Author's Voice, Character's Soul

So, somehow unexpectedly over my last year in Japan, I have found myself becoming more and more of a Star Wars fan.  This comes as a bit of a surprise to me, and I can't quite explain it.  But I rewatched all six Star Wars movies some months back, started playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, watched some of the Clone Wars animated series.

And then I took what might be the real plunge a few weeks back.

I started reading Star Wars Novels.

While it would have made sense to try and find something a wee bit earlier chronologically, my home library system had the Legacy of the Force series available for digital check-out.  So I went with that.

By the end of the first chapter of Legacy of the Force: Betrayal, I was grinning.  Throughout Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines, my heart went out to the characters, especially Ben Skywalker, just how confusing the whole situation around him was, and how he was striving to figure out what it meant.

Then I came to Legacy of the Force: Tempest, and everything went wrong.

Now, to explain, the nine books of the series are written by three different authors in rotation.  If anything, this has made it an interesting study of how different authors' voices affect the perception of characters.  I jived with the first two authors' voices, their writing style.
The third author's voice was nothing like the first two.  Despite being the same characters and the same story, it took me over a week to slog through this one book when the first two only took me days. I very nearly decided to just give the whole series a rest.

I'm not saying that the author's voice or writing was bad.  It just didn't click with me.  The way he chose to describe things, the scenarios he favored, the relationships he put emphasis on, these things just didn't jive.  My awareness of every description used was heightened because I had seen how two other authors had handled these things.  If I'd placed all three books in front of me, I could have easily pointed out moments for the same characters where each author handled them differently.

It got me thinking more about how an author's choice of words and actions really does create the character.  The same character can be portrayed as a blind follower or a consciencious one.  It comes through in what they think and what they say, more than how they act.  It comes in a furrowed brow, a hesitation, or an instantaneous spring into action.
A hundred thousand little words show who the character is.  The author's voice becomes the character's soul.

And that has me thinking all the more about choosing the right words for my own characters.

Color Scheme

I'd like to show you something lovely that a friend of mine was working on.
She drew this amazing peacock and then colored it in digitally.  See tumblr entry!  Click!

It was lovely and I enjoyed the sight of it.  I love things in rainbow colors.  They are so bright and cheerful.  Have I mentioned my undying love for Rainbow Brite?

But one user made a suggestion to choose a specific color scheme.  My lovely artist friend did so, and this is the result.  Suddenly, it felt more like a peacock.  Keeping it to those blues, greens, and that bit of pink added a coherency.  The rainbowsplosion is nice.  This, though, it is lovely.

Now, I've learned something of visual art in my dabbling around online art communities.  One of the skills I learned about was that keeping a consistent, coherent color palette in any given piece makes it feel unified.

I found it to be true when I was working on costumes and teddy bears and other such sewing projects, too.

Surprise, surprise, it also applies to writing.

I've been realizing it more and more as I work on things with PGC.
As a teenaged writer, I saw everything I loved in all my favorite books and I threw it all in one giant pile of joy and gladness in my own writing.  Of course my setting would have all the things I love.  Why shouldn't it?  All the things I love in stories are good.  All the things I love all in one story would be even better, right?  Right?

The last couple of days, it's finally set in that I need to choose my color schemes with care and consistency.  My dearest oldest setting, my precious Wyld, has become a rainbowsplosion over the years as I layer on more and more of the things I love.
I love the core of Wyld too much to let it go.  It's a treasure to me.  But for Wyld to be its best and purest, I must choose a consistent scheme.  I must peel back what fits and what doesn't.

There are some things that I know will have to be chopped off as a result.  This isn't a bad thing.  In fact, it's a wonderful thing.  Those chopped-off bits can become their own worlds.  They'll have the proper room to grow and expand.  All my settings, all my characters, all my stories will be better for my choice to use a consistent scheme.

Besides, no one said that an author can't write crossover fanfiction using their own stories, characters, and settings.  If I ever get in the mood for rainbowsplosion of a story, I can just call it a crossover fanfic and get it out of my system.

Perfect solution.

Right?

We write together

With certain stirrings of certain decisions being made by certain people far up the food chain, it's easy to get caught up in the fervor, or to get lost in it.

This isn't about that particular fervor, for the record, but it is one of the things that has me thinking, along with the things Brent Weeks said in this opinion column about how readers and writers interact online and Grant Faulkner's introduction as the new Executive Director of the Office of Letters and Light.

Now, the fervor had me feeling lost. I could imagine what a child who long dreamed of becoming a radio star might have felt like when she realized that television changes everything. What does it mean for her dream? How does she follow it now?  Does the dream evolve?

It's in the shadows and away from the extremist perspectives on both sides of the matter that I found my heart and my hope. It's in what Brent Weeks had to say about the GRRM situation. It's in the spirit of Grant Faulkner's introduction. It's right there in my mind and heart from my time as a writing consultant in college. It's in the friendships I have made in writing and roleplaying communities online.

Internet replaces nothing and expands everything.

It is nothing like what we have had before. It does something that I think everyone yearns for. It connects us to each other. We find people like us, people who understand us, people who want to share with us, people we want to share with.

