All doubts and existential quandaries aside...home is home...
Some measure of normality for once is a God send.
More ways than one really...
Saturday, December 4, 2010
What's in a Novel?
I seriously cannot believe November is already over.
Considering all of the school work, health issues, school obligations, having three people join (and another four people express interest) in the classic Deadlands game I've been running and writing the first draft of my fourth novel...all of it just flew by ever so quickly.
More than once I have had people question my sanity over not just the task of writing a fifty thousand word first draft in just a month but writing a novel at all, much less the fact this was my fourth time to take part in Nanowrimo.
I have four rough novels on my hard drive, something that adds up to being somewhere between 220,000 and 250,000 words of fiction.
That I, Matt Pike, wrote.
I feel some context, some explanation for all this madness is in order:
I. My first venture into the NANOWRIMO madness was back in 2007 and I wrote an incredibly awkward fantasy novel set in modern America about a group of hapless fools who had the misfortune of being chosen to save the world. I plagiarized the personalities of several close friends at the time, the narration style of Douglas Adams and the plot of most every console RPG to be released in the past decade.
The basic story followed a group of teenagers/early twenty somethings who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and had a Guardian (think angelic warrior type wielding a katana) who was commissioned to find the chosen ones and lead them on a quest to prevent an ancient evil from being unleashed onto the world.
Being unfortunate to have me as the writer means their quest was for nougat because they all were screwed over in the end by the leader of the organization who was supposed to be stopping this madness. Their quest lead them to bringing a relic to a holy site that ripped a hole open in the fabric and time and space, causing a spiritual barrier to be removed and in a literal sense all of Hell broke loose upon the world and the heroes were caught in the vortex.
Considering my incredibly lack of skills of narration and writing it is at least a somewhat redeemable work.
II. My second novel during the 2008 novel season was written as a direct sequel to the first book (neither of which have names yet) and continued the groups misadventures as they had been trapped on an alien world and were trying to return hope to stop everything they loved from being wiped out.
I was going through a rather dark phase so the black humor aspect was played up quite a bit and although I broke the 50k mark there really was no real ending and I was at a lost to what I should write.
III. Then came my third novel which became a stereotypical high fantasy novel with a stereotypical unpronounceable name, "The Twilight of Sin'ai" and I took a lot of influence from both "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Dark Tower Series".
In my mind "Sin'ai" takes places in the same universe as the first two novels but was a prequel of sorts showing a grand spiritual battle taking among the stars and that the Earth was insulated from the horrors of it all.
A race of fallen beings called The Dark (original, I know) are these beings who have been stripped of all emotion and rational thought, they are like a virus that simply consumes and steals the bodies of people and creatures and take their form but are merely a twisted and perverse caricature of what once was.
The main group of heroes are fighting a loosing war to protect their realm and have to chase a mysterious man in dark and crimson colored robes who has stolen an artifact which if used can open a portal and allow the Dark free reign to consume this doomed world.
It is quite possible that I was going through a really dark time of my life because without intending to there is a lot of fatalism and nihilistic themes, more so than this years novel which was the intended focus.
IV.This brings us to this year, 2010 and my novel which was lovingly dubbed "The Downward Spiral". A lot of my essays on spirituality draw their names from song titles so it made sense to me that this book would be named after one of the albums I listened to most during the writing process.
The original goal for this novel was to construct a storyline and plot which could be both a stand alone story as well as provide the content for a campaign for the "Call of Cthulhu Campaign". I drew from several sources, most notably H.P. Lovecraft, Steven King, Franz Kafka and Flannery O'Connor.
I wanted to take some unfortunate every day people and throw them into these horrible and impossible situations where the best they could hope is to last just a few minutes longer as the barrier of what is possible/impossible gets ripped down and they feel their sanity being ripped from their being. A lot of the essences was that they were shown the edge of the world and looked over to see this overwhelmingly impossible void that they looked into and saw something coming for them out of the darkness.
I consciously made the choice to pick a genre I have avoided, that of supernatural horror. I also tried to let the content flow as organically as it could and so there is a good amount of dark content so that I would label the books as being PG-13 if not R rated. I did not set out to try and offend people by having characters that swore, had sexual thoughts or were in danger of dying but in order to be true to the story I had to tell what I was saying.
