writing

Nicking from Novels: Jim Butcher’s Dead Beat

This week on Nicking from Novels, my first encounter with Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files.

The Overview: Contemporary supernatural with the whole standard slate: vampires, fae, werewolves and wizards (among others). First person narrative with an extensive supporting cast (more on that below). This volume is far enough into the series that protagonist Harry Dresden has accumulated a bunch of miscellaneous powers in addition to his raw wizardry. Nothing particularly fancy or clever going on with the language. Protagonist succeeds through raw talent and stubbornness. And consistent outside intervention.

The Plot: An old enemy (a vampire) blackmails the protagonist into going after a macguffin. He finds out what it is, finds out there are Bad Guys who also want it. There are some fights. Then there are some more fights. Between, there is investigating. The finale takes place on a literal dark and stormy night. Background events combine with main story events to suggest plot points in later volumes of the series.

The Cool Thing to Consider

In a moment, I’m going to discuss the use of supporting cast, particularly in series. I want to clarify a few things before I get into that, though. The Dresden Files books have been recommended to me by several people whose opinions I respect. I went in hoping for a good read, and instead found what is, at best, a “good enough for an airplane” book. I’m willing to give Mr. Butcher the benefit of the doubt, though. I jumped into the middle of the series, and every author has bad books. (They’re sometimes harder to avoid when you’re an NYT bestselling author with publishing contracts.) Not especially liking the book kept me from getting sucked into the story until the very end—this also meant that I picked it apart more than I generally do. What follows is going to skew academic, because that’s the part of my training that the reading activated.

Phew. Ready?

When I was halfway through Dead Beat, I was mentally sketching a Nicking from Novels about quality supporting cast. Harry Dresden has plenty of friends. A few of them drive the plot here. (More of them show up in passing.) Butcher fleshes out his secondary characters well, combining Harry’s perspective with enough direct experience of the characters’ actions to give a sense of both personality and ability. I liked that.

What became harder to deal with as I continued into the latter half of the novel was the sheer volume of supporting players. Dresden has a laundry list of supernatural friends, foes, and frenemies. Butcher gives many (too many) of them face time here. They become distractions for several reasons.

First, Harry’s reliance on allies makes him less convincing as a protagonist. Butcher shows off Harry’s power plenty, but Harry is constantly bailed out by buddies…and nearly as often by enemies who are inexplicably more concerned with having their own vengeance than with Dresden getting what’s coming to him. By the end of the novel, I was never wondering “how will Harry get out of this situation?” I was wondering “who will come out of the woodwork to save him?” That’s not a good place for an author to leave his or her protagonist.

I think I understand what Butcher was aiming for. Harry Dresden occupies a world full of powerful nasties. Super necromancers. Wizards who can hold off armies of demons with a single spell. Fae nobles who can shred reality. Demons who hide in coins. Ninja ghouls. (Yes. Ninja ghouls. And the ninja ghoul is just a flunky.) Dresden is a bundle of power and, more importantly, the potential for even more power. The bad guys and the grey area guys all want a piece of that, but Dresden isn’t quite tough enough to play in those big leagues yet. Therefore, he needs help. Rather than making the antagonists seem especially big, though, the constant saved-by-a-friend makes Dresden shrink.

Second—and trickier—this is a book well into an ongoing series. Recurring characters are going to recur. I kept comparing it to Brust’s Taltos books. What would I think of those if I jumped into the middle of the series? I mean, technically I did, but I chanced into reading the book that is, chronologically, the earliest. Brust has Vlad accumulate a variety of friends (and a smaller number of enemies). Sometimes the least of these make cameos that are only mildly necessary, or necessary only because of the narrow but extreme competence of the supporting character in question. None of those appearances ever felt quite so gratuitous as the ones in Dead Beat. There are just too many. Dresden needing help is fine. Dresden getting that help from sixteen different angles just dilutes the plot.

Third: because there are so many of them, we’re not invested in seeing the bad guys defeated. We know they are bad mostly because Butcher (via Dresden’s first person narration) tells us that they are bad. Yes, raising zombie armies is bad. Yes, attempting a superspell to siphon hundreds of spirits into your own personal godhood potion is bad. I just didn’t get any personal investment in seeing the villains defeated. We know they are bad and powerful right from the start. We learn nothing more about them. They take turns beating Dresden up until they eventually take turns getting defeated by him (and/or his allies).

