ieva melgalve

Last week was one of the busiest, most stressful weeks ever. I still managed to get my writing done and accumulated 3K words for Virgin, as well as got some editing done (acceptable amount).
Last week was also when we launched a social project in Latvia, one that proclamates 2010 as The Reading Year. At some point it became profoundly important for me personally.
Other than that, I seem to be running out of words badly. I somehow manage to use them up in writing and at some point, there’s little left. I console myself thinking that at least they went to the right places.

And we’re still snowed in. This is the deepest, most beautiful winter I remember; and each morning, the frozen-and snowed over Daugava river greets me with its whiteness that approaches nothingness. Waking up and seeing whitescapes all over is so freeing, so true. So good after all the nightmares I have of late.

Are you writing too? How did it go?

Writing Virgin has been very smooth this far, despite the fact that I’ve barely planned anything. I sort of try to do my best at planning but editing and day job gets in the way. So I’ve done, well, almost nothing. The funny thing is that I don’t miss it. I have some things figured out already, some things I just take as they come, and the daily word count is so low I don’t need much to get myself going.
There will be middle swamps, of course, but there are middle swamps anyway, plan as much as you might.

These days have been extremely busy, so I’m making just a short note to tell that I’m alive. I’m writing Virgin in the mornings, and finally (finally!) things are becoming more 3D. I still haven’t done even moderate planning, and honestly, I don’t feel much need for it since I still am able to hold things in mind. It seems that I’ll be best off making a sort of planning hack–a derivative of what I learnd in HTTS workshop, mixed with my own approach (Tarot card reading, for example).

This is moderately like being able to tell whether somebody is gay, or having uncomfortable strings, or really really needing to fart or being dead scared while trying to appear nonchalant. The first: yay/haha, I’m can tell! The second: OMG, I wonder what others are able to tell about me?

I am still not 100% sure I can tell whether a writer is having fun while writing (or having a smart-attack of “I’m just inserting this scene in the second draft and it’ll appear as if I knew it all along, haha!”), but I sure as hell am able to tell whether a writer has had a bad case of middle swamps, chapters and chapters of “damn it, why do I have to do this again… I loathe writing, I loathe being a writer; and while it’s sorta cool that, being a pro, I can pull this off and the reader will never know but WHY THE HELL AM I DOING THIS? OH RIGHT, I’M NO GOOD AT ANYTHING ELSE”, and this is depressing to no end. It makes me cry and contemplate the futility of my own writing, which will hence have the same symptoms of “oh hell why am I doing this?”. And thus the futility will spread like a disease, poisoning and suffocating more and more writers and drowning the unsuspecting readers in depression (”this book is really smart and well-written, I’ll enjoy discussing its literary novelty and then I’ll go to the closet and hang myself there because oh my god life is miserable and pointless”).
I wonder, by the way, whether this has happened in Latvian literary scene. I honestly can’t remember a book where writer was clearly enjoying the act of writing (some scenes from “Warm Earth” perhaps?).

Be as it may, I have swallowed two good anti-writing-depression-pills (Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone” and “Belle’s Best Bits” by Belle de Jour), and am on my revising-horse again. It’s not that bad when you know that it can be good.

A snowy morning.
We are stopping the traffic
With a goodbye kiss

Today, for the first time in a long long while, I got the kicks out of writing. Finally (after 7K words), I led my protagonist to really really hate me. Well, not me, but the people and the culture I created.
She is, it seems, very resistant to pressure. She can take it, for a long long while, not telling anything, not complaining, just accepting things that are happening to her even if she knows that they are wrong and somehow flawed. Then, for quite a while, she tries to keep her eyes squeezed shut in hopes that if she doesn’t see the problem it will just go away.

This is when she finally broke, when she said, that no, this is not right, this is not how it should work, and to hell with all the people who are saying that this is how it goes.

Yes, it’s just a small village resisting the change, resisting an opportunity of growth and the risks that go along with that. But for her, this village is the whole world–even the people from the next village are alien to her, they’re “others”. And still she broke, and she burst out, and she said no to everything she’d learned as true and right, and good.
We don’t get this sort of conflict in modern world–I can safely piss off all the people in my country and still I’ll find somebody to talk to, somebody who doesn’t give a damn about what those Latvians think of me. But in a world without Internet, without literacy even, this is not possible. Your neighbour, your mother’s sister, your village elders–they’re the whole world. You don’t get another chance of communication, normally.

Except that I think she will.

Here, I wondered about who my first future reader will be.
Today, it dawned on me who my “last” future reader will be; the opposite end of the spectrum: the person who reads one book a year, or maybe one book in his (or her) whole life, barring high school when you can’t really get around that.
Now, imagine that person–somebody who is so preoccupied with other things that reading simply doesn’t have any appeal. Imagine her friend gave her my book, saying “this is cool, probably you should read it”, and she does.
First, the obvious thing: if my book is her only shot at literature, it just has to be good. After all, for a newbie reader, every page is a struggle. If my book was her only shot in a decade, it just has to give a reward for reading it.
Next, the less obvious thing: I must treat her like a blank page. She doesn’t know what other books are out there and my book just has to stand on its own without the crutches of past geniuses.
For example, Terry Pratchett. I wasn’t a fantasy geek when I first read his books. I hadn’t (and still haven’t) played Dungeons and Dragons. So oftentimes, I stopped somewhere and thought “this must be a joke and a funny one, too bad I don’t know exactly why it’s funny but I still get it”. This is why Terry Pratchett is a great author: while having read lots and lots of fantasy classics helps a lot to get the subtle jokes, it is still fun even without this background. Even without knowing how D&D works, I still get the magic system of gods.
Another example: a book “Nedotepa” by Russian author Lukyanenko. That’s a cool and funny book, with lots of references to modern culture. For example, the apprentice has a magic book that is called “ipod” (a funny word-play in Russian, and a long story). I keep wondering – if, in ten years, or twenty, I read this book and I don’t know what iPod is, will that name of the book still make sense? (Also, should he care? I don’t know.)

