The Middle Path of Extremes

I have been away for a few weeks, with the family on a cruise through the Pacific. It was fun, dancing upon the waves, island hopping and celebrating Christmas. A variety of ups and downs accompanied this vacation as if to mimic the very waves we sailed upon. But hose are not the waves I want to address just now.

This is the blog about Ælemental, my YA series and in particular how far along I'm coming with Book 1: The Tree of Life. Well, as it is it is slow sailing. And also an attempt to navigate through the extremes of high and low waters. Because I cannot tell you the exact nature of the story (that would be spoiling it) allow me to use the movie I saw tonight.

In search of a rhythm

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Good solid movie fare. Excellent acting, solid story, smart plotting and excellent sets. Yet I could only give it 4 out of 5 stars (yes, I dabble in rating my movies online). Why? Well, as I commented along my rating, it lacked Vaudeville. It didn't engage in presenting a clear platter of major and minor acts, of the 20/80 golden rule of storytelling, of comedy and tragedy acts.

In essence it lacked the middle path of extremes.

Any good story you come away from entertained. Any great story will blow your mind. Good is often discarded along the many other goods (there is a lot of creative talent to be sure), but great leaves memorable impressions for days if not months thereafter. You can cram all the juicy plot twists, exotic locations and snappy one-liners you want into a good flick, but a great flick will revolve around one or two pillars of epic intensity - usually surrounded by intentionally lesser intensive story elements. Sherlock Holmes had no singular moment or scene that stood out. No epic set piece that everything culminated towards. Not even an imposing set piece that brilliantly outdid the previous and following locations.

Too much of the same.

Mind you, it is a lot better than Tin Tin's animated venture or even the white (deafening) noise of Transformers earlier this year. And I'm even bold enough to lob Harry Potter into this category, because as good a read as the books were, I can't for the life of me remember the rhythm of each story or any specific details of the seven books. And that's my point:

a story needs to know when to slow down and speed up

when to dim the lights and when to crank up the sound. It needs to live like a living breathing entity.

There are not many stories that can pull this off. But I'm going to try it.

In fact, that's the whole reason I started this story six years ago in Ireland. As much as I liked the YA fare that was out there at the time, I felt I could write a better, more textured story, compose a better rhythm, weave a more brilliant tapestry. Ælemental's world is a world of symbolism and symmetry. The plot was carved out into five major concepts. The story was written kind of as a fun exercise in letting the leashes of the beast and see what I could write. That was the easy part. It was also of horrible quality. Every fairy tale and mythology aspect was crammed into one long string of events - the whole was really just one big lump of spaghetti. Subsequent drafts (2 & 3) weren't much better. I had cut so much, it was not only the same flavorless spaghetti, now it was also hopelessly incoherent. So now in draft 4 (the most intensive effort) I am bringing balance to the force, creating rhythm between action and emotion, driving characters through plot and sculpting intense set pieces by diminishing others.

This takes a lot of time, gauging all that I have written before and using the stronger elements and ditching the weaker ones. I have one thing in common with the depicted Sherlock Holmes and that is that I am blessed and cursed with seeing all the elements around me. The trick is to find the ones that count.

The journey may take some time, but the waves are now much more fun to dance upon...