The Magicians

I just finished reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

This book was recommended to me as "Harry Potter for grownups," which turns out to be an accurate description.  In it, Quentin, an overly intelligent guy who's constantly depressed because he's waiting for his real life to begin, for the big adventure that's going to make his life worthwhile, goes to a secret college for magicians.

From the outset, it seems that just the idea of going to a secret magic school and entering the hidden community of the magicians would make it like Harry Potter, and the inclusion of swearing, sex, and violence would make it for adults.  But there's more to it than that.  The way in which the magical world is presented echoes the prose in Harry Potter.  Details of the magical world are presented simply as existing, then there is a line about how the students feel about it or the subtle effect it has on their lives, and then the detail is never mentioned again*.  The difference is that in The Magicians, the students' response is some variant of "Ugh.  Fuck that."

"Quentin spent very little time in the Brakebills library.  Hardly anybody did if they could help it.  Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility."

The fact that little details like this are never mentioned again in a way makes the culture and traditions and history alive and immersive.  The characters take them for granted almost as part of the scenery, which makes the world feel lived in.

*Of course, in the Harry Potter books no detail is safe from being a major plot point later.  But in order for these details' importance to stay a surprise, they have to be buried in a bunch of other details that are unimportant or they'd be too obvious.

The Magicians extends this treatment of details to descriptions of characters.  The descriptions are minimal and focus more on Quentin's response that the color of each character's eyes and hair and nose shape.  This is something I love to read and love to write, even though I should do it more often than I do.

"Because he was plump and red-faced he looked like he should be jolly and easygoing, but in actuality he was turning out to be kind of a hard-ass."

The other thing I was really taken with was Lev Grossman's ability to tell the story of a series of books that the characters in The Magicians have read.  The series is called "Fillory and Further" and are basically a fictionalized Chronicles of Narnia.  A family of children visit the magical land of Fillory through a magic portal and there become kings and queens and talk to horses and rabbits before being send home by a pair of ram gods.  The exposition of the plots of these books are interwoven into the plot of The Magicians with exceptional skill.  Quentin loves these books, and so their plots and characters are presented in a similar way to the details I've already mentioned.  Quentin knows these books backwards and forwards and doesn't need to stop and explain.  He thinks about them often and he thinks about them well before they're needed in the plot of The Magicians.  It's cool.

So the Magicians and Harry Potter present the magical world in similar ways, but The Magicians is for adults because of the themes it explores.  Where Harry becomes an angsty teen, Quentin becomes a depressed man who has no one to understand his genius and his beautiful ennui (especially not women who could never understand him).  Where in Harry Potter, his life changes to what it's meant to be when Harry goes to Hogwarts, Quentin is still waiting for something better when he goes to magic school, he's still waiting even after he's graduated.  While in Harry Potter, bad people use bad magic and all the magic the good guys use is good and useful and harmless, The Magicians has a running theme that magic is dangerous and corrupting in how much power it gives to users.  It lets them live lives of excessive luxury where they lose themselves.  It lets them cause horrible accidents that get people killed and disrupt the boundaries between worlds.

"Just thinking about that place now gives me the howling fantods.  They're just kids, Quentin!  With all that power!...It's amazing that place is still standing."

Too Many Concepts in the Kitchen

Last week when I made my outline, it turned funny pretty quickly and I started thinking about this blog post.  Thankfully, I've made some breakthroughs since then and I get to ultimately talk about those.

A while back, I had a premise that was not enough to support a whole novel.  Then I had another idea, and again not for lack of trying) I couldn't extend it into a novel.  Maybe a short story.  Or a song.  And THEN I had a third idea for a novel that I probably could have written, but it turned boring what with being so flimsy and I lost interest.  Even after weeks spent flushing out motivations and back stories, side characters and wold building, these ideas stayed skeletal.  I had a surplus of ideas and I kept shifting them to the back burner in hopes one day a brainwave would strike to flush out one of them.

And a brainwave I got: what if I rolled them all together into one story?  Ben from story 3 replaces Hank in story 1, changing his motivations and changing his name to Trip.  Hank from story 1 then becomes a side character named Ben.  The guy from story 2 gets genderbent and the little girl from stories 2 and 3 get melded together.  Then I do all the plots at once.  Now that's a story!

I'm sure you will spot the problem I ran into faster than I did.

The first thing I did while outlining was to make a chart, diagramming the story strands, giving each storyline its own color of gel pen, putting each in order, then grouping them with events from other storylines that happen at the same time.

This is madness.  Cthulhu wrote this.

It was at this point that I realized that I had five stories going at the same time and aside from being a logistical mess, they felt wholly separate from each other. Each story arc happened to the same characters at the same time, but they had little effect on one another.  One had a mythical monster; one had a serial killer.  Even if I wrote it all in the same book, it wouldn't be one story.

