Tag Archives: Darkborn

Darkborn goes academic

Derek Newman-Stille, author of the Speculating Canada blog*, who previously reviewed Darkborn, has just published an academic article on “Where Blindness is Not (?) a Disability: Alison Sinclair’s Darkborn Trilogy” in the September 2013 issue of Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature. He examines the trilogy in the context of literary portrayals and conventions of disability in general and blindness in particular, and compares and contrasts those with the descriptions of blind people themselves as to how they perceive the world. He points out the parts that worked, and the parts that did not, in places because of accommodation to genre and in places because, yes, I did not think something all the way through. It’s a very enjoyable read**, accessible to the non-English academic, and my one niggling criticism is that Mosaic is not open access. But I’m sure Derek has reprints.

* Which just last weekend won the Aurora Award for Fan Publication
** Which is not just authorial ego speaking!

Lessons learned along the way

In an exchange on a listserver I am on, the question of writing lessons learned along the way came up. This was my list . . .

Published novels are the finished product: one never sees the messes, failures and train-wrecks on the way, so one is completely misled as to how easy certain things are to execute. The downside of a diet of the best is that the emerging writer can become inadvertently overambitious and try things that are too difficult for them.
I did two dumb things and two smart thing in my first novel. Dumb things (ie, things I wasn’t developed enough to do): writing a quest novel, and using that past-present structure that Ursula Le Guin made work so beautifully in Dispossessed. I didn’t realize until a year or so after Legacies came out where I’d got it from, and why I was so wedded to it. The sort-of-quest structure is difficult to pull off because it doesn’t innately have a strong narrative drive behind it. Smart things I did: having a single viewpoint, and having a character I had deliberately written as attentive and extremely perceptive. Sometimes, wrestling with the need to convey something essential via a viewpoint character for whom it’s not in character to notice that, I miss Lian.
Certain plots are more bomb-proof than others – they carry their own structure and drive with them. [cref Blueheart]’s initial plot is a mystery, and once I’d got that – the dead body in the ocean – it found its shape quite quickly, carried along by the central question of who and how. By midway through the book the reader actually knew everything, and it turned into a political novel, but by then the central conflict was established and on its way to the climax. I did myself an inadvertent favour, there.
Quest plots – frequently the first plot an SF&F writer tries – are not as easy as they look: certain choices have to be made to ensure the quest plot gets and keeps its narrative drive and doesn’t become picaresque (a right-on editorial comment about an early draft of Legacies). If I were writing a quest, even now, I’d make sure that what was being sought and who was seeking it were established in the first chapter, and not lose sight of that for a moment. I’m still not sure enough in my plotting to do the young man/woman goes off all unknowing and find his/her destiny on the way. I was unwittingly smart enough to have the quest front and center in the beginning of Legacies’ frontstory, interspersing it with the interleaved backstory in which Lian had to find his mission.
Passive, reflective characters fall under the heading of Advanced Work. Again, writers have pulled off the reluctant hero wonderfully, but life is much easier if a character wants something and goes after it. Lian climbing over the wall, throwing himself into the path of Lara and Rathla and the story itself, was a wonderfully liberating moment for me.
Sometimes the writer just has to give up and do what’s obvious – usually because they’ve set themselves up that way. In one of my unpublished novels I was resisting a particular idea because it seemed too obvious. When I finally accepted that it had to be that way, a whole lot of other problems were suddenly solved, because my characters’ repugnance (they didn’t like the idea any more than I did) prompted them to actions that led directly to the showdown. Moral: It’s a bad idea for the writer to argue with their own story.
Even after (almost) 9.5 novels, I still don’t get control of the plot until my second draft (or later). I’ve just had to do a massive overhaul to keep two of my main characters on the scene for a major action setpiece (this was [cref Shadowborn]). I also had difficulties setting up a crucial event in that conflict, because I needed not to surprise the reader, but I knew that if one of the characters knew about it, it would be out of character for him to leave. So overhaul. And it works. So. Much. Better. Moral of the story: keep the viewpoints where the action is. As long as the action is essential to the plot.
If I reach the end of my first draft, and it isn’t right (usual metaphor: large plate of spaghetti, stands slithering over the sides), I start cutting. I usually have a fixed idea of the endpoint from fairly early on in the novel, and I reshape the novel to line up with the end. I cut out everything that that isn’t related to the end. Then I put in everything that’s missing.
On the other hand, all the scenes that end up on the cutting-room floor mean that by the time I get the scene I need, it practically writes itself because all the decisions are made and I have the characters rounded out. Ibsen described his growing familiarity with his characters through successive drafts. In the first draft he knew them as if he had met them on a train (‘One has chattered about this and that’). By the second draft he might have spent a month at a spa with them (‘I have discovered the fundamentals’). By the third draft, he knew them thoroughly (‘as I see them now, I shall always see them’).
I try to obey Chekov’s Law (‘One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.’), which usually means I have to round up a certain amount of unused artillery during revisions. One of the downsides of writing a trilogy is that once [cref Darkborn] was committed to press, I was committed to firing off the guns lying around. Twelve of them, when I did the inventory in my notebook. I was delighted when I found a way to get four to pop off at once in the archduke’s breakfast.

