Whenever you finish a long piece, it's a good idea to write a kind of postscript, at least for yourself, about how it went.
Did it work out the way you thought it would? Did you do what you meant to do? How did it change on the way? What lessons did you learn?
Whenever you finish a long piece, it's a good idea to write a kind of postscript, at least for yourself, about how it went.
Did it work out the way you thought it would? Did you do what you meant to do? How did it change on the way? What lessons did you learn?
With Short Chapters, I learned two big ones:
When I first started posting at BCTS, I'd already written Rules Are Rules and was posting a chapter a day.
I was uncertain about whether my story really belonged on the site... whether I fit in with the other authors, and so I was a little vulnerable, and much more sensitive to comments and demands that I should have been.
Lucky for me, Rules Are Rules was already complete, and I had already begun the sequel. So I wasn't in the mood to make revisions, although I did fix a few things. Small things.
In any case, a lot of the comments on the story, on my blog, and in private messages complained that the chapters were too short. It was distressing. And when I replied, "The whole thing's already written, and this is how long the chapters are!" People said, "Post the whole thing, then!"
It was deflating.
Someone began insisting that I make Marcie's medical status clear.
Others had the mistaken impression that Mark was being forced to be a girl, and that really bothered me.
In a word, I was overwhelmed. I was confused. But then, one person pushed me too far. It was the last straw, and I went from feeling lost to feeling angry. It was a good thing in the end, because if you're writing, you need to make the decisions, regardless of what anyone says. If you're cooking, you have decide what goes into the pot. If you're driving, you have to drive.
The next time I saw a complaint that my chapters were too short, I said to myself, "I'll show them! I'll write a story in which all the chapters are at least 3000 words," and without further ado (and without any more thought than that) I launched into Short Chapters.
The thing is, it's pretty easy to start almost anything, and it will run along fine for a little while. But soon, if you don't know what you're doing, or you aren't willing to put some energy in, it will stop.
And so, the story rolled along fine for nine chapters, but then it got into such a tangle that I had no idea how it could possibly continue. In the next two chapters I pretty much talked out the contradictions, and after three weeks I managed to find a way to get Victor to Boston with a suitcase full of girls clothes.
After that, every chapter became a problem to solve, and by chapter 19 there seemed no way to get Victor to the hospital in a skirt. It took seven months before I got over THAT hump, and in the end I had absolutely no idea what would happen between him and Auralee at the funeral.
It wasn't writer's block. It was just logistical problems. Plot.
I almost came to hate the story. I often wondered if I'd EVER finish. I decided to not go on with anything else until I *did* finish, but Lord, what a chore!
So... lesson learned. Never again. Maps, calendars... the end point... the whole story in mind before I start.
Moving on...
First of all, I did a bad job with the names. I've thought about going back to fix it, but by now it seems a bit late.
Usually I have a chart with all the characters listed, but for some reason I missed the fact that almost every character's name starts with an M: Marcie, Maisie, Misty/Mary, Margaret/Maisie... even Miriam! And I bet I missed one or two.
And why were there *two* Maisie's? Maisie Beale, the little girl, and Maisie Sabatino, now known as Mrs. Wix?
Honestly, I don't remember why. I did have a reason for the two Maisie's, but I can't remember what it was. Maybe it was just to bug young Maisie as she looked in the yearbook. That was probably the only reason, but of course it had the collateral effect of mixing people up.
There is the twin-naming thing, too: Misty's real name is Mary, and so her twin is Margaret. Mary and Margaret: very common twin names. Again, somehow I missed all the M's.
And speaking of similar names, why is Ms. Overmore, who teaches at a Blessed Yvette High School, called "Yvette"? More confusion! And now she'll be the principal? She'll be the Yvette in Blessed Yvette.
I must have had a reason... it wasn't for a silly joke. Unfortunately, I can't remember why I made that match-up. I only remember that I did it on purpose.
In any case, another slip-up on my part. Sorry!
However, I *did* have a reason for calling the poor little rich girl Maisie, even if it is an old-fashioned, outdated name.
