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A friend said to me in the newsgroups:
>So the pig is one of those >characters that just waits on the sidelines for a good book to wander into whether he was meant to or not?
The Pig would say, "That last requires a definition of who's doing the meaning..."
> No wonder you get writers complaining about their characters running away from them.
(snort) I wouldn't be one of those as a rule. I've said it before: if a character routinely shows an inclination not to do as they're told, to the point where their actions threaten to derail a carefully designed plot, I kill them. Plotting is mine, saith Me: Iwww.le-shop.ch and have them delivered to the local post office/train station for you to pick up.
But for stuff like milk and bread and fresh vegetables and so on it's silly to do that. After a day or three of hard work the urge to get out a little further than the apartment's terrace gets strong, and besides, you need fresh bread...and Swiss bread is the best in the world...so you grab a shopping bag and walk down the paved footpath to the _dorfladen_ or village shop in Rigi-Kaltbad, about half an hour's walk down the mountain, and then (if you're a lazy thing like me) avoid the climb back up by catching the little cogwheel Rigi-Bahn train back to the apartment.
Rigi-Kaltbad is where I was when the Pig ran into me.
I have to write carefully about this, because people are prone to misunderstand it. After twenty years of this work, I've found that -- for me at least -- there are modes of creativity which can briefly overlay the normal senses, so that things that genuinely aren't there except in your imagination seem for a few moments to coexist with things that have what passes for physical existence. It doesn't qualify as hallucination, since never for more than the initial split second of surprise are you in any doubt that what you're experiencing is an internally sourced artifact of the making-it-up process. It's not a state that can be induced or forced. And it's not invariably useful. Sometimes it's just funny, your brain making a visual or aural joke to break the tension. Sometimes it turns out to have been helpful after you've figured out to what use the data or suggestion can be put. It's never to be taken as gospel, but it's always something to pay attention to when it happens, which for me isn't all that often.
So I've done my shopping and got my bread and milk and so on, and it's going to be about another hour and a half before the train comes through. Scene-setting here: Rigi-Kaltbad is all one steep hill. It's a small resort -- I guess from the name there must have been a small spa there at one point or another -- and has a number of good small hotels. One of them is right by the train station, which is literally only a place where the track briefly becomes flat so that when the train stops, people can get in and out without immediately falling either uphill or downhill. The nearest hotel is set at a right angle to the tracks, directly across from the station building, and the front of it, one story up, has a narrow terrace restaurant.
This is the best place to wait for the train, since if you've paid for what you've had, all you have to do is walk down the outside stairs and walk across the tracks to board. I went up there and had a salad and a couple decis of white wine. Nice day, warm, sun leaning westward, the lesser of the two views showing to the north -- Luzern, and the Jura in the distance. When lunch was done I pulled out the pad I always carry with me up there (the laptop was locked up in the apartment) and started to go over the remainder of the DILEMMA outline and the beginning notes for the broad "arc" outline for the next three books. There were some details that were evading me.
I kept getting distracted. The day was gorgeous. The surroundings were gorgeous. The restaurant manager, waiting tables, let me alone except to bring me a little more wine and to pause by me briefly to deadhead some petunias in the nearby windowbox hanging over the railing. I stared at the train station for a while, and the building site to the left of it where they had finished tearing down the century-old hotel there and were rebuilding it on the same site, and then I turned my attention to the pad again.
Pad. Pen. Red and white checked tablecloth. Something standing beside the table. White. A pig. A *large* pig, its back at nearly the same level as the table.
"You never come see me any more," says the Pig in a voice partaking about equally of Milton Berle and Harlan Ellison. "You don't even call."
The next second contains the following thoughts, in more or less this order:
(1) A pig?
(2) Boy, this is a good one.
(3) Why a pig?
(4) Oh, it's him...
(5) Now isn't that interesting. I wonder....
"You come here often?" I "say" to the Pig, since I feel it's rude to treat one of these visitations *entirely* as if I were making it up. Then I laugh. Dumb line.
He laughs too, and he's gone. Reality, such as it is, reasserts itself in toto. But I've been reminded of something I hadn't thought about in a while. I think about it. Some ideas start to arrange themselves in configurations they hadn't been in before. These look like much better configurations than the earlier ones. I start making notes. The train comes. I ignore it. I ignore the next one. And the next. I finally catch the last train up, around the time it gets too dark to write.
When I get home I check my own reference to the Pig, and check the one in Barry Hughart's BRIDGE OF BIRDS. I do a big old web search and another search at the main library at Trinity, and find hardly anything. Through a mutual acquaintance I get in contact with Hughart (who never made any use of the character beyond the one throwaway reference) to see if he knows anything more about the Pig. He gets back to me in due time and adds a little info from another source besides the Larousse, a large work on Chinese mythology, but there's really very little data, and nothing to prevent me going in the direction I'm heading already.
So I write the Pig my way.
And now we add the spoilers. There are a couple sentences' worth of material here vaguely having to do with the next three books, so don't blame me if you go ahead and read this and then later you're sorry.
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As things develop it will become obvious why the Pig has become involved with this storyline at this point and not before. This particular internal arc will take at least three books to resolve...maybe more. Probably it's wiser to say
nothing more at this point, as this business is still shaping itself.
best! D.
