Boy, am I thinking about process a lot this week. Wonder if it has anything to do with all the writing I’ve been doing, and how my very soul is not being sucked out by the Day Jobbe. Huh. Funny that.
So today’s process-thinking is all the way down at the sentence level. And it has to do with reading other people’s work while you’re writing. I mean, not literally while writing; but what books or crit work or whatever you’re doing during the weeks and months you’re composing a novel, or the shorter time you’re composing a story.
I know a lot of writers don’t read fiction when they’re composing, but I’ve never been able to do that. I love reading too much; and I think the constant fertilization of other ideas, other prose, other styles, feeds my own fiction–makes it richer, more complex.
But it’s important to switch out what you’re reading. Otherwise you get voice-imprinting, style-imprinting.
Like what happened to me yesterday.
I just finished reading Dragon in Chains, by moshui (Daniel Fox). Gorgeous, gorgeous book, and it has such a distinctive and pleasing elegance to the prose, a rhythm. I kept noticing it as I read–not in a distracting way, but in a happy way. I wish I could write that pretty.
Well, apparently, so does my undermind. Because when I sat down to write yesterday’s words, they came out stylized just a little different. I knew I was doing it at the time, but since it was a first draft, I just let it go; this can all be smoothed out in the editing. And Jay will put his own mark on the book, of course.
But here’s a paragraph from yesterday:
“Turn, turn, turn damn you!” Reikos yelled, and somehow, the Fair Passage nudged her nose just the tiniest bit to the right, and the immense ship still scraped against the side of the bridge as she passed under it. Sian ducked her head, though she wasn’t in danger of being hit; just cringing from the impact, moving her body as if she controlled anything. As if the power in her person could do anything useful in this moment. As if she could do anything but yell, and yell some more, unheard in the larger shouts around her.
For comparison, from page 85 of Dragon in Chains:
He felt it, all unsaid, day and night around him. Now particularly, when they had a stone of such majesty, a stone that could be cut into a famous piece, an imperial treasure; now, with the emperor on Taishu, why should they simply hand their discovery over to a common wagoner in exchange for his reckoning of its value by weight, paid in coarse fabrics and tea…?
Do you see it? It’s subtle, and moshui does it so much better than I do, but there’s an elongation of the sentences, a gentle rhythm there. It’s not how I usually write. Oh, sure, I blather on in this journal; but it’s not how I usually write fiction, anyway. 🙂
(And, parenthetically, if moshui was in the Zombie Club and Red Shoes got hold of his manuscript, she’d be all over him for the “mistake” of using comma splices. She really, really takes me to task for them. It’s nice to see that they can be allowed in published work.)
Anyway–this kind of thing could be a problem, I think, if you don’t notice it, if you let another’s style influence yours. If you fall prey to the imprinting, and don’t fix it in editing. And it’s why it’s especially important, I think, to read widely while writing. Before Dragon in Chains, I read Perdido Street Station–which had such a strong style, so alien from my own, that it didn’t affect me at all. Same with matociquala’s Blood & Iron, which I also read during this draft.
So I guess it has to seem close enough to my own writing to be achievable, to my undermind, for it to bleed over. Which I only want it to do in completely invisible ways: fertilizer; or, one seasoning among many: not ingredients. Anyway, I started Rosemary and Rue last night, by Seanan McGuire. We’ll see how that goes…