nnozomi

 So, given the blessing of summer vacation I've been spending more time on the volume-four-that-will-not-allow-itself-to-be-written. Most of the recent stuff has been a moderately soul-baring conversation between T, a fictional character of my invention, and K, a person who exists in the real world, although I have never had the honor of meeting K and he'd probably be horrified to find himself appearing in a (would-be) mystery novel. I did have a lot of fun going through his semi-memoir, which was published a couple of years ago and is excellent, and coming up with little bits of information and attitude to help myself out. (Once or twice he "said" something fictionally which I then found in his real text, making me do what in this country we call a "guts pose.") 
Apart from the hard work of trying to make it ring true, this has actually been a fun conversation to write. T and K have been through the same long-drawn-out hell, and have in some ways come to know each other intimately, but it's only recently that circumstances have allowed them to speak frankly together--and in their mutual mother tongue for the first time. So there's a lot which remains unsaid because a) they both know it and b) they're both so much in the habit of not saying it. One of the challenges is to make sure the reader knows it without making them say it.
I wish I could finish this damn thing and make somebody read it, because I'm trying to do a lot of things I've never done before, and I'd like some feedback (as long as it wasn't along the lines of "This whole thing is misbegotten and I don't know why you think you're a writer," which would just make me cry in a corner somewhere.) Getting it finished, though, looks to be a very long way away yet.

I just had a shattering realization, though. The main plot--not T and K, they're a side story, bless them--turns partly on a character who hasn't appeared before and whom I'm struggling with. I'm just not as interested in her as I should be, and if I don't care about her, the reader isn't going to do so either--and is certainly not going to give much credence or sympathy to the protagonist as he semi-unwittingly allows his association with her to screw up his life. And, oh man, you know why I'm not as interested in her as I should be? That I just shatteringly realized? Because she's a woman. 
As the avatar-picture hints, I'm a woman myself, and I don't think I find women intrinsically less interesting than men, or less worthy of being written about, or anything like that. But, oh brother (goodness, how male my interjections are), if I'm trying to create a complex, messed-up, hopefully interesting character, I do seem to find it a lot easier and more interesting to do if the character is a man. 

I wonder why. Maybe it's that I'm about eighty percent straight and I like having a kind of romance with the character as I write of them. (Joan D. Vinge says in an essay somewhere that in her Snow Queen series, she ended up falling in love with BZ Gundhalinu and letting him take over a lot more of the series than she originally intended, and I can see that, especially as I was always a bit in love with Gundhalinu too.) More than that, though, I think it's very much that I'm not a man and so it's fun for me to be one on the page for a while. Many of the authors I've studied in grad school, Japanese women roughly contemporary with Virginia Woolf, made a practice of writing autobiographical novels. As one of them, Hirabayashi Taiko, commented on the others (and herself): "Some people say that the fact that so many of their novels were autobiographical proves that they didn’t have enough imagination. But these women’s imaginative power was already being given full play in their lives. ... They wrote their novels after living out their plots for real.” I think it was important for them, at that time and in that place, to do just that, but--as Gershwin says--not for me. My life is not as interesting as theirs, but in my case, either way I'd find autobiographical fiction kind of a wasted opportunity. I have to be me all the time anyway. If I'm writing a novel, I have the chance to be someone else, all kinds of someone elses I'll never get to be in real life. Why not take advantage of that?

One of my favorite mystery writers of all time is the great Peter Dickinson. I want to write a full post about him sometime soon, but I was rereading Hindsight lately, and thinking that if I had never read another Dickinson novel this one would give me serious qualms about his thoughts on women. Then it occurred to me that it's one of a very few among my favorite Dickinson books to have a male protagonist. Almost all his books I like, as it happens, are narrated or centered on women and girls. Poppy Tasker, Lydia Timms, Princess Louise, Letta Ozolins, Margaret Millett, Lucy Vereker, Rachel Matson and Jenny Pilcher, Doll Jacobs... there are exceptions, but I wonder if Dickinson doesn't find it interesting, in the same way I've described above, to experiment with writing from within a woman's personality.
I should be so lucky, of course, as to write books one tenth as good as his, but one has to start somewhere.

Anyway, after all this waffling, my problem is that it's just occurred to me: well, if I like writing about men better and I'm better at it, should I just take the plunge and make this damn uncooperative character a man? I've already had my nose rubbed in the fact that the protagonist isn't going to sleep with her like I originally meant him to, and it wouldn't affect any of the other plot elements significantly. Well. Maybe one. The one major female character I really like writing about is the protagonist's long-term girlfriend, who in earlier volumes has been a semi-protagonist herself--maybe because she's a bit of wish-fulfillment for me, maybe because I see her through his eyes to some extent--and it would affect her take on the whole situation if Troublesome Character were to become a man.
Argh, argh, argh. Why do I get myself into these things? 

 For the last, my God, ten years now, I've been working on and off at a series of mystery novels. The first three are complete, and one day I will find the nerve to try really seriously to get them to a publisher. The fourth has now been in progress for something like four years. I know roughly what's supposed to happen in it, and in the fifth, which will be the last; I just can't make it happen, or at least not on a less than glacial schedule. (A day job which is always time-consuming and often emotionally exhausting doesn't help speed the process along, either.)
Part of the trouble is that the fourth book demands a somewhat different structure from the first three; rather than just telling a story from start to finish with two or three closely related viewpoints, it also involves a lot of real-world history, presented mostly through interludes from people who otherwise don't appear directly, and a lot of references to other books. Also I am usually happy-ending girl, both in what I write and what I like to read, and the fourth book only has a happy ending to the extent that the main character doesn't actually die. 
I'm struggling at the moment with all of this, but especially with the problem of getting the plot where it needs to be. I know what the main character needs to do next, but he refuses to do it; he thinks it would be out of character, and I can't produce a convincing argument otherwise. "But if you don't do it the plot won't get moving!" I complain to him, and he answers politely, "Then perhaps you should think some more about the plot?" Gah. You're just words on paper, do what I say, and don't start making me feel guilty about how much I'm trying to hurt you and your girlfriend, you have to get hurt, it's inevitable. I refuse to stand back and let you have a nice placid uneventful life at the expense of my mystery.