INSIDE TWICE - Shelter

SUBSCRIBER NOTES FOR EPISODE SIXTY:

Hi again, stalwart subscribers—and thanks for checking in on another episode of TWICE!

This week’s episode was one of those I’d already written years ago—so, upon rereading this week, I just sat down and ‘improved’ it—having, as I said last week, a much clearer idea now of what both Lita and Stacy are for in this story, and where they’re headed.

As I’ve mentioned before, Matt’s Tale is the only one of this story’s three main threads I have already written ‘all the way through.’ That phrase was in scare quotes, of course, because, as I’ve also mentioned before, I wrote it YEARS ago, and so many things about my understanding of the story have changed that I am now rewriting large chunks of it too as I go forward. Such alteration will only grow more substantial as the story continues. I already know that whole multi-chapter chunks of the original version will have to be replaced by new material or just deleted before I’m finished. But I’m going to talk a bit this week about the particular challenges this Matt’s Tale thread poses—which are very different from those posed by the two other ‘current-time’ threads.

The first of these was just the challenge of trying to present a story this lengthy, complex, and vividly ‘immediate’ as a flashback account from seven to ten years earlier. I had to find at least marginally credible answers to questions like, “Why would Matt have written this to start with, given that he’s living in hiding, and no one is supposed to know this story?” and, “Would anyone really remember this much in such vivid detail after so long?”

I got a little bit of help with the first of those questions—about WHY he’d have written his story down—from the current literary craze for memoir! Suddenly, Shannon, I, and half the people we know are either writing and/or reading memoirs—downing them like candy! I had been writing TWICE for years before this trend became noticeable, but it was reassuring to see that, yes, people with lives weighing on their minds do sometimes write it all down just to get it out. Matt is carrying a LOT of heavy secrets around—alone. It seemed like he might really need to get them out, and down—just to help him make sense of it all for himself.

I tried that myself a year or two ago… If you saw that blog, well…you know I got lost in the woods on what I’d thought would be a much shorter walk, and finally decided to put us all out of my misery. :] But in doing that exercise, I did realize, very helpfully, that, yes, if events mattered at the time—and especially if they were interesting or unusual—an astonishing amount detail survives in memory. It may not be unaltered, or accurate, but there’s a LOT of it there—even after decades. So, okay, Matt’s accounts of conversations and experiences ten years later weren’t really much more vivid and detailed—if at all—than mine were about events much farther back in time.

And then, I realized that Matt really did hate leaving the two people he’s ever cared most about in his life so completely in the dark about himself and what they’d actually all been tangled in together then. So, yes, he might even have written all that down for some actual external audience, imagining that someday, somehow, he would send all this to them—very handily, since there’d have been no time to write all of this down in a day or two when the moment suddenly befell them all. :]

An additional challenge in Matt’s Tale is that—unlike the other two current-time narratives, which are rotating, tight third person point of view—Matt’s Tale is a first person POV account—which means I have to convey every important event or discovery—anywhere, to anyone—without ever being in anybody’s head but Matt’s, or anywhere he’s not present. While this requires an ‘inner editor’ always looking over my shoulder to make sure no one else’s thoughts are ever reported directly, or events Matt wasn’t present for referred to, except in conversation or other direct discoveries of evidence by Matt himself, it also turns out to be a very useful device for controlling which information is revealed or omitted in Matt’s Tale. This matters, because there are all sorts of ‘surprises’ later in the current-day stories that would be spoiled instantly if we knew the wrong things about events happening in Matt’s absence all those years before. If Matt’s Tale were from anyone’s POV besides his own, there’d be no acceptable way to prevent us readers from knowing about them much, much sooner than I want us to. In fact, given the length and complexity of this story, the job of not only keeping track of who knows what, and who doesn’t/mustn’t, but anticipating which fragments of even indirect information might fall together in my readers’ minds with other fragments of information to reveal things I don’t want known yet is gargantuan—and only getting larger as the tale grows. As I occasionally remind Shannon—pointing at my head—it gets very LOUD in here sometimes!

The last challenge I’ll mention is just controlling the way Matt’s past tense story and the other two stories affect and limit each other. I wrote Matt’s Tale first because it was the earlier story, so I figured I’d better get it down before I wrote the story that happens after it in time. Things that ‘happened already’ in Matt’s Tale require or prohibit things that might otherwise have happened, or not, in the present time story—and vice versa. But not having written the later stories, I had no real way of being sure when I wrote Matt’s Tale what things I would want or need to happen in the later stories that might require different or additional set-ups in Matt’s Tale to work. So, this time around, I am trying to map out the remaining current time stories fast enough to allow me to make changes to Matt’s Tale as necessary before I post them now.

What a juggling act! Will he make it work, folks? Or will all these plates and knives come crashing to the ground five episodes from the end, two years from now? :O Stay tuned to find out!

On a different topic, this week’s scene was particularly challenging and enjoyable to write—both years ago, and again this past week—because I so love complex characters; and they don’t get a lot more complex than Lita! As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, only a very, very few secondary characters in this tale remain who they were—or who they seemed to be—at the start. Most of the characters in TWICE are not only more and less than they seem to the reader at first, but more and less than they imagine themselves to be. Almost none of them will reach the story’s end without having changed in substantial ways. Lita is one of my favorite characters in that regard, because she is all of that on steroids. There are so many Litas—in so many states of advance or retreat at almost any given moment. She is a kind of psychological chimera—living many lives at once—all of them ‘truthful’—not all of them ‘true.’ Some of those lives she’s worked very, very hard to own, and some very hard to disown, but they are all always present—in her appearance and presentation, in what she says and what she doesn’t. For anyone who thinks to look, she’s nearly as much a Rorschach as the tarot cards were. So how did YOU see Lita here? Which of her elements were ‘important’ to you? Which seemed irrelevant or invisible? Which did you believe—or view with suspicion? If all your answers match, I’ve failed in what I was hoping to do here.

In this scene we see what Matt sees at his first viewing of the inkblot that is Lita. But, like any inkblot, Lita will reveal many different views, and mean many different things to him as time passes. Matt did a lot of hiding from growth and learning about life during his first lifetime. Lita thinks the universe has reasons of its own for bringing people together—and who’s to say she’s wrong? She will certainly teach Matt a lot of lessons he missed completely the last time around.

And with that little hook, I leave you for this week with my thanks, as always, for the encouragement of your company on this journey! Thanks for reading along—and please do share any thoughts, questions and or suggestions you may have! It’s ALL useful—and deeply appreciated! :]

Until next week—I wish each of you safe and healthy—and as at peace as this wacky world allows.