The Part About Endings

I just read a good ending, in Jerome Charyn's The Seventh Babe, and so it got me thinking about the subject.  As a writer, this is a particularly compelling subject.  It's about as important as the name of the story, the names of the characters.

The way I ended The Cloak of Shrouded Men, for instance, was crucial to the whole story.  When I originally wrote this one, it was during the course of three successive NaNoWriMos, so it's perhaps more accurate to say that I wrote three endings.  The first, after "Colinaude, the Angry Avenger," came about because I realized the main character was headed in a dark direction.  He kills a man.  Considering the main character is a superhero, this is a fairly significant event for him.  The second, after "Repose of the Eidolon," was less of an ending because by that point I knew I was going to be writing the character again.  That ending was more of a beginning, as the character dons his superhero costume again for the first time since the end of "Angry Avenger."  The whole of the third, "Cotton's War," is one long ending.  Actually, it takes place after the ending, the climactic fight the character must experience in order to complete his experiences in the story.  The fight apparently leaves him at death's door, only for an eleventh hour reveal that he's switched places with someone else, and that he's been comfortably observing the results of his response to killing a man from 'Angry Avenger."  His morality has flipped.  He has decided that the only way to respond to a world that no longer makes sense to him is to reshape the landscape.  It is a little like my version of Watchmen in that sense, except there's no belief that he has won a war so much as completed, well, a story.

That was my first attempt at concluding a novel.  The next one, Pale Moonlight, was a little trickier.  The whole story became a study about ideas.  Everything about it is less a traditional story and more a confrontation with 20th century psychology in the wake of some of the greatest horrors history has ever seen.  It's what happens when the climactic battle becomes more about one side walking away.  Who does that?  So the character who is supposed to walk away dies instead.  Of the three protagonists who confront the villain, one of them symbolizes the effort to understand evil, another the effort to reject, and the third the effort to confront it directly, which is to say contradict it.  This is what a lot of people have been trying to argue recently, that instead of picking a fight you pacify the enemy.  Except I'm ambivalent as to how easy that really is.  So if I'm to write a story about it, I write about what I imagine has to happen in order for it to work.  It's such a convoluted story, I'm sure I won't have any readers for it basically ever.  I guess that's why it had absolutely no traction with publishers.

So I went in a different direction with the next novel, which I'm seriously considering self-publishing this year.  I've previously referred to it as Minor Contracts and its original title, Ecce Homo, but it's now going by Holy Men.  This is the first time I've written a long-form story without having some kind of climactic fight at the end.  Like Pale Moonlight, it's a story of ideas, a much more direct grappling with my religious beliefs.  I knew exactly how this one would end from the moment I started writing it, which was why I named it Ecce Homo originally, Latin for "Behold the man!," which is what Pontius Pilate utters to the crowd after having Jesus scourged.  Except the man in my story isn't Jesus, but Adam, who is pleading with God to give his son Cain a second chance.  Really???  It's a story that needs to be read to be understood, and this is something I knew from the moment I started writing it, so it's actually one of my clearer narratives.  Swear to god!

From there, I wrote The Whole Bloody Affair, which was my version of a young adult novel, following the adventures of warrior orphan Yoshimi.  Since the whole premise of this one involved fighting, I knew the climax definitely involved a fight.  And so I peppered the book with a lot of short fights.  It was originally my idea to have the climax feature another one, because I don't choreograph very well.  I have to think a lot about it.  It's the whole reason the superhero in Cloak of Shrouded Men does very little actual fighting.  So I end up thinking of such moments more as set pieces, the way movies center a lot of their stories around specific moments, usually action scenes.

That's what happens in Seven Thunders, which is the first book I think other people might actually want to read.  I've been foolish enough recently to send it to a publisher.  It's the linchpin to my whole Space Corps saga.  Whatever else I write, this is still what I think will be my legacy.  It took me fifteen years and three prior manuscripts to even attempt writing Seven Thunders.  And it was the same movie that ended up informing the fighting in Whole Bloody Affair that ultimately gave me the shape of it, including the ending.  I'm talking about Warrior, the best MMA movie that will ever be made.  It's the story of two brothers and their father, all of them estranged, all of whom converge back into each other's lives thanks to a tournament.  The brothers end up meeting in the finals.  It's seriously one of the best movies I've ever seen.  Seven Thunders is also a story about brothers.  I knew that whatever else I did in the story, I needed the ending to ring as true emotionally for me as Warrior's did.  I'd dreamed about this ending for so long.  Previously it played out a little like the lightsaber duels of the Star Wars prequels.

