3-Day novel Journal

If you've been following these blog posts, you might be interested in the following edited extracts from the journal I kept (with additions by my friends) through the weekend. Perhaps this would help you plan your own #3DNC, or maybe you'll have suggestions for us? 

Actually, I can't imagine that anybody would be interested in this journal besides us and our close friends. So, Sharon, Marian, Betsy, friends, and family: this is for you! 

Everyone: Tune in over the next few days for sample chapters from our novels. 

3-Day Novel Journal

Friday, 30 August

7:30 pm -- Arrived at the cabin with Betsy. The view outside is perfect: homely and quaint. A Shire-like cabin, with smooth green lawns, a creek with a rocky dam, a mossy bank. A story-tale site!

8:00 pm -- Did some prep work: outlining, re-arranging previously-written material, typing up chapter summaries, etc.

9:00 -- Sharon and Marian arrived, with immediate ensuing craziness, multiple conversations, loud mockery, and a constant stream of Wholockian reference, followed by a yoga session.

11:59 -- We started! With happy dances and hugs all around, we got down to work.

Saturday, 31 August
12:05 am -- I finished typing my outline.

12:11 -- I started writing the actual prose! This is the moment I've been building up to for a year!

1:15 -- finished chapter one! The tone is very casual, and I'm not thrilled with the sentences. But the embedded blog posts fit in very well, and I think I've got the main character off to a good start. It's been an interesting, productive hour or so, with three of us working away mostly in silence. Now to try to sleep for a bit, perhaps?

1:34 -- I guess nobody's going to bed. Everyone's awake, so I'll work on some of the blog posts instead of trying to plow through a whole chapter at this hour. If I can write a chapter an hour regularly, I can do this. 28 chapters in 36 (ish) hours....

2:00 -- Now one of my characters is trying to work out logical proofs, and my mind just won't do it. Time for sleep.

7:29am -- I only got bits of sleep, in fits and starts. The brain is not a whole lot clearer now than it was, but I'm back at it. Everyone is awake. Sharon and Betsy are doing yoga. Now I'm outside, alone, in front of a lovely fire, about to tackle those philosophical musings again.

7:54 -- Betsy  just read me a couple of excellent sentences she wrote last night to set up the rules of her secondary world. Very nice indeed. The larks begin to sing at 8:00 each morning precisely in her universe. I'm waiting for them to start here.

8:38 -- All four of us are at work. I have finished writing one series of embedded blog posts, but have not yet written a chapter. I need to get to it!

9:14 -- We're listening to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack when Betsy gets a text: her text alert sound is the TARDIS' materialization sound. “The TARDIS and Lord of the Rings,” she says: “That's pretty epic.” I think what I'm writing is pretty awful.

9:24 -- Chapter two done!

10:05 -- My battery died, and when I restarted, I found that the latest version had not been saved. I only lost a few sentences, but that was enough to annoy me. Meanwhile, Marian and I had a debate about whether or not River Song's hot red shoes were stilettos. We had to watch the beginning of “The Time of Angels” to solve this dispute. Marian was
right; I was wrong.

10:16 -- We're all in the cabin now, plugged in. Sharon's got Bach playing from her Kindle fire. I'm about to rewrite a student essay (a real one) in order to incorporate its sentence structure into my story. I'm getting a bit too caught up in the teaching aspect of the story, not focusing enough on moving the plot forward. I need to speed it up!

10:33 --We had a lovely discussion about profanity. Betsy: Can I invent my own curse words? Me: If they are monosyllabic.

10:45 -- Marian grew an antler.

10:55 -- Sharon tells Betsy I love you. Sorina bursts into song. Marian has a notebook on her head.

11:04 -- I am having serious problems with verb tenses. I wrote my outline more or less in present tense, so it's tough to switch it over to past tense as it should be. Plus a lot of the narrative is kind of stream-of-consciousness, which makes most sense in the present tense.
This leads to potentially confusing shifts. But it's probably the least of my worries, and I don't even know what my greatest worries should be.