I actually didn't set out to fix this immediately.  

I set out to fix a list of plot holes and things I hadn't settled yet.  Why is the plot line about the curse even happening?  Why would the serial killer show up at the climax?  Big problems, but almost expected at this early stage.

My breakthrough was this: I started fixing these plot holes using the other plotlines.  Why is he cursed?  Because a mythical monster hates him.  Things got knotted together.  Then things got streamlined.  The little girl(s) became a dog.  A big chunk of the serial murder story (including the woman who was the serial killer) got scrapped and replaced with "that guy from another plotline did it."  

Furthermore, while thinking about these plot holes, I started to see thematic similarities across story arcs.  This makes sense as I came up with all these concepts during the same period of my life.  These similarities could be expanded upon to bind them tighter.  Then I thought about the tone, how the main character is purposefully taking on too many things in order to stay busy and distract himself.  So I can use that chaotic feeling of jumping from one issue to the next to drive that home before the plotlines start interweaving.

In short, all the different branches of a story have to support one another.  They can't just come together, but they have to work together like a great sport team or the members of an orchestra.  I think I've got this in good shape, or at least in good enough shape that I can work on it.

Two-Month-Old Reading Preferences

I have vivid memories of giggling uncontrollably as my mother read The Monster at the End of this Book in her best manic Grover voice.  So, of course, I got this book for my son as soon as I started building a library for him.  I pulled it out with a grin and cleared my throat for my best grover voice. 

He hated it.

He did not like how upset I got and started crying in response.  He's also not at the developmental level yet where he turns pages, which is most of the fun of that book, and it's also like I was turning the pages, then yelling at myself for doing it, then doing it again.

Since then, I've learned that he's not ready for pretty much any children's book I remember enjoying.  He gets bored with a lot of them and only this week even started looking at the pictures.

We had to reassess, and we found that two-month-olds like lyrical language and stories with structure.  Or maybe my son just has a persnickety personality.  Who knows? 

He likes books that rhyme and have a distinct meter.  He likes books that have a set, predictable format, where optimally the last word or phrase of each verse would be something that everyone in the room can shout together  and wave their hands as if to say "ta dah!"

"Is your mama a llama?" I asked my friend Dave.
"No, she is not," is the answer Dave gave.
"She hangs by her feet, and she lives in a cave.
I do not believe that's how llamas behave."
"Oh," I said.  "You are right about that.
I think that your mama sound more like a
BAT!"

A BAT!  YAY!

He goes nuts.

He goes nuts for Goodnight Moon and Time for Bed too. 

And there were three little bears
sitting on chairs
and two little kittens
and a pair of mittens
and a little toy house
and a young mouse
and a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush
and a quiet old lady who was whispering "hush"

Every couplet, he kicks his feet and beams like chairs and mittens are the cleverest things he's ever heard.  He really  likes it, but it's not a bedtime book.

I'm Big Enough to Admit When I'm Wrong. And Rude Enough to Admit I Thought you were Wrong.

Lots of people I know swear by outlining.  They say that especially for National Novel Writing Month, you have to know exactly what you're going to write before hand, so when you sit down to write, you'll know exactly what you're doing and it will flow like a mighty river of printer ink.

The pieces I have outlined before were all articles in list form ("Seven Ways to Be a Helicopter Parent") or junior high papers where I had to have an intro, three arguments, and a conclusion, and I just slotted arguments into place.  In junior high this was stifling and no one bothered to explain the benefits of presenting a clear argument, what we were actually learning with a five paragraph essay, or why nothing we read ever looked like what we wrote.  So when people talk about outlining fiction, my first thought is that chart of rising and falling action, where you would insert plot point one and plot point two and plot point three, which has the same issues as outlining a persuasive essay. 

I've looked at outlining like it's sucking the magic out of the process.  I've always discovered a story as I write it.  The more time I spend working on it, the more I learn about the characters, the more the world unfolds, the more plot puzzles snap into place.  I've heard writing a novel compared to a romance: there's a get to know you phase and a magical phase and a phase where you hate each other.  At the beginning, you're strangers, so how could I possibly know what I'm going to write enough to outline?


Clearly, I did not understand.  I apologize to all my outlining friends.  You're not as crazy as I always thought you were but never mentioned so we could stay friends.


I learned this week that I can outline the same way I write.  That's to say I can start with the main plot points that I know well, then put them in order and quilt them together, adding smaller events around them, things that need to happen before them, tension that needs to build and release.  If I make the outline detailed enough, I can learn about the characters and the plot as I outline, and then go back and alter things acordingly.  The outline isn't written in stone, and I can cycle through it, adjusting and expanding, adjusting and expanding.