I think that Butcher tried to convey some sense of the chaos of competing factions and just didn’t manage it. There’s never a sense that power balances are shifting, nor much sense that the stakes are rising. (The stakes become clearer over the course of the novel, but that’s not quite the same thing.) There’s little differentiation among the villains’ agendas. And the wicked vampire who kicks the plot into motion? She appears twice. Once at the beginning of the book and once at the end. She becomes an afterthought.

There is one place that the secondary characters effectively add to the story. Dresden has a problematic relationship with the Wardens (wizard cops), but he ends up having to call them in anyway. When they arrive, the tensions are sharp and the novel’s main plot snaps into focus as part of broader events. Why does it work? Because the characters take things personally. The antagonisms are emotional and mutual. The way the book is written, Dresden has much more personal stake in getting the best of the Wardens than he does in stopping the wicked necromancers. Those conversations were the ones that had me flipping pages and spurred me to the book’s finale.

Overall, the plethora of secondary characters might be well-realized, but their volume—as allies and antagonists alike—becomes a distraction. There is only room for so much supporting cast, especially in a first person narrative. (It’s one of the difficulties of the technique. The more you focus on secondary characters the more the protagonist recedes toward the background.) There’s a balance to be struck, and Butcher misses it in this book.

What We Nick from this Novel:

You have to choose between Batman and the Justice League.

If you’re going to write a story with a single badass protagonist, make sure he (or she) is at the center of the thing. If you’re going with an ensemble cast, go with an ensemble cast. You can’t have it both ways.

Find and Replace

I am working in feverish fits and starts to get the last few thousand words into my first draft of Ghosts of the Old City. It was supposed to be volume one of “The Fairworth Chronicles.” (That is, in fact, what my Scrivener project is called.) A few weeks ago, I read a blog post about names and languages, along with another about a writer having to rename her protagonists to move them away from stereotypes. The combination of those two posts set the niggling worms of doubt to work at the back of my mind. Sometimes—this time—those worms were simply the precursors of an uncomfortable but necessary change. I have to find one of my heroes a replacement surname.

I loved “Fairworth” as a surname. It sounds great. It has interesting connotations for a character who doesn’t always think of himself as worth much, and particularly for a family that has done some pretty unworthy things. It also just works for a pulp hero. Those characteristics were particularly important for Maedoc’s original incarnation, years and years ago, as a character for a short-lived online game. (The game never got off the train it started on.) The concept for that character—“unlucky dilettante who sees ghosts”—didn’t change much for the novel, but the novel has given that thumbnail a chance to develop into a full character.

More importantly, I’ve developed my own world around him. That game had trains and elven cults fighting the erosion of magic (with dynamite!) and a world vaguely defined by a recent war between magicians and technologists. I didn’t really keep any of that, instead building a culturally divided city, partly made of magic letters. There are humans and, in the background, seal-people—no elves or dwarves or (FSM forbid) gnomes. There are trains but not automatons or dirigibles or other steampunk staples.

…and that world has its own languages. More importantly, I’ve worked hard to avoid it becoming some undiscovered part of England. One language is based loosely on Bulgarian and associated with a culture formerly reliant on horses. The other language features a phonemic rune alphabet. Neither has a place for “Fairworth.” The name makes it too easy to think of the faux-Bulgarian Parukhi as British (and thus substituting France or a vaguely-defined Far East for the opposing Shehru rune alphabet culture). It also just doesn’t fit with all the place names I’ve used. I had, at one point, a half-baked theory about the Parukhi aristocracy all having adjective+noun or noun+noun names: Fairworth, Stormcliff, Briarwood, usw. The Parukhi commoners had one-word surnames drawn from common objects: Wood, Needle, whatever. (Gene Wolfe does a lot with those object-names in his Book of the Long Sun, by the by.) In theory, it’s not a bad idea. In practice, there’s absolutely no spot to explain or demonstrate that in the novel. I’d end up with something forced or confusing. Never mind that even with that distinction, squashing together English words for names just doesn’t fit with all of the other things I’ve created.

So I spent Sunday afternoon playing with Google translate and trying out different surnames. I’m testing one of them now, but am not wholly sold on it. It’s hard to take a name I’ve been living with for over a year and replace it. My initial feelings are that it loses some of the sonic “essence” of Maedoc, but deepens the sense of his family history. Given that the name was originally created for a character with minimal background, this isn’t surprising. I think the change will ultimately help anchor poor Maedoc to the world, make him more a part of his family (not necessarily a good thing for him!) and help the world stand better on its own. Like so many things in writing and in life: necessary, but not necessarily fun at the time.