And EVEN IF it was way too similar to the name Marcie... People mixed up the names in the comments, and I mixed them up myself in the story. Luckily, attentive readers were quick to point out my errors, and I fixed them.
The names are way too close! If you twiddle your eyes, they're identical.
And yet, even though all the M-starting names was a mistake, and putting Yvette in Blessed Yvette's was a bone-headed move, I don't think "Maisie" was wrong.
Why didn't I pick a different name, a modern name, a name that was popular in 1993, when Maisie was born? A name like Sabrina or Haley or Briana? Why not call the story What Courtney Knew?
I was surprised that no one noticed — or at least no one said — that I'd not only taken the title from a Henry James story (What Maisie Knew), but I'd even used the same names of his characters.
His Maisie started off like mine: a young girl, a minor, inherits a pile of money. Her parents have a bitter divorce and fight over the girl's money.
She reacts to her suffering by pretending to not see, or not understand, what's going on. In her case, everyone believes that What Maisie Knew was exactly nothing.
While I was reading Henry James' story, I had no idea what was going to happen in Marcie Donner's life. I knew that she would move to New Jersey and go to a Catholic girl's school, but beyond that, nothing. I couldn't cook up any wild, rope-swinging stunts for her, and I was stalled.
At the same time, there was another story I was working on, a story that had nothing to do with Marcie. It was a ghost story that was SUPPOSED to be a transgendered Topper-like comedy. It was moving along, but it was going in a direction that I didn't like. Somehow, it became very grim and dark, and my dead girl turned out to not be very nice. Plus, I had absolutely no idea how it was going to end.
So there I was: writing a "comedy" about a ghost that wasn't funny at all, and wanting to write more about Marcie, but lacking a story.
All the while, that title What Maisie Knew kept banging around in my head, and it suddenly struck me that What Maisie Knew might be something very interesting: something about Marcie Donner.
Of course, it couldn't be a frontal collision. Maisie couldn't just meet Marcie and say, "You look familiar... Hey! I know you! You're Mark Donner, in a dress!"
It would be much worse if it wasn't certain... if it was a impending threat... if I kept adding reasons that pointed to Maisie knowing Mark, or knowing *about* Mark.
And there were a lot of indications of just that.
Unfortunately, putting the Mark-tomboy story in front of it all effectively killed the issue for most readers... even if, ironically, the tomboy story made it possible for EVERYONE in the story to talk about Marcie as a boy. Mrs. Means does it right off the bat. Maisie keeps bringing it up. Even Susan talks about it.
Of course, Maisie doesn't KNOW that Marcie was a boy. She "knows," but she doesn't know-know. It's not a complete, fully-articulated, verified-by-evidence knowing. It's more of an unformed idea that kept running around at the edge of her consciousness, jumping and waving... Maisie was never *sure*; she just had the sense that there was SOMETHING in Marcie's Marky past that didn't fit.
One of the biggest hints came at the end of Chapter 14 ("Outed Already?"), when Maisie says the name "Mark Donner" out loud in a thoughtful way, as if it rang a bell. Because it did ring a bell.
Another big hint came at the end of Chapter 17 ("Just Like Us"), when Marcie's father realizes that Maisie and her mother used to live in Tarhent, the town where Mark grew up.
There are other hints spread throughout the story. I'm not going to list them all.
By the end of the story, you can conclude that Maisie had at least *heard* the name "Mark Donner" when she was younger. This is why she called Miriam Clegg: because she knew that Miriam would know, and she hoped that Miriam might have some juicy gossip about young Marcie. Maisie wasn't expecting to find out that "Mark" wasn't a just tomboyish girl, and she was shocked.
So, Maisie knew. Or half-knew.
But to my surprise, none of the comments at any point said, "OH MY GOD! What if Maisie knew that Marcie used to be a boy! What if they knew each other back in California?"
I mean, why do you think Maisie came from California? She could have easily come from Austin, Texas, or Beanbag, Wisconsin, or any other place.