Here on the internet, we write together.

My writing has grown up online. Find any of my old usernames, old defunct sites or artsites, and I'm sure you'll find things that trace all the way back to when I was twelve and chilling in that Pokemon Chat, or when I was fourteen and found myself obsessed with Rainbow Brite and other wonderful Eighties Cartoons. Throughout high school and college, when I tried to find a place on art sites. I wasn't the most loyal of members, but I made friends and I grew.

Regardless of skill level, age, or end game, online we write together. Our words can do things now that they could never do before.  Authors and readers have this wonderful capability to interact. I cried when I learned that Diana Wynne Jones had died, you know. She is an author I would have loved to meet. I never took a chance to write her or seek her out. Readers these days have that capability to reach out to authors, and some others reach right back. Others focus on other things. But there is this opportunity for us all to come together. It is beautiful.

I've grown to be what I am because of the internet. I can never turn my back on that.

We write together.

Knowing a story inside and out

Sometimes when I'm working on the Phoenix Girl Chronicles, I'll find myself saying, "I know this story inside and out.  Why isn't it finished yet?"

Usually, it's right after I say those words that the story proves me wrong.  Its characters look at each other and look back at me and they decide to explain how they've been lying to me.

Today one of the characters confessed that he isn't even what I always believed him to be.  He's something else entirely, something that makes more sense in the whole context of the setting and the story. The reasons for his actions are different, too.  He himself lied to another character, who didn't even know he was lying, so she perpetuated his lies thinking she was telling the truth.

It can be a bit frustrating.  But it's also a relief.  It's moments like this that keep the story alive inside me.  They give me new clarity and direction.

I suppose by now I should accept that I won't know this story inside and out until it actually is finished.  And even then I might find myself rereading it some day and realize that there is something else undiscovered tucked inside of it.

Writing, it may surprise you to know, is an awful lot like reading.

I've read my favorite books many, many times.  But every time I pick one of them up to revisit the pages, I see new things.  I'm comforted by the familiar passages.  The words themselves never change.  It's that I do.  My experiences change me, and they change what stands out to me as I read.

Suddenly the way a character acts makes sense in a whole new light, or the description of the setting clicks because I realize it's similar to some culture or location I've become more familiar with.  Even something as small and seemingly inconsequential as the use of colons, semicolons, and dashes suddenly stands out when I've been toying too much with grammar.  Even that changes the meaning.

Maybe it is impossible to know any story inside and out.

And maybe that's part of the reason why we keep sharing them.

Knowing

This isn't about writing, or at least not exactly.  Everything is about writing to a writer.  I just ramble enough about music this time around that it would feel odd to transition the ramble to writing.  Let us begin!

Three weeks ago, I was asked by a woman in my church congregation to sing "Oh, Holy Night" for the church Christmas party.  Now, everyone knows the melody of "Oh, Holy Night."  (All generalizations are dangerous.)  It's a Christmas favorite.  You can't go a December without hearing it played somewhere at some time in the United States--and apparently you can't in Japan, either.  So, I accepted readily enough and I found some sheet music we could print up to use for the pianist, and mostly considered that good.

I went into it with the same attitude I've always had with music--which is not the most productive, I'll admit.  I absolutely, positively love music, but there's this spark of passion that sets true musicians apart from dabblers.  I know this because there's a spark of passion that sets true writers apart from dabblers, too.  Everyone dabbles.  Only some people immerse themselves.  I don't tend to immerse myself in musical studies the same way I do in the language arts.

But then...  well, there are three verses to "Oh, Holy Night."  Everyone knows the first well enough.  I knew the first and a bit of the second and third, but not especially well.  So I had to get to memorizing the words.

It was as I ran through them a million times in my head and aloud on the drive to the church today before I was to sing this song that I started to realize how perfectly the words fit together.  The rhyming scheme in the song is so subtle, but it connects the pieces, and it made it easier to remember which lines go where as I gave that some knowledge.  The individual lines use such lovely alliteration.  It's smooth off the tongue.  Some words carry through from one line to the next, or at the least synonyms do.  And the content, the meaning... each verse has a purpose, and all together they show the whole life of Christ.

And as I actually considered not just the words, but weighed their meanings in my mind, I began to know the song.  I began to comprehend how it has become so popular.  These little details, the sounds of the words, the timing of the phrases, the rise and fall of the notes?  The song is incredibly well-written, so well-written that anyone who hears it feels the fact without having to take the time to figure it out.

But a singer ought to do more than appreciate a song.  They ought to know all the reasons why a song is beautiful so that they can better convey it to the audience.

The sad truth?  On the car ride to the church before singing a song is not enough time to take the seed of knowing and let it grow deep.  I wish I'd had at least one or two more days to feel the roots take hold in my heart.  The song meant more to me tonight as I sang it than it had ever before, but tomorrow night, or a few nights later, given the chance to process the meaning and translate it into better dynamics and better pauses and consider my physical expressions, and I would have truly been able to perform.

Even so, I've learned something about music, and I've learned something about passions, and about digging in and /knowing/ a thing.  I learned these things too late for it to truly count tonight, but the next time will come.