Art shorthand as character triggers

Eventful weekends are not only inspiring my writing, but helping me to get out of hermit mode. The Art Bomb, a group of art studios where some of the most innovative local artists work, once again had one of their rare shows in their renovated historic building in Greenville, SC.
 Often one or two of the pieces I see at Art Bomb shows will infiltrate my imagination and end up in in my writing. 
The pieces are owned or viewed by my characters. In Shaman Circus, two characters are artists.  Mavis, the Katrina survivor is a painter, and Lily is a painter  who also  creates 3-d sculptures in copper and pottery. 
 I thugged this concept from my favorite author, John Fowles, whose character, Nick in the The Magus, visits a house on the Greek island of Phraxos. The house's charismatic and mysterious owner, Conchis traveled the world and owns  large valuable art collection. However, among, all the paintings, Nick is drawn to the Bonnards.
When I first read The Magus, I was unschooled in art. I was young and foolish, and didn't bother to look up the artwork, but years later, after about my 5th or 6th read, knowing the painter and his subject matter (nude and semi nude women in the boudoir or bath) added layers to the scene. Fowles used the painting, instead of words to speak volumes for those who knew Bonnard's work.
Granted some of the pieces I mention are not internationally known yet, but I believe they will be or should be. my character's reactions to the art, is another way for me to do characterization, even character development. I call this technique art shorthand.
 Twice these have been pieces by Greg Flint, but the artists there always offer something which challenges my preconceptions about art and writing, which then filters into my characters mindset. For instance, a piece I own of Greg's and its message of the hero's journey is incorporated in Shaman in Exile. The piece and it's meanings are touchstones throughout the entire book, reflecting one of the main themes. The characters refer to it over and over again, and even carry symbols of it as a talisman. A second a piece I drooled over but which was eventually bought by someone else inspired parts of Fireworks, Interference Equation. 
I know a lot of you who are writers already use music to augment your atmospheres, what your characters listen to hum or play, but don't forget art.  Look at your favorite pieces and see what they tell you.  They may tell your characters something as well, who will turn around and tell your readers, thereby  making your writing richer, deeper, multi-layered.
I'm curious, who of you out there have used art in your writing....and how?


 

The Spice Guild Navigators of Dune & Folding Space

When the main character, Sean, took over my novel in progress, Fireworks: Interference Equation, and created a chapter I had not intended, I discovered how novelists are like the Spice Guild Navigators of Dune. 
We fold Space, thereby altering time. Perhaps the spice Melange could be compared to our need for story and metaphor, our addiciton to playing with words.
However, it was only after I stood back two days later and examined the runaway Chapter 30, that I realized Sean, a splinter of my imagination, folded space.
I traced four real life events which happened over a span of 15 years juxtaposed and compressed into this brief scene lasting only 692 words. In fact, through Sean, I had folded both space and time and they combined experiences emerged in the scenes like the vivid three-dimensional scene which pops upp in a pop-up book.  These experienced had been pulled from their original places within a flattened plane of linear time to create a more well-rounded and complex scenario.

In my view, our characters are splintered off Jungian archetypes, who have something to teach us or to release. As an unpredictable quantum physicist, Sean has more leeway to act out things I'd never persoanlly dare or consider.
And when a book is rattling along at a speed we can no longer harness, only hold on and steer the best we can, a character can disrupt a timeline, leave other characters sitting in the dark, because of what needs to be brought to light to create a more complex and well-rounded story.  
And while, this act of Sean writing the chapter is totally screwing with my head, and I’ll have to restructure a confrontation which took months and chapters to put into place, it's proven to me how powerful and strangely logical the suboncscious can be.
The runaway chapter took me no time to write. It's filled with the metaphors I often struggle to pull from the ether. 
And the fact that the chapter drew upon, four different real life events which took place over a span of fiftteen or more years still amazes me. 
The first was a mempory of driving by a cemetery in a freak snowstorm around Valentine's Day, a second even in 2004 or 2005 when I had a rather heated discussion with Wil Martin, lead singer of the band, Earshot. We were discussing if we gain the same satisfaction from what we create whether we have an audience or not. The third the was another freak winter storm we had this past February and the fourth, related to stumbling on the video, Misunderstood, on You Tube by accident.
Of all the experiences over the course of my life, this chapter wanted to "enfold" those four events to tell the story and to reveal more about the character.  Odd.
John Fowles, author of The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Collector, in his March 16, 1975 journal entry, addresses the way novelists have an inadequacy in time perception. He thinks fiction writers look at past and future events in the present tense, and often turn to metaphor and hypothesis to view both time and events.
"I think the only way to historianize the personal past is through fiction: that is, by treating one's past self as a fictional situation as a hypothesis,"  he wrote. "Others like myself (all novelists, probably) see their pasts in highly metaphorical terms.  They are primary ore, counters in the game, mere raw commodities before processing and refinement and manufacture."
 So now as Fireworks, Interference Equation stands at 30 chapters and 57,000 words, I feel as if I'm digging into my own personal past to "mine" some of the philosphical, psychological and even spiritual issues buried there. Things I don't know or won't admit on a conscius level.
By letting Sean take the lead, I negate the censor, the editor in my brain who would stop me from airing controversial issues or concepts which would make me look  like a bad person, or someone out of control, someone I might not even like.
But by airing these asepcts in my fiction, I not only tell a more complex story complete with human fraility and faults, but also bring things to light various aspects of my psyche so I can look at them without fear or judgement in a more objective rather than subjective manner. 
I still believe that writing a novel is the best therapy a person can undergo.  Once the story gathers momentum, we can barely slow it down from going further and further into the far reaches of our psyche to draw up new material.  Granted by the time it reaches the page it's so altered: by metaphor, by fitting the events into our story, by many factors that it make it unrecognizable from the actual event.
But still, we as novelests do something only theorized in quantum physics such as wormholes... or only managed by beings such as the Spice Guild Navigators... a remakable feat which constantly surprises me - and that perhaps isa  the spice, Melange, I'm addicted to.