Endings aren't always my strong suit.  Half the reason I spent a few years doing micro fiction was so that I had to tackle endings on a regular basis, the beginning so close to the ending that there could be no mistake as to how one met the other.  As a reader, I've developed an instinct for how a story's shape looks.  I happen to be partial to stories that end well, not just begin well.  I hear all this stuff about how a story has to begin well, but that's perhaps the least important part of a story.  I've read plenty of bad beginnings that quickly turn into excellent middles.  But how many excellent endings?

Sometimes, when I want to end a story without having really finished writing it, I simply conclude with the overall effect the events of the story have ended up having. That's what I did with "Lost Convoy" from the Monorama collection.  Last summer my laptop died on me.  It ate the ending of Seven Thunders.  Not the ending, but the coda.  With that one, it was as important to do a proper ending as explain what happened after it.  I guess bringing the lessons of Cloak of Shrouded Men and later efforts full circle.  Luckily my sister helped the computer regurgitate the coda.

With the manuscript I've recently completed, In the Land of Pangaea, there are three separate stories that are nonetheless interrelated, and so once more I needed a coda to bring it all together satisfactorily.  I've also been working on Zooropa all year, which is another way I've been meditating on endings recently.  Zooropa is the title I've given a series of stories I've been working on for about as long as Space Corps.  It encompasses "Leopold's Concentration" and several other stories from Monorama, and several that aren't in it.  When I tackled "Eponymous Monk," a serialized quasi-cartoon strip I recently completed over at Scouring Monk, I knew I still wasn't completing that story.  So when it came to thinking up a theme for this year's A-to-Z Challenge, I determined that it only made sense to use the Zooropa world, which was all I needed to finally reach the conclusion, which will come in the form of "Shooks Run," from an outline I actually completed last year, without realizing where the story would be by this point.  (If you're interested in my A-to-Z, it'll be at the Monk, as always.)
 
So I will soon have the shape of that whole story completed, including its ending, which may seem to be a little out of left field, the way Cloak of Shrouded Men and Pale Moonlight end.  I'm not regressing, though.  I wonder if I will rewrite the whole Zooropa saga one day.  But for now, it's enough to know I finally have its ending, because that's something that has eluded me for close to two decades.  Which is incredibly frustrating for a writer who has made endings so important to his stories.  But all the sweeter for finally having reached it.

Done in the actual time of Pangaea

I've been working on my current WIP, In the Land of Pangaea, since November (it was the subject of my unofficial NaNo effort, you may recall).  Yesterday I concluded the first draft for the first and longest section of the book, the part that takes place in the eponymous supercontinent.  I ended up being damn happy with how it developed, which made it easier and easier to write as time went on.

That leaves the second section, which is the shortest, and the third, which is the final (I'm a sucker for three-act structures, which is the basic shape nearly all of my manuscripts have taken, with so far the lone exception being Minor Contracts, which has a general medley of five narrative threads, one of which is a tapestry of different, illustrative voices).  I hope to be done, as I think I've said previously, by the end of February on the complete first draft.  I will certainly let you know how that works.  It's a fantastic feeling, though, knowing that I did exactly what I wanted to do, and am pleased with the results, which ended up turning into a murder mystery, something I've only tackled on occasion.  I blame it on all the John le Carre books I was reading at the time I started writing...

Why Neil?

So, why Neil Gaiman?

The short of it was that it was offered me and I was quick to embrace the opportunity.  The long of it, of course I'm a fan.  I didn't mention him in the Ode-athon, but Neil has been a huge inspiration to me.  His depiction of the trickster god Anansi has informed material in Minor Contracts, a manuscript I wrote three years ago, and is a considerable part of In the Land of Pangaea, my WIP.  Anansi was featured in Neil's American Gods and of course the subsequent Anansi Boys, and perhaps it's a sign of my affection for the character that I was never able to understand why people didn't like that one as much as I did.

Plenty of people love Neil's work.  I spent a good portion of this year reading his Sandman, and as I have yet to read the complete series (to say nothing of the new follow-up, Sandman Overture), I anticipate doing more of that in the future.  It's arguably the most literary comic book ever attempted, and the style hugely informed how I approached Modern Ark, a manuscript I wrote four years ago (what's easy to do in a comic book is not so easy to do in a book if you're looking for an actual audience; maybe I just need to identify my Morpheus more clearly?).  Since I didn't read Sandman as it was originally released issue by issue, even though I was actively reading comics during the second half of the series, it's been interesting to play catch-up.

