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026: Masonry

Plots are built like Lego projects: you draw pieces out of a pile and assemble your tower by interlocking the pieces together. Each piece, by itself, has no shape or form and only works as part of a larger structure. Did you ever play with Legos as a kid? I did. I spent hours fabricating and refabricating war ships. It took me awhile to figure out the trick. I could make tall, spindly ships bristling with guns and extraneous wings; I could make flat vessels like airborne flounders that had absolutely no grace to them. Slow and solid. I had a hard time making the vessels that were strong and graceful. I would spend a few hours and would eventually come up with something that would work, but never anything that I fell in love with and left assembled on my shelf for months and months.

Plots are like Legos. I took my apart over the last few weeks. There have been a number of holiday distractions and, when I returned to the BOOK OF LIES, I was struck by the gracelessness of what was there. In fact, I started to obsess about some hidden flaw in the design which would come out at the most inopportune time and bring everything else down when it erupted on me. I took the whole structure apart and laid the pieces out on the floor. I left them there for a few days and, when I returned, I started to piece them together again. In fact, I put a number of them back in the bucket and drew new pieces out.

The thought which had sent me along this path was that I wasn't quite sure what I was building. You know that moment when you've started to snap the pieces together? Just what the hell have I got in my hands? Yeah, I had one of those moments. I took everything apart, mixed up the pieces, and put it all back together again.

I was building a rocket ship. It looks much like the previous one did, though fatter around the back end. Stronger boosters is my guess. Escape velocity is a bitch after all. I'm still not quite sure what sort of craft these boosters are taking into space -- I'm still tinkering with the deployment vessel -- but the body of the ship seems much better. I'm not nagged by the possibility that I've forced two pieces together which weren't meant to touch. I can bang my knuckles against the side of the craft and feel pretty good that it isn't going to fragment.

This one needs to be strong, you see. I've built enough rockets and war planes and medieval castles to fill a thousand Sunday afternoons. And, at the end of the day, the pieces all went back in the box. For a change, I want to leave this one on the shelf.

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A new year and a new design lends itself well to a quick recap for those who might be just wandering in. The on-going journey charted here in SYMBOLIC is the progress of a novel started last November as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge: write 50,000 words in one month. 50k wasn't enough to get the story out (nor was it ever really planned that way) and SYMBOLIC continues as I thrash out this book. In addition to discussions and observations of the authorial process from the first word on the page to the last signature penned at the inaugural book signing, we'll be looking at the nature of symbols and how they affect us.

I'm the monkey in the glass cage, picking up things that I find interesting when I'm not banging on the typewriter. You should feel free to throw odd trinkets over the wall if you like. The truly fascinating thing about symbols is how they facilitate and obfuscate communication.

Posted by Teppo at January 25, 2003 08:23 AM

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