Researching Your Novel

I couldn't quote the statistics but I'm curious to find out how many hours authors spend researching their novel behind the scenes.  Even when we draw on personal history and experiences, if we go into the past we often end up researching things which happened during our childhood but we didn't pay attention to.  We were kids.  It didn't matter.  I've discovered that about half my published novel, Shaman Circus, and maybe even more for my two WIPs, Shaman Exile and Fireworks: Interference Equation involves a ton of research, many hours.  When I first started writing novels 29 years ago, I had to run to the lbirary, request inter-library loans on books unavailable locally, and write letters to experts.  I also trolled used books stores and bought many volumes which related to the storylines of my books. Maybe that's why my house is full of books and I never finished my first three novels. 

 I like a lot of back story for my characters in addition to a variety of locations. So I need to do lots of research even on the places I've lived.
 It's so much easier now with the internet what with online historic news and town histories as well as immediate answers through e-mails with experts.  And wow, I wish I had places like Amazon and Abe Books to locate the books with the necesssary info instead of always hunting used book stores in person to find such resources.
But even in 2910, rresearch takes hours and hours, sometimes entire days. But it's fun and the payoff is huge.
In the past year or so, I've researched a lot on my father's French Canadian family because I was never told much.  He died when I was very young and even though I spent a lot of time at his aunt's, who raised him, his family didn't tell us many stories. As kids, my sister, cousins and I had to eavesdrop on  conversations between the adults instead.

 So while I broke my recent writing drought yesterday with over 2,200 words for chapter 26 of Fireworks: Interference Equation, only two of those hours was spent on writing. I've tallied it up and so far for Chapter 26, I've spent 12 hours doing research for two hours of writing. Wow that's an eye-opener. I never tracked it time-wise before.   

This chapter, number 26, takes place in a flashback to Great Boar's Head, New Hampshire, a strange promintory which hulks out over the Atlantic, part of the mere18 miles of New Hampshire coastline.  Boars Head, known to geologists as a  lenticular moraine or drumlin deposited years ago by a glacier, has a long, often spectacular history, some of it plesant, much of it not. Howling storms, fires and other natural disasters have assaulted the cliff-top community which has witnessed much on the shale of North Beach or Rocky Beach below on one side and the sand of Hampton Beach on the other. John Greenleaf Whitter wrote poetry here. 

It's been a part of my life ever since I can remember as we swam below its cliff's or hunted seaglass on the rocks below. The shale side was once the launch spot for whalers and  the last resting spot of The Glendon, a three-masted schooner. In 1896, when in danger of splitting in half during a snowstorm, The Glendon was pulled ashore with ropes shot by guns, by people from Hampton Village. All crew were rescued. Up until recently remainders of the ship could be seen rotting away on shore. 

To find the info for just this chapter, I consulted Babelfish to translate French, went to a site to translate a large Roman Numeral into Arabic numbers so I could know the date on an old pamphlet.  Read three historic newspapers online, read and printed out about five different sites on this part of New Hampshire and on Prince Edward Island. Printed out a couple of sites on The Glendon, which I already knew about from a book of postcards of Hampton and Hampton Beach. I viewed 30 or 40 images to get the lay of the land since the 1500's when it was first settled, printed out a number of sites on the Port La Joye settlement on Prince Edward Island, one of the first settlements of the French Canadian seamen, and got sidetracked by videos of the Feb. 2010 fire which took out five blocks of oceanside property at Hampton Beach..  I also used about five books I have in my library, one on shipbuilding in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, another one from the shipbuilding museum there which has photos of whaling boats launched from my beach, books on Hampton and Rye Beach and one on New Hampshire.

Whew - that was a lot of work.  But well worth the time. 

So how do other writers out there conduct their research and what would be the ratio between hours spent on research and hours spent writing? Have you ever kept track of the hours and the resultant word count?  How many authors research the histories of their ancestors for their characters and books? 

I know Brian K. Ladd in my writers' group puts in probably five times as much research as I do because he goes into all the various linguistic aspects of individual words.  

