Jump to content

Student of Trinity

Member
  • Posts

    6,622
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Blog Comments posted by Student of Trinity

  1. This is as far as I got with "True Magic", apart from a very vague note about what might actually happen in the story, and a brief final scene that is meant to imply that the old man and Greta take the young author into their company as a new colleague. In some way, despite his ignorance, he has contributed something that has saved the old man's scheme from disaster. They recognize this as a talent. They invite him to join them in a glass of their most potent cordial, which sounds rather like an elixir of eternal youth.

     

    The basic idea of the story is supposed to be that magic is real and yet not distinct from ordinary causality. It is rather a matter of bringing things that are normally random and unpredictable into deliberate control; a sort of engineering of coincidence and subliminal suggestion. It's always so subtle as to be almost impossible to see, but over time it can have huge effects. So, in particular, the old man's business is mainly cultural engineering. He is trying to change the world, very slowly. Sort of like Hari Seldon, in fact, but in a late medieval world. He's slowly working to tip it into a Renaissance. Poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, the young author really is a natural ally.

     

    All of which is much too vague for an actual story. You can see why this thing stalled out here. But maybe some day.

  2. Another thing that several of my beginning stories have shared is multiple first-person narration. A Lady of Morandau actually continues this, albeit in larger blocks rather than chapter-by-chapter. Having considered the story from one limited perspective, I'm curious to see it from another. And I like the opportunities for surprise and irony, in seeing the same things from different viewpoints. I also like trying to construct distinctive writing styles, and keep them separate.

     

    The 'starving young author' in the inn was going to be this story's other narrator. He has two voices, actually. There's his voice as narrator of the story he's trying to write, which is rather purple, especially compared to the ancient magician's spare dryness. And there's his own voice, making notes, which is chatty and a bit morose.

     

    Here I'm experimenting with the unreliable narrator, because the young author is romantically fanciful, and gets lots of things wrong. But then again it was just too dismal to write as an idiot, so the hint slips in that he's not really living in a fantasy world, but simply trying to write one. He's perfectly well anchored in reality, but his reality is depressing; and on the other hand, fantasy is his stock in trade. And then, yet again: the old man really is impossibly ancient, and he really is in some way uncanny. Could the author somehow be right?

  3. My Morandau story is the only writing project I have time to work on now. It's in its second draft, and precisely because it has really grown into a full-length novel, I've stopped posting it here. But it's the seventh story I've started over the years, and I can maybe post some of my earlier stalled-out starts.

     

    It's clear now why A Lady of Morandau took off when the others didn't. It's the only project of mine that has had action right from the start. The others weren't really stories, I realize now, but only premises or pitches for stories. I had scenes and characters, and narrative voices, and notions of what kind of world the story would happen in, what would be possible and what would not. I never had a plot. Maybe I was unconsciously writing as a Dungeon Master, laying out the setting and the NPCs, but leaving the events of the story to work out during play. Now that the clever trick of action has finally occurred to me, I may someday come back to these old ideas, and make something of them.

     

    Most of my stories have had first-person narration. I'm not sure now that this is such a good idea. It's quite a limitation in perspective. You can only show your villains cunningly planning, for instance, if your protagonist can eavesdrop on them. And it can feel as though you're writing dialog, because you're writing in the voice of your narrator-character, when in fact you're rambling on with too much exposition. It works very well in some of my favorite stories, though. I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to it.

     

    This story started with the whimsy to try a really passive narrator, who was virtually incapacitated with extreme old age. But a totally helpless narrator was such a crushing limitation that I found I couldn't go three paragraphs without slipping in some hint that this narrator was somehow not so completely passive or incapacitated. It couldn't just be that he was faking his age and frailty, though; those were more interesting than any mere disguise.

     

    So this led to the idea of a kind of story, about a kind of magic.

  4. Reading successive drafts of this chapter, my brother has kept insisting that the math stuff is too technical. He's convinced me, and I'll rewrite it. The idea of determinism has developed into a sort of motif for Anastasia. "What has to happen, will" is one of her catchphrases. She's a fatalist; but as she puts it later at one point, "I'm part of what has to happen." Her fatalism is the kind that encourages her to be reckless and aggressive, rather than resigned and passive.

