Struggling to Show the Story & Coyote Rising
Wrote: 5 pagesRead: 3 chapters PAGE AFTER PAGE 1 chapter TIME'S EYEOff to watch: BSG mini-series PREFACE:
I’ve hit a wall where my writing feels amateurish, unfocused and even though I have all my wonderful plot points outlined on paper, I can’t seem to SHOW what’s going on in each scene, I can only TELL. I suck.
After 3 days of beating my head, it dawned on me that there are a few issues behind this dry spell:
1) Unlike every other creative work I’ve done in my life, my writing persona doesn’t like to be told it HAS to complete 5 pages a day, 5 days a week. Point blank, I just am rushing things. I suppose if I had not had such a lousy year last year (father’s death, husband/daughter/self all having major surgeries), I may have produced more than 200 pages in the 1st year of writing this novel. But facts are facts and my head really gets resentful when it’s pushed too hard. This is not a good thing but it’s a truth.
2) I’m not reading enough good fiction to ‘feed my head’, plain and simple.
There’s nothing I can do change item 1 but certainly I can do something about item 2. Though I have to admit to some hesitancy and frustration…
MY THOUGHTS ON COYOTE RISING
A year ago I picked up Steele’s first installment of this series, COYOTE, (see my review) and became enamored. I need to emphasize that prior to discovering Steele (thanks to a nudge from my 1st mentor at SHU- Tim Esaias), I’d spent several years whining about the lack of good SF that is ‘post 2000’. Along came Steele and I got hooked. His characters’ POVs are deep. The science was mostly soft - an exploration of how humanity behaves under stressful (and often, political) situations. I read it, I loved it, and I wanted more.
Flash forward a year and COYOTE RISING debuted. And while COYOTE explored what drives humanity to explore, to reach out past the known and find new places it can call freedom-- and, more importantly, what does freedom mean -- COYOTE RISING delves into the “what if” when freedom is threatened, by those who believe might makes right, and by natural forces that threaten to tear the planet apart.
Steele has a knack for making writing seem effortless. He charges in, full barrel, with a story that is filled with believable characters, plot twists that not only ‘could’ happen but most likely will when different factions of philosophical and societal belief clash. And he does it with a smile, a lilt and without beating the reader over the head. Humor, adventure, action, romance and even a tinge of the cautionary tale all reside in this sequel and I am envious.
There’s a few ‘secrets’ Steele uses that I’m beginning to discern. For one thing, we never stay in one character’s POV for more than a few chapters. The character may appear in other scenes but he never, ever, goes back into that character’s head again. So you never get bored, and he doesn’t need to worry too much about growth and arcs for too many characters. Usually the first and last characters of his stories are the ones that get to learn something, to change, to grow. He also uses just the bare minimums of science hardware in his stories. They’re there, but just like a modern day story in the kitchen wouldn’t stop to explain how a toaster works, Steele doesn’t stop his tale to tell you how his spaceships work. You just have to trust him. And because of the level of confidence evident in his storytelling, you do!
And that’s something I really need to achieve in my rewrite of CP - I have way too much technobabble - some of it is inaccurate (in large part to my own weak science education) and it SLOWS THINGS DOWN. So yes, Steele will be a great model for me in my rewrite phase.
He also manages to make a 3, 4, 5 page dialogue scene come to life. You never feel like it’s a case of “literary talking heads”. His dialogue is crisp, conflicted, mostly angry - and very real. His characters are people I can quickly identify with - they aren’t caricatures or 2 dimensional widgets (see my complaints of Stephen Baxter’s Time’s Eye), they breathe, they bleed, they fight for what they believe in. I ripped through this 382 page book in no time.
But… my chief complaint is that he didn’t delve deep enough into one very important and special character: Captain Lee. In the first Coyote installment, the reader becomes very close to the leader of the rebel movement that founds Coyote. Steele spends a great deal of time crafting a character that has admirable traits and yet wrestles deeply with his beliefs in freedom and liberty. In this sequel, Lee is pushed to the side and we don’t get to “be” anywhere near him for the first 250 pages! A poor decision, in my opinion, and one where the author wasn’t paying attention to what resonated so deeply with his readers in the first place: the hero, the leader, the main character of his first book.
Steele fell in love with his full cast, and his world, and sacrificed his main character to explore the others. And not just figuratively because … this next piece is a spoiler so you’ll need to highlight to read … he lets Lee get killed by the villain and contagonist of the book: Matriarch. A completely dissatisfying way to have your favorite character bumped off.
SIDEBAR: Antagonists vs Contagonists
Think Empire vs Darth Vader for Star Wars
Think Social Collective vs the Matriach for Coyote
Think US Senate vs Burke for Critical Past
The Antagonist represents the overall evil, the Contagonist personifies that evil and uses it to obstruct the main character's goals.
Back to Coyote Rising . . .
One last note of criticism -- and this is something I noted in the 1st book as well. Steele has the ability to come up with some tremendous allegorical images. In the first book he developed an entire mythology - or rather a crewman whose cryogenic chamber stopped working 20 years into a several hundred year flight. And he never used it. In COYOTE RISING, he’s created this wonderful half bat, half man creature but we never are allowed inside Zoltan’s head to understand his agony. And his ecstasy. Very frustrating.
I just “poked my head in” over at Amazon to see what the reviews of COYOTE RISING were like and was surprised to see some ‘bashing’ in regards to inconsistencies and irregular science. The book is not doing tremendously well in sales at a ranking of 124,000 either. Which is too bad, Steele needs our support.
Why, you may ask? Because we need confident tellers of tall tales, make believers and storytellers that can look up at the night sky and share our futures with us with confident writing that leaps from the page and keeps us moving forward in anticipation of the end.
And if I can get through my "suck" phase, I hope to be able to do the same.
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