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do not condescend to your reader, and try not to confuse her, either.

Here I am writing the fifth book in a series, moving along carefuly from one scene to the next, listening to the characters talk to each other and think. Somebody is thinking about Curiosity, and it occurs to me in a distant, sort of irritating way (much like a mosquito buzzing) that some readers coming to the series by way of this book won't know who Curiosity Freeman is. She hasn't actually shown her face in this new book yet, either. So I've had no opportunity to introduce Curiosity, and she has no opportunity to introduce herself.

For those of you who have read the series so far, you'll realize this doesn't suit Curiosity in the least little bit. She's not shy. As she gets older she is even less not shy, if such a thing is possible. So what to do?

There are two extremes. One says, forget the backstory. The readers will figure it out; if not, they can go read the first four books. Trying to build in all the missing backstory makes the damn thing really unwieldy and awkward. Don't know who Curiosity is? Read between the lines. I'll also admit that it's hard thinking up new ways to describe something like, say, the cabin at Lake in the Clouds. I've had to introduce it five times now, withut repeating myself and potentially boring established readers. This I've handled to some degree by changing POV, but there's a limit. Does it matter if there isn't a description in this new novel? You can't answer that question, probably, if you've read any of the series at all. Or even if you haven't.

Lack of backstory means the novels don't have as much chance of standing on their own. They wobble. Even with the help of the long character list, they wobble. Do they wobble so much that a reader, who is engaged in the first three pages, will give up? That's the question.

Thus far I have managed (to my considerable surprise) to make the novels stand alone, I think. I keep getting email from readers who started with Lake in the Clouds and worked backwards. This makes me happy for a number of reasons:

(1) the standing alone thing, hard to pull off;

(2) I think (I hope) that I get better at this as I go along, so I always like the most recent book best. It makes me happy to have readers start with the most recent book

(3) readers are drawn in by the story enough to go looking for the rest of it.

But there's still the problem of what to do with this particular novel, right at this minute, and about Curiosity. Curiosity has announced her intention of sneaking into a footnote, which I have strictly forbidden. I do have control of the delete key, after all, and footnotes in a novel are more trouble than I care to take on. Though some novels have pulled it off very well indeed. The French Lieutenant's Woman comes to mind. No matter; can't start with footnotes in volume five of a series.

I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm just about finished with the newest novel in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, Song of Susannah. He has done something in this novel which was a huge risk, but I think he pulled it off. He wrote himself into the story. This whole series deals with the idea of multiple universes co-existing, all spinning off one axis (the Dark Tower) which is in danger. It's a quest story, of course, except the main characters jump from one reality to another now and then, differents whens and wheres. So King's characters (two of them) show up on his doorstep) He recognizes one of them (Roland) as his character but not the other (Eddie), because (this is the interesting part) he hasn't written Eddie yet. They are there, in part, to see to it that he carries on with the story, for the sake of saving the Dark Tower. This is weird, I know, and yet it works. It works for me, maybe, because I understand this strange idea of the characters turning up and making demands.

In the discussion King has with his characters, he's trying to explain why he abandoned the series after the first novel and one of them sums it up for him (paraphrased): what you do is a little bit like pushing. You push against the story, but this time it ... pushed back.

I laughed aloud at that, and I'm sure many other writers will too.

The reason all this comes to mind is that this curvature of King's story, layers within layers folding back on each other, involves revisiting earlier parts of the series to understand how the universes intersect. What might seem like a simple continuity error in an early volume (Eddie of New York is from -- he says -- Co-Op City in Brooklyn, when in fact Co-Op City is in the Bronx) Eddie's Brooklyn is Eddie's Where and When, but not ours, yours and mine. Is this whole series just an elaborate way for King to resolve a simple continuity error? Or was this planned from the beginning? Is it some combination of the two?

At any rate, this should help establish how complex these issues are. And why when I say that when Curiosity is talking about footnotes, I feel... pushed, but I'm still not sure exactly what to do about it.

June 21, 2004 12:10 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Pam Shaw at June 24, 2004 11:24 PM

Posted by: Sarah at June 25, 2004 11:44 AM