5. What’s in a Name?

When I used to teach novel-writing, I noticed that some students spent way too much time deciding what to call their characters. I don’t mean to suggest that your characters’ names are not important--they are. But often getting to know the character better will lead you to the perfect name.

In the case of Pandora’s Genes, the Principal is a case in point. When I began writing, he was known only as “the Principal.” That came to me without much thought, but it made sense in that I wanted a Leader-sounding name, but didn’t want to use “President” or “Commander” or “Commissar” or any similar title. “Principal” worked for me, because the Principal sees himself not only as a leader, but as an educator. His role model is Alexander the Great, who endeavored to spread Greek civilization throughout the known world.

I was well into Part II before I learned the Principal’s  given name: “Will.” This worked for me also, because he has a very strong will. The name and the title are used more or less interchangeably throughout the book, but I tended to use “the Principal” more when he was acting as a leader and “Will” in private moments. When other characters (like Zach) are displeased with him, or otherwise feeling distant, they tend to refer to him by the title, rather than his given name.

Zach’s name took a long time for me to settle on--I think I didn’t have it until near the end of the entire manuscript (rough draft). At first, I called him “diSachs,” because that was the name I’d seen in the dream I had that started my writing. I realized after a while that this probably came from a historical character in my favorite opera, Hans Sachs, from Die Meistersinger. In the opera, Hans Sachs is tempted by and perhaps in love with a young girl, which resonates with Zach’s situation, but the name never seemed right to me, so I changed it to Zach, and that worked.

Evvy’s name came from a couple of preteen kids who were hanging out at the running track in Riverside Park in NYC, where I used to jog. One afternoon shortly before I began writing Pandora’s Genes, I was stretching on the steps while the kids argued with each other. I couldn’t help noticing how beautiful the girl was. “Darn it, Evvy, stop that!” the boy snapped at her. I’d never heard that name before and loved it instantly; it was the only name I ever considered for my heroine.

Tomorrow: distractions that can prevent you from writing

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4. Who Are These Guys?

“The Principal was in a rage.” So begins Part II of Pandora’s Genes. As with the first part, the second seemed to come to me as if it had been dictated. I still didn’t know much about the Principal; but as I wrote more I came to  learn the following things about him: that he was a brilliant and charismatic leader who was dedicated to restoring civilization; that he was given to drinking too much and to volatile mood swings; that he hated and distrusted women, yet had a compulsion for sex with very young girls; and that he loved and trusted Zach above all others and found it difficult to carry on without Zach’s presence and counsel.

The story is written throughout from alternating points of view. As I continued to write, into Parts III and IV, I came to know Zach, Evvy, and the Principal as well as any real people in my life. I thought about them constantly, and dreamed about them.

I am sure that for most fiction writers each character comes from a part of our own personality, which is transformed through  creative alchemy. Obviously I have never been the charismatic leader of a society, nor a brave warrior; I have, however, been a fourteen-year old girl, yet I never had any more doubt about what Zach or the Principal would do than I did about Evvy’s actions.

I’ve been asked which of the characters I most identified with, and though you might think it would be Evvy, it was actually the Principal. He is a very complex man, and though several readers have expressed misgivings about his sexual predilections, I always saw him as a very sympathetic character, a good but deeply flawed man.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you a bit more about the Principal and where he and the others got their names.

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3. But What if Your Car Catches It?

Part I of Pandora’s Genes, which was a little over 100 pages long (25-30,000 words), introduced me to two of the main characters: Zach, the good man I had seen in my dream, and Evvy, a courageous fourteen-year-old girl whose parents have sold her to the Principal. All we (and I) know about the Principal at this point is that he is the ruler of the strange and dangerous country where Zach and Evvy live, and that Zach is his most trusted aide.

In this first section of the book, we see that plants and animals are for the most part mutated forms of animals we know today (the dangerous poison bats, for example, are mutations, as are the extremely bright and possibly empathic fox-cats); we learn that most women die if they give birth to female babies, resulting in an extreme scarcity of women; and we learn that these frightening conditions were caused by something that happened long ago called the Change.

Flashback: It is five years earlier, a year when oil spills were big news as they have become again today. I happened to read a piece in the Wall Street Journal about a natural bacterium that breaks down  oil; some scientists were working to make it a more efficient oil-eater.

I grew up with science fiction, and one of my great interests is genetics, so I was intrigued by the possibilities. What would happen, I wondered,  if the bacteria were made too efficient? What if they were to get out of control, creating a new “disease” that would attack machines that use oil? What, I wondered, if your car catches it?

As I embarked on Part II of Pandora’s Genes, I realized that the dangerous world in which Zach and Evvy found themselves was the very one I had imagined years earlier, the result of a scientific advance gone terribly awry.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about my introduction to the Principal, and how all of the pieces began to fit into a coherent narrative.

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2. Thurber’s Mud

For me, and for most writers I know, the hardest part of writing is the first step, getting something down on paper.