12:00 -- Finished chapter five! Time for lunch. Poor Marian is sick to her stomach. Sharon is working away in total silence, hour after hour, completely focused.

12:40 -- Sharon is still a novel-writing machine. She spells out her thoughts in sign-language when she's stuck. I'm trying to give one of my bloggers a character arc. I think I'll write a whole series of his posts in a row, in order to develop him, and then figure out where they fit into the narrative later. I should probably do that with several of the bloggers, but that takes a lot of time away from writing the main narrative.


1:41 -- Marian is sleeping. Betsy seems to have gotten a second wind, and Sharon is just still plugging away. She's the energizer bunny.

2:21 -- Finished another set of blog posts! I'm going running. :)

4:17 -- In the last two hours, I went for an hour-long run up a goodly hill and back, then all four of us went and washed in the creek. Now all four of us are outside by the fire, listening to soundtracks, and ready to go at it again. 

5:20ish -- Finished chapter six.  

5:29 -- Discussion on leeches. I call leeches "small vampires disguised as slugs." Betsy insists we document this for posterity.

6:32 -- Chapter Seven done. 

6:37 -- Betsy randomly breaks out, in the middle of a silence, with “Be vewy, vewy quiet,” as if she didn't know she said it out loud.

7:32 -- Finished chapter eight. I'm so sick of this stupid book! I don't think it's a book I would read, so why am I writing it?

9:10 -- We've spent the last hour and a half reading each other's work (Marian, Betsy, and I; Sharon is still keeping hers close to her chest).

9:30 -- We took a Doctor Who break to watch “The Pandorica Opens.” That is an emotional roller-coaster.

11:02 -- We're back at it again. All of us. Still awake, still writing. Sharon is a writing machine.

11:20 -- Chapter nine—done. And I really like that one. It's very, very weird. And I love it. One more tonight?

Sunday, September 1st
 
12:30am -- Chapter Ten done. Ten chapters in 24 hours. I have 16 chapters left, and 39 hours left. Can I do it?

10:07am -- That was almost eight hours in bed, then, although not eight hours of sleep. Still, not bad. The brain fog is not as bad as usual this morning, and it is another beautiful day: overcast, humid, and heavy, but not raining and not searingly hot. We do have a small local
tragedy: Sharon's Kindle Fire docking station is not working, so she is currently without a computer to work on. She worked on Marian's for a few hours this morning until Marian woke up, and just now called her husband to bring her a laptop. So later this afternoon
some of are going to drive 20 minutes or so into the nearest town and he's going to drive 1 ½ hours up here, to bring her a computer.

10:54 -- Marian tells us that "Your body becomes desexualized in ballet class."

10:56 -- Marian randomly announces: "A misogynistic masseuse working on a moose."

11:00 – 12:00 -- We walked in the water to worship. We sat on a log and were joined by a snake. We sang the doxology, then Sharon read Hebrews 10:19-25 and we discussed briefly what it meant to draw near to God. Marian read Galatians 2:17-21 and we discussed in what ways we set aside grace. We sang "Come thou fount," "Man of Sorrows," "Praise the Savior," "We are marching," and "Awake O Israel." Then Sharon closed in prayer.

A little snake watched us all through our worship, charmed out of his hole whenever we sang or Sharon spoke. So Sharon must be a parselmouth. On the way back we saw a 4-foot long snake about 2 inches round and Marian vowed never to get in the creek again.

During this time we also established that Betsy is a hick because she used the word "crick" once and as Marian pointed out that if you steal from a store once, you become a thief. Therefore, Betsy is a hick.

2:03 -- Back at it! I can't believe it's 2 in the afternoon and I haven't written anything yet. This is bad. Dunno if I can crank out ten chapters today at this rate.

3:11 -- Marian is giving birth.

Later -- Marian: It's really hot outside. Me: That's because you were out there. Marian: It's a big problem. In the winter I melt the snow.

3:22 -- Marian's baby is born! It's a girl!

4:04 -- Me: What's the word like “hooker” for a guy?

5:33 -- Finally wrote one chapter, the first all day. Blah.

6:14 -- Washed in the creek.

