It’s the story of a guy who warns everyone of imminent danger and then vanishes into the frozen water. The facts get confused. Everyone remembers his story differently from the other, until the guy reappears but they now ignore him.
It’s all about perception, like riding a ship down a muddy canal on a rich fall day.
Truth be told, there is no content. That’s the thing. I know I should spend less time on my perverted stories and listening to Black Sabbath’s Snow Blind. Too many old comics too.
A spark is needed to start writing. And the trick is to allow that thing to turn into something substantial before getting at it. This can’t be forced or ignored. It’s like a cat. She pretends she doesn’t want to interact, but she does.
You just have to wait, even when she is sitting there. She needs to be coddled. Oh, no, not coddled! My mistake. That can’t be said, even thought. Appreciated. That’s the word. Appreciated.
Play with her. Stroke her face and sides. She will go with that. And then it’s great fun and games, moving ahead like it was nothing at all. Why weren’t we always here? Simple as that? And then she is gone, quick as it started, and it’s a matter of waiting for another round
Non-fiction writing is the art of the unseen. The author must create a clear narrative with a definitive voice, revealing the story to the reader, and never take over.
At one end of the spectrum are poorly written books like The Mad Trapper of Rat River or James Barnett’s Captain George Vancouver in Alaska and and the North Pacific which sacrifice discernible structure for a spew of meandering details. At the other end, overly books such as David Grann’s The Lost City of Z or the obsessively detailed Lost Paradise by Kathy Marks read like never-ending magazine, drowned by minutia and over-writing.
Non-fiction demands something in the middle, not a information dump nor the author doing cartwheels but something that does the story justice through clear prose and content.
Two books I have read of late fit this bill. Nathanial Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea probes costs of survival at sea while Don Starkell’s remarkable Paddle to the Amazon documents the remarkable story of a 12,000 mile canoe trip, both taking the reader on a journey they will not soon forget.
One of my few strengths as a writer is dialogue. I rarely use an outline or definitive plan. Instead I focus on knowing the characters, watching them move and interact. Most important of all is knowing what their motivation is for the scene (why they there and what they want) as well as their background and relationship with the other(s).
I spend a great deal of time in thinking about how the scene starts, the exact lines and scene, and keep that moment in my head. It is almost like a moving snapshot – a gif as it were – that goes around and around, anxious to get out of the loop. And then I let them go and do what they want. At that point, it’s just a question of keeping up with what they say, basically transcribing as they go. They can get stuck, repeat themselves and run down blind alleys. It’s all a matter of trying to keep them on track.
The trick is to move ahead for as long as their voice stay strong. And when the momentum is gone, to step back a little and start again, like getting a car out of the muck, rock it back and forth until it’s back on track. Once the scene is done, it needs to be run through again a couple more times. Time is needed after that, a few days to do a proper edit, focusing on the structure and repetitions and that oh-so-impossible satisfying arc.
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