In the meanwhile, there will be much find and replace. So much find and replace.

A New Feature: Nicking from Novels

I am reading more. I haven’t quite made it to a book a week yet, but that owes as much to skimming several books at once as to a lack of time spent reading. Last week I posted about Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road. That post was more or less a book review. A short one, but a book review.

That’s not what I want to do on this blog. I love books. I sometimes like reading book reviews. My personal reading plan, though, revolves around mixing up books that I “should” have read—ones generally agreed to be good—with arbitrary grabs off the library shelves. Those won’t all be good, and I don’t want to fill up my blog with takedowns of authors who are probably perfectly nice people writing perfectly serviceable fiction that doesn’t please a snob like me. (I reserve the right to flex my scathing review chops if I come across something truly awful, though.)

Instead…instead I’m going to write about literary larceny. Grammarian grand theft. Reckless writerly ransacking. In short, I’m going to approach the books I read like Conan approaching a jungle temple. Even bad books do good things. The point of reading—as a writer—is to take those good things and make them your own when you need to.

Back when I was doing my degree in (music) composition, I had to listen to unfamiliar pieces of new music every week. Usually, I was listening along with the score. Given the average age of the composition faculty, it’s not surprising that we tracked this ongoing assignment with notecards. On the front of the card, we wrote the particulars of the recording and the score. On the back, we wrote notes about what we heard (and sometimes what we saw). In addition to building familiarity with a range of new music, the idea was that we could return to these pieces if there were techniques we wanted to use. I had a big stack of 3×5 cards by the end of my two years. They didn’t make the move from Minnesota, but it was a good project while it lasted.

The new feature here at Walking Ledges will be something similar: Nicking from Novels. For all the books I read, I hope to find a few things that the author does particularly well. I’ll describe those, providing some quotes when applicable. Over time, it will create a compendium of sorts for other people to use (while giving props to the original authors), and be more interesting than just hearing whether some guy in Texas liked a book or not.

Planning the new feature has already changed the way I’m reading. I spent years as an undergrad and grad student picking texts apart—sometimes for content, sometimes for delivery. It was analytical work. Reading novels for technique is not quite the same. It is, again, like the listening I did when I was a composer. The what and why become less important than the how. (This was also the thing that led me away from composition: I really cared about the why.) Sometimes the things I notice are little, like the one I mentioned last week about Chabon sketching his background characters with mini-anecdotes. Sometimes they are larger: how the author deals with magic, with the foundation of the world, with characters’ roots. I don’t expect that it will kill my enjoyment of what I read. I have a better perspective on the questions now than I did ten years ago, and can approach them a bit more like I approach eating things other people have cooked: what’s tasty? How can I use that stuff in my own recipes? Will it work without mushrooms?

Anyway! First proper post of the new feature will likely come tomorrow. The series should continue to run weekly on Fridays.

…So I Built It

“So here I am trying to build something. Thanks for coming. I hope I do my job well enough to draw you back.” —The end of my first post

That was 77 posts and most of a year ago. I had sketched out some ideas for a blog in one of my moleskines (I think using a fountain pen, even). I jumped into producing content before I’d really designed the blog, setting it up using a grey and orange color scheme that unintentionally mimicked Steve Brust’s Dream Cafe. I intended that the blog be “something about writing.” A few weeks later, I published Of Dreams, Carrots, and Towers, which was picked up by Minnesota Public Radio’s Higher Ed blog. Suddenly I was a #postac blogger, too.

The last year has been a snake eating its own tail. The kids went off to school today—their first day in the new school. I am at home at my improvised standing desk, unemployed. At this time last year, I was busy hurling my resume at anything writing related. I wasn’t sure I’d get any of the jobs I applied for, but I didn’t despair. (That came later.) This year, I’m coming off three weeks of Not Getting Hired as a teacher. I had a few interviews—some went well, one went so poorly that I withdrew from consideration. There’s still a chance I’ll get a full time position for this school year (enrollment numbers continue to wiggle, and teaching positions with them), but there’s also a chance that I will be stuck as a substitute teacher for the foreseeable future. On the plus side, I don’t owe my program more money until I’m hired. On the minus side, substitute teaching isn’t the most remunerative endeavour.