-- DD
>So the pig is one of those >characters that just waits on the sidelines for a good book to wander into whether he was meant to or not?
The Pig would say, "That last requires a definition of who's doing the meaning..."
> No wonder you get writers complaining about their characters running away from them.
(snort) I wouldn't be one of those as a rule. I've said it before: if a character routinely shows an inclination not to do as they're told, to the point where their actions threaten to derail a carefully designed plot, I kill them. Plotting is mine, saith Me: Iwww.le-shop.ch and have them delivered to the local post office/train station for you to pick up.
But for stuff like milk and bread and fresh vegetables and so on it's silly to do that. After a day or three of hard work the urge to get out a little further than the apartment's terrace gets strong, and besides, you need fresh bread...and Swiss bread is the best in the world...so you grab a shopping bag and walk down the paved footpath to the _dorfladen_ or village shop in Rigi-Kaltbad, about half an hour's walk down the mountain, and then (if you're a lazy thing like me) avoid the climb back up by catching the little cogwheel Rigi-Bahn train back to the apartment.
Rigi-Kaltbad is where I was when the Pig ran into me.
I have to write carefully about this, because people are prone to misunderstand it. After twenty years of this work, I've found that -- for me at least -- there are modes of creativity which can briefly overlay the normal senses, so that things that genuinely aren't there except in your imagination seem for a few moments to coexist with things that have what passes for physical existence. It doesn't qualify as hallucination, since never for more than the initial split second of surprise are you in any doubt that what you're experiencing is an internally sourced artifact of the making-it-up process. It's not a state that can be induced or forced. And it's not invariably useful. Sometimes it's just funny, your brain making a visual or aural joke to break the tension. Sometimes it turns out to have been helpful after you've figured out to what use the data or suggestion can be put. It's never to be taken as gospel, but it's always something to pay attention to when it happens, which for me isn't all that often.
So I've done my shopping and got my bread and milk and so on, and it's going to be about another hour and a half before the train comes through. Scene-setting here: Rigi-Kaltbad is all one steep hill. It's a small resort -- I guess from the name there must have been a small spa there at one point or another -- and has a number of good small hotels. One of them is right by the train station, which is literally only a place where the track briefly becomes flat so that when the train stops, people can get in and out without immediately falling either uphill or downhill. The nearest hotel is set at a right angle to the tracks, directly across from the station building, and the front of it, one story up, has a narrow terrace restaurant.
This is the best place to wait for the train, since if you've paid for what you've had, all you have to do is walk down the outside stairs and walk across the tracks to board. I went up there and had a salad and a couple decis of white wine. Nice day, warm, sun leaning westward, the lesser of the two views showing to the north -- Luzern, and the Jura in the distance. When lunch was done I pulled out the pad I always carry with me up there (the laptop was locked up in the apartment) and started to go over the remainder of the DILEMMA outline and the beginning notes for the broad "arc" outline for the next three books. There were some details that were evading me.
I kept getting distracted. The day was gorgeous. The surroundings were gorgeous. The restaurant manager, waiting tables, let me alone except to bring me a little more wine and to pause by me briefly to deadhead some petunias in the nearby windowbox hanging over the railing. I stared at the train station for a while, and the building site to the left of it where they had finished tearing down the century-old hotel there and were rebuilding it on the same site, and then I turned my attention to the pad again.
Pad. Pen. Red and white checked tablecloth. Something standing beside the table. White. A pig. A *large* pig, its back at nearly the same level as the table.
"You never come see me any more," says the Pig in a voice partaking about equally of Milton Berle and Harlan Ellison. "You don't even call."
The next second contains the following thoughts, in more or less this order:
(1) A pig?
(2) Boy, this is a good one.
(3) Why a pig?
(4) Oh, it's him...
(5) Now isn't that interesting. I wonder....
"You come here often?" I "say" to the Pig, since I feel it's rude to treat one of these visitations *entirely* as if I were making it up. Then I laugh. Dumb line.
He laughs too, and he's gone. Reality, such as it is, reasserts itself in toto. But I've been reminded of something I hadn't thought about in a while. I think about it. Some ideas start to arrange themselves in configurations they hadn't been in before. These look like much better configurations than the earlier ones. I start making notes. The train comes. I ignore it. I ignore the next one. And the next. I finally catch the last train up, around the time it gets too dark to write.
When I get home I check my own reference to the Pig, and check the one in Barry Hughart's BRIDGE OF BIRDS. I do a big old web search and another search at the main library at Trinity, and find hardly anything. Through a mutual acquaintance I get in contact with Hughart (who never made any use of the character beyond the one throwaway reference) to see if he knows anything more about the Pig. He gets back to me in due time and adds a little info from another source besides the Larousse, a large work on Chinese mythology, but there's really very little data, and nothing to prevent me going in the direction I'm heading already.
So I write the Pig my way.
And now we add the spoilers. There are a couple sentences' worth of material here vaguely having to do with the next three books, so don't blame me if you go ahead and read this and then later you're sorry.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
As things develop it will become obvious why the Pig has become involved with this storyline at this point and not before. This particular internal arc will take at least three books to resolve...maybe more. Probably it's wiser to say
nothing more at this point, as this business is still shaping itself.
best! D.
-- DD
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