Novel Watch #41: +4.5 pages [107.5 total]
So I’ve been thinking about infanticide.
I don’t remember where I read it, but some author mentioned something about “killing your babies” when it comes to writing fiction. A morbid metaphor, indeed, but I’m thinking it might really be an apt one. What it refers to are those moments or scenes or whatever in a story that you’re so attached to that you just don’t want to let go. Those are usually the moments or scenes or sentences that really need to be cut. Kill your babies, indeed.
In my case, I think of this one scene pretty early on, where Adrianna is sitting on the plateau with Bandolor and looking out over the town, and the forests, and the bay in the distance. The sun sets and the stars come out and she looks up and realizes, “hey, those are the exact same stars as the ones back home.” I like the poetic imagery that comes to mind (disclaimer: none of said poetic imagery may be included in the actual scene as written), and when I rearranged some stuff in the early chapters I worked things out awkwardly so I could still include it. I’m thinking now that perhaps I need to cut that out. Do you really need to be up on a mountain to see the stars?
Well, around here, the answer is probably yes. Because of the light pollution. Not where Adrianna is, though.
The other thing I’m really coming to grips with is just how much every part of the story needs to depend on relationships. A scene is, fundamentally, an examination of how two or more characters interact, or how a single character interacts with an inanimate object. When I get to the end of this book I think the first thing I’ll do is go back and divide everything up into small sections, scene by scene or theme by theme, and really look at just how the characters interact — is there progress? Do things change? Obviously, sometimes the plot needs to move on without the characters coming to huge realizations, but I don’t need to put all my imaginary people on a train to the end of the story. They can walk. Heck, they can even get out and push if I do it right.
Everyone has secrets. Everyone wants something. Everyone has something that drives them. Everyone has something that complicates them. I’m only just now discovering what those are for some of my characters. It’s an exhausting process. Also, on an unrelated note, the end of this story keeps on getting more complicated. It’ll be a righteous bang if I can pull it all off right.
Today’s quote is from the introduction of two farmers involved in a land dispute over the Bog of Sorrows:
Adrianna met the farmers in the kitchen, where she found them sitting on opposite sides of the table, glaring at each other. Of the two, Hamel Borde was meaty and thick-necked, with the largest jugular veins Adrianna had ever seen, while Teppyk Wootton, balding and beady-eyed, looked something like a gnome by comparison despite his average size.
October 23rd, 2007 at 11:14 pm
I think the one other thing to remember, is that if you’re going to call cutting out scenes “infanticide,” then you should also remember that you have the power to bring the baby back to life. The nice thing about stories, or any kind of writing, is that you can cut a whole bunch of things out but save the pieces, so that if there is ever an *appropriate* place to put them, they can go there. Sometimes I do this with grant writing or paper writing - if I’ve figured out a really great way to say something, but then it turns out it doesn’t need to be said in that document, I cut it out and put it into a “stuff cut from writing” document. Most of the time, I don’t ever actually go back and use it. But knowing that it will be somewhere makes it a *whole* lot easier to cut in the first place.
Sort of like what I told you about your iMac - put it in the garage for a while, and when you haven’t used it for a year, THEN you can get rid of it. 
And regarding stories (good ones, at least) being all about the relationships, that’s starting to sound a bit like a certain JW we so appreciate…
October 24th, 2007 at 2:42 am
c1: Well, yeah, I suppose it’s true that you can always bring those things back. The point of the metaphor, as I understand it, is more that you can get attached to things for the wrong reasons, and being unwilling to cut something out can be detrimental. The issue is not that you like something and it doesn’t fit, it’s that it doesn’t fit but you’re keeping it in because of an irrational affection for it. The whole infanticide thing is just a way to make you sit back and really look at everything — even the stuff you would have never considered eliminating.
In the case of the scene on the plateau, I think it’ll probably vanish entirely, but I might have a scene later on that takes place up on the mountain. If it works out the way I envision, then it’ll be pretty dramatic and it might work better. The one thing that I haven’t quite figured out how to deal with is setting the scenery of the world — the plateau scene works well for this because Adrianna looks down and sees the village and the trees and the bay and all. I’m not sure what I want to do about that, but hopefully it’ll come to me.
Not to worry, though, I’ve been backing up my files every evening, so I have a daily history of previous incarnations of the story if I end up deciding I want to go back and add it back in. I also have a little cullings file from when I did rewriting in part 1.
What amazes me about our good friend Mr. W is how he manages to incorporate both heavy duty non-relationship plots in with all the crazy relating that goes on at the same time. Yeesh. How does he do it?
October 24th, 2007 at 8:46 am
3GF: I suspect one way to circumvent the problem of “babies you love but love to see die more” is to think what it is, really, about a scene that you like. Is it that you like that she’s standing on a mountain under the stars, or is it that she (a) is experiencing a moment of serenity, (b) is gazing at a star-filled sky, (c) is swimming with complex emotions, …, (z) is a zombie. Then work that into a future scene where it would fit.
October 25th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
That’s a really good point, Jacob.
3gf: I’m just not sure this infanticide analogy really works. Because it’s making the point that you’re attached to these scenes as if they were your own babies, but it’s also making the point that it’s good to kill your babies. Something about that just doesn’t seem right…
And it’s true that Joss incorporates both non-relationship plot-lines with relationships. But even those non-relationships actually all tie back to a way of relating at some point. Serenity, in terms of non-relationships, was about finding an example of a horrible action by the government, and calling out the bad guys. But what it was *really* about was Mal finding something to believe in again, and River processing something that was taking up space in her brain because it had been put there by the bad guys. Both of those things required relationships in order to happen. There’s no reason for Mal to try and uncover the secret at the cost of his own life, unless he cares about someone (anyone, really) else in the universe. For River, it’s more that what she needs to go through to stay alive can only happen with the support of these other people, who care about her in some way (Simon, Mal…). And what people do in any given scene, whether action-oriented or not, is going to depend on how they relate to the other people in the scene, or in their greater world. Or at least, that’s the way *I* see it.