My friends probably already knew this obvious bit of insight, and now think I'm really stupid for not already knowing that.  Kind of the same way I thought they were weird for outlining.  Now we're even.

Water is wet, y'all! 

I now have five iterations of an outline, each more detailed and filled in and flowing than the last.  I have a list of issues that I can already tell are going to be problems, a list of people and things that need names, and a list of research I need to do before I write in any detail. 

National Novel Writing Month Preparations and Tailgating

I'm self-aware enough to realize that doing National Novel Writing Month with a two and a half month old and starting at the same time I go back to work is going to be way harder than even normal NaNo.  The state of this blog can attest to that.

The bunny baby usually lets me write for about an hour a day when I put him in the sling, walk him to the coffee shop, and sit for a bit.  The baristas like him.  They call my order "the usual" and greet us by name every morning.  Two out of three times he falls asleep on the way there, and just takes his morning nap in the sling.  One of the baristas commented the other day on how quiet he is.  I took the compliment and didn't correct him.  The truth is I know how irritable some people get about babies crying in public, so as soon as he starts getting fussy, we pack up and leave in record time.  So I get an hour of writing in about 4 or 5 days a week.

This is not enough for NaNo.

I've been thinking about ways to mitigate this problem, and have come up with a few strategies.  I'll talk about each in more detail in later blog posts, and if they work, I'll continue with them post NaNo.

1. Plan Ahead

Whaaat?  But that's not how I operate.  Outlining!?  Researching ahead of time!? Who am I and what happened to Carolyn!?  I recognize that with my time constraints this year, it would help me to know exactly what I need to write before I write it, especially with a story as complicated as the one I want to tell this year.

2. Get Hyped

If I love my novel, if I think and plan and mold every minute even when I'm not in front of my computer, if I'm excited every day to sit down for what little time I have and get it all out like releasing a pressure valve, I will get it done. 

3. Write on my Phone

I spend a lot of time on my phone lately, mostly reading or listening to podcasts or playing Flow.  I have a lot of down time when the bunny naps, but the problem is that during the day he will only nap if I'm holding him.  This makes it difficult to use the computer (without the use of the sling) or hand write in a wobbly notebook without balancing something on his back and praying everything doesn't clatter to the ground and wake him up.  But my phone I can manage in terms of how to hold both it and him.  The problem is that it'll be slow going, maybe frustratingly do.  I'm going to give it a try and see how it goes.

4.  Be Forgiving

I've talked about this before, but it's--as always--still relevant.  I'm probably not going to win this year.  I will probably be hilariously far behind.  That's just how it's going to be.  But the key word there is "hilarious."  Instead of a frustrating failure of skill and self-discipline, this is going to be funny.  If I go in with the attitude that I'm going to be compassionate and forgiving of myself, that my pace is my pace and it's justified, I may not win, but I'll feel good about myself and my story and eventually get it finished at my own speed.  Follow the #RuhRohWriMo tag for more!

Misleading Prologues

My husband the other day told me that he likes prologues that have nothing to do with the story.  This boggled me, and I realized that I'd been thinking around this topic a fair bit lately without approaching it directly.

"Really?" I said.  "Because I hate that.   It's like I've been tricked.  I get emotionally invested in this first character and then they never show up again."

Maybe this is left over from my high school English class where we learned that a book teaches you how to read it, what to expect, and then spent the year analyzing the first lines of everything we read.  Or maybe it's from college where my Film Studies class said that the first scene teaches you how to watch a movie.  Or from grad school, where they said that a video game teaches you how to play it, the internal rules, the implicit expectations.

"I like seeing the story from different characters' points of view," he explained.  "Especially from characters that aren't involved.  It gives things a sense of perspective."

He pointed out that this happens a lot in movies.  The first scene will focus on the bad guy, showing just how awful they are and what their evil plot is, when the good guys won't be able to see it for themselves (and therefore it wouldn't come into the story if you stuck with their POV) until much later.  Sometimes the first scene will focus on the victim of a crime: it'll show the event that sets off the rest of the story, even though the main characters aren't involved in that sparking event and aren't called in until later. 

