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Gaining Perspective
Well, the first two weeks of this new year have royally sucked. Mostly, it’s due to the non-COVID19 batch of misery that is slowly releasing its grip on me. The rest of it? Well, C’mon man!
Reactionary
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. ~Epictetus
When your field of work requires mental acuity, being beset with an extended case of seasonal ickiness is quite burdensome. In fact, you could say it was decidedly…
A Bunch Of 💩!
…and not just because I had a lot of gastrointestinal distress. The perpetual cloudy brain and exhaustion was no fun. Seriously, it’s been two solid weeks of utter suck.
It seems to be fading at last. Not a moment too soon, either. Boy, I thought I had completely lost the ability to think. Work has been suffering. Stuff that I wanted to have done last year is dragging along waiting for my brain to kick back into gear.
I did get a few key things done more or less at the last minute. I’m not happy about that at all. I should have been able to get them done when I set my mind to the task. Hopefully, I can do some catch-up work this weekend and be somewhere in the neighborhood of where I’d like to have been already.
Seriously! What A Bunch Of 💩!
That’s not even factoring in the work that I’ve yet to put in on my own business. Despite my weariness and muddled mental state, I do need to get going on the books that need writing this year and they’re not going to write themselves.
Great Expectations
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
I’ve mentioned before how much I admire Dickens’ ability to spin an intricately woven tapestry of a tale. My first exposure to Charles Dickens was one of the many interpretations of A Christmas Carol. My first opportunity to explore his heavier works came in 7th Grade English when we read Great Expectations.
Seemingly unrelated characters and plot lines all came together over the course of the novel. It was an unconventional type of mystery. I was used to mysteries being set in an otherwise orderly world.
Everything’s fine 👉🏻 A crime is committed 👉🏻 The detective sorts it out 👉🏻 The criminal is identified and arrested 👉🏻 Life returns to a new normal.
Not so with the complex avenues of Great Expectations. Who’s the convict? What’s with the crazy old lady? Why is the little girl such a bitch? How is Pip supposed to get on with his life with such a jacked-up cast of characters plaguing his life?
I can only hope to get there after a lot of practice but at least I have the benefit of hindsight and lots of excellent examples to draw inspiration from.
Great Expectations 1946 Full Movie
Time’s Lens
Time moves in one direction, memory in another. ~William Gibson
That’s the interesting thing about narrative prose. As you’re reading it, it generally follows a distinct timeline. That being said, a lot of prose is written in the past tense as if the main character is remembering an event.
Being able to shift perspective is a useful tool for storytelling. You can keep people riveted in the moment or you can put them on a slow boat to someone’s reminiscence.
For the Sentinels, there’s quite a bit of history to cover. To that end, I’ve been looking into some timelining tools. Fortunately, the most useful of those I found appear to be MS Excel files.
It’s all good in theory. We’ll see if that turns out to actually be the case.
As I mentioned previously, Connor recommended starting at the end and working backward to hit all of the major plot points and introduce the twists I’m hoping to include. There’s a fair amount of territory to cover since the stories technically span from the present day back to the early Seventeenth Century and perhaps beyond.
The best way to get it all together and have some perspective is to put it all on a timeline. Some of the heroes who turn up later in the series will be teased as kids who are fans of the Sentinels in one way or another. In order to do that correctly, I need to break out the key dates of Sentinels history and all of the birth dates of the characters.
It has been said that you only need as much world-building as is necessary to tell the story. In order for the characters to be the right age at the right time, it’s necessary to have a firm grip on this timeline.
With this information in hand, it’s a lot easier to stage memories that are of relevance to the story and introduce characters in correct relation to each other when their time comes. Since my natural inclination is to be a “pantser“, “gardener” or “discovery writer“, I can apply that style of creating to the process of starting at the end and working my way back.
The problem I’ve had in the past is that some of these paths of “discovery” wind up painting me into a corner. That actually winds up being kind of okay. If you look at a narrative in reverse, there are abrupt stops where any given storyline actually begins. That winds up not being a corner so much as the terminus of a ray.
If you remember math class, a line had an arrow at both ends to indicate that it extended infinitely in both directions. A ray, however, was drawn as a line with a knob at one end and an arrow at the other end.
The knob is the point of origin and the ray is understood to extend infinitely away from the point of origin in the direction of the line. In my case, I’m walking the ray in the direction opposite of the arrow end. As such the seemingly inevitable awkward stop is actually the point of origin and therefore a logical stop rather than an awkward one.
Quicksilver Kitchen Scene – X-Men Days of Future Past – MOVIE CLIP (4K HD)
That’s what’s buzzing in my bonnet at this point. At least the bees are finally stirred. This post-Christmas crud has been causing me no end of lost productivity. Hopefully, I’m actually past it now. My stomach is still pretty unsettled and I’m only too happy to take a recuperative nap after a bit of doing. Hopefully, you are feeling well and productive. I’m almost there…