Tag Archives: King of Rogaland

Writing

Of convection and creative angst

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Nice day, though the coolness of the earlier week (highs in the 70s) has passed like a memory of youth. It got up to 90 degrees today. This is annoying when I drive my loaner car (a Honda Civic), because the driver’s side window won’t roll down partially – it’s full commitment one way or the other. Like all sane vehicle operators, I like to leave the windows cracked about an inch when I park on a hot day, but with this one I can only do one side. You don’t get the cross-ventilation.

And yes, Miss Ingebretsen, my PT Cruiser, still languishes at the transmission shop. They tell me they think they’ve located the cables we need, and might possibly have them tomorrow.

I’ve heard this song before.

Anyway, the Civic gets me around – and with a little more zip than Miss Ingebretsen, I have to admit. Had to go to the dermatologist for an annual check-up this afternoon; I won’t disgust you with details about that. Nothing serious. My flesh is generally uninteresting (as many women have noted over the years), which is what you’d inspect in a man who gets less Ultraviolet than the average Morlock.

I arrived precisely on time, to be confronted with a sign that said “No Admittance Without a Face Mask.” This shouldn’t have surprised me – they’d made it clear when we scheduled the appointment. They get cancer patients with compromised immunity in there. But I hadn’t thought about it. I keep a stock of masks in Miss Ingebretsen for just such emergencies. But of course they’re baking in the transmission shop lot right now. And it never occurred to me to stash any in the Civic.

So I stood outside the clinic door, and called them on my cell phone. When the woman behind the desk answered, I made eye contact and told her, “I’m standing outside the door talking to you. This is embarrassing, but I haven’t got a face mask…”

She waved me in and handed me one from the cache I expected them to have there. No doubt I’m not the first patient in that situation.

What else to say? I’m revising, revising, revising on King of Rogaland. It’s amazing how lame (yet resonant) my Negative Interior Voice’s arguments are – “This is hopeless. You’ll never finish it.” Despite the fact that the thing is essentially written, and I’m just polishing now. Though it’s true the bumps never seem to run out. I’ve still got a lot of loose plot ends to tie up, and some ends are tied to the wrong other ends, and so need to be untied and re-tied somewhere else. This is far from the longest novel I’ve ever written, but it seems to be the most complex. Lots to keep track of.

I think I may not be smart enough to write this book.

But I plan to finish it anyway. When did I ever claim to be smart?

Religion, Writing

Making new friends through novel writing

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Nicolai Cleve Broch as Saint Olav in the annual Stiklestad Play, near Trondheim. Photo by Leif Arne Holme/NRK, 2004.

Enjoyed a minor writer’s pleasure today, as I worked on the new Erling book.

I went over this one scene I’d added during the last revision. I always feel uncertain about inserted scenes, worrying that the graft might not take (even though most of the time I insert them precisely because I feel something’s missing at that point).

But it did work. Quite well, actually. Not only dramatically, but emotionally. The scene moved me, in fact. Which is always a surprise, like playing a practical joke on yourself.

The scene centered on King Olaf Haraldsson – Saint Olaf. Who is, in the great scheme of the series, the villain. In spite of the fact that he’s the patron saint of my second favorite country, the man was a totalitarian. Also a heretic, in my view, because I consider the use of violence in evangelism heretical. So I approached this project prepared to give him a waxed mustache and a black top hat.

But a funny thing happened as I wrote. I started getting under his skin. The first breakthrough came some years back, when I was talking about Olav’s life with a (longsuffering) friend.

I told him about a story from the Icelandic Flatey Book, not included in Heimskringla (the usual source). Flatey Book explains how Olaf was named after an ancestor, a great king called Olaf Geirstad-Elf, believed to have had supernatural powers. In the old heathen religion, naming a child after a recently dead relation was thought to cause a sort of reincarnation. The new baby was believed to be, in some sense, that ancestor reborn. (Yes, they also believed in Valhalla. And they believed the ancestor slept in his grave mound. Consistency played no part in their theology.) So Olaf was raised believing that he was really a wizard who’d lived before. His foster father Rani even dug into Olaf Geirstad-Elf’s grave mound and removed the ancient family sword, Besing, which was then given to young Olaf.