It's funny, the way so many story elements got analyzed down to atoms in the comments, and so many close guesses about what was coming next, but no one gave any attention to Maisie knowing Mark, or knowing *of* Mark.
But, anyway, that was my idea: that Maisie knew. It's still there, in the story, coloring things...
Of course, Maisie knew what James' Maisie pretended not to know: she knew that her parents didn't want her. At least her father doesn't. Her mother does, but Maisie may never come to realize it.
So, one evening I was walking up Comm Ave, here in Boston, thinking about Marcie Donner and a young heiress named Maisie, trying to work out the story, but it still didn't go right, and for sure it wasn't funny AT ALL.
Which reminded me of my ghost story, which was downright grim. And I suddenly saw in my mind's eye a house I'd once lived in, and there, in the upstairs window, a little face looking out.
Misty Sabatino.
Finally, it all clicked.
I love the name, and the girl, and the spooky things she can do, and I miss her now that she's "moved on."
My favorite episode was Chapter 25, "And Then What Happened?" which ended like this:
"Who are you?" she asked me. "Why are you here?"
I tried to respond, but panicked: the words caught in my throat. A wave of fear washed over me, and I clutched my blanket desperately with both hands.
There was no reason to ask who she was: I recognized her right away.
She was Misty Sabatino.
I was aiming for gooseflesh; I know that *I* got when I read it; I don't know about anyone else.
And if it was a movie? I imagined Emma Roberts playing Marcie, and Victoria Justice as Misty. (I watch a lot of kids shows with my daughter.)
And that's What Maisie Knew!
I had to get it out of my system.
I got the idea for Marcie And The Amazons very near the end of writing What Maisie Knew. I'd already started mapping out the next Marcie story, which deals (in part) with Maisie being stuck in California with her father, and what Marcie does to free her.
However... some other ideas came running in to mess up my plans.
At different points in What Maisie Knew, some readers pointed out that Mrs. Donner was not always the best of mothers — a point that I wasn't ready to accept. I liked all my characters, and when people started pointing out Mrs. Donner's shortcomings, I got irritated. I argued with my readers, and got pretty angry. It seemed like people didn't like most of the adults in my story, and at last I finally said,
In my next Marcie story, there will be no adults at all. It will be a kind of sitcom based loosely on Lord of the Flies... for girls.
I didn't really mean it. I only said it because I was upset.
But then... the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. By that evening, the setting of the story was clear to me. At first, because of Lord of the Flies, the Amazon's manager was called Piggy, which gave me the idea for all the other terrible nicknames. But to call a girl "Piggy" is just too too mean (though I'm sure it happens), and — remembering a high-school friend named Hedwig — I softened the name to Wiggy.
Next came research: I got reading. Lord of the Flies came first. What an awful little book! It's so badly written I had to read some scenes five times before I had any clear picture of what had happened.
The Wikipedia article on Lord of the Flies says the book was intended as a rebuttal to R.M. Ballantyne The Coral Island, which I then read and liked much better, except for the end, which is quite boring. I borrowed a good many things from that book. I also read Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky and Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, which are in the same family of story... children marooned without adults. I didn't take anything from those books, aside from the name Captain Blackett.
After that reading I had a lot of scraps, but not much of a story. It needed something else. Plus, I had a big problem. What Maisie Knew ends on Christmas. The next Marcie story (The Madonna of the Future), which was pretty well planned, starts on New Years Day. How could a South Sea Island adventure fit into the week between the two holidays?
If the story was "only a dream" it would work, but that sort of thing just antagonizes readers. You get emotionally involved in a story, and just when it gets interesting... "She woke up and it was only a dream." I didn't want to do that. I don't know how many stories actually make it work. I think Alice in Wonderland does... and after a bit two other examples came to me.
Way back in 1974 I went to see Pasolini's film The Arabian Nights. At one point the man behind me whispered to his date, "Do you realize that we're five levels down?" She responded with a puzzled, "Huh?" but in a flash I understood what he meant.
