DOING THE WORK // 11.14.02

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By Harris O'Malley

Well, I'm finally somewhat settled in my new place. The computer is set up, I've got my precious broadband again (THE POWER! THE PHENOMINAL POWER! BWA-HA-HA-HA!), I've located the bars and most of my stuff has been moved to the new Caer O'Malley. Still have to make a couple trips to get the rest out of storage, but otherwise, I'm fairly well established.

And thanks to the moving, I'm even further behind in BETWEEN THE CRACKS and the second part of NIGHTS OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS than before. Gah!

Since I think I've effectively worn out everybody's patience with my bitching about the difficulties of getting the work done, I've been thinking about a different end of the process. A thread at Steven Grant's Permanent Damage forum talking about how to fit characters into an existing plotline got me to thinking about writing and how much of myself I invest into my work.

Now is the time at DOING THE WORK when we navel-gaze.

"Still Waters", the latest chapter in BETWEEN THE CRACKS, started life as a prose story for one of my creative writing courses in college. Most of the stuff I wrote back then was, frankly, crap. Either I was trying to hard to be clever, or else I handed in warmed-over Charles DeLint pastiches.

Yeah, yeah, left myself open for that one, very fucking funny. Shut up.

"Still Waters" was different. If I were forced to describe it, it was as much an experiment in multiple personality disorder as it is urban fantasy.

I tend to be a character-driven writer, rather than a plot-driven one. I just like the idea of crafting little lives and then setting them loose; of course I tend to do all sorts of horrible things to them for I am a capricious and wrathful god, but that's just the nature of the beast, really.

No, I don't play THE SIMS. Why do you ask?

In the case of "Still Waters", I did things completely the other way around; I had the basic plot. But damn if I knew who the characters were. So I decided to do what every good author knows he isn't supposed to do: I made myself the main and supporting characters.

Images of Grant Morrison's explorations in the boundaries of fiction and reality aside, this was less of a Mary-Sue and more of a very odd form of therapy. It was in college that I first actually faced my problems with depression; by no small coincidence, the absolute worst of it roughly coincided with my beliefs regarding relationships having the cold, hob-nailed jackboot of reality applied upside the head. Repeatedly.

Without going into the details, let's just say that I entered college as a starry-eyed romantic and the (quite frankly, embarrassing) fantasies I had about the nature of love dissolved rather quickly when faced with the reality of my first serious relationship.

Dragging this column back on topic, I decided somewhere along the lines that the best way to deal with this mental dissonance was to take the two aspects of myself and just let them duke it out amongst themselves, sit back and just record the results. It made for interesting writing, to say the least.

The trickiest part of it was divorcing myself enough from the characters that they were actually realized individuals, rather than just two thinly veiled caricatures yelling at each other for twenty pages. I started with assigning both characters a defining trait and a secondary trait; basically, the face that they showed the world around them and the face that they didn't like to acknowledge. From there, it became a matter of plugging in facts: hair-color, favorite food, that sort of thing. I know many authors see exercises like this to be a pointless gimmick at best; I have to disagree. Like the tarot card reading from a previous column, I've found it to be an invaluable means of making the characters seem real enough to me that I could actually get a feel for how they would react in the situations I had in mind.

The phrase "the story wrote itself" is such a damn cliché, but it's the most accurate way to describe the results. While certainly not the most effortless piece of writing I've ever done, it was certainly some of the most surprising. I've heard some writers say that the characters, not the author can control the story and I've heard others say that that sort of thinking is the hallmark of a sloppy writer. All I can say is that "Still Waters" took turns that I certainly didn't foresee or even plan for, but in the end, I couldn't see things progressing any differently.

As a result, I've got a story that's surprisingly personal considering, or despite of, the fictional nature of everyone involved.

Now, the changes it made from prose to sequential illustration is another story altogether, for another column.