelled to write what I'd like to call a "retrograde" outline. Retrograde, in that it is being written after the complete text, instead of the reverse. I've only filled in summaries of the first two chapters, and the chapter titles for the other chapters, but already something seems to have fallen in place. I discovered a brand new plot element that I'll need to introduce in Chapter 1. I see a connection between two characters that heretofore had no link between them. I may not have written 1000 new words, but my efforts have broken through the inertia. To borrow an image from Robert Jordan: the Wheel turns, and the Pattern weaves what it will.
After wrestling with my 1000-word goal on Sunday for six to eight hours, I finally relented on Monday and returned to Chapters 3-4 for revamps. By early Tuesday morning, I had made some headway cleaning up the plot progression, and I felt compelled to write what I'd like to call a "retrograde" outline. Retrograde, in that it is being written after the complete text, instead of the reverse. I've only filled in summaries of the first two chapters, and the chapter titles for the other chapters, but already something seems to have fallen in place. I discovered a brand new plot element that I'll need to introduce in Chapter 1. I see a connection between two characters that heretofore had no link between them. I may not have written 1000 new words, but my efforts have broken through the inertia. To borrow an image from Robert Jordan: the Wheel turns, and the Pattern weaves what it will.
*
The second book in The Wheel of Time series is shorter and--I think--stronger than the first. I still stand by my belief that Jordan used the first to grow into the writer who eventually garnered such a devoted following, and a little bit of his journey remains in the first part of The Eye of the World, lodged there, perhaps unintentionally. But it taught me more in the past few weeks than a learner could reasonably expect from a mentor he will never meet in person, from a lesson begun only after the teacher had passed from this world. As Brandon Sanderson observes, there is an amazing depth of fore-planning at work in Jordan's epic; details that seem cryptic in The Eye come to the fore in latter volumes, I'm told. Now, I realize it is likely that some of those things were written before their ultimate significance could be cemented in Jordan's mind, just as others may have been intentional from start to finish. But his example has shown me the depth of vision I must aspire to--via design and serendipity alike--and my sight as a storyteller has grown deeper in the process.
*
I've been religiously watching the new Doctor Who ever since David Tennant took up his Time Lord mattle, despite the fact that the series has never achieved even the barest suspension of disbelief, at least to me. It's camp, but neo-camp, a kind of pulp audio-visual medium with the fit and finish of a modern dramedy series, but lacking any real internal consistency. The penulitmate episode in season 4, The Stolen Earth, is a great example. Without spoiling much, a great master plan is put into action, jeopardizing the Earth and twenty-something other "stolen" planets--and, ostensibly, the entire universe, once the plan reaches fruition--but the cliffhanger ending hinges on the fact that the Doctor is grazed by the "extermination" ray of a passing Dalek soldier, and about to undergo a regeneration.The second book in The Wheel of Time series is shorter and--I think--stronger than the first. I still stand by my belief that Jordan used the first to grow into the writer who eventually garnered such a devoted following, and a little bit of his journey remains in the first part of The Eye of the World, lodged there, perhaps unintentionally. But it taught me more in the past few weeks than a learner could reasonably expect from a mentor he will never meet in person, from a lesson begun only after the teacher had passed from this world. As Brandon Sanderson observes, there is an amazing depth of fore-planning at work in Jordan's epic; details that seem cryptic in The Eye come to the fore in latter volumes, I'm told. Now, I realize it is likely that some of those things were written before their ultimate significance could be cemented in Jordan's mind, just as others may have been intentional from start to finish. But his example has shown me the depth of vision I must aspire to--via design and serendipity alike--and my sight as a storyteller has grown deeper in the process.
I should pause here to explain to the uninitiated: the Time Lord "regeneration" ploy is a wonderful device used to allow the smooth passage of the Doctor's mantle from one actor to the next. Essentially, it is said that his race, the Time Lords, are capable of spontaneous regeneration when mortally wounded--the old rule of thumb was up to 13 regenerations per individual, but that rule has been breached in the past--in which they are revived in a different body, complete with its own new set of character quirks. This has allowed ten different actors to take on the role and make it their own, and given the legions of fans a plethora of reasons to argue about which doctor is "their" doctor.
Therein lies the problem with using the crisis of a "regeneration" as the episode cliffhanger. First of all, the sequence in which the Doctor is wounded is one of the most hackneyed of melodramatic shots: the slow-motion, lovers-running-across-the-expanse into-each-other's-waiting-arms sequence, which inevitably ends with one or the other being shot or otherwise intercepted before the sequence can be completed. Second, the Daleks have established a nearly mind-numbing inability to act on their strident impulses to "Exterminate!" the Doctor in the past. (Seasons 1-2 are replete with examples.) Nevertheless, this lone soldier finds his trigger (assuming that the weapon has one to pull) just in time to graze the Doctor and initiate the cliffhanger scenario.
But worst of all, besides the fact that the Doctor's feelings for Rose might change with his next regeneration (which, at this point, after said love interest has been MIA for the better part of two seasons, has the emotional potency of tepid water), the central crisis seems to eminate from the assumption, on the viewer's part, that David Tennant will no longer be playing the Doctor after the regeneration--that is, that the current actor will be replaced by the eleventh. (That is the underlying crisis; however, I believe the writers will find some convoluted means by which to keep Tennant in the role, no doubt at the expense of further compromising an already broken plot mechanism.)
It is a sad state of affairs where one of the most popular shows on BBC1 has to rely upon a matter of casting rather than plot to captivate its viewers. It's reasons such as this that Doctor Who remains a very guilty pleasure of mine--though if it continues to degenerate, who knows--it may not even remain that for very long.
*
The first time I laid eyes on the trailer for Pixar's WALL-E, I knew I'd have to see it during the opening weekend. I have always harbored an inexplicable affinity for robots, and so this animated movie seemed tailor made for me. (It also helped, hot on the heels of my Doctor Who rant, that Pixar has established a reputation for solid plotting along with its spectacular computer-generated visuals.) WALL-E skirts the wonderful balance that allows a movie to transcend audiences--delightful for kids, thought-provoking for adolescents, and satisfying for adults both young and old. Profundity and humor. Darkness and hope. And that thing which is often so purely distilled in dramatic representations of robots--which may be the reason they move me so: the unbridled luminescence of the human spirit, a light that we ourselves tend to forget. I was moved to tears more times that I'd care to admit during the movie, but they were tears of joy rather than sadness--bursts of kinship with thoughts and behaviors that make the experiences of our lives uniquely human.
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