A little something different ...

Things went a tad off the rails last week. I got most of my planned paintings done, but a couple of them went wrong, and one was for that week’s chapter … yeah, it’s getting fixed. Sorry. But hey, look! It’s the Black Mask!

In the meantime, I was wondering what to blog about this week, and it occurred to me that I haven’t actually talked much about what’s in Teh Novel, which is currently working-titled The Resurrectionist’s Song. That’s deliberate, of course; I don’t want to give everything away, especially when things might get drastically changed once I start working with agents and editors and people. (Please note: I don’t actually have an agent or an editor at the moment. But if I manage to go the traditional publishing route on this book, I will, and I do have to think about them now.) 

But I am spending an awful lot of time in that world right now, and it seems only fair to give you guys a little taste of what’s making Masks turn up late from time to time. So while I can’t go into the whole plot of the book, I can give you a little taste of a central piece of the story, one that’s unlikely to change much in the rewrites—its protagonist and narrator, named …

Well, there’s my first big problem. He hasn’t got a name.

He cut his hair off with scissors. Really.

For my own convenience, I’ve been calling him by his nickname, Butterfly. And if that sounds to you like the worst name ever for a seventeen-year-old boy, you’re not alone. Still, it’s probably the most accurate name he could have. You see, the reason Butterfly doesn’t have a proper name of his own is that the people who made him (more on them in a moment) don’t consider him worthy of a name. He’s not a person, as far as they’re concerned. He’s a human experiment who has lived his entire life in a laboratory, surrounded by people who regard him as about half a step above a white rat.

There’s one person who doesn’t think of Butterfly as an animal—his handler, a rather strange man named Holland. Holland is a semi-evil genius who was originally given charge of Butterfly because Butterfly wasn’t expected to live long, or produce very important results. Basically, somebody handed a sickly infant to him to keep him busy. But something unexpected happened. Holland bonded with the kid and saw him as a little brother, or possibly a son. He took such good care of his young charge, including giving him the social interaction that none of the other experiments got, that Butterfly survived and grew up to produce some very interesting results indeed. Results that prompted Holland to give Butterfly his nickname.

Going into the precise nature of Butterfly’s experiment would spoil one of the main plot twists, but the way it all shook out is that Butterfly has the power to warp probability. Like the eponymous butterfly in chaos theory, he excels at making small moves that will produce big effects. A popular illustration of chaos theory describes a butterfly flapping its wings, causing ripples of air that eventually build into a storm system halfway across the world. A butterfly lands on a flower in Tennessee, and a typhoon flattens Singapore. Our friend Butterfly can, if asked to flatten Singapore, find exactly the right butterfly and poke it at exactly the right moment to make it flap its wings in exactly the right way. He doesn’t understand how poking a bug will cause a storm—just that it will. That’s a useful talent if you want to, say, raise the price of corn futures. Or start a war.

Now, Butterfly is mostly ignorant of all this. He knows that his talent works, and he knows that periodically he’s given assignments to complete or gets stuck with needles by people trying to find out what makes him tick, but the whys and wherefores don’t interest him very much—that is, until he gets an assignment that’s a little out of the ordinary. We don’t find out exactly what happens until fairly late in the story, but something Butterfly does has an unintended effect, and Butterfly—a sweet-natured, wisecracking, rather naïve teenage boy whose greatest pleasure in life is reading a new book in the library of the tower where he lives—discovers that his actions have put a little girl in terrible danger. He’s never met her, doesn’t even know her name, but he knows that she will die and it will be his fault unless he does something to fix his mistake. So he does what any sensible boy who’s lived his entire life in a laboratory would do.

He runs away.

Butterfly runs away, out into a dirty, complicated, wildly dystopian outer world he knows almost nothing about. He meets lots of interesting new people, many of whom try to kill him. And he follows his talent into the middle of nowhere, where he knows he’ll find this mysterious girl. The quiet, sickly boy with the magical talent has to learn how to drive a truck, cross a desert, win a knife fight. He has to learn how to deal with people, too which is considerably harder than any of the other things. He has to find the girl, and save her. And he has to do it all in just fifteen days, because one way or another that’s all the time he’s got.

You see, Butterfly’s a very complicated sort of lab rat. Every day of his life, he’s had to swallow pills and take injections and in general get medicated to the gills just to stay alive. Nobody’s supposed to have the kind of talent he does, and it’s all his creators can do to keep his body from rejecting it like a transplanted organ. When he runs away, the clock starts ticking. He’s running out of time. Holland goes after him, determined to save the only person in the world whom he loves, and who loves him, but Butterfly has his own plans and his own timetable. Holland did too good a job of raising this kid—so now Butterfly’s got a moral center that not even his “father” can shake. He knows that Holland will never let him do what he has in mind, he knows he’s going to get sicker and sicker and eventually drop dead, and he’s okay with that, because some things are more important than staying alive. He’s carrying a secret that the little girl can’t live without, and he chooses her over himself. Despite the best efforts of everyone around him, Butterfly is a hero.

