Wrestling with Sunder is like wrestling a crocodile. Truth be told, I've never wrestled an crocodile. The closest one has ever come to me arrived on a plate with a side of rice and roasted veggies. (Actually, that was alligator, but who's counting?) I've seen Steve Irwin wrestle crocodiles on TV and it looked a lot like what I went through tonight: a tough roll in the mud and only one of you enjoys it.
Caring about the end result of these labours means I must be meticulous, but during my breaks away from the keyboard I often forget just how meticulous one has to be. In some cases it's not enough to simply come up with an idea to set up or flesh out a crucial aspect of a character. In cases where an event has an impact on the trajectory of a major character's life, the heft of such an idea will translate into the story as questions about the events surrounding the idea. The more questions the author poses to himself about that idea, the more important and integral it is. The more integral the idea, the more care the author has to take in shaping it, even if it is never directly revealed to the reader. The world that fictional characters live in is just as real to those characters as our own world is to us and if an author's intention to convey the true grit and texture of that world is serious then he or she must make an effort to understand something of what is going on there. The web of circumstances that a character dangles in is as dense and interwoven as that in which we often (always?) find ourselves.
What I am resigned to is spending more time than I had anticipated trying to set in my mind a crucial event--a murder--that occurred just prior to the opening of the novel. The aftermath of investigating that murder and attempting to bring it to trial has a very serious impact on the life of one of the main characters, but the more I think about how that character is impacted, the more it becomes clear to me that I don't know enough about the events surrounding the murder. I'm playing the How did he get here? game. Who was murdered? Was it a man or a woman? Who is the killer? Why was the victim targeted? How was the victim killed? How did the murderer attempt to cover up the crime? "How did Solis get rid of the body?" I've pondered that question for the better part of an hour without coming up with an answer that satisfies me. The questions lead further and further back until I can feel the "shape" of the event, but I need answers to dress up the frame. I'm impatient to get past this, to finish revising the synopsis proper and get on with the real story.
In other news, I recently bought a new laptop so I am mobile once again. Though the noise situation in my apartment has drastically improved over the years, it is sometimes not quiet enough for me to write and so I end up going to the library or the office, more often the latter. I also need a machine that I can take with me when I visit my parents or when I visit my writing partner. My old laptop has gotten so slow as to be practically useless to me as a writing tool. My new machine is an Asus (the same company that manufactured the motherboard in my new desktop PC) and has an Intel Core i3 chip in it. All I know about it is that it's "wicked fast" and it will stand me in good stead for at least three or four years.
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