Doppelgänger

I’m working on The Restoration, which is the Praxis book following Fleet Elements, and lately I’ve been having a hard time with it.

Part of it has to do with how much less amusing it is to write about a great empire that’s tottering because of greed, mendacity, scapegoating, and stupidity when I’m actually living in a country that’s tottering because of greed, mendacity, scapegoating, and stupidity.

I had no intention of making this series quite so relevant.

Be that as it may, there were other problems.  For one thing, most of this book takes place entirely in artificial environments, on starships and space stations— which was also the case with Fleet Elements, by the way, and with much of The Accidental War.  The action takes place in corridors and offices and sleeping cabins, just like the last book, and if I were going to describe those corridors, and how they differed from the last set of corridors, I did it in the previous book, and it hasn’t changed in all the pages since.

Nobody gets to feel a breath of fresh air on her cheek, or walk in a fog-filled street, or enjoy a cloudscape or a sunset.  Instead everyone is in these goddam corridors.  I’m really sick of corridors, but the plot can’t escape them.

But that problem is minor.  What became the major problem was what the characters were doing in the corridors, because much of it wasn’t very exciting.

My two main characters are widely separated by distance, and won’t encounter each other again for months.  They’re confined to starships.  (They’re also suffering, but how many ways can you describe misery and keep it fresh?)  Which means that they have to deal with the people they’re with, and for the most part that means engaging in professional interactions.  They talk business, in short, or they handle the sort of professional problems that pop up.

All this can be interesting in small doses, but if it goes on for too many pages the reader will find it a hard slog.  After a couple weeks of trying to fight my way through a series of scenes in which characters were involved in dinner-table discussions of tactics and logistics, I began to despair.  I felt the book needed episodes that were a lot more involving, but I couldn’t work out what they should be.

Well hell, I thought.  I teach this stuff, don’t I?  What would I tell my students to do?

This was the first time I actually looked through my own lecture notes in search of inspiration.

Process bogs down narrative.  That sentence jumped right out at me, because it described my situation very well.  All those details were cluttering up the actual story.

I looked through my list of narrative elements, and sub-story jumped out.  (Sub-story: also known as a subplot or a B story.)  Get some juicy, involving story happening, one outside of the main story.  But a problem is that my two man characters are stuck in a situation— those of you who have read Fleet Elements will know what it is— and they’re sort of frozen in place emotionally until they can meet again, so the subplot can’t really happen to them.

And then shadowing jumped out of the list, and I was home.  Shadowing is where a secondary character is involved in a situation that in some way mirrors the main characters’ problem.  Shakespeare was a master of this, with Antipholus of Syracuse mirroring Antipholus of Ephesus, or the story of Beatrice and Benedick shadowed by the story of Hero and Boring Patsy Guy (uhh, Claudio is it?).  Hamlet, who has lost his father, comes with two shadows, Laertes and Fortinbras, who have both lost their fathers and react in ways that contrast with Hamlet.

(My other example of shadowing comes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which, when Buffy’s love life takes an upswing, her friends’ relationships spiral into the toilet, and vice versa.  I’m eclectic when it comes to examples.)

Well.  Problem solved, or so I hope.  I’ll add a couple of juicy subplots, but they won’t exist independently of the rest of the story, but will reflect, in different ways, the situation of my main protagonists.  It’ll get me away from all those dinner-table conversations, anyway.

I’m stoked!  Wish me luck.