8:03 -- Finished Chapter 12---the sensory deprivation chapter. Very weird!! I need to go back and check the chapter in Richard Feynmann's book that inspired this, make sure I'm not plagiarizing anything.

Marian and I had a push-up contest. We tied.

8:20 -- The smoke alarm went off to let us know the french fries were ready.

8:40 -- Chapter thirteen done! I read Marian's latest chapter It is amazing. Marian is definitely the most talent and capable writer in this mad little group.

9:26 -- Let's get a calipers and measure nose widths. The unanimous decision is that I have the best nose.

9:55 -- Finished chapter 14! My heroes have reached the dystopic city.

11:31 -- watched Doctor Who “The Big Bang.” Maybe another chapter before bed? Or
maybe no bed tonight?

Monday, September 2nd

2:46am -- I went to bed around 1, but couldn't sleep at all. So now I'm up and writing again.

3:35 -- Finished chapter sixteen. I wonder if I can sleep now? Fat chance.

7:10 -- I did sleep for a few hours after all. Back at it.

9:45-- We're talking about Sharon's flaws. Apparently she only has one. Before that, we went for a walk and talked about Christian romance novels. More Doctor Who quotes ensue.

We realized that next year everyone in this group will be over 21—partay!!

10:32 -- Me: Next year we need to bring booze—and boys. Sharon: Which ones?


12:32-- Ffinished Chapter Seventeen.

1:38 -- We're all sort of winding down, whether by choice or necessity. Sharon and Marian
danced like Miley Cyrus. I'm going for a run.

I ran in the rain and got chased home by a thunderstorm. We worked a bit more, then cleaned the cabin and headed out by 4:00. We met up with Jeff and a few others at Ekphrasis, exhausted, where most of us read our first chapters.

First chapters to follow, starting tomorrow.

3-Day Novel Debriefing

As I wrote in previous post “72 Hours of Novel Madness”, six members-or-friends of my Artists' Fellowship Group recently participated in the Three-Day Novel Contest.

We participated to varying levels. Here are the stats:

- Jeff paid the fee, entered the contest, and submitted his completed manuscript. He wrote 15 chapters with 20,926 words.

- Stephanie paid the fee, entered the contest, and finished a prologue, 7 chapters, epilogue, and 14,294 words.

 

The other four of us spent the weekend at a cabin in the woods, and didn't officially participate in the contest. 

- Marian was working on Aakraveil, a novel she's already been writing for two years or so. She carefully crafted 2 chapters with 9, 504 words.

- Sharon wrote 6 chapters with 24,000 words in her sci-fi/fantasy/spiritual novel with a working title of Hummingbird and Hoth.

- Betsy wrote 12 chapters with 22,022 words in her retelling of Beauty & the Beast, entitled Dragon's Hoard.

- Sorina (me) wrote 17 chapters with 29,073 words of a dystopic novel entitled The Four Senses. 

I'll post the first chapters of some of these works over the coming days.

But what you want now is the lively and hilarious narrative answering those questions like “What was it like?!?” “How did you survive?” and “How do you overcome writer's block?”

I don't believe in writer's block, so I won't answer that one. I think if you've got writer's block, you're not a writer. But that's probably me being obnoxious. 

What was it like? How did we survive? 
It was like Heaven. 
We survived through Love. 

It was an amazing weekend of fellowship and mutual admiration. The kindness shown me by my fellow writers kept me going. We got to be really girly and juvenile in the best ways: dancing, singing, giving backrubs, and constantly telling each other how beautiful and talented we are. This won't work for everyone. Some people need to be locked away in silence to get that much work done. But as the statistics above show, it worked (more or less) for us. I was really happy for this as my first 3-Day Novel experience.


What would I do differently next time?
- Write out chapter summaries for the whole book
- Do any necessary research beforehand
- Plan what music to listen to and make playlists. Maybe bring noise-canceling headphones so that I can give my retreat signal to the others when I need to have a good solid few hours of uninterrupted work.
- Devise a much simple plot and straight-forward narrative. This book has blog posts embedded in it (the main character reads a blog as the action goes along), so writing the blog posts really, really slowed me down. I think without them I could have written twice as many words and finished the entire story.
- Actually pay the fee and enter the contest. That gives me both a more focused goal and more bragging rights!

