The Write Stuff

[the_gneech]

I've been puttering around in my head with Michael Macbeth for the past few days now, and did some more intensive puttering, if such a thing is possible, today. In particular, I pulled out the big honkin' blue binder that contains The Collected Michael Macbeth ... scenes, fragments, notes, and about five major pieces of five different novels, and have been looking at them to see if I could figure out what worked, what didn't, and why -- and more importantly, figure out a way to come up with a plot for Michael to be involved with, rather than just scene after unconnected scene.

The conclusion I've come to, so far, is that while Michael is a fairly interesting guy, the things he gets involved in are boring. I.e., in order to have Michael be the eccentric genius of the story, everyone else involved is so hopelessly pedestrian that I don't actually care what happens to them. And if I don't, why the heck should the reader? One of the things about the Harry Potter stories is that almost all of the major characters are wizards, and as such, each of them have stories of their own to tell.

Another way of putting it: think about Sherlock Holmes. Do you remember any of the victims in his stories? Or any of the people who engage his services as a detective? I sure don't, all I remember is Holmes, Watson, Lestrade, and Moriarty, because they were the interesting people.

I think the problem with the MM stories may be that I was depending too much on the breezy narrative and witty repartee to carry the story, and in the end it always fell down because there wasn't anything solid to support it. What I'd be better off doing is to come up with a good, solid framework -- characters, circumstances, rules-of-the-world, and coming up with stories that flow out of that, rather than putting everything into the gloss on top.

Speaking of all of which, I found the original passage that I recreated from memory the other day. It was noticeably better, if only because it was in context and Lillian (not Susan) was a more fleshed-out character and had more input into the conversation than simply being a sounding board for Michael's pontifications.

-The Gneech

Comments

[richardf8]

Every episode of Columbo I've ever watched begins with a pair of shoes walking into a room where their owner does something awful, a body falls, and the shoes leave. The next thing that happens is the cut to the crime scene with Columbo making a general nuisance of himself to the Uniforms trying to Conduct Business.

It's dreadfully formulaic, of course, but that initial scene does so much. It lets the viewer know a murder has happened, but it also serves as the final scene, the culmination of a series of events that are disclosed, one by one, like bits of anatomy slowly revealed in a striptease. Fact is, the utter apathy one feels toward the parade of anonymous upper-class twits who seem forever to be the subjects of Columbo's investigations does little to diminish the interest with which the viewer watches, because the viewer is watching to see what events led up to the murder, even more than he is watching to learn whodunnit.

This is all my very roundabout way of saying that you don't necessarily need to create interesting characters, so long as you set the hook early on, and keep revealing stuff. Coming back to Stray Cat Strut, which I will call the seminal MM story, since you seem to regard it as the only successful one, the thing that kept me reading was not any sympathy for Snuggles/Richard, nor any desire for revenge against Aeaea, but the desire to know, first, what hold Aeaea had on Snuggles that he kept returning to her (you did a good job making it apparent early on that he was a transformed human - I assumed he was a lover she had done with), and then the desire to know just why she was doing this. All in all, you managed the "striptease" aspect of that story beautifully.

I think this striptease, more than fully developed characters, more than a thoroughly fleshed out world, is the essence of the mystery genre. Even Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone gives us no real insight into the characters of his splendid array of upper class twits and their butler, but still manages to keep his readers turning pages. In many ways, this is also Collins' only successful (i.e. readable) novel.

Well, anyway, I don't know if my prattle does more harm or good, but if its useful to you, I hope it helps.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Alas, the peeling of layers you describe requires a solid plot underneath, which is what I've been having trouble with. I'm still trying to figure out a fix to that problem!

-TG

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Just saw the recreated version; the original would be interesting as well.

Parts of this sound a bit like the dialog between rmwilliamsjr and myself. He has insisted that science is a religion; I'm a tad more active than Susan on the opposite side of this question. ];-)

The ones who retain Sherlock Holmes' services are often not significant to the story other than a brief appearance or mention to set things afoot. But there was The Woman... and Holmes will never be the same.

===|==============/ Level Head

[elektron.livejournal.com]

Being a genius doesn't necesserily make the other characters fade into the background.

Part of what makes the Discworld series so popular (I think, anyway) is the wide variation in the characters. They're all distinct (the main-ish ones anyway), and there are a lot of them, which lets people find one they identify with (All of them!), and also has the added benefit of letting you write 27 books.

I have to say that most of my writing is heavily influenced by Terry Pratchett, and I'm currently (well, when I was still writing) trying to make things less main-characters-and-filler, partly because writing mostly about two people falling in love will bore my readership (approx. none) and also because there's just not enough to write about otherwise.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that characters don't have to be geniuses or wizards or whatever (Rincewind is the main-character wizard, and he can't even do magic most of the time). They just have to be unique.

The other thing Terry Pratchett does away with is chapters (I still use them, for those four-hours-where-nothing-happens. Then again, my rewrite is still at chapter 1).