Of course, then he actually meets the girl. And as anyone who’s read my stories can predict, she’s not quite what he expected. There’s an old military saying that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy; Butterfly’s plan won’t survive contact with the person it’s designed to save. Not least because of what happens on the day that they finally meet …

Why is this story called The Resurrectionist’s Song, you may ask? Well, aside from the fact that I had a devil of a time coming up with any title at all, I eventually settled on this one because there are two characters in the story who resurrect the dead, or do something like it. Butterfly is one of them, with his near-miraculous talent for changing the future (though he can’t change his own. He learns early on how his talent can bring death; his arc in the novel involves learning how to give back life, whether it’s to the girl or anyone else. As for the other … well, I’ll get to that later.

Oh, and then there’s the Song part. Butterfly has had very little exposure to music, and none at all to human singing, before he runs away. Combine that newborn fascination with his most prized possession—a mysterious book of poems that he plans to give to the girl—and you begin to see why songs will matter …

The extra lesson

Ms. Stumpf, my host in Arizona.
Also Raven, her horse—er, dinosaur—er ...

Once, I didn’t have any teachers.

Not for writing, anyway. My first dedicated lessons in the art of writing came from my grandmother, a writer herself, when I was a teenager and had already been writing Rae Masterson’s adventures for about three years. Before that, I was largely self-taught, and in many ways I still am. I read widely and voraciously, and constantly challenge myself to write the best stories I can. I am my first test audience, and I’m quite a nasty one. (Remember, I used to tell my English teachers in school, “Don’t tell me whether my writing’s good work for a twelve-year-old, tell me whether it’s good!”) Most of my techniques are hard-won lessons I taught myself, the fruit of trial and error.

You know that old saw about how conflict is essential to good writing? I actually tried writing a few stories without conflict. (They were incredibly boring, and you will not get to see them.) That’s how I did most of my early learning about writing—through experimentation. I experimented with different kinds of characters and plots, and hammered away at my writing until I figured out how to introduce themes. It was tedious, grueling work, and it’s a good thing I loved it so much, or I might never have persevered.

In Arizona, I got to cheat that process. I got to stand up in front of about 600 kids, all told, and say, “This is how it works. This is what I know.” I broke down the basics of plot—using my own system, the one I developed when I found that “beginning, middle, and end” was the most frustrating way imaginable to describe a story I then had to write—and then helped the kids apply them to their favorite books and movies. I shared the best of the many tricks I’ve learned for characterization—secrets of motivation and worldview that lead you outward to words and actions. I showed them how to build fictional worlds, from gravity up. And I showed them how to find themes in what they read and what they watch, which I believe is the key to putting your own themes into your own work. (For one thing, I’ve found I tend to write them into my own stories without knowing they’re there, and find them only later.) If someone had told me these things when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I could have shaved years off my development as a writer. I am proud to have shared these ideas with those students.

Even so, I hope they didn’t listen too closely.

Because while all those elements are crucial to writing good stories, there is one I can’t teach. The best writers don’t just swallow what their teachers say (even when the teacher is me). They go after the rules with a hammer and bash them until only the stuff that works is left over. They try things, even if they’re told those things can’t possibly work. And they write. They sit down, day after day, with a pen or a pencil or a keyboard or a stick in the dirt, and they write. They find out what works for them. Everything I said in those lectures is what works for me, and for a majority of my students—but I’ve never met a writer who didn’t violate at least one important rule in at least one way. No two brains are exactly alike; no two souls are identical. Every writer has to discover for himself or herself what works for him or her. And the only way to discover that is to try everything in the hope of finding something.

Right now I’m writing a novel that came to life when I heard someone say I couldn’t do something. Specifically, they said that no one could write an adventure story (at least, one in the style of the West) whose hero was committed to nonviolence and making a serious go of it. If the good guy can’t fight the bad guys, I was told, the story doesn’t work, at least for Western audiences.

I’m writing that story now. I’m about halfway done with the first draft, and I’ve passed the first major fight sequence where the hero’s principles are put to the test. The chapter is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever written, and consistently exciting (at least to me). There’s action, there’s suspense, there’s a funny bit with a dog and a moment to make you cry a little inside. You could say I cheated a bit, since there are plenty of other characters in the story who have no problem whatsoever with using violence—but the nonviolent hero is the most consistently interesting part, the most difficult to write, and the most satisfying when I finally figure him out. So it turns out it’s not impossible. It’s just hard. And that’s the thing about writers—they’re not afraid of hard. They’re not afraid of time-consuming. They’re not afraid of impossible, because they’re used to making the impossible happen.

I could see a few faces in the audience in Arizona that were thinking hard about what I was saying. I could almost hear wheels turning inside heads—“Can I really do that? Can I make that work? What if …?” Go with those instincts, guys. Try it. Mess around. Find your own voice, your own method. Figure out how you too can do the impossible.

And send me a link afterward, will you? I do so like to see how it’s done …