If you know the story, the book, the movie, the idea — it's a mass of nested stories. Someone in a story tells a story, and someone in *that* story tells a story, and so on and so on... You, the reader, the person in the audience, get so engrossed in the current story that you forget that it's "just a story" until it's over and poof! you're back in the previous story, one you nearly forgot about.
It keeps going on like that, but you don't care how many stories "down" you are in the story-in-a-story-in-a-story. You just want to know how this story ends.
A few months ago I happened to read The Manuscript Found In Saragossa. It's also a set of stories-in-stories and you wonder at times what is real and what's fiction. When I finished reading it, I said to myself, "I wish I could write a book like that!"
That's when it hit me: Marcie And The Amazons could be that book! It could be my Arabian Nights, my Manuscript Found In Saragossa.
It was an ambitious idea. The girls would stay on the island for months... there would be stories inside stories, and I wanted the inner stories to be so engrossing that you'd forget it wasn't the real story.
I was going to cram it full of stories, in fact. I was going to have Wiggy tell a story on the plane, and Ding-Dong tell a story in the cave. I wanted to show Mirina's dream about a boy on the island.
As I mapped things out, I kind of forgot the huge ambitious plan. I didn't have stories to fill all those spots anyway, and the confusion readers felt over the Marcie Auburn episodes unnerved me.
The point of the Marcie Auburn business was to throw you off... so you wouldn't realize that the business with the Amazons was only a fever dream as well.
It was a lot more difficult to write than I thought it would be, in part because the plan was so ambitious, but also because there was so much research I had to do. I knew nothing about Bora Bora, or even Hawaii. I've never been to the tropics, let alone a tropical island. And though I once spent a week in a sailboat, I know very little about sailing. In fact, I still have no idea how much space there is below decks on the Seward.
But anyway... now it's out of my system. The next Marcie story will be more run-of-the-mill. No alternate realities, no ghosts, no question of what is real.
Just regular old Marcie.
Now that I've finished The Madonna Of The Future, I finally feel free. It's the last of what I considered my backlog from 2008.
The Madonna Of The Future was supposed to immediately follow What Maisie Knew. I was already working on it before What Maisie Knew ended in May 2008. It was all there: characters, calendar, plot, first chapter... But then Marcie And The Amazons appeared and became irresistible to me, so I put The Madonna Of The Future aside.
Unfortunately, by the time I finished Marcie And The Amazons in October 2008, I didn't have the heart to go back to The Madonna Of The Future. Some of the people who didn't like Marcie And The Amazons were so thorough and insistent in their criticism, that they really got me down. I'm still touchy about that story. I consider it one of the best things I've written, and yet when someone recently left a supercilious comment on it (demanding a rewrite), I got pretty angry.
I'm not fishing for compliments or looking to rehash what's been said. Of course I can't expect people to like everything I write, and yes I should have a much thicker skin. Still, even the strongest egos aren't bulletproof.
In any case, at that time I had two unfinished stories: Short Chapters and Wish I'd Stayed In Bed. Even though I loved them both, it was a struggle to finish them. They used to be fun; now they felt more like incomplete jobs. It only took six chapters to finish both, but those six chapters took me three years to write. Once they were done, I went back to The Madonna Of The Future. It was next on the list.
Anyone who's written for more than a few years has had the experience of rediscovering their own past work. Specifically, I mean when you pick up something that's old enough to be unfamiliar. It's a strange experience, almost as if someone else wrote it. It's even stranger if it's something you barely started, because instead of a finished work, you only have the unassembled pieces. No matter how good your notes are, some of the most important connectors are missing... exactly because they were so obvious, at least, they were obvious back then.
And so, you have to look for clues to what you were thinking, as you pick up the puzzle you left for yourself. You look at your own handwriting and ask, "What on earth did I mean by this?"
Still, in the end, I think the story came out pretty much the way I meant it to, except for four things.
The first was that Mallory was going to play more practical jokes, much like the ones Alicia plays in Enid Blyton's Malory Towers. And yes, Mallory's last name *was* going to be Towers, as stupid as that would have been. And that's exactly why I ended up with another character whose name starts with M (Mallory, Maisie, Marcie), which I wish I hadn't done, but oh well.