To a degree I still do not know what the ending of this book is, I had a few scenes in my head and did the best I could to connect all of them into some sort of coherent order and considering how little experience I have in this genre...I think it came out well.
There were several points where I considered just scrapping the project and try to stick to something familiar but then I came across this utterly amazing quote:
"The writer who emphasizes spiritual values is very likely to take the darkest view of all of what he sees in this country today. For him, the fact that we are the most powerful and wealthiest nation in the world doesn't mean a thing in any positive sense. The sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him... My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable... The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural."
-Flannery O'Connor
This quote sort of smacked me in the face with not just inspiration but this obligation, this need to avoid the intellectual and creative ghetto that exists within the American Christian bubble.
I do not read much Christian fiction because I find both genres to be hopelessly dull, contrived, predictable and full of more Deus ex Machina's than you could hit with a dead Greek playwright.
There are good intentions in trying to shelter people from themes and ideas that might be too much for them, however it should be pointed out that if the entire Bible was adapted it would be rated X because in Genesis alone you have sexy, murder, incest, extortion, lying, drunk people stumbling around, God killing the majority of the population and nuking a couple of cities.
To say that one can read about these things in the Bible and that they are topics in faction that are taboo is a double standard that helps no one.
I have no illusion of ever having any of my books in Lifeway or the other chain Christian bookstores because I have little interest or desire to write feel good, mushy, lovey-dovey let's all hold hands and sing songs while pretending that only "sinners" and "bad" people experience bad things in life.
I suppose me saying that is a wee bit pretentious but I am okay with that.
At the end of the day the best any of us can do is pray, hope and trust that we can follow the convictions and desires God has placed in our hearts.
To me those convictions are:
1.No comprising or censoring of the works I write.
2.That I need to be as painfully honest and open about my struggles because too many Christians hide their scars and pretend everything is perfect when this world is broken. Any fool can see that and I refuse to put my head in the sand just to make people feel good about their complacency.
3.I was given this ability to write and until the day I die I am going to keep writing, keep revising and tell the stories I most want to hear because there are those who need to hear them just as badly as I do.
4.Temet nosce, the unexamined life is not worth living and to write I have to live, fail, learn and grow.
5.Bake more brownies and give out more hugs.
Considering all of the school work, health issues, school obligations, having three people join (and another four people express interest) in the classic Deadlands game I've been running and writing the first draft of my fourth novel...all of it just flew by ever so quickly.
More than once I have had people question my sanity over not just the task of writing a fifty thousand word first draft in just a month but writing a novel at all, much less the fact this was my fourth time to take part in Nanowrimo.
I have four rough novels on my hard drive, something that adds up to being somewhere between 220,000 and 250,000 words of fiction.
That I, Matt Pike, wrote.
I feel some context, some explanation for all this madness is in order:
I. My first venture into the NANOWRIMO madness was back in 2007 and I wrote an incredibly awkward fantasy novel set in modern America about a group of hapless fools who had the misfortune of being chosen to save the world. I plagiarized the personalities of several close friends at the time, the narration style of Douglas Adams and the plot of most every console RPG to be released in the past decade.
The basic story followed a group of teenagers/early twenty somethings who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and had a Guardian (think angelic warrior type wielding a katana) who was commissioned to find the chosen ones and lead them on a quest to prevent an ancient evil from being unleashed onto the world.
Being unfortunate to have me as the writer means their quest was for nougat because they all were screwed over in the end by the leader of the organization who was supposed to be stopping this madness. Their quest lead them to bringing a relic to a holy site that ripped a hole open in the fabric and time and space, causing a spiritual barrier to be removed and in a literal sense all of Hell broke loose upon the world and the heroes were caught in the vortex.
Considering my incredibly lack of skills of narration and writing it is at least a somewhat redeemable work.
II. My second novel during the 2008 novel season was written as a direct sequel to the first book (neither of which have names yet) and continued the groups misadventures as they had been trapped on an alien world and were trying to return hope to stop everything they loved from being wiped out.
I was going through a rather dark phase so the black humor aspect was played up quite a bit and although I broke the 50k mark there really was no real ending and I was at a lost to what I should write.
III. Then came my third novel which became a stereotypical high fantasy novel with a stereotypical unpronounceable name, "The Twilight of Sin'ai" and I took a lot of influence from both "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Dark Tower Series".