So I'm wondering how other authors view research too. I'd be curious to see how other authors conduct their research and how many hours the figure they spend.  

out of balance

I'm being a naughty naughty writer in allowing the seesaw to tip out of balance.  I meant to write today on Fireworks, but have run away to work in the garden due to the weather, which feels more like coastal New England than South Carolina.

Signs and Synchronicity

As an avid student of Carl Jung, I'm frequently aware of synchronicity. Jung coined the term and explained what he meant in his book, Synchronicity, An Acausal Principle. He saw synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, important because of the timing. Beneath the veil of everyday life, Jung believed, as the quantum physicists now do, that everything is connected.

Like déjà vu, many writers have experienced synchronicity - a prime example is when someone recommends a book, not a common title of the day, but a more obscure book that you'd really like to read. Within a few days you spot it on a sale table or at a yard sale - staring you in the face, as if you were meant to read it - right now.
I experience synchronistic events in waves. There'll be dead times when it doesn't happen and others when it happens repeatedly day after day. Sometimes it’s pretty dramatic.
It's been a while since the signs were there, but they came back in force this week. Sunday, when it was a balmy 66 degrees, highly unusual for SC in February, after a successful writing session of 2,000 words on my WIP, Fireworks: Interference Equation, I went to the garden for balance. I raked leaves but had previously filled a pit that opened up a couple of years ago. So I considered hauling the leaves further away to another sinkhole area at the side of my house. But I was tired and dusk was coming so I didn't haul the wagonload to the sinkhole, just piled the load on top of the pile on the pit, hoping the coming rains would flatten it.
This morning I was doing research on indigenous natives of Australia for Fireworks. I found a great deal of info regarding the controversies over the aboriginal housing settlements near Alice Springs (Alice - the first sign, is one of the main characters in this book). The settlement endured a horrible situation when their sewage system collapsed and raw sewage backed up into most of their houses which the tribe rents from the government. The pipes are not well-maintained. I was shocked because the article called the area a fifth world situation, not third world and before this I had no idea of the plight of the resettled indigenous tribes.
This afternoon I had to call a plumber when my washing machine wastewater backed up into my shower. After four hours of snake lines, cameras in the pipes and digging, the diagnosis was a busted sewer line. Tree roots broke into either the iron pipe beneath the house or the clay pipe just outside of it. The prognosis was to the tune of $1500.00. Needless to say, as a writer who’s only been able to find part time real world work, I will be without running water, bathroom facilities, etc, etc. for a while.
The tree roots had broken the sewer line the sink hole. Two days ago, somewhere in my subconscious I made the connection with the month's worth of gurgling plumbing sounds, followed by the sudden back up of water in my shower with the depression in the earth on the side of my house. Before Sunday, I'd never considered using the sink hole as a compost area.
The connection with reading about Alice Springs was totally out of left field except for the timing - a meaningful coincidence.
I will now more fully be able to write about this topic from a firsthand perspective. Normally I wouldn't go this far in my research, but obviously the universe (or Jung's universal mind) thought otherwise.
Not quite the signs I was looking for. And even though I had a sleepless night last night, I'm trying to be philosophical,  - synchronicity works in mysterious ways.

The Conundrums of releasing a novel

Many authors have said releasing a novel is like giving birth, with both pain and excitement. However, I believe it's even more, it's like giving birth, sending your child off to kindergarten and shipping your child off to college all at the same time. At the same time the novel is given birth it's cast out into the wide world, to stand alone on its own merit.

A frightening thing. I couldn't quite understand why I've been in a funk for the past few days. It felt familiar but not recently so. And then I recalled the feeling. I've had it before. It occured each time I released an issue of my goth literay mag, The Howling, It did get easier over the 7 years and 15 issues of the mag; went from a miasma of two weeks to a recognized down time for two days. For lots of different reasons: the project is finished, the soulmade project is out in the world to be judged, and the new project hasn't yet taken hold.
Since Shaman Circus went to the printers, I've fiddled with various projects and ideas, from whether to edit the second Shaman novel or to focus on my third novel, Fireworks, etc. I've written and edited a few stories, started a few more, submitted a batch but still this haunting feeling of being out of place lingers.
I may not suss out all the reasons for a while. It's not really white page syndrome or writer's block, it's more like I'm in a holding pattern, holding my breath, waiting to see what happens and until it does, not sure what next step to take or what to do. It's an eerie, disturbing psychological limbo. On one hand, inside I'm jumping up and down with joy to see my first novel published, but on the other, there's fear and a sense that what if I can't ever finalize another?
I don't know if other writers have experienced this. As the contemporary Thomas Moore recommends in his Care of the Soul series, its better to go into the dark places and see what secrets they have to tell you, than to deny they're there. Maybe this is postpartum depression and separation anxiety all at the same time. I don't know.
These days I teeter on a tightrope of words. Below me the carnival explodes in glorious color, freaks and frenzy, jangly music and garish trellises of light. The words want to run away with the carnies. I must grasp these scattering syllables with my toes or herd them to my aid, for without them I'll fall.

Perhaps to cheer myself up and not feel so isolated, I'll collect quotes from other writers on what its like to see a first novel published.