     

    So I think that, rather than talk in the technical language of 'boundary conditions', I'll talk about determinism. It's actually only a change of language. Determinism is precisely what Anastasia and Huygens argue about, in talking about initial and final conditions, and the existence of solutions. It shouldn't be too hard to raise the same ideas in more accessible terms, and at the same time get more resonance with later parts of the story.

  5. This was a glossary entry I made because iBook-Author gives you a default glossary. Then I gave up on iBook-Author because I found it more convenient just to have a separate Pages file for each chapter. I sort of like this definition. 'Everyone knows they are real' seems to set the tone well, by implying that the Morandau are bogeymen whom most people would rather doubt if they could. I'm not sure this paragraph fits into the story as it has grown, though. Maybe it would serve well at the beginning of a second volume, though, as a sort of recap. If I ever get that far.

  6. I can't remember now when or how I got the idea that Anastasia's parents were so badly damaged. To a small degree this feature of my story is autobiographical. Both my parents had siblings die in childhood, and as my brothers and I have grown up and had children ourselves, we've slowly recognized that our own upbringing had some ripples from those tragedies. To say that our family life was eerily serene would be a great exaggeration, but I think it did lie a bit outside the normal range, in that direction. There was not a lot of overt emotion.

     

    The other reason to put this in the story is just to excuse myself from writing a convincing emotional life for a young woman. I have no idea how to do that. I await seeing the outer signs of the real thing, in my daughters, with trepidation. So it's a necessary premise of the story that the protagonist-narrator has uncanny sang-froid. First-person narration is in this way another excuse. If emotions are handled clumsily, I can pretend it's not my fault. It's just that Anastasia grew up with attachment deficit.

     

    I can put in all kinds of emotionally charged events, but Anastasia's reactions will always be weirdly muted. I will sometimes try to hint that she actually feels things more than she herself realizes. There is meant to be a certain amount of dramatic irony in many of her statements about her or other people's feelings.

  7. The story does continue, but so far it only has three chapters, plus a few fragments from later in the story. It will be a long time before it is finished. I think I probably will eventually finish it, though, because I want to find out what happens. I know how it ends, and I know several major plot features, so I don't think it will just bog down or peter out. So far I've found, though, that by writing I discover a lot more about the story than I knew when I started the chapter. So I'm kind of motivated to keep writing.

     

    I haven't written much poetry in recent years, but I have gotten into prose instead. I'm not looking for a new career. It's just a hobby, and I've been content to just putter around at it. I have the beginnings of about six stories. I like them, but I have no idea where to go with them next. This one seems to have more momentum than the others.

  8. I intend no deep meaning. It's just an image that came to me years ago, with the feeling that sometimes the drama gets to be a little much. I've tinkered with it very slowly. I have written several poems, but I don't think I've started a new one in the past ten years or so. I guess the accurate statement is that I was a little bit of a poet when I was younger, but lately I've only been a very little bit of a poetry editor.

     

    I'm not even sure what a heath is, exactly, but whatever it is, I know that it's sure to be withered, and the chances of a ruined tower are high. I think this is based on a confused association between heaths, cliffs, and wuthering heights. I may as well admit that I think of wuthering as a conveniently small sort of thunderstorm. For the whole gothic genre I'm kind of one of those embarrassingly ignorant fans. I guess this is what the poem is about.

  9. The best argument for astrology I have heard is that the planets do not affect us at all, but merely mark the passage of profound rhythms in the cosmos, which affect everything, and hence also affect us. So (the argument goes) judging whether the time is right for a business venture by looking at the position of Mercury is no different from judging whether the time is right for planting corn by looking at the flight of wild geese. The geese have no effect on corn (except of course to eat it, but that's not part of the analogy) but they fly north in spring, and spring is time to plant. In other words, astrology is about correlation instead of causality.

     

    The person who gave me this argument also told me that it was a very old and traditional one, dating back to Paracelsus. I don't endorse the argument, but I do take from it that questions about how the planets can possibly affect us here on earth are beside the point.

×
×
  • Create New...