What would I do the same?
- Work with friends, preferably those same friends. I thought I would go crazy from the company (I'm a super introvert) but found that I worked better with people around. When the action was right there, I could tune it out into a sort of background noise; when everyone was outside and I was in, or vice versa, I found my brain distracted by wondering what was going on elsewhere. I think this is a result of being homeschooled: I always had to focus on my work in the midst of noise and activity.
- Take lots of healthy breaks. Go running, swimming, do yoga, cook, eat, watch Doctor Who. Sure, all that takes time, but it resets the brain and keeps the ideas fresh.
- Try to keep the syntax simple and the story moving forward. Think like a theatre director: make everything active and visual. Don't try to write literature. Just try to tell a story.

What is my novel about?
It's the dystopic tale of an Adjunct English professor (yup) who finds herself living a microcosm of her generation's problems: the inability to grow up, get settled, find a husband, find a sustainable job, move beyond teenage emotions, or deal with the challenges of vocation and sexuality. She's an exaggerated version of my weaknesses and those I observe in adults my age and younger. She's an exaggerated version of the repressed conservative Christian trying to deal with the world.
And then she stumbles upon a dystopic, totalitarian society in which everyone has had one of their senses taken away by an oppressive power. She sets out to find this place and to tell the world about it through her writing. I got her all the way through her road adventures, reading the posts these victims have put on their blog, into the city, away from the authorities, disguised, and ready to start digging into the underworld.

So tomorrow I will post excerpts from the journal I kept during the weekend, and each day after that I'll post selections from what we all wrote. Enjoy! 

72 Hours of Novel Madness

I am about to launch into one of the craziest things I have ever done: To participate in "The World's Most Notorious Literary Marathon." This is the Three-Day Novel Contest, which is exactly what it sounds like. 
You write a novel. 
In three days. 

(check out #3DNC on twitter)

To make matters even more exciting, 6 members of my artists' fellowship group are also participating in this gloriously insane weekend. Three others are writing new novels from scratch, one is finishing a novel-in-progress, and one is using the time for visual art. Four of us women, will be spending the time in a little cabin in the woods, with electricity but without indoor plumbing, writing and painting all day and all night, trying not to kill each other, trying to produce masterpieces under artificially adverse (or ideal?) circumstances. 

What's wrong with us?!?

I can't wait. 

Here are a few more details about what each of us plans to do, then some chat about how we're getting ready. 

- Two members of the group are actually, officially participating in the 3-Day Novel Contest. They have paid the entrance fee, planned their plots, and are ready to go. 
- One other member and I have not paid the fee, and are therefore not officially participating (and won't be sending in our MSS to the contest at the end) in order to have a bit more freedom to continue writing after the time, revise significantly, and so for. 
- One other member has been writing a lovely fantasy novel for, oh, about two years now. She reads a chapter each month at our meetings. Last meeting, we read three chapters out loud, in parts, and it's getting pretty tense! Her story is magnificent and gripping; I do hope she gets it all drafted this weekend. 
- And then the sixth member, as I mentioned above, is using the time to make visual art.

So, then, how am I preparing for this madness? Well, besides grocery shopping and packing all the stuff for such rugged, hormonal conditions, I have been planning the plot of this book for just about a year now. I started writing it last summer and got a few chapters done, but then put it aside and realized I needed to make some serious character changes. So I will be starting afresh, writing all new sentences. After the weekend is over, I may go back to my earlier drafts and see if any material could be reused. 

And then I've written an outline of the book, with a few sentences describing the action and themes of each chapter. 

I started writing chapter summaries, but didn't get very far. I wanted to write out summaries for every chapter, especially so I could do all the necessary research beforehand, but I really couldn't prioritize this over teaching, scholarly writing, and daily life (read: cooking). I know some people plan out their stories in great detail, and even go so far as to plan out how many hours to write each day and what to accomplish in those hours! I'm totally not that organized. I'll just start writing at midnight tomorrow night, go for a while until I fall asleep, and follow my body's rhythms that way all weekend. Plus there's the complication of 3 other women sharing a very small and smelly space! 

