Years ago at a convention, someone mistook me for someone else they had talked to online, and tried to pull me into a corner, so we could plot our novels by beading.
I think my reaction read — to her — as “I’m horrified” or perhaps “I’m better than this”, because she looked offended and upset and apologized in that ultra-polite way that’s an insult.
I don’t remember who the writer was, but she was a professional at the time. And I was neither horrified nor looking down on her. I was panicked.
First, because I am not a natural plotter. The natural way for the novels to appear in my head is to appear fully written. Well, at least as to events. I can not quite hold it words and all in my head, though they do appear when I sit down to write. Block, for me, consists of not being able to word. And it’s usually either organic — lately — or depression — okay, lately too.
Though yes, I can extract a plot from the story in my head, I never saw much point. It’s a lot of effort and it’s already in my head, fer Bob’s sake. Why do unnecessary work? In fact, I despise writing the plot down ahead of time for the same reason I despise exercise machines. If I’m expending effort, there should be something to show for it.
But that’s me, and my process. Oh, and it’s not always like that. I’ve written books — A Few Good Men, most notably — and almost all my short stories, without having the slightest notion what the story is. All I have is a few words ahead. I type very fast, but even so, I’m usually three sentences ahead in my mind. in the case of these novels, that’s all it is. and all I see. It’s akin to driving in the dark, in fog on a mountain road, and you have no idea if what you’re charging into is more road or a deep ravine.
In short stories, this process is even more annoying, because suddenly the road will stop and I’ll realize I wrote the end of the story, but not the beginning. And then I have to write the beginning. Very annoying, truly. Has never happened in a novel. (Spits to the left, does the sign of the horns to the right. Throws some salt over left shoulder.) Of course, now you know it will, for my sins.
And even when the whole story is in my head, it doesn’t mean it comes out of my head perfect. You see, in my head, there’s often “the things that happened around the war of the magicians” which means a whole slice of a world. A hundred people and their stories. And a thousand elephants. (I’m lying about the elephants. There’s only one. His name is Sidney, and he’s very lonely.)
I suspect the people who were
The truth, though, is that there is no right way to do this thing. I’d like to think there was. You’d like to think there was.
But despite the existence of a whole class and profession dedicated to never telling the truth — politicians, people! — lying turns out to be very difficult. Much less the kind of complicated lie that conjures a whole setting into being. And yeah, you still need to do that, even if you’re writing something set in your hometown and the place you grew up. And even if your entire audience grew up there. You still need to make it real to have your character in it, and have your character be real too. (It’s actually harder to write about a place you know very well. And I don’t understand people who write their friends and neighbors. Look, what you see and how you experience a location is not how other people do it. Dan just read a set of books that took place in Denver ten years ago, and THAT Denver was unrecognizable to us. Rather upscale malls, and apparently well known pricey eateries and get togethers. Our Denver was the place of amazing thrift stores, writers’ groups, and diners that were open all night (and often attracted writers.) The problem is to make the place real to someone else, your place, and your sense of it, it helps to have the familiarity a little blunted, so that you give them the clues they’d otherwise lack.)
It’s very difficult, even for the time of a few hours your reader takes to read the book. It’s much harder to have the book live in the reader’s mind afterwards and have them daydream of it. I have reason to believe I managed it a few times, but not every time.
So I don’t look down on anyone’s method to do it, and to bring the semi-solid fog of imaginings and dreams into the light of day enough that others can experience it.
I imagine if I were very visual and tactile, instead of verbal, I could bead a plot, by having different bead colors symbolize a scene of emotion, a scene of fighting, a scene of– or whatever. Now if the goal is to make a beautiful necklace, I can’t imagine how that would work. Because a plot is not necessarily balanced or symmetrical. It’s usually a thing of rising, with minor falls, until it rises to the heights and then resolves and falls all the way.
But understand, I’m not visual at all (though I am tactile) so even the idea makes no sense to me and I panicked at the invite. It wasn’t something I could even fake.
