I am recovering from a bout of total exhaustion this morning after my next-to-last panel…got back to the hotel room shaky and basically unable to do anything but flop down in this chair.\u00a0 At least I got the netbook plugged in before I just couldn’t get up again.\u00a0 Last panel will have to survive without me.<\/p>\n
But–ChiCon was fun, and I’m glad I got to meet those of you who were able to come (and who found me–this hotel\/convention complex is confusing!!!) The chocolate–both the bar with almonds and cranberries, and the gorgeous box of Latvian chocolate–was devoured with glee (I did share the big box with others, because…well…I’d have felt guilty gobbling it all on my own.)<\/p>\n
I will be in the throes of packing as soon as I can drag myself up to full vertical.\u00a0\u00a0 NOT my favorite thing, on either end of a trip.\u00a0\u00a0 Things that I finally got squished into the suitcase before coming, and then unsquished enough to look decent on, are now resisting the re-squishing process.\u00a0 In the meantime, a blog post.\u00a0 About…not conventions…but writing.<\/p>\n
Those of you here saw that I was knitting a lot, never without my knitting tote.\u00a0\u00a0 On the trip to Chicon, I added enough to the ribbing of GreenTwo to get both socks off the ribbing, past the stockinette, and start the heel flaps.\u00a0 While here,\u00a0 I finished the heel flaps, turned the heels, and have the A sock connected and onto the gusset.\u00a0 Meanwhile TurquoiseOne has grown from under an inch to about 3 inches on both socks.\u00a0\u00a0 I did not knit on all my panels, or on all my work sessions at the LoneStarCon3 table…but I did knit at some, and in the other “waiting” periods…waiting to meet with Editor, waiting to meet with Agent, waiting for panels to start, etc.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I got through only one needle’s worth: 28 stitches on the heel flap, for instance.\u00a0 Sometimes I got through\u00a0 1, 2, 3, even more rows.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But all four socks–both pairs, that is–are much farther along than they were this time last week.\u00a0 (And what, you’re about to ask, does this have to do with writing?\u00a0 Hang on…it’s coming.)\u00a0\u00a0 I am most proud of turning the second heel of GreenTwo–the B sock–while sitting at the LoneStarCon3 table–doing it in public, without any directions in front of me, while people were talking, while I was interrupted twice and had to put it down and do some actual work, while making and fixing a mistake in the heel turn.\u00a0 In other words, in spite of difficulties.<\/p>\n
Taking socks through different sections, one stitch at a time, has a connection to taking a story through different sections, one word at a time.\u00a0\u00a0 In my knitter persona, I get tired of a sock (or pair of socks, or just the whole idea of knitting.)\u00a0 String, sticks, loop, string, sticks, loop….SIGH.\u00a0\u00a0 In my writer persona, I get tired of a paragraph, a page, a chapter…a book.\u00a0\u00a0 But while writing can seem unreal as you’re doing it (or it does to me sometimes), knitting is a very tangible occupation…with every stitch the project is visibly larger, close to completion.\u00a0\u00a0 Words on the screen are “there” but it’s not as easy–even with word count–to feel that you’re getting anywhere.\u00a0 In the old days, writing on paper with pen or typewriter, the pages stacked up.\u00a0 Here, the computer screen swallows the words at the top of the page as new words appear at the bottom…there’s no sense of heft, or any way to “feel” them.<\/p>\n
Yet the process is remarkably similar.\u00a0 Out of breath and little gray cells, we make words…and fingers twiddle about on a keyboard…and the words become sentences, paragraphs, pages….become people and their actions, places and their feel. A dimension the single word doesn’t have–or many dimensions–words that can grow, in the reader’s mind, into an analog (never quite exact)\u00a0 of what the writer thought and tried to set down. \u00a0 A container, in a way, of what can be imagined.<\/p>\n
Out of\u00a0 fat string and sticks (and little gray cells), we make loops\u00a0 in the string, and pull those loops through other loops, and make a fabric that exists in more dimensions (reducing the string to\u00a0 line) and in real space shows what the knitter had imagined (or doesn’t, in which case you pull loops out of loops until you have kinked yarn.)\u00a0 But this thing, this object the knitter makes, can then contain other objects (heads, hands, feet, necks, bodies…or, in some cases, things you carry around.)<\/p>\n
It was an idea…it becomes a book or a pair of socks or a house or a Mars rover.\u00a0\u00a0 And in every case, there’s a stage of step-by-step, one word, one stitch, one line drawn, one stick nailed to another, one piece fitted in, one step on a checklist after another…to get it done.\u00a0 And in every case, I will bet you, there’s a point at which the maker gets tired of the project, however much he or she is committed to it.\u00a0\u00a0 Experience helps.\u00a0 Write the next word.\u00a0 Make the next stitch.<\/p>\n
It also helps with design…I was thinking about that relative a problem that developed in Book V, as I was turning the sock heels.\u00a0\u00a0 Stories are more like “round thing” in knitting than like “flat things.”\u00a0\u00a0 More like socks than scarves.<\/p>\n
You can knit a perfectly serviceable scarf all in one stitch and one color.\u00a0 A flat rectangle.\u00a0 Nothing at all wrong with that.\u00a0 a scarf or a rectangular shawl or afghan or blanket is a useful object and many people knit only flat things of that sort.\u00a0 But a story that’s a flat rectangle is like “I went to the story to buy milk, bread, eggs, and a pound of salami.”\u00a0\u00a0 It’s not a story. Minimal linguistic skills will get you to the flat-rectangular-knitting level of communication.<\/p>\n
If you knit socks (or sweaters) both your knitting experience and your using experience of that knitting will be different.\u00a0\u00a0 (Yes, you could wrap your feet in scarves…but bear with me on the advantages of socks!)\u00a0 To start with, the sock has to fit the oddest-shaped part of your body.\u00a0 Socks have been knit flat and sewn up, but the best socks (she mutters firmly) are knitted in the round.\u00a0 You need more skills to knit in the round, and you need different equipment.\u00a0 Knitting socks means (for me) being able to plan a sock so that K2P2 ribbing comes out even (multiple of four),\u00a0 decreasing for the stockinette portion of the leg ,\u00a0 doing a slip-stitch pattern to reinforce the heel flap, turning the heel, picking up the side stitches of the heel flap to rejoin the top of the sock and start the run to the toes, decreasing to make a neat gusset on each side.<\/p>\n
Writing a story instead of a simple narrative (What I did today…)\u00a0 requires more skills and more “equipment” (in the sense of techniques required by fiction)\u00a0 and a story has changes in pace, changes in tone, changes in direction, that are remarkably (to me, anyway) similar to what needs to happen in a sock.\u00a0 Working through a sock feels very much like working through a story, though it’s a lot clearer where the sock ends…when it comfortably covers the foot the sock was made for.\u00a0\u00a0 Stories were made for readers, and readers don’t always have the same length…mental toes, let’s say.\u00a0\u00a0 Very few want the overlong story stuffed into their mental shoe…but they also don’t want the too-short story that cramps their toes.<\/p>\n
But my hand’s now cramping a bit from typing on the netbook’s tiny keyboard, so ….a question for you:\u00a0 what other metaphors strike you as workable?\u00a0\u00a0 Writing a story is sorta-like….what?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am recovering from a bout of total exhaustion this morning after my next-to-last panel…got back to the hotel room shaky and basically unable to do anything but flop down in this chair.\u00a0 At least I got the netbook plugged in before I just couldn’t get up again.\u00a0 Last panel will have to survive without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[62],"class_list":["post-1670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","tag-craft-of-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1670"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1671,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670\/revisions\/1671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}