Writing in the dark

When I first thought up the Darkborn, I never envisioned writing three novels about them (plus an assortment of short story beginnings scattered like crumbs – or maybe seeds – on my hard drive). I had Balthasar and Floria, and the paper wall between them, and I had Tercelle Amberley arriving in distress on Balthasar’s doorstep, and I had Telmaine coming down the stairs and encountering Ishmael. Who was a Shadowhunter, whatever that was.

I ought to know by now to watch those offhand remarks. I toss one off, and when I look again it has sprouted and ramified, and turned into a major part of the plot.

So I hadn’t considered the sustained exercise of writing a novel completely lacking in visual references. The Darkborn are born without vision: they have eyes, but the optic nerve is atrophied. They replace vision with a sense akin to sonar; however, although the liberties I have taken are considerable. The original reference is Howard C Hughes fascinating book, Sensory Exotica. Electroreception is going to work its way into a story, one of these days.

First of all, I couldn’t use colour. I couldn’t describe the colour of peoples’ hair, eyes and complexions. I couldn’t describe the colour of curtains or carpets or tiles or linoleum or wallpaper or trinkets or flame or … or anything. In one stroke I’d lost the use of every single colour-word I possessed – and I keep lists of them, even the ones so archaic or extravagant as to be inadmissible to modern prose. I lost all references to distance; it’s not merely indistinct, as it is for myopes such as myself, but beyond reach of their senses. I had to expunge all references to distance and things only seen at a distance, sky, stars, clouds, etc, though horizon works its way in there, via an outré piece of artwork. I’d to start thinking about living in a world composed entirely of echoes, sounds, shapes, volumes, textures, and smells. My first concentrated exercise in it was that scene in Darkborn where Ishmael is lurking and waiting to speak to Vladimer. Ish is an excellent viewpoint for an immersion in the world of the Darkborn, because he pays such close attention to his senses. Balthasar and Telmaine are both urbanites.

Next, eyes are irrelevant to the Darkborn. I couldn’t describe looks or glances, directed or exchanged, when I was in Darkborn heads. No-one’s eyes would meet another’s in a private moment. In my teens, I’d been given a boxed set of Jane Austin’s novels, and the introduction to one of them described Austen’s portrayal of the language of looks and glances in playing out relationships and social exchanges in that repressed and rôle-prescriptive society. Nothing else about Austen took (truly), but I liked that. With the Darkborn, I lost that vocabulary, too; I had to do much more with speech, tone, and timing. I think being a regular listener to radio drama helped

Furthermore, there’s no watching from the sidelines. A Darkborn can listen without being observed, but the moment he or she sonns, his or her attention becomes obvious to the listener. That changes the dynamics; passivity is less achievable. Sneaking around is challenging, since Darkborn are aware each others’ sonn. Scenes such as the one where Ishmael comes into Tercelle’s house required strategy, on my part as well as his. I wasn’t quite writing action with my eyes shut – because doing that has the tendency to produce output like piy[iy ;olr yjod, but I was deep in my head.

