My Box
I’ve taken a break from the querying process to do maintenance on my wee novel, clearing up which characters need to be deleted, which characters need to be added. It has been an enjoyable process. Especially now that my rogue printer has been brought back into the world of functional reality.
Because I am writing a steampunk fantasy, there is an awful amount of worldbuilding that goes into shaping and sculpting this story. A lot of my materials are dedicated to the art of character work.
A few years ago, I found The Box at a craft supply store. It was big, large enough to hold notebooks of useless trivia on the three interweaving storylines that make up my book. History of wars and fascist movements? Check. The many stories that one character in particular relates to the others? Check. A list of settings and their descriptions? Check. It was spacious enough for papers and pens, small enough that when I moved into my current apartment, it fit comfortably under my desk.
The Box is the home of drafts of chapters. In the mornings, I get out my fountain pens, and I get to work shaving down the decadent language that no one likes but me. In the third draft of the novel, I knocked down about forty percent of the text by clipping and discerning which words, while I hope them pretty, were empty calories. The shed words have found a home in The Box.
Sometimes Fable likes to take his meaty paw and bat at The Box. There are woven thread handles that he is especially fond of pulling on one end until it is tight, then moving onto the other end so that the play never ceases. It makes its way across the borders of species.
The directory.
Nestled deep in the bottom of The Box is my directory, which consists of my meditations on the story, how I want it to be described (“Lush,” she said), a list of settings and their histories, and outlines of themes.
A history of the conflict known as the Moon Wars.
I found this notebook at World Market. In the novel, a backstory of armed conflict has repercussions for the current setting of the story, is the catalyst that pushes the tension forward, and therefore I needed to know the ins and outs of foresaid conflict. In the novel, these skirmishes are known as the Moon Wars.
The Box plays host to my fascination with history in this sense. When I was sixteen, I finally took an American history class that offered up not just facts and dates, but an exploration of how and why the competing philosophical visions of the country came to be, the development of character and ideas. I was so moved that I put this goal in The Box. With luck, the reader will see some growth in the ideas of this secondary world.
The stories that make up this secondary world.
The central theme of the novel is that we are storytelling animals at our hearts. The stories we tell ourselves, so to speak. In The Box, these stories are placed in a jaunty brown notebook that Kailee and Jared gifted me one Christmas. Its paper is creamy, makes for a smooth writing experience.
The kinds of stories that make their way into this journal include mythologies of the secondary world, a list of angels and their personalities, the great cosmic wars at the helm of the worldbuilding experiment. This is a story where angels live openly, can be vindictive, can die. And when framed between life and death, a myriad of possibilities open up, a cavern of ideas.
The Proust Questionnaire
Among the oldest inhabitants of The Box is the Proust Questionnaire, a handful of questions related to the understanding of the internal world of a single person. There are about thirty-six questions, acting as a test of the pulse of a character. I answer the Proust Questionnaire on behalf of every major character in the novel.
Writers of any book have to determine if their novel is plot-forward or character-forward. I tend to subscribe to the thought that at the end of the day, the characters will peak out likes stars in a constellation, and the constellation itself is the plot. My book is in part a character study of a boy in the throes of grief and madness. But there is also a portal, a war, and an enchanted forest. People are housed in the storylines; I try not to forget that. So it also goes in The Box.
The tertiary world.
Welcome to the newest notebook in The Box. Here, we have a worldbuilding guide for the tertiary world that appears later on in the series. As a bit of a spoiler, this world is not steampunk, but, rather, cyberpunk. The lack of development of this setting has stalked me for some time now. When I turn around, my insecurities about it dart around a corner and vanish.
But they cannot hide from The Box.
Beetle's stories.
Also found at World Market, we have the stories that the character, Beetle, tells in this book. Our dear Beetle is fond of ghost stories, fables with animals, and theology. The thing is, a lot of the themes pivot around her. If this is a book about the stories we tell ourselves, then in some ways, Beetle is the one who speaks most truth and power to that notion. She gets her own book, separate from the brown notebook, and both of them go in The Box holding hands.
When characters interact
Characters are a bit like individual sounds that, when blended, produce the new word. I have an entire notebook — see above — dedicated to the ways in which characters interact, how they feel about each other, how it affects the plot. I decorate the pages of this one with colored pencils, little stickers.
One might naturally assume that I use the sketchbooks for maps or character illustrations. Alas, The Box is safe from such a constituent because I have the artistic abilities of a shrieking toddler. The sketchbook goes towards planning, and I get back to dreaming.
Character diaries.
For the past month, I have been battling a writing slump. I know that writing is a job, a professional commitment; I cannot indulge slumps. A few weeks ago, I was writing in my journal, my hand forming a fist beneath my chin. Writing there was natural, breathed. I decided to use the notebook Vicki kindly bought me for my birthday to write character diaries.
In all honesty, I can report to any writer that it has been spectacular. If you are like me, sometimes you get a bit overwatered and overwhelmed by the various threads and ideas that one wants to bring to the page. Sometimes, I get so worked up that my pen hovers above the page, drooping my hand. By switching to writing the text to writing the diary of the POV character, I’ve broken ground into new insights. What a wonderful way to learn new things about the world. Of course, it had to have a place in The Box.
Writing.
And, of course, there is no book without actual writing. I have about four or five notebooks ready to receive text, and I switch from them depending on my attention span in a given chapter. I never had the most robust attention span, so bouncing about has been the only way to proceed for me. I throw stick pens and highlighters at the problem like water on a fire.
The Box bulges a bit these days. When I close it, Fable scales it like it is his private seat of power. I suppose it is mine as well. It is cumbersome, but it holds this project that has been near to my heart, such that it nestles in it, for so long. It is almost a friend.