But Olaf sailed abroad as a Viking, saw a bit of the world, and chose to be baptized a Christian. We’re never told what he thought of his supposed reincarnation, in light of his new faith.

But there’s a story in Flatey Book about how he rode his horse one day past his ancestor’s grave mound. And suddenly a terror came over him. He turned his horse around and galloped off, giving orders that no one should stray near that mound again.

As I told that story to my friend, I suddenly felt I had an insight into Olaf’s psychology. He’d had a traumatic experience there at the grave mound. It instilled in him a terror of the old religion, a fear that he’d be sucked back into the power of a horrific ancestral curse. This helped explain his whole approach to Christianization.

I don’t think I’ll ever be an Olaf booster. His actions are too repellant.

But I think I’m beginning to sympathize with him. A little.

Which leads me to the inevitable thought…

After a thousand years dead, this S.O.B. is charming me! No wonder they made him patron saint!

Writing

Writing pains

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Writing a book has sometimes been compared to giving birth. I can’t speak to the comparison; it’s for female writers to comment on such matters – not that I generally listen to female writers these days.

But I was in metaphorical labor last night, working on the new Erling book, King of Rogaland. As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve finished the first draft, but that’s very far from finishing the job. I’ve been particularly concerned about the second half, which seemed to cover the plot ground way too fast, and to be insufficiently linked to the first half. So I took one character, whom I’d sent offstage at about the half-way point, and signed him on for another tour of duty. I also decided I needed some more fantasy action. All yesterday, when I wasn’t working on proofreading The Year of the Warrior, I was thinking about a scene to insert.

Thinking is the embarrassing part of writing. It doesn’t look like you’re doing any work. It also doesn’t feel like you’re doing any work. It only amplifies that voice in your head that keeps telling you you’ve lost it… if you ever had it at all.

In the C.S. Lewis story collection, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, there’s a story called “Ten Years After.” It was, I believe, the last attempt Lewis ever made to start a novel (it’s about Helen of Troy). But it’s very short. By the time he wrote it, Lewis was near the end of his life. His health was failing (something glossed over in both filmed versions of “Shadowlands”), and he’d never really gotten over his wife’s death. He just couldn’t find the energy or creativity to write fiction anymore. He decided he was past it.

That was how I was feeling yesterday, when I set about plotting my new scene. I’m several years older than Lewis was when he died, after all – although my health is better, and I’ve insured myself against bereavement by successfully avoiding almost all meaningful relationships. But I was still wondering if I had it in me to write an imaginative scene.

But I came up with something. I think it’s good. It took a lot of thought, and it took time to gel, and it didn’t come together until I’d gone to bed, so I had to turn the lamp on to note it down, but I have a scene. I’ll get on it tonight.

Writing

Resisting the draft

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No review tonight. Instead, a little writing update. I’m sort of at a milestone, having sort of finished the first draft of the next Erling novel, whose name – I think – will be King of Rogaland. I didn’t really want to call it that, having used the word “king” in my last title, but it seems to be what the book wants to be called.

I say the first draft is “sort of” finished because I’ve already identified a major revision I need to make, which will involve ripping up a fair amount of the work I’ve done.

Which is, I keep telling people, precisely the way it’s supposed to be. The first piece of advice I give to young writers is, “Don’t worry about making the first draft perfect. Your first draft is supposed to suck. That’s its function. The first draft is raw material – unshaped clay, unchiseled stone. It’s what you make a real story out of.”

What amazes me is that I don’t follow my own advice. I sit here thinking what a failure the book is, because the first draft is flawed.

It’s like I don’t even listen to myself. Considering all the time and money I’ve spent maintaining this font of wisdom in my life, I don’t even use it.

No wonder I never made the bestseller lists.

Now, to take your mind off my miseries, here’s a short film – about a half hour. It’s an adaptation of a Terry Pratchett story (or at least based on his characters; I’ve never read Pratchett). But it impressed me in many ways.