In my mind "Sin'ai" takes places in the same universe as the first two novels but was a prequel of sorts showing a grand spiritual battle taking among the stars and that the Earth was insulated from the horrors of it all.
A race of fallen beings called The Dark (original, I know) are these beings who have been stripped of all emotion and rational thought, they are like a virus that simply consumes and steals the bodies of people and creatures and take their form but are merely a twisted and perverse caricature of what once was.
The main group of heroes are fighting a loosing war to protect their realm and have to chase a mysterious man in dark and crimson colored robes who has stolen an artifact which if used can open a portal and allow the Dark free reign to consume this doomed world.
It is quite possible that I was going through a really dark time of my life because without intending to there is a lot of fatalism and nihilistic themes, more so than this years novel which was the intended focus.
IV.This brings us to this year, 2010 and my novel which was lovingly dubbed "The Downward Spiral". A lot of my essays on spirituality draw their names from song titles so it made sense to me that this book would be named after one of the albums I listened to most during the writing process.
The original goal for this novel was to construct a storyline and plot which could be both a stand alone story as well as provide the content for a campaign for the "Call of Cthulhu Campaign". I drew from several sources, most notably H.P. Lovecraft, Steven King, Franz Kafka and Flannery O'Connor.
I wanted to take some unfortunate every day people and throw them into these horrible and impossible situations where the best they could hope is to last just a few minutes longer as the barrier of what is possible/impossible gets ripped down and they feel their sanity being ripped from their being. A lot of the essences was that they were shown the edge of the world and looked over to see this overwhelmingly impossible void that they looked into and saw something coming for them out of the darkness.
I consciously made the choice to pick a genre I have avoided, that of supernatural horror. I also tried to let the content flow as organically as it could and so there is a good amount of dark content so that I would label the books as being PG-13 if not R rated. I did not set out to try and offend people by having characters that swore, had sexual thoughts or were in danger of dying but in order to be true to the story I had to tell what I was saying.
To a degree I still do not know what the ending of this book is, I had a few scenes in my head and did the best I could to connect all of them into some sort of coherent order and considering how little experience I have in this genre...I think it came out well.
There were several points where I considered just scrapping the project and try to stick to something familiar but then I came across this utterly amazing quote:
"The writer who emphasizes spiritual values is very likely to take the darkest view of all of what he sees in this country today. For him, the fact that we are the most powerful and wealthiest nation in the world doesn't mean a thing in any positive sense. The sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him... My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable... The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural."
-Flannery O'Connor
This quote sort of smacked me in the face with not just inspiration but this obligation, this need to avoid the intellectual and creative ghetto that exists within the American Christian bubble.
I do not read much Christian fiction because I find both genres to be hopelessly dull, contrived, predictable and full of more Deus ex Machina's than you could hit with a dead Greek playwright.
There are good intentions in trying to shelter people from themes and ideas that might be too much for them, however it should be pointed out that if the entire Bible was adapted it would be rated X because in Genesis alone you have sexy, murder, incest, extortion, lying, drunk people stumbling around, God killing the majority of the population and nuking a couple of cities.
To say that one can read about these things in the Bible and that they are topics in faction that are taboo is a double standard that helps no one.
I have no illusion of ever having any of my books in Lifeway or the other chain Christian bookstores because I have little interest or desire to write feel good, mushy, lovey-dovey let's all hold hands and sing songs while pretending that only "sinners" and "bad" people experience bad things in life.
I suppose me saying that is a wee bit pretentious but I am okay with that.
At the end of the day the best any of us can do is pray, hope and trust that we can follow the convictions and desires God has placed in our hearts.
To me those convictions are:
1.No comprising or censoring of the works I write.
2.That I need to be as painfully honest and open about my struggles because too many Christians hide their scars and pretend everything is perfect when this world is broken. Any fool can see that and I refuse to put my head in the sand just to make people feel good about their complacency.
3.I was given this ability to write and until the day I die I am going to keep writing, keep revising and tell the stories I most want to hear because there are those who need to hear them just as badly as I do.
4.Temet nosce, the unexamined life is not worth living and to write I have to live, fail, learn and grow.
5.Bake more brownies and give out more hugs.
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