If I admit to doing this, someone’s sure to send me an email saying ‘you missed one’, but I did try to remove all visual references. I kept ‘visualized’, as a generic term for an internal representation of a reality, but I tried to round up and substitute for ‘look/looked’, ‘see/saw/seen’, ‘watch/watched’, etc, without getting into verbal contortions. There was a point late in the edits of Darkborn when I was so sensitized to the words that they distracted me in other people’s writing.

I got a bit odd, I must admit. One does – well, I do – when the writing becomes intense. If the phone rings, I’m not quite sure who’s going to answer it. I’ve experienced my characters’ dreams and the odd attack of social anxiety for violating imaginary customs. At one point during the revision of the Darkborn sections of Lightborn I could be found following a nervous pigeon along a side-street, trying to find the exact words for the softly opaque, greyish cream of its feathers. I’d go into a trance in the grocery store with a tomato in my hand, tripping on its pure redness. (When I was writing Blueheart, it was plums. Eight hours writing, and I’d be standing in Safeway thinking, ‘what is this thing?’, bewildered to find myself on dry land). I blame the need to go on restorative colour trips for my fascination with the graphics capabilities of R, and the vcd package – though I think the 20″ by 20″ mosaic plot that took 1.5 hours to render was carrying it to excess.

Thank you, says the voice from the hole

This is the first month’s anniversary of Darkborn’s publication, and last night I did my first Google search on the title and noted that a number of people have already reviewed it. I’d like to thank you all. Even if you didn’t care for it, I still very much appreciate the time and attention you put into reading it, thinking about it, and writing about it. And of course, if you did like it … well, I’m human (when not being something else for literary impersonation purposes), susceptible, and even more appreciative.

I’m afraid I’ve been rather un-interactive; in fact, I more or less jumped in a hole and pulled it in after me. The first three novels I published were not only in the early days of the internet but stand-alones. By the time Legacies was published, I was deep in Blueheart. By the time Blueheart was published, I was trying to subdue Cavalcade. When I received reader and reviewer feedback, it was on a story that was completed in my mind and characters that had safely arrived, deservedly or undeservedly, at their destinies. Not on a story that was still working itself out and characters that were still developing. I had one critical comment pre-publication, quite offhand and definitely not intended to have the effect it did, that made me realize how easily my nerve could fail me in taking the trilogy where I want it to go. (I usually know where I want my characters to end up early in the writing, but the getting there is rather like the famous cartoon of the mathematical proof on the blackboard that has, in the middle, “And then a miracle occurs”.) So I’ve been – and continue to be – a bit skittish. Particularly since, instead of establishing the trajectory for Shadowborn over the summer, I’m in the midst of what has turned out to be a complex and substantial rewrite of Lightborn.

But it’s time to bunt myself out of the hole. Start Twittering again (I’m alixsinc – note the c – on Twitter and alixsin on identi.ca). Turn comments back on. Post photographs. Tidy up the blog. Finish posts and book-notes that are cluttering up my hard drive. Get over to tor.com and chip in my 2-bits-worth on some of their fascinating articles. Get the website upgrade done, which involves making a final decision on Dreamweaver (if it will condescend to accept my license key), Dokuwiki, or WordPress as the publication engine. So many more options since I first learned basic HTML. Can’t promise much over the next month, alas. Aside from Lightborn, I’ve summer courses in pharmacoepidemiology and Bayesian statistics. And I mean to get myself into a kayak at least once a week, before the water freezes once more. And since I’m in Montréal, I have a natural deadline to climb out of my hole: Worldcon 2009, Anticipation. Going to be fun!

Darkborn, out tomorrow

The official publication date for Darkborn is tomorrow, and I have finally got the page on line at my website, although the complete redesign I had been working on is still … being worked on. My love of bold design is at war with a cautious austerity born of knowledge of my own artistic limitations. Plus, after some two years of writing from the perspective of characters who do not see as we do, and therefore obliged to forego my usual repertoire of colour-words and visual references, I find cycling through Xaos fractals and tiling background patterns quite hypnotic.

And the website redesign – with transfer to a more modern CMS (probably WordPress) – is competing with revisions to Lightborn, incubation of Shadowborn, revisions to a technical document, and readings in Bayesian analysis. Plus the random sleet of particles of inspiration that seem to be particularly intense when I have things I must get on with … and the fact that spring has finally arrived, and the waters have thawed.