So here’s the conclusion: a great book must be great regardless of how many other books (and which books) the reader has read. Given a reasonable amount of readers, they would have, cumulatively, read way more books than I ever have (and ever could possibly read). Also, each of them will be blissfully unaware of most of the things I have read.
If your book has vampires, some of your readers will know nothing about the idea of a sparkling vampire. Some of your readers will have read everything about porphyria and will invariably wonder have you done your homework on vampirism. Some will know another tiny bits of information that you might or might have not employed.
A great book doesn’t assume anything about the reader, her knowledge basis, her education, her culture and things she considers “natural”, “commonplace” or “obvious”. Everything the reader needs is in there already.

This week, I didn’t do particularly well writing-wise (two days I didn’t write at all due to death in husbands family and funeral) but on the rest of the days, I fared sufficiently (even today, when I was slacking for the most part of the day and managed to pull my act together rather late). I did almost everything I needed to write and learned a couple of things, both personal and writing-related.
- I got a small notebook for noting small glimpses of ideas, this seems to be working just great. Some ideas come from books I read, some from dreams.
- Got un-afraid from writing slow and literary (however, the simple tricks of raising stakes and sticking with people that matter seem to work here, too).
- While editing, I discovered that I actually make more sense than I thought (namely, some of my scenes that seemed pretty useless plot-wise actually are about critical character development stages. I’ll have to change them but at least now I know why I wrote them in the first place).
- Personally, I found out a marvelous thing: that you can communicate with people way more rewardingly if you open up and give them back relevant information, connect with them on levels that aren’t normally in place within first communication with a stranger. Well, that’s a weird thing to discover when you’re almost 30 (normal folks figure it out at 7 or so), but better late than never.
- Also, I found out that (except today) I waste little or no time at all. That’s sorta cool, but also a bit frustrating (it means that I cannot free up more time for writing, I must focus on doing more in shorter amount of time instead, and use a short-short breaks more effectively).
So all in all, this has been a fulfilled week.

Yesterday, I did a quick math about how much would I be able to accomplish if I worked slowly/fast/very fast over several years, played with my speed and varied the planning, writing and editing lengths and frequency to figure out how would I accomplish more without burning out. As a result, I got two years planned out (quite satisfactory) and I also felt incredibly bored by the prospect to write in that time frame.
“Writing isn’t fun,” I decided. “It doesn’t have to be fun. It hasn’t been fun for two months or so, and it probably never will. That’s fine. It doesn’t have to be fun, has it? Granted, I stopped writing when it stopped to be fun last time around, but I was not this determined then.”
Then I stumbled on this article in Seth Godin’s blog and realized that I’d been wrong and I’ve been hurting myself for two months. (Go ahead. Read that article. It’s good.)
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The job I’m doing right now with Virgin is clearly experimental, switching between different perceptions of time, focusing on nuances instead of the obvious, and going slow, having no major stuff happening (yet). This is probably what could be named “literary fiction” if I wrote better, or “high literature” in Latvian (actually, Latvians have trouble even accepting commercial literature as “literature”).
This is enormously delightful. This is also scary for me personally, and not just because the market for mediocre literary fiction is incredibly small.
This goes back to my personal history. Namely, I used to write literary fiction a lot. I was told to; all other kinds of literature was called trash. Besides, there was that myth going on that it’s impossible for somebody from a small country with a tiny language to write commercial fiction. And writing literary fiction was fun and it got me recognition that I thought I enjoyed. I published a book where every story proved a point: there was a story where no two sentences were interlinked in any way (not even sharing a protagonist…not that it had any protagonist), a story with no emotions named, a story where the protagonist is a time-traveling, reincarnating ghost, a story that was repeated many times, decomposing in the process, and a couple of surreal stage plays.
Then, at some point, I realized that there are–cannot be–any rules for experimental writing. If I write to prove a literary point, it will not work for most of the people. And I stopped writing because I lacked that point of evaluation. I stopped writing because I wasn’t thinking “outside the box” since I didn’t have a box at all.
After a few years, I started researching, studying and writing genre fiction because it had a box. I learned what “scene” meant and that my protagonist had to have some sort of personality and needs, and obstacles. I chose to write in English primarily because I didn’t know the language well enough to pull fancy literary stunts. I learned a lot, and I still have lots and lots to learn. I survived the shock of the discovery that instead of requesting stories, editors were actually rejecting them.
Right now, I’m trying to combine both features: the box and the outside of the box. I have scenes and protagonists and antagonists, needs and complications. I am re-evaluating the rules I learned and bending them when I think it could make sense.
Am I ready to do that?
I don’t know.
But this is exhilarating, and it’s scary and it’s what I’m doing right now.
My only consolation: that in any case, I’ll learn a lot in the process.