Neil can sometimes be a little intimidating.  And yet I don't think he's hit his full cultural reach yet because I also think he can be underrated by people looking for a little more of the mainstream in his work (a problem that also plagues Grant Morrison).  Sometimes even as we champion artists who can make anything mainstream we limit our ability to find them by asking that they have a certain level of conformity to what already exists.  They see that Neil came from comic books and that's excuse enough to not take him as seriously as they should.

I haven't read enough of his work, Sandman or otherwise, even though I was still in high school when Neil started taking the art of writing books seriously.  That would have been a good time to start, but then I was still fighting my appreciation of Stephen King then, too.  I think Neil has a good amount of King in him, but they approach the same kind of material differently.  For Neil it's about seeing the grand scale on an intimate level, whereas King takes the intimate at a grand scale (which is why he can do horror and things like Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption with equal aplomb).  But they're essentially the same.  They see the hidden mythologies around us and attempt to interpret them.  Clowns are scary, mm-hmm.

On the one hand having this comic biography under my belt means I'm an inch closer to working in comic books the way I always dreamed.  That's the selfish part.  On the other, I'm also an inch closer to Neil creatively.

But only an inch.

The Insecure Writer's Support Group October 2013

I've spent a long enough time not participating in this thing, so I figured I'd finally join.  And such good timing!  The IWSG now has its very own site.  It's the brainchild of ninja captain Alex Cavanaugh and meets on the first Wednesday of every month.  As for the purpose?  It's the porpoise, of course.  (He's in the water across from the lighthouse.  He took the picture.)

For my inaugural post, I'm going to talk about clarity.  Recently I've been exchanging thoughts on the film Immortals with A. Lee Martinez on Facebook.  Why I'm talking with Martinez, the author of such books as Divine Misfortune, is because of Pat Dilloway, who has latched onto the author.  Martinez recently saw Immortals presumably for the first time, and thought it was a hot mess.  The film, from visionary director Tarsem (best work: The Fall), was originally released in 2011, and is a more recent version of the sword-and-sandal epic resurrected by Ridley Scott's Gladiator in 2000 and also exemplified by Zack Snyder's 300 from 2007.

Now, even though Gladiator won a Best Picture from the Oscars, most people these days still think of 300 as the definitive modern example of this genre of movies, even though Gerard Butler, the star of the film, is equally considered by most people to be merely a more histrionic version of Russell Crowe, who starred in the Scott picture.  Immortals was Henry Cavill's first big role, but chances are people were thinking then and will still now and for the foreseeable future consider this past summer's Man of Steel (where he played, y'know, Superman) for that distinction.

Immortals is one of many, many films that were released in the wake of 300 to adopt a similar aesthetic presentation.  In fact, most people seem to have assumed the whole reason it was made at all was to capture the very same audience, and perhaps for studio bosses that was exactly the case.  And yet, knowing Tarsem as I do, I could never view it that way.

The film, as Martinez suggests in his vehement and negative opinion, can easily be said to be a hot mess, in one viewing.  Even though I have an abiding love for Tarsem, that's pretty much how I saw it myself the first time.  It was virtually impenetrable, or in other words lacked clarity.  Cavill isn't nearly as striking a presence as Butler is in 300, and he's rarely in a position as Crowe is for the majority of Gladiator to command attention.  The roles are very different.  If anything, Cavill is far more like Sam Worthington in Clash of the Titans, a reluctant hero who has to crawl all the way to the top (besides being a generally heroic and capable kind of guy to begin with).  (Given that few people seem to like the Titans remake, this is not such a great allusion.)

No, the big star of Immortals is Mickey Rourke, who approaches the villain role much as Butler does the hero role in 300.  There's also John Hurt, who has one of the most distinctive voices in film today, who acts as narrator and one of the guises of Zeus, as well as the lovely Freida Pinto in one of her early post-Slumdog Millionaire roles.  (She is was and always will be the best thing about that movie.)  The fourth and fifth leads go to Stephen Dorff and Luke Evans.

The gist of the story is that Rourke is a power mad monarch who wants to declare war on the gods by unleashing their ancient rivals (who just so happen to be...the Titans).  Naturally Zeus isn't too keen to see this happen, so he gently nudges Cavill into position to stop this from happening.  The problem is that in the chaos that follows in the wake of Rourke's maneuvering, Cavill ends up further from his goal than is convenient.  By the time he's ready, it's too late and the big battle at the end of the film has already provoked tragedy, including the deaths of several gods, which finally forces Zeus to break his own vow of noninterference.  It is indeed Cavill who stops Rourke, thus being the hero Zeus thought he could be, but the catastrophe remains.  But then again, the original war between the gods wasn't so great either, and once the Titans, like the kraken, are unleashed there's only so much damage control possible.