These make sense and don't bother me that much.  But I find they are more common in movies than they are in books (or maybe that's just the kind of books I read).  It's narratively efficient to show things this way.  But in a movie, the prologue will be just a few minutes, where as in a book, reading it can take twenty minutes or so.  20 minutes out of a movie would be a sizable chunk of time.  So it makes sense to me that I'm more upset about prologues in books, where I've already sunk a decent amount of time only to find out this is not the character I should care about.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a book I ready recently, did this.  The book starts from the POV of a book rep from a publishing house, come to sell the winter collection to a small book store on an island.  The rep has her own problems and back story outside of this set up, and it looks like shes the person we're going to get to know for the span of this book.  I assume she's going to learn something about small town island life, or wax poetic about books, or something will happen to her at this meeting that will set off the rest of the novel.  (At some point, I must have read the back cover of this book and then just completely forgotten it by the time I got around to it on my To Read list.)  About ten pages in, she leaves the book store and the POV shifts to the owner of the book store, who is the actual main character of the book.  Bah!  Why?  I liked the sales rep and this guy was kind of a jerk.  The first time I tried to read it, I didn't make it too much farther into the story before turning to something else.  Turns out she comes back later as an important character, and that the book makes a note (in a kind of lampshading, wink-wink way) that in novels, sometimes they follow random side characters for a few pages to flush out that they're fully developed.  So there's a reason, but I didn't get far enough in the first attempt to learn that.


I've also been thinking about it with respect to my own work.  I've been working on this beginning for way too long, which is silly because I'm positive that once I have a full draft, I'll end up completely rewriting it and making it so now there's an explosion or something instead.  But one of my earlier attempts focused on the rival from down the street instead of on the main characters responding to that rivalry.  It made it seem like the rival was going to be the main character, even from the first few paragraphs.  When I switched over to the people I really cared about, the jump was jarring.  So I refocused even though this was on a much smaller scale than a misleading prologue.

The Effect of Heavy Editing on Atticus the Dog

With today's release of Go Set a Watchman, I figured it was a good time to talk about how the book's portrayal of Atticus Finch is not the fall of a hero.

In the months leading up to its release, Go Set a Watchman was promoted as the long lost sequel to the national treasure that is To Kill a Mockingbird.  It's set 20 years later, in the 50s, with an adult Scout returning home to Maycomb, Alabama with characters from Mockingbird making appearances, which certainly sounds like a sequel.  Then the early reviews started to come out, shocking absolutely everyone with facts that come to light in Watchman: Atticus Finch is a huge racist.

What? 

But--What?

Yeah. 

While Mockingbird presents issues of racism and the end of innocence by creating an upstanding moral hero for Scout to look up to, Watchman covers the same themes by having an adult Scout realize that her father, who she always considered to be a moral compass, is not as great as she thought he was when she was a child.  So Watchman pretty much ruined everyone's childhood, including Scout's, and has made things awkward for everyone who named their children and pets "Atticus."

Atticus the dog was a little awkward anyway.

For me, there are two ways to rationalize this.  First, take into consideration that Mockingbird is written from a child's perspective, and therefore her father was a great man who did great things and formed her into the person she became.  It's only after she grew up (in Watchman) that she was able to look back and see that things weren't the way she interpreted them at the time or that things weren't as shiny as they are in her memory.  And we, the readers, can go through this horror with Scout, since we too believed him to be a shining example of morality.

This way of looking at it makes sense, and may hold even more of an emotional punch than if Watchman hadn't been released at a point long after Mockingbird had become a renowned part of the American Literary Canon and Atticus had taken his place in our hearts.

But I prefer the second way to look at it: Watchman is not a sequel.  And not in the "Lalala pretend it didn't happen" kind of way.

Looking at the history, Go Set a Watchman was actually written first.  Then Lee's editors told her to rewrite it, focusing more on the charming stories of Scout's youth.  In rewriting, she came at the same themes from different directions, changing the point of view and time period, along with characters' personalities and plot points.  So it's as if Watchman is a first draft of Mockingbird.  (a lot of reviews are calling it a "bad first draft.")  We can see this in the fact that several sections (mostly descriptions of setting) appear verbatim in both books, like they were reused in Mockingbird because they were worth keeping and Watchman was never going to see the light of day.  Furthermore, some facts are altered between Mockingbird and Watchman, most notably the outcome of Tom Robinson's trial.  Yeah!  In Mockingbird, a huge plot point is that he was accused despite lack of evidence, but when it's mentioned in Watchman it's stated that he was acquitted.  That kind of continuity error doesn't make a lot of sense if Watchman really is a sequel.

So it's not that we didn't know Atticus or that we were fooled by an unreliable narrator.  It's that these Atticus Finches are different people with the name held over between the two drafts.

I prefer this way of looking at it, because it shows how much books change in the editing process, and I personally find that more fascinating.  How did these ideas start?  What did this book used to be?  What changed and what was kept?  How did it evolve?  We can actually look at the progression of To Kill a Mockingbird, like looking back through fossil records.  It makes me feel better about the massive overhauls I've done on stories and makes me feel better that even if what I'm writing is crap, there are ideas there that have the potential to flourish.