I do have a visualization for what I do though. But it’s not so much a visualization as a …. vivid metaphor?
One of the old time magazine editors, when I was breaking in, back in pre-history, had this thing in his rejections (for reasons known only to his psychiatrist) that talked of falling asleep to the sound of his mother’s typewriter.
My childhood was not devoid of typewriters. Dad sometimes used one. (He writes long form, epic narrative poetry. It’s a hobby.) And he taught me to use it. (Though not ten-finger typing, which was almost unheard of in Portugal at the time.) But that was an occasional thing, and rarely went on late night.
No, I fell asleep to the sound of mom’s knitting machine.
Mom’s preferred occupation was designing and making clothes. Either taking the designs from Paris (at the time actually wearable and not post-modern constructions, yet) or her own concoctions. And sometimes she got paid for adapting designs for mass production, or for making entire wardrobes for someone with a lot of money.
But the place we lived in was poor as Job — though we didn’t know it, not really — and those jobs were rare. Well paid, but rare.
Most of the work was in mending and fixing for people who couldn’t afford to buy new. And it wasn’t worth much, because they couldn’t afford to buy new.
However, there’s always a way to make a living. And mom saw the need for knit sweaters — so precious that people would unravel them, when they were worn and had holes, redye the wool, and re-knit — and making sweaters was relatively well paid, because labor intensive and time-consuming.
So, she researched, bought an automatic knitting machine — very new then, in Portugal — and took the lessons for using it.
That machine, made of iron, and unholy heavy — mom destroyed her shoulders, meaning dad has to comb her now, because she can’t raise her hands above her shoulders — was our main bread winner, because for various reasons dad’s job paid only about enough to buy his work-clothes and his transportation to work and back for the first five years or my life or so.
The machine, visually — and yeah, I saw it used, but I have no idea how it actually works — is a long metal tray, with another metal tray over it, which has handles, by which you pull it back and forth. Mom then had specialized tools — think of a needle that ends in a hook with a square around it — which she used for picking up the occasional dropped stitch (some thread combinations and settings dropped stitches a lot) or to work some pattern on the knit, or presumably to add and remove width.) Oh, and the piece of knitting, once it was more than a few rows long, took weights on hooks, pulling it down, so it wouldn’t get enmeshed in the new stitches.
The design is probably hopelessly old fashioned, something perhaps used in the early twentieth century. Portugal was at least a quarter century behind times. I don’t even know if they still make those machines, because cloth manufacture moved to third world, with the improvement and lower cost of travel, but the last model I saw sometime in the seventies, was all plastic and slick, and didn’t look like mom’s monster at all.
At any rate, the Rrrrrr Rrrrr Rrrrrr of the upper tray going back and forth on the lower tray — a noise like a low metallic roar — was the sound of my childhood. I’d wake up with it going, and go to bed with mom sitting at the machine and knitting into the wee hours. I was rocked to sleep by Rrrrrr, rrrrr, rrrr, as if a great metallic dragon were singing me to sleep.
Weirdly, when I started writing novels, it was that machine that came back to me, heavy and unyielding, painful to drag across from side to side, but making the three separate bobbins of disparate thread create complicated cloth that appeared and grew beneath the machine at speed.
So I found myself saying things mom said and that probably no one understood.
You see, that piece of cloth, hanging with weights, needed to be completed in a timely manner, or it got distorted, and then would be very hard to pull into place. If we had an emergency and interrupted mom, or when she had to run to pick us up from school, or– We were likely to hear, “Hurry up. I left a piece hanging from the machine.”
And when she was doing a very complex design you’d hear her mutter under her breath “I have no idea where the guide-thread has gone.” Or “The guide thread is so hard to see in this light.”
When her design had, inexplicably, usually because very odd thread didn’t work well with the “teeth” of the machine, you’d hear her say, “Why has the main thread gone lax?”