The visuals do indeed evoke 300, but there are the telltale signs of Tarsem all around.  (He began his career in music videos, but called greater attention to himself with The Cell, in which Jennifer Lopez traverses a surreal landscape.  In fact, Tarsem is always immersing himself in those.  It's the story he tells every time, and like a great storyteller is always finding new ways to do so.)

As far as clarity goes, however, there's not so much of that going around, at least initially.  For this reason, it can seem unsatisfying and even a gross case of bad filmmaking in general.  In such cases it's easy to extrapolate that the story simply didn't work or was executed poorly, or that characters behaved stupidly.  All these things are the reaction of someone who failed to connect with the presented experience.

So why am I going on and on about this in a post that's supposed to be about my specific writing experience?  Well, for one thing I recently had another look at one particular chapter in my manuscript for Minor Contracts, one of three I have floating in the air.  I was unsatisfied with the way I'd written it.  And I went back to reservations I've had about the opening chapter.  And I started to think, maybe I have to write the whole thing over again.  Generally, I hate even the idea of doing that.  I will sometimes have to start over again, but I've never even thought about doing that with a whole manuscript.  With the Modern Ark  manuscript, I haven't thought about doing that sort of thing too much, because it's a whole house of cards, almost every chapter doing something entirely different.  If I move one piece, the whole thing could collapse, and I've already monkeyed around with the opening chapter of that one several times.  I'm of the idea that what was going through my mind when I wrote the thing in the first place is more than likely the best version.  Anything else is just another version.  If the due diligence was performed in the original conception, you should be fine.

Now, certainly editing is a key thing to consider.  In movies editing can affect everything.  Oliver Stone has four cuts of Alexander (my favorite movie, and another sword-and-sandal epic), for instance.  Studio heads used to chuckle wildly as they hacked apart Orson Welles' work.  With someone like Orson Welles, you change the shape of his work and you most definitely change the whole thing.  (I'm not claiming to be Orson Welles, mind you.)

And I'm just talking about things I've already written.  Twice now in the past month I've already radically altered the course of the next manuscript I'll be writing, In the Land of Pangaea, even thinking of alternate titles (which happens to my stories frequently anyway, even years after I've completed first drafts).  Thinking of those changes and the changes I could make to Minor Contracts doesn't even begin to take into account clarity.

Because I'm always wondering how clear my stories are.  Most of the writers around me strive almost single-mindedly for clarity.  Sometimes I've taken that to patronizingly calling their work simplistic.  And yet most stories are like that.  When it's anything but it's either quickly forgotten or a classic.  (And no, I'm not going to say I write classics.  That's for history to decide.  And here you understand that I'm speaking in the voice of Dr. Sheldon Cooper.  Which reminds me, bears are terrifying.)  

When I'm looking at my own work and not even considering clarity, I can understand why I look at a movie like Immortals differently than A. Lee Martinez.  Clarity is clearly one of his priorities.  Me, I can deal with a little mess.  This isn't to say that I'll accept anything.  There's really is such a thing as a hot mess, when someone's reach has exceeded their grasp.  I don't think that's the case with Immortals.  It would be hard for someone like Tarsem to do that after nailing something as brilliant as The Fall.

So when I look at my own writing, and worry about specific elements or passages, I'm worrying less about how they will ultimately work and more about how they fit into the greater tapestry.  There's got to be a unifying imperative.  In Immortals it was always John Hurt and and my belief in the abilities of Tarsem.  Did I convince myself the movie worked because I wanted it to work?  That will always be the counterargument.

But I don't think so.

My Current Doings

Things I'm currently working on:

• "Unsafe at Any Speed" - This is a short story for a WWII era anthology that's being spearheaded by Brennon Thompson, started out as a proposal for comic books but has since shifted to at least initially a prose property.  This story takes its title from one of Ralph Nader's famed consumer advocate articles (that for some reason he never talked about while running for president), but features a character I first envisioned while I was in high (possibly middle) school, a youthful speedster who sucks at being a speedster.  I've been working out the whole arc of the story, and that's been fun, as well as started writing it, but for some reason I've known that this isn't one that I should just get over with, which is what I do with the majority of my short fiction.  Thompson's vision is known collectively as The Tarnished Age, and hopefully I'll have more to say about this, even though it's been a thing I've been helping develop for months now.
• In the Land of Pangaea - Perhaps I've got a problem of the impulse to write too many books, especially considering that I've had a "little" trouble getting them published by someone other than myself (though I'll be working on that with Seven Thunders in the coming days and weeks, submitting it to at least two potential outlets).  The book I'll be starting soon (because I've more or less written a manuscript a year since 2009) is something I hadn't even considered until earlier this year (thus postponing yet again some other stories), but the more I've thought of it the more excited I've been to work on it.  Pangaea is all about a fake pre-history of mankind, a previous era of great achievement that takes place two hundred million years ago (during the Jurassic period), and ties together a lot of obsessions I've had and want to work out in writing (which tends to be what all my stories are about, which I figure should be what every writer does), among them the continent of Africa, Hurricane Katrina, and the trickster god Anansi, who makes a cameo (along with other deities) in Minor Contracts.  And yes, in my mind, part of the whole reason for writing Pangea at all is to help justify both Minor Contracts and the earlier Modern Ark, because one of the other things I hope to accomplish with Pangaea is a further exploration of dragons, and our continuing obsession with them, but outside of a typical fantasy setting.  The story will unite the present and the past, and dragons will be that connection.  The biggest conceptual hurdle of Modern Ark is the fact that the main character is a dragon, although he is also a perfectly normal human being.
• "Outliers - A Deep Space Nine Celebration" - I've been writing Star Trek fiction for more than a decade now.  For most people, this stuff is known as fan fiction, but for me, it's just another form of my own particular work, that follows its own particular rules, and is not strictly just me mucking around someone else's playground.  Actually, my Star Trek work is a huge part of my formative development as a writer, and I'm particularly grateful to it for that reason.  This story will appear on my writing blog.  Although fun fact!  I've written at least one Star Trek story every year since 1999.  This one won't be this year's first, but it will be one of the few ones to feature the cast of my favorite series, Deep Space Nine, which premiered on TV twenty years ago this year.  "Outliers" will feature each of the signature characters just before we met them, some of them in the very first episode, and many well beyond that point.  Should be fun!  Hopefully this particular one will be done before the end of this month, as will be the first draft of "Unsafe at Any Speed."
• And yes, there are a bunch of other stories I said I'd be working on this year, and before my laptop developed issues, they were absolutely going to be done.  But life threw some curveballs, and this is what I did with them.

The Seven Books That Follow "Seven Thunders"

With a nod to PT Dilloway's recent Scarlet Knight timeline/outline for future volumes, I thought I'd give you a sneak at the bigger picture for my current WIP, Seven Thunders, which is part of the greater Space Corps saga, which is something I've developed for almost twenty years.

Before doing so, however, let me just put in a word or two as to why I'm finally writing Seven Thunders, after initially conceiving it in 1998, and why I feel like announcing the rest of the series.  For one, I've written a number of manuscripts at this point (including Modern Ark and Minor Contracts, which I've talked a little about previously, as well as the Yoshimi trilogy, but more on that in 2013), and so have gained a certain level of confidence in my ability to write books I'm satisfied with.  But I'm also beginning to see where my vision can fit in.  Thanks to certain movie and television developments of the past ten years, I've been able to see past some of my original sources of inspiration, Star Trek and Star Wars.  Peter Jackson's Tolkien films, for instance, or Harry Potter, even George R.R. Martin's newfound wide success thanks to Game of Thrones on HBO.  These have widened the public's popular reception for science fiction and fantasy (at a certain point, Space Corps really starts to blend the two genres).  It's not hard to see how the recent past has made it cool to be a geek.

Anyway, that's not really here nor there.  Space Corps is my baby.  I've nursed it to the point of obsession.  It's time to start introducing it to the world.  Seven Thunders, as I've discussed in the past, owes a great debt to the War of 1812, so it's only appropriate that I've begun to make it known in the world in 2012, the bicentennial of the conflict.  It's about two brothers, however, caught in the cross-hairs of a war between civilizations.  I've learned a great deal about this story I've only thought I've known as I've been writing it.  There were some things about it that could only have happened once it became a reality rather than something floating around in my head (and various notes).

And yet Seven Thunders is only the beginning.  One way or another, the saga will continue:

• The Dark Side of Space, which in many ways is a direct prequel to the story.
• The Fateful Lightning, which in many ways is a direct sequel.
• A Tremor of Bones, which in many ways is my favorite Space Corps story.
• The Feud We Keep With Space, which mirrors many of the elements of Seven Thunders.
• Dead Letters, which brings the timeline into entirely new territory.
• The Second Coming, which plays even wilder games with the timeline.
• The Universe and You, which is an indirect prequel to Seven Thunders.

 Should be fun.  You have the Space Corps scoop right here.  Years from now you'll thank me!