If the snake has been gnawing its tail, it has also grown: I am happier than I was a year ago. Most days, I’m over my breakup with academia. Many days, I feel like a writer. I have not fallen in love with Texas, but I am learning to tolerate it, to appreciate that I can get decent avocados year round. I get to see one of my nephews and most of my in-laws on a regular basis. I can swap date nights with my sister-in-law. I haven’t managed to play ultimate year-round yet, but I know it’s possible to do without ever having to decide whether cleats or tennis shoes are better for the day’s snow and ice mix. (Next summer I don’t expect to be training for a new career and moving into a new house, which should help get me on the field.)

I would really like for something to go according to plan. The shine has come off the optimism of June. It was baffled optimism even at the time, but as little as two weeks ago I really felt that everything was going to work out and I’d be able to busy myself with day to day troubles and worry less about my personal trajectory. There is a hell of a lot going on in the world that needs to change. It’s hard to work on that when you’re swallowed in a job…but it’s also hard to work on that when you’re busy with the algebra of pay checks and due dates.

In the meantime, I am trying to take advantage of the quiet house to write. I have fewer than 10,000 words to go to complete my first draft of Ghosts of the Old City. I’d like to write them soon enough that I can make a pass through the draft in September, spend October planning the sequel, and then try to repeat last year’s National Novel Writing Month win. I still have the secret project that was supposed to launch in July and didn’t (because moving). There are many things to write.

As for Walking Ledges? It’s one of those things. I’ll continue to be up front about the challenge and opportunities I encounter as a #postac and as a writer. I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate my reading goals into the blog—more on that later this week. I may occasionally write about music. (I’ve only got a friggin’ PhD in it. No reason to schweigen about it.) I should have some cool announcements in the next six months.

In the meantime…that last line of my first post works well as the last line of this one. Thank you for reading, whether you got here from a #postac-tagged tweet, Freshly Pressed, or through a Google search for “who was the composer who was way too good.” (Really happened!) Thank you to my handful of commenters. Thank you for the clicks on the like button at the bottom of my posts. Thanks for the retweets and shares. I hope I can keep doing my job well enough to draw you back.

What Can I Do?

Yesterday was a dark day. It’s been a bad week for news. Social media was full of horrors from Ferguson and stories about depression. (Never mind Gaza, Ukraine, and Iraq.) I continue to fight a terrible head cold and have been worn down physically. It was also one of the days that I waited for a phone call about a job that never came. Some big things, some small things, all pulling in one direction: down.

I’m not going to lie. I felt the way Erica Moen describes in the middle part of this comic. Or like George Bailey on the bridge wishing he’d never been born. It’s not the darkest place I’ve gone to (and I’m better today), but I kept coming back to one question:

What can I do?

What can I do to make a world where my black friends and neighbors do not have to worry about their sons getting shot by the men and women who are supposed to be protecting the community?

What can I do to make a world where our response to a crisis isn’t “how can this be happening in America?” but “how can this be happening to human beings?”

What can I do beside shake my fist at the sky as I sink into the morass?

I clung to this question, because it was the only way I could see out of the dark place I’d gotten to.

Look, I’m just a guy. I’m a privileged guy, too, even when I’m hurting. The last time I worried about the cops was when they were taking my picture during post-9/11 protests. I have an intact, supportive family and a lot more education than most people. I live in a house that is only partly owned by the bank. That didn’t stop me from tearing up when I saw the photo of the Ferguson protest at Howard University, or read Rembert Browne’s Grantland piece this morning.  Humans should not be doing these things to each other.

This is what I’ve got: my words and my vocation. Words dragged me briefly to the forefront of those protests 13 years ago. I can write. I can speak out. I can struggle to make the feelings I’m wrestling with intelligible, along with the situations that provoke them. Words matter. Words make people think and make people feel. I will do what I can to write meaningfully, whether that’s stories that help people step out of the dreary for a few hours or essays that make people think or terrible over-referential humor that makes people shake their heads.

The other one is more important. I get to be a teacher. I see sixth graders already leery of anybody in a uniform. I listen to high schoolers talk earnestly about which county has worse police. I see students buying into what society has told them about themselves. I see students fighting that. And I get to be a part of what they learn. I can make a difference. I can help them find their voices. I can listen. If I do that job well, if I listen and teach and believe in the students…I can help them hope.

Hope. We usually oppose it to despair, but it’s a hell of a good opposite for depression, too. When those veils come down, nothing good matters. You can know you’re loved. You can know people would hurt if you’re gone. You can even know, in some puny intellectual way, that things are likely to get better eventually. On the darkest days, though, you can’t believe it. Tomorrow doesn’t matter because today stretches forever, and today is awful.

