Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Slowly
I feel the muse stirring like an arthritic dog. A seventeen-year-old arthritic dog, begging me with her eyes, Put me down already, will you? But I’m stubborn. She’s not getting off so easily.
Mind you, all of this is happening in idea space. Nothing on paper yet, electronic or otherwise, but notes. Notes on culture, slang, plot, etc. Notes.
I have a setting and a roughed-out plot. It’s a trite plot, which isn’t always a bad thing. I’m hoping it will develop some freshness the more it molders in my brain. But anyway, what I’ve been missing is character. So let’s say we have two policewomen, call them, oh, Cagney and Lacey, and Cagney’s my main character, and yet the only one who is talking to me is Lacey.
But Cagney has to be my main character. She’s the outsider, so she should be best able to see through this foreign culture’s paradoxes and hypocrisies. And yet it’s Lacey who is coming alive in my mind while Cagney remains a few notes on mental paper.
As I endure this process, I’m rereading another alt history SF, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. And I’m wondering if Chabon had a similar problem, since his main character is really pretty simple when you get down to it: he’s an alcoholic cop, a divorcee who pines for his ex. Not too many layers there. He’s stubborn and brave, two musts for a hard-boiled cop protag. Meanwhile, his partner is a hoot — a bear of a man, a Tlingit Jew (hey, you’ll just have to read the book!) who carries around a whopping huge hammer as a sort of enforcer, who has way too many kids, whose wife alone threatens to steal every scene she shares.
Maybe that’s all I need for my Cagney: stubborn, brave, and broken. Maybe I should just let Lacey be the one with all the color.
D.
Mine has been stirring, too, but she’s being beaten up by regular applications of too-much-other-stuff. I have a setting and some technology and culture, but no characters.
Ah, well. Maybe in the new year….
Don’t feel bad . . . my characters are very nearly nonexistent.
I loved TYPU; Doc and her mom both hated it. I think you have to go into it liking and appreciating both noir *and* Judaica. One or the other may not be sufficient in and of itself… (perhaps noir is more important).
Hated it? See, I don’t understand that. Karen didn’t get past Chapter 1 because she felt the premise was too gimmicky. But any alternate history SF could be accused of being gimmicky. It’s a novel premised on a gimmick. What’s important is whether the gimmick makes for an interesting novel. Karen liked The Man in the High Castle, incidentally, so it’s not as though she rejects all alt history SFs. And she has read all of Chandler’s novels, so she doesn’t dislike noir, either.
Maybe she just dislikes Jews 😉