The second thing is that Blair wasn't supposed to be a troubled girl. She was supposed to be comically absent-minded, like Irene in Malory Towers. That was the only change that came into to story as I was writing, and it *is* too abrupt, as one commenter observed. I need to go back and fix that.
The third was the shortness of the story. There was going to be more about the beauty pageant. I expected to do more with the artist searching for a model. I meant to have more conflict with the boy who hit Marcie; I wanted to play up the double standard: that the bully found it natural to beat up a boy, but was horrified that he hit a girl. And there was going to be more going on in and around the tea shop; in fact, my first title for the story was The Real Tea Girl. Mr Fisby was supposed to be a friend of Ida (Maisie's mother), and *that* connection was supposed to get Marcie the job in the first place, AND involve Ida and both Marcie's parents in discussions of the Ponzi scheme. But when I was dividing the plot into chapters, it was kind of like sorting bones. The story got very concentrated, and characters ended up appearing only when they were strictly needed. I didn't mean to do that. But I was committed to finishing it, and it wasn't easy, because it all tasted of 2008 to me.
The last thing that troubled me, even back when I was planning the story, was that it didn't seem funny at all. I mean, Marcie complaining about her mother's pregnancy; her getting hit in the nose; everyone thinking it was a nose job... when those ideas first occurred to me I thought they were funny, but on second thought, they just seemed sad.
And *that* scared me. I was afraid that I used up my supply of laughs, and when it came time to write the story, I was still somewhat deflated by the bad reviews of Marcie And The Amazons.
But then I remembered a friend who wrote screenplays... *he* wanted to write comedies, too, and when he was searching for a new idea, he tried to build a comedy around the black market in human organs.
The two of us used to commute together. He'd be driving, describing this poor man... "The guy's only got a month to live, so he travels to this third-world country. Haw! Haw! Haw! He's running out of time, because he will die if he doesn't get a new liver!" I'd sigh and look out the window. He'd poke me and say, "Aw, come on! Come on! It's FUNNY! Haw, haw, haw!"
The lesson I took from that is: If you're desperate to be funny, maybe you should wait and be something else for a while. You can be funny tomorrow.
So I tried to not force any laughs, and just wrote the story.
And now, as I said at the start, I feel free. I feel like I just paid off a debt. I've got another Marcie story in the works, and a few short projects, but I'm going to do them in my own time and try to not make much of comments, either positive or negative.
There was one thing that happened while I was working on The Madonna Of The Future that brought me out of my funk and made me happy about my writing: I was looking through what I'd written, and laughing at the chapter titles. I hadn't gone back to Marcie And The Amazons since I finished it, and one of the chapter titles was completely unfamiliar to me: First Prize Is An Old Nightgown. Puzzled, I clicked on it and started reading.
Honestly, considering the scene that begins when Marcie wakes up on the couch, I don't know that I've ever done better. Marcie is confused, and so are the other characters, and the reader feels what Marcie feels. And it's FUNNY! Haw, haw, haw!
After reading it, I felt good. I even went so far as to feel triumphant, and thought, Ha! Beat that, if you can! Rewrites? Rewrite your grandmother, if you want a rewrite! Marcie And The Amazons stands as is. Long may it wave.
Now I think I can write with more confidence in myself, with a bit more steel in my heart. I think I've been vaccinated, although I've still got a little weak spot where Marcie And The Amazons is concerned.
The next Marcie story will take place in the summer and is set in Europe, which Marcie visits with her Aunt Jane. I'm aiming for scary as well as funny, but we'll see how it turns out. You never know! At least this story isn't planned down to the atoms, or grown old on the shelf. It's still new and fuzzy. I don't know how it ends yet and a lot of the middle is implausible even to me. In other words, it's showing a lot of promise. While I work it out, I'm aiming to do some shorter, unrelated stories. I'll keep you posted.
Thanks for reading!