That is why I clung to “what can I do?” If there’s any answer —no matter how small—to that question beyond “end it all,” then there is hope. There is hope. Hope alone won’t do the work, won’t make the changes. Hope won’t armor you against the evils of the world. But if you have hope, you can get out of bed. You can do.  Hope keeps the door to the future open. Even if it’s just open a crack, that crack breaks the darkness with a little light.

What can you do? Keep the door open. Keep hoping and asking yourself what you can do. Then go out and do it.

Embed from Getty Images

Reading for a Different Kind of Job

I finally have a library card again. Among the things I learned in this last move: I have too many books. Even just my fantasy fiction collection (diminished somewhat from the boxes I left at my parents’) fills up a whole wide shelving unit. I don’t regret having those books; the ones I’ve kept are the ones that have some combination of quality, re-readable-ness, and sentimental value. I just no longer feel the need to own the books I read.

And I need to be reading more. Graduate school turns reading into a job. There were semesters in which I was responsible for reading 500+ pages of scholarship every week. Reading stops being fun. I grew up reading for pleasure, and still do occasionally. As a writer, though, it has to be more often than occasionally, and it’s seldom just for pleasure. I’ve written about this before, but it’s something I’m reminding myself of now that my family is settling into the new house and we are shifting gears for the impending start of the school year. Reading good books makes me want to write ones like them. Reading bad books makes me want to get more good books out into the world. Win-win.

I’m pulling some inspiration on this from my former teammate Mike Dariano. Mike is one of those few people whom I feel closer to in the social media age than I did when we were actually going to the same school. This isn’t because we actually share stuff; it’s because we’ve ended up with strangely parallel lives. We’ve both put in time as adjuncts and years of being stay-at-home dads. We both write. We both try and use wiles to keep up with younger legs on the ultimate field. Mike, though, is scads more organized than I am, and works much more consciously toward improving himself and his work. He’s blogged about his projects in reading more, buying less, using Evernote, and half a dozen other things. (I’m particularly enjoying his recent stuff about incorporating Stoic principles into modern life.) Mike also has a new e-book out on building reading into your life.

Which brings me back to the library. I had a library card in Minneapolis. I got it the first week we were back in the Cities from Ohio, largely because I needed a card to use the internet at the library (a necessity until I could get internet at the apartment). When the kids were old enough, we used the library card all the time to check out children’s books. It was rare for me to check out anything for myself. Part of that was the grad school reading=work thing I mention above. Part of it was the fact that getting a toddler and an infant through the library did not leave much leeway for the lone grownup to explore the stacks. These days, my kids are old enough to look contentedly at the books they’ve picked out while dad finds a few to check out for himself. (My seven-year old is a voracious and frighteningly fast reader.)

On Thursday, the three of us went to the library here in Round Rock. The kids got five books each. I got two for myself. The first was Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, which I’ve wanted to read for ages and have never gotten around to. The second is a book I randomly grabbed from the fantasy/sci-fi section. It has a gryphon on the cover and something to do with elemental magic. That’s as much as I can recall without having it in front of me. The grab-bag is sort of the point. Every trip to the library, my plan is to make one careful selection of something generally deemed worthwhile. There are swathes of the fantasy “canon” that I haven’t touched, and some literary fiction I want to get my hands on. The other selection will be something arbitrary. I expect there will be good books and bad book and many that fall into the range my mother calls “airplane books:” good enough to read when you’re stuck in a metal tube hurling through the sky. Mostly, I need to get more novel words (ha!) through my brain to keep my own figurative fields from going fallow.

My vague plan is that posts about these books will gradually replace my writings on #postac. I’ve said before that I’ never intended that Walking Ledges become a #postac blog. I still am one, but I’m not sure I will have new things to say about it every week. I’ll still keep my annotated postac page, and I’ll continue to write about my transition from teaching nominal adults to teaching people who aren’t yet old enough for a driver’s license. For now, you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got some books to read.

Cook, Love, Write

The other day, my wife asked me why I cook fancy meals even when I’m really busy. I’m not sure that what I cook counts as fancy most of the time, but July certainly counts as busy—moving into a new house, taking subject certification exams, finishing up the alternative certification course proper, and trying to find a job for the next school year. That doesn’t count writing or my (modest) CampNaNoWriMo project for the month. I do cook dinner three or four nights each week, and often “re-condition” leftovers on one or two of the others. (Reconditioning usually involves adding more garlic and either a different leftover or frozen vegetables.)

