Wrestling a Sentence

Writing Season in Seattle

Been working on to the sequel to On The Rocks (available, for free, on link at www.siblaska.net ) and a couple of things have struck me.

First of all it’s writing season. The sun goes down at 4pm, comes up at about 8am so we are wrapped in the blanket of darkness for 16 hours a day. There’s only one football game a week to watch—instead of the three or four baseball games I usually watch a week in the summer. You sit at the computer for hours, and nothing externally changes. Maybe the patter of the rain on the roof gets louder and softer as the squalls pass by, occasionally there is some wind, or one of the cats wants attention. But basically it 16 hrs of …… well, not a lot.

The other thing that came to my attention was how many times one wrestles with a sentence. I’m at the stage on the second book where we are working from a sketch of each chapter. The basic plot of the book is broadly laid out, and now we have to go in and flesh out the moments, making sure the sequences are right, the language is interesting, and it all makes sense. This often involves working on one sentence many times, finding the correct word, often when there are dozens in the language which are close to what you mean. But it may have the wrong rhythm, or the connotation is not really correct.

A Case in point. As part of the exposition in an early chapter we are describing the state of the Pacific Rim in our alternative timeline where there has been a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and China, c 1990. We started with a simple sentence—Once the radiation subsided Japan flourished. This was fine for someone who had read the first book, or in our case, written it. But it really didn’t help someone who might pickup the second book and begin reading. How did Japan flourish? Where would it get its resources? Huh?

SO the sentence changed to Once the radiation subsided Japan retreated to the old Imperial path, southward to Indonesia. Retreated get replaced by Returned, but that’s still not right. This was a nice historical reference to late 30’s early 40’s, but didn’t really reflect the part of the books time line that was shared with our own timeline, and suggested that Japan had resorted to its totalitarian past. Our first book envisions Japan as a capitalist behemoth, where corporate empires share power and wealth with underworld gangs. Ziabatzu and Yakuza . So that didn’t work well either. By the 90’s Vietnam was recovering from its wars with America and in Cambodia, and with the removal of its traditional enemy (China) it could come to dominate Southeast Asia. So now I had something like Untouched once the radiation passed, Japan looked south to the economies of Indonesia and Vietnam for resources and capital. Better but that did not help to suggest that Vietnam and Indonesia were also growing, not just resource economies. So now the sentence became Untouched once the radiation passed, Japan looked south to the more established economies of Indonesia and Vietnam, first for resources, eventually for capital as those economies matured. Great! Except there was a repeated word in the same sentence. I don’t think there is a rule against this, but it looks bad. So, a quick fix Untouched once the radiation passed, Japan looked south to the more established states of Indonesia and Vietnam, first for resources, eventually for capital as those economies matured.

Its just a little part of the picture that we are trying to weave together, for ourselves, and for the reader. But its worth the effort. It reads a bit like a proper history, or at least a decent graduate thesis. And it offers a glimpse of the world our character inhabit.