Throughout my writing life, I have found that the best way to get that first draft down is either to do as I did with Pandora’s Genes--to write as quickly as possible, not censoring or otherwise interfering with the flow--or, if nothing at all will come, to write a MINIMUM of one paragraph each night before going to bed. I’ve discovered that the one paragraph often turns to two, to four, to a page or more. Either method leaves me with a very sloppy draft, what James Thurber referred to as “mud.”

The 100 or so pages I had when I finished my paroxysm of creating Part I of Pandora’s Genes, was most definitely mud: full of incomplete sentences, repetition, inconsistencies, infelicities of language, abbreviations of things I would want to fix later. But the important parts were there: the basic story and two of the three main characters.

Learning how to turn a very rough draft into professional prose was for me a big part of the process of becoming a professional writer.  I will have more to say about this in a later post, but basically it has always been a matter of trial and error, trying first one thing and then another, seeing what fits, removing things that don’t fit or moving them to a better place.

Ah, I hear you asking, but how do you know if something fits or not? I believe that this knowledge can only come with experience, and that experience must include lots of reading of other people’s work--the classics, bodice rippers, The Wall Street Journal, children’s books, whatever you enjoy. It’s also necessary to read and re-read your own work. Is this sentence smooth? Hasn’t that word already been used sixteen times in the same chapter? Is this really the way someone would talk? Reading aloud, is the rhythm right, not only in the dialogue but in the exposition?

In a later post I’ll give an example of how I cleaned up the “mud” in one problematic passage of Pandora’s Genes. But tomorrow I will return to the book’s genesis, and show you how The Wall Street journal figured into it.

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1. The beginning of Pandora’s Genes

This is my first post for the 2012 WordCount Blogathon, which takes place all of May. 

I was already a professional writer, mostly of adult nonfiction and series books for children, when I wrote my first adult novel, Pandora’s Genes. It began as a dream, just after I had finished a long, research-heavy book.

In the dream, I saw a good man who was about to do something very bad for what he thought were good reasons. The dream was fuzzy about what he was doing and why, but the feelings when I woke up were sharp and real. Who was this man? What was he about to do? Why was he going to do it? I really had no idea, but the thoughts were so insistent that I sat down and started typing… and basically didn’t stop until I had a rough draft of the entire first part of Pandora’s Genes. This first writing took me about three weeks, and it was essentially all I did during that time. .

This was the first and so far only time I have written something long this way; it was almost as if it were being dictated to me. The characters and situations seemed to arrive on the page of their own accord, and I worked as quickly as I could, because I wanted to find out what would happen next. The process was very exciting, mentally and yes, physically. I later described it to a friend as “like having a three-week long orgasm.”

It was six years from the first writing before the book was published, but the basic kernel for the entire story was there, then.

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Me and Zach*

I have signed up for a blogathon challenge.  This will involve blogging every day for a month, starting May 1 and ending on May 31.  I am doing this partly because of Kindle KDP, in which I have some books enrolled.  These are my first conventionally-published science fiction novel, Pandora's Genes, Pandora's Children (which is not enrolled), and The Ptorrigan Lode, a novella that was never previously published.  I have also enrolled Going to See Grassy Ella, my favorite of my children's books.

If you enroll a book exclusively in KDP, you are allowed five promotions (making the book available for free) per quarter. This has been demonstrated to lead to increased sales.  I have offered Pandora’s Genes for free three times, and have given away probably 4000 copies.  As for sales, so far I have sold several dozen copies of the book.  But the interesting thing is that one to three weeks after each promotion I sell more copies of Pandora's Children then of the original book.  It seems clear that people who have read the first book want to find out what happens next.  So my plan is to now write the third novel in the series, which I have been thinking about for many years.

The writing of the first two Pandora’s books, and my progress on the third book, will be the main subjects of my blog posts during the Blogathon.

*Zach is one of the three main characters in the Pandora’s books.

Brave New (and speedy) World

The technology of writing has changed more than I can believe in the nearly 40 years I have been a professional writer. I am thinking now of the process of publishing on the Internet. Back in the day it could take months or years to publish a book. Now, once your book is formatted, you fill out some forms online and within a few hours your book is available. I recently needed to change one of my covers. It used to take forever to choose a cover and to have the available art completed. This time I got in touch with a friend who is a graphic artist and explained what I needed. He told me where I might look for images, I found an image, I told him what I wanted, and within a couple of hours he had a cover for me to look at. I asked for a couple of changes, he made some tweaks, and voila! I had a cover. I put it on Kindle and within 3 hours it was available.

Of course, before I got to the publication stage I had spent many, many hours revising my manuscript. I also had many readers look at it. Some were professional editors. This is one of the main problems with the self-published books. Many if not most are insufficiently edited. I believe that eventually the better written and better edited books will prevail in the marketplace. For now it is fun and exciting just to be a part of the process.

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