Or much, much worse, “I’ll have to unravel and do it again.”
I’ve said all these sentences, in similar times. When I have a piece “hanging from the machine” it’s not only bad for the piece to hang too long: it does become distorted. It’s also bad for me, because I have a sense of urgency, of work not completed.
And I do think of a guide line: there is a main plot thread, which I pull through, and into which all the others weave and interact.
Yes, sometimes the main plot goes lax, and then I have to backtrack and figure out what is missing. What event of the ones I chose to elide from the panoply in my head is actually essential to keep the thread pulled tight.
And yes, sometimes — though I hate to do it — you have to unravel the thing and start again.
It’s all part of pulling the gossamer of imagination into a coherent design that other people can see.
Also, do not forget, like any knit cloth, you’ll still have to block it at the end. Pull it into a sharper, neater shape, and apply heat and moisture — or brow sweat and cursing — to make it as it should be.
The only thing I regret is that my keyboard didn’t purr like a metallic dragon, so my kids could sleep by the sound of it.
On the other hand, it’s not heavy enough to destroy my shoulders either. (My finger joints, on the other hand, have been pounded to shreds.)
And now excuse me, I have four pieces, in various states of completion, hanging from four different machines, and it’s driving me insane.
Rrrrrr. Rrrrrr. Rrrrrr.
Mad Genius Club 
33 responses to “Hanging From The Machine”
This made far too much sense to me.
LOL. Only because you too have gone into the twilight lands to harvest the narrativium thread….
Lovely metaphor.
I have worn off my fingerprints by my typing.
Oh, you can see the faint patterns where the ridges were, but they no longer register well enough to show up on fingerprint cards. Even the electronic reader cannot make them out.
Hmmm. There’s a crime novel/short story in that somewhere. Old ladies taking to major heists, never leaving a print behind.
Same. that’s why my phone has to be unlocked another way. Also, I’ve lost feeling in the very tips of my fingers. Son said “Well, mom, they’re not made to be pounded against something at the rate of hundreds of times a minute.”
Interesting. I would not have thought that keyboards could do that. Another profession that often doesn’t have fingerprints are brick masons. At least I can visualize that one being so abrasive.
Potters. There’s not much grit in the clay, but enough that when I was throwing regularly I had no fingerprints.
oh wow, I had no idea that wasn’t just a me thing….
No. I have the same issue.
I went to get fingerprinted for a job interview a couple years back. (It fell through.)
The guy trying to take my prints actually remarked on my likelihood of not getting caught at a crime….
My mother used to say, “Poor as Job’s old church mouse.” I have no idea why.
Mixing metaphors. Very creative. We just said “poor as Job.” Though “poor but honest” was in there too. I’m not sure why the “but”. And my favorite “poor but making do.” Which is why we didn’t feel poor. We all had contrivances.
“Despite the temptations to dishonesty that poverty poses.”
There will always be temptations.
As far as I can tell, the poor are more moral than the rich. (If rather more likely to run afoul of the law.)
I report. I do not explain away what it means because it does not suit me.
The poor you spend any time around are likely to be so; going off of listening to the stories they tell, heck no. The honest ones get preyed on by the dishonest ones, and poor people have a harder time fighting back.
There’s also the situational dishonesty– the never-charged drug dealer at my first command was very picky about his targets, but took great pride in being a predator. (And yes, he stole from the coffee mess.)
One of my characters, explaining that his precog abilities are not as coherent as his father’s, says something about how his subconscious makes connections between events and then shoves the results at him “like a half-finished puzzle.” And that is how story-telling works for me as well. I know the people, the situation and setting, and what some would call the candybar scenes and others would call the setpieces. The rest has to be extrapolated, and since I have the attention span of a gnat I have to write down notes to myself about my extrapolations.
