Writerly Meditation

From The Daily Writer
Spend a few moments thinking about a specific facet of the story or essayyou're currently working on... Write down some of the thoughts that occur to you.

My greatest challenge in writing the Ivan/Rasputin story is in pulling together a really vivid sense of place.  Diana Gabaldon did this for Outlander just by researching; her descriptions were INCREDIBLY vivid but she never went there till after all the profits from the novel made it possible for her to go.  For the London of 1916, who would Ivan and Rasputin have encountered as they walked around; what smells would they have smelled?  What was the traffic like?  I know parts of Piccadilly are subject to lots of crashes and accidents, but how long is the street and what part of it is 107 Piccadilly (the location of the Savile Club in 1916) located on?  What would the foot traffic have been like during different times of day?

And how much does the accuracy of all this detail matter?

Victoria Glendinning did a beautiful job of making the neighborhood and household at the opening of Electricity really really vivid, but she is British and had better access to this stuff than I have, on top of being a very good biographer.

And then there are the specifics of my story.  What they do and who they encounter determines what happens to Rasputin and what happens, ultimately, to Ivan.  I need to do a little better about pulling them together.  I'm worried about it now.

Reading the biography of Daphne DuMaurier by Margaret Forster.  It's good.  But it strikes me that Daphne was incredibly business-like about her writing because she was motivated to make money to support her family.  That's what I want to be like.  Businesslike and determined to finish things that can get published.  Selling my work.  Of course I expect it to be good and I intend it to be good, but I don't know how to be experimental and I don't intend to try.  With the challenges of doing these ordinary stories I think I have enough on my plate just trying to make people see what it's like to be somewhere else rather than trying to invent a literary form that I like just fine how it is.

So Ivan is going to leap out that window across that great intersection and he and Rasputin are going to take a walk.  And on that walk Rasputin is going to tell Ivan about all the things he's been missing, and Ivan is going to tell him how little he understands his new world, and share maybe a little bit about his early years as a vampire (or think them, and then words will fail him; this information could have saved Rasputin but won't).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jean-paul-margnac/366276689/

https://maps.google.com/maps?num=10&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=park+lane+hotel+london&fb=1&gl=us&hq=park+lane+hotel&hnear=0x47d8a00baf21de75:0x52963a5addd52a99,London,+UK&cid=0,0,15648347873338012588&ei=6V0GUMKOCOHI2gWyibjEBQ&ved=0CLcBEPwSMAA

Ah, better, better, better.  OK, Tomorrow I think I can start writing again.

Good night!!