It takes time. It makes dirty dishes, which take more of my time later. I could totally get away with using the slow cooker of beans I make every week to do most of the meals, supplemented with pots of rice and pasta or another pot of something stewish. My kids would be happy eating only rice, noodles, and fruit. The only person in the household who is really interested in having different things for dinner most nights is…me. So why do I do it?

Mostly, my dad is to blame. He cooked dinner every night he wasn’t busy cooking at the family restaurant. It used to baffle me how he could spend 60 or 80 hours a week cooking and running a restaurant and still want to be in the kitchen when he was home. I understand it better now: my dad really, really liked to cook. He also liked to cook new dishes, things that weren’t on the restaurant menu and never would be. The kitchen was home and laboratory and studio for him.

Cooking was also important to him—and now to me—because it’s an offering to the family. You’ve probably seen articles (and listicles) about “love languages.” Cooking was one of my dad’s. He liked food, but he loved to cook for his family and friends. That’s how he showed he cared, especially when other things were going poorly. Putting something tasty on the table and getting us all to sit down to eat it together was easier for him than hugs and words.

I like words. I love writing. Despite that, I’ve never written very much for the people I love. My wife is awesome, but I’ve only written her a handful of things in the 13 years we’ve been together (unless you count the many, many e-mails that went back and forth while we were living in different states). I’ve spent many more hours cooking for her than writing for her. I might even cook too much for her. There are things she likes to eat that she also likes to cook, and I don’t always give her the chance to cook them.

When I write, I like subtlety, allusion, and implication. That’s part of the reason why it’s not always easy for me to write for (or to) the ones I love. I can’t just come out and say it, you know? Big displays of real emotion are tough. Fictional characters can channel my real emotions without it being so…blatant. The extra layer protects my raw feelings. Even here on the blog, I hide behind quasi-anonymity. Some things are easier to say in front of strangers (even if many of my friends and family do read this blog).

I would love to claim as much control over my cooking as I exercise over my language. I can’t. My “secret techniques” are mostly garlic, fresh ingredients, and knowing how to avoid overcooking things. I know my way around a spice rack and a grocery store (thanks to my dad), but not enough to have precise targets in mind when I cook. As in horseshoes and hand grenades, close usually counts. I cook edible dishes that taste good more often than not. They’re mostly healthy, and when they’re not I make sure they’re especially tasty.

Most of all, though, I cook things for the people I care about. I want us to sit down and eat together. I want us to enjoy each other’s company as much as I want us to enjoy what we’re eating. That’s even more true when we have guests. I might not be able to say “I love you, I am glad you are part of my life and at this table with me.” I might have a hard time writing my wife the poems she deserves (but I haven’t forgotten the sestina I promised you!). But I can fill a table with food, and the kids can set the places, and we can all sit and eat together. That’s why I do it: because there are some things that are easier to say with food than words.

Recycling (Literary, not Literal)

I’ve mentioned Imperial Secrets a few times before—it was a writing “game” I was part of for years and years. It was my first opportunity to spend long periods of time (and lots of words) with the same characters. I also wrote with some fantastic creators, a few of whom are published authors now. We created the world as we wrote our stories. It didn’t always make sense—the geographer in me cringed at some of the terrain juxtapositions, and the historian in me always wanted the background to be more coherent. (Weaving disparate chunks into a coherent history was one of my major projects in support of the game.)

I have almost everything I wrote for Imperial Secrets. The question is figuring out what to do with it. While my main characters are my own, as are many supporting players, there are characters in the stories that belong to others. All of the characters belong to the world. How can I remove them from what made them?

Recycling. That’s how. It’s work, though, distinct from simple re-use. Recycling a character (or a setting or a plot) involves figuring out what lies at its core. You don’t want to melt the character down completely—you might a well start from scratch at that point—you want to get it soft around the edges so you can re-mold it to a new purpose. What makes the character worth keeping? What’s compelling?

One of my unfinished novels involves a recycling of Leor Naechtweard, a character who, in Imperial Secrets, started as a noblewoman’s guard and eventually rose to something between fame and infamy as a bloodthirsty shape-shifting duke. Leor’s exploits (and the stories I dragged other players into) had him defeating demons and using a civil war to seize political power. He was also entangled with a different demoness who started as his co-guard. Leor was over the top, a character who fits a high fantasy framework that I had, by my mid-20s, abandoned. The involvement with other characters—often started because I wanted to write with their authors rather than any organic cause—made him messy to extract from L’Isle (the core setting for Imperial Secrets).