On the subject of one’s home turf being hard to write convincingly, I remember reading Fr. Murr’s “The Godmother,” which is about his interactions with various movers and shakers in the Vatican in the late 1950s/early 1960s, notably Pius XII’s right-hand woman, Sister Pasqualina. Now I’d visited Rome a couple times as a kid and teenager, and knew people who knew Rome and the Vatican City considerably better than that, so I kind of rolled along with much of what Fr. Murr had to say about the lifestyle there (a lot of going to concerts and eating at cool restaurants; in an era when this was a relatively cheap part of the world to live in). But I found myself wondering how comprehensible those parts were to readers who’d never been there.
Ah, storytelling … I was fortunate in my first novel that the general plot and a lot of the significant incidents were already there, in the historical records, as brief as those were – of the wagon train party that preceded the Donner-Reeds by two years over the California trail, got stuck in the same place, under much the same circumstances … and yet managed to pull themselves out of that jam and arrive in California with two more than they started with. (Babies born on the trail.) The last novel but one I dreamed the whole thing and the characters – damn, I wish more of my books came to me in dreams! But the rest of the plot of the historicals came through having to weave characters’ lives into participating or observing events, and the contemporary rural comedy series plots come from random bits of this and that.
Still, I wish that I dreamed more constructively!
“The truth, though, is that there is no right way to do this thing.”
I suppose that’s true, although it would be nice sometimes if I knew what was going to happen next. I almost never do.
However, something different this time with current WIP, I started out with a whole concept, setting and everything. I even had proto-characters. They developed into something different of course, they always do, but at least I had a starting point.
Plotting for me would be a complete waste of time, the characters would look at my outline and laugh. “We’re not doing that.” I can practically hear Alice say it, and see the eye roll.
Those of us whose plots are not fully formed on appearance benefit more from outlining. Also known as making the plot bunnies get to the end so they can’t run off half way and leave me stranded.
Sarah Hoyt, out weaving fates again.
“Want to be a protagonist this time, Kim?” “Nope, I’m content being a retired space pirate. Stop threatening me, already.”
Never enough amazing thrift stores in this world.
I discuss many different approaches to visualizing stories here.
Finally someone who gets it. I write exactly the same way.
Really? It’s so rare.
I know! And people get all up ons when I tell them how I write, because “How do you know what’s going to happen?” “How can you foreshadow anything?” “You need to OUTLINE a story!”
So many times, I am happily writing along, and out comes something which was foreshadowed on page, I don’t know, fifteen, and it FITS as if it were precision-machined. I do this ALL THE TIME. And I look at it and say, “Well, shut my mouth, so THAT’S why I put in that seemingly nonsensical element, back there!”
I set out to write a story about the fall of the government in my main SF universe. Something I’d alluded to in other books. I thought it was going to be a single novel. Instead, it was THREE. And there was SUPPOSED to be a huge space war in book 2 of the thing; I’d been leading up to it–and it just FIZZLED. Because of “way back on page fifteen….”
Not to worry, though–there was a big space war in “book two”. Just not where I’d expected to put it.
I tell people, “I write the story so I find out what HAPPENS in the thing.” Otherwise, I don’t know.
Yep. That.
It happens to me too. Mostly when I’m outlining, for plot critical surprises. A fair amount when writing the first draft, sometimes for plot critical surprises that I didn’t winkle out in the outline.
Happens to me as well. In my previous book, I introduced a character I had no idea existed until she (and her friend/semi-fiancé) showed up shivering in the cold. But in book two she becomes a major plot point and possibly more. Again, 100% a surprise to me.
a throw away line in Darkship Thieves, where the main character talked about hte odd religion of the USAians became the centerpiece of A Few Good Men. Eh.
I thought it was a throw away line, silly me.
…which is EXACTLY the kind of thing I’m talking about, thank you very much. LOL
I have this image now of young Sarah sleeping at the feet of a weaver goddess.
LOL Only when she was so busy she forgot to tell me to go to bed. Happened a few times. Usually I was hiding in a corner with a history book.