What, then, am I writing about? Well, hm. I usually don't like telling anybody anything about what I'm writing until it's done. I think that kind of freeze me up. I've only told my sisters the plot of this one. Suffice it to say it's contemporary, dystopic, and very slightly (only very slightly) sci-fi. It's a commentary on the lost nature of Millenials. It's an exploration of the Via Affirmativa. It's an angsty first-person narrative of insecurity and self-discovery. It'll probably be absolutely awful. 

But there you have it! On Monday evening, we troop in from the woods and wherever to meet up and share our work. If I'm still alive, I'll blog again next week to tell you how it went. Don't hold your breath!

The Doctor Diaries III.11, 12, & 13

“Utopia,” “The Sound of Drums,” 
and “Last of the Time Lords”

 This three-episode story is almost too beautiful, and too sad, to write about. I love how each season works its way towards a multi-episode climax, as if the writers and actors are saving up their energy and their ingenuity to make sure they end well. Each ending-story is kind of a summary of all the themes that have preceded in that season, as well as the emotional high point of the season

Similarly, this three-episode story summarizes all the themes I've been blogging about in this series, and raises the theological and emotional stakes of all those experiences

The Shape of the Story

I wrote about how all stories follow a narrative arc, and that the size of each part of that arc changes with the length of the story (number of pages or minutes). Each of these three episodes has its own shape, and then the three-episode story has a larger shape of its own. “Utopia” and “The Sound of Drums” each follows only an upward trajectory: those each end on a “cliff-hanger,” a crisis, without a following resolution. This means that the overall story goes up and up and up, with three peaks, three moments of crisis, and only one resolution. There are mini-crises, too, when the character or the audience think a disaster is impending, or when a disaster actually happens. So the three-episode story form is an excellent shape to use for ramping up tension. Within the story, it corresponds to just how awful things are: the very family Martha loves has betrayed her, then been captured and endangered in turn; the one person who promised to take care of the human race has betrayed them; and the one person who could be a real friend and companion to the Doctor has betrayed him. Each horror is big enough that it deserves, and receives, its own narrative high point. 

But then the length of the three episodes allows for a good resolution, too. All that tension needs to be diffused, and it is, in the glorious, magical, Peter-Pan-style ending. 

 

I Am You

I wrote about the tradition in comic books, superhero stories, and epics, for the antagonist and protagonist to be paired in an equal-but-opposite relationship:

 the bad guy is a foil for the good guy. Sometimes this is expressed in the chemistry between the two, which gives the feeling that if they weren't enemies, they'd be best friends. Sometimes each is delighted to find a worthy enemy. Sometimes their hatred runs deeper than any fellow-feeling and each is the exact polar opposite of the other. Some versions of this paring may be found in:

Batman vs. the Joker

Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker

David Dunn vs. Mr. Glass in Unbreakable

Indiana Jones vs. Rene Belloq

Kirk/Spock vs. Khan

Harry Potter vs. Voldemort/Tom Riddle

Eragon vs. Murtagh in the Inheritance Cycle

Cockatrice vs. Chauntecleer in The Book Of The Dun Cow

Picard vs. Shinzon in Star Trek Nemesis

Gandalf vs. Saruman (or more generally, the Wise vs. Sauron, Morgoth, and Ungoliant)

Ransom vs. Weston in Perelandra

Sherlock vs. Moriarty

This theme is very strongly developed in the “Last of the Time Lords” story, because the Doctor has finally found an equal. The Master is just like him: a Time Lord from Gallifry, a time-and-space traveler who can regenerate, a brilliant scientist and engineer who can fly the TARDIS, someone who shares his past and his memories and experiences: someone who should be his best friend. If they joined together, they could multiple exponentially the good that the Doctor does alone.

And there is the final temptation scene that almost always happens in these kinds of stories: “Turn to the Dark Side, Luke!” – but it is in reverse. The Doctor begs the Master