I have something like 600 single-spaced pages of Leor’s posts. To get anything out of them, I had to start stripping away external things. The first obvious thing to go was the demon sword. I’d had fun with it, but it did not fit the character’s arc at all. The political stuff could all go, too, because its origins were in Imperial Secrets promotion system. The love interest went by the wayside because I couldn’t possibly imagine replacing her author (who had all sorts of technical issues but was a fantastic storyteller).

What was left? Leor had a few key characteristics. He was ruthless but not vindictive (if I were hanging a D&D alignment on him, he’d be lawful evil). That ruthlessness went hand in hand with a nearly feral outlook. Imperial Secrets Leor was closely connected to wolves, both physically and mystically. Recycled Leor would have to develop some similar kind of connection. There were a few bits of the mystical backstory that were entirely mine and did not depend on the Imperial Secrets world—the most prominent were the Three Daughters of the Moon, a triple oracle that would appear to Leor in visions.

I eventually spun the outline for a novel out of those characteristics. I built up a shell of a world around them and wrote about three chapters before grad school ate my capacity to sustain nonacademic projects. The character translated beautifully to a low-fantasy setting of isolated wilderness villages and dangerous spirit-pacts. I might go back there some day.

I’m undergoing the same process with one of my other characters right now for the project I was supposed to launch three weeks ago. It’s an interesting process. There’s nothing like going through ten-year old work to make you grimace at your tastes and linguistic stumbles. There were some good moments, too, even if the character often behaved like an abstraction rather than a person. Trying to figure out what to “keep” has become more like trying to figure out what to “take.” Like Leor, this character (Hallas) had intimate ties to the Imperial Secrets setting. The character was concocted at an early moment in the game’s history when we had an overwhelming majority of evil characters and we felt we needed a white knight. So…I created a white knight who would, in fact, literally lead an order called the White Knights. (Those were another player’s creation, but the founding character had become a vampire. It’s complicated.) The stuff I’m working on now is high fantasy, but it’s much more nuanced than Imperial Secrets was at that age. I’m trying to keep only the best stuff.

Next question: is this even worth it? Why create new versions of old characters rather than concocting ones who will wholly fit a new project? It’s a valid concern. For Leor, but more particularly for Hallas, I feel like their stories weren’t done. There’s more to tell. Hallas, canonically, is dead. I martyred him to help end some metaplot stuff as Imperial Secrets was on its last legs. He was just getting interesting, though. I spent a lot of Imperial Secrets using him as a paladin who, while not lawful stupid, was nearly saintly in his piety and purity. On his penultimate story arc, he ran into some things that had the potential to complicate him. That’s what I want to explore going forward. What does a somewhat more realistic version of Hallas look like? How does he react to moral grey areas?

There’s another concern—is this “original?” Creatives tend to fetishize originality and, more often, raw novelty. We want to make something new. Recycled characters aren’t new. But we re-use ideas all the time. Composers do it constantly. (I did it occasionally as a composer; the tone row I used loosely in my master’s thesis was one that I’d first made for part of my undergraduate honors project.) Visual artists revisit the same subjects over and over again. I don’t feel bad about recycling old ideas…as long as I’m actually breaking them down and building them into something that fits.

Recycling literal waste takes energy. Artistic recycling—like any art-making—does, too.

Repeating Ourselves

My son has autism spectrum disorder. My daughter has some congenital hearing deficit. This means I spend even more time than most parents of young children repeating myself. Then I go to work and repeat myself some more. It gets tedious—especially as a habitually impatient person who (usually) understands things on the first try.

Life is built of repetitions. Most of us do nearly the same thing every working day. My days start with the same beeping alarm, proceed through breakfast and waking myself up…then the tug-of-war to get the kids out of bed, make their at-school meals, and generally try to herd everybody out the door. Waking, working, meals, sleep…the necessities of life are repeated. If we’re inclined, we can sketch broader patterns of repetition: weeks to seasons to years to “history” repeating itself.

We sometimes allow ourselves comfort in repetition, but I think that most of us find it tiresome. We complain about cookie-cutter sitcoms or action movies or rom-coms, about derivative pop songs and comic books and fashion. Part of acquiring “culture” is learning to praise originality and novelty. Even popular consumer culture constantly reinvents its surface features. Why, then, is repetition such a powerful tool in art?

Most musical structures, for example, are about repetition and return. Whether it’s a song’s verse-chorus form, orchestral movements shaped by the sonata principle, or even the simple ternary form, we constantly hear repetition. In electronic dance music (and most dance music, really), the repeated units are even shorter, their repetition more frequent. (There’s also minimalism—if you’re interested in how minimalism, disco, advertising, and “sewing machine” classical tracks used similar structures and principles, check out Robert Fink’s book Repeating Ourselves. Yes, that’s where I got this post’s title.) When we hear something, we want to hear it again. Sometimes we won’t recognize it when it returns. Other times we will. Think about the way themes work in film scores to reinforce characterization and narrative shape. One of my few thrills in the Star Wars prequels came during Episode II, where the Imperial March began to weave into Anakin and Padme’s love scene. The power was in recognition; to recognize, we have to have encountered something previously. Without repetition, recognition is impossible.

In writing, similar principles apply. Essays conclude with amplified versions of the ideas at their openings. The Hero’s Journey classically ends with a return home. Repeating imagery in a poem heightens the image and helps unite the whole. (The same can be done in novels.) We introduce parallel scenes to demonstrate how characters have changed…or how they contrast with their counterparts. On the small scale, repetition creates mood. Assonance accelerates action scenes…or lugubriously oozes through confusion. Alliteration can secure us in Scandinavian scenes or highlight the hurting in our hearts. (The sonic tricks are fun but obviously best used sparingly.)

Repetition creates shape. It creates pattern. It’s possible to develop structures that don’t rely on repetition, but they’re harder to perceive. When we repeat ourselves in writing, we must do so mindfully. Repeated elements gain significance. Too much repetition destroys meaning. (In an early Conan book, for example, the hero was described as “panther-like” in consecutive paragraphs. Rather undercut the effect.) It’s one of the things beta readers and editors can help with tremendously: we’re often blind to the habits that lead us to repeat ourselves.

Repetition is one of our most powerful tools in telling stories and in making words dance. We just have to make sure it’s more like sunrises and coffee than alarm clocks and commutes.

Droughts and Drafts

Central Texas is dry. Right now, it’s spectacularly dry, in the grip of a years-long drought that has climatologists talking earnestly about a repeat of the Dust Bowl. We had a storm dump four inches of rain about a week ago; the ground soaked it all up. The reservoirs are 27 feet below full—instead of having nearly four years’ worth of water in them, they have about a year and a half. It won’t be long before the landscape reverts to its sere summer brown.

My own drought isn’t as severe or as far-reaching. I’ve been working and busy with chores and working on behind-the-scenes grownup stuff. I’ve managed to keep my blog updated. What I haven’t managed since April is much work on Ghosts of the Old City. My reservoirs are running low. When I go to work on it, I enjoy what I see. I can wring out a few paragraphs at a time. Then the well is dry and I have to wait until opportunity and desire again intersect.

Two things have been missing: reading and sleep. Sleep is probably the one with the most import, simply because it colors so much of my days and my mood. Lack of it makes it easier to sink into wasting my waking hours and suffering mood swings. It’s also contributed to the resurgence of my cold, which hasn’t helped.

I’m missing reading more, though. I’ve read plenty, but most of my reading these last few weeks has been internet stuff: newspaper articles, blog posts, usw. As metaphorical rain, they’re barely enough to keep the grass from dying. Replenishing the reservoirs takes sustained reading, away from a screen, away from habitual clicking over to a game or social media every few minutes. It takes the energy to focus on something once the kids are in bed.

Writers constantly tell their aspiring counterparts to read. There’s a practical level to that: the more you read, the more tricks you learn to spot and pull off yourself. The more you read, the better sense you develop for the subtleties of language. You find stuff to steal and build into your own style. Those are all good reasons. None of them are enough to make the absence of reading a drought.

It’s not the how that needs renewal. It’s the why. Lack of reading dries us out because reading makes us feel. It makes us think. When we read to replenish our stores as writers, we’re replenishing our love for words and stories. We’re remembering what it means to be transported, for doors to open and stars to align. That’s the stuff that feeds us at the root.

The skies are grey this morning. The clouds aren’t dark enough to hold much threat of rain. The trees don’t stir. The forecast for the long weekend is much more amenable to sunscreen and swimming pools than drought relief. Schools—both my kids’ and the one where I teach—are descending into the whirlwind of end-of-year events. There’s a birthday party to go to on Saturday. There will be laundry and dishes and another attempt to deal with some broken blinds.

But there will also be sleeping in and reading and breakfasts that don’t come as a prelude to prying my kids out of bed. By Monday, maybe I’ll be ready to grow my writing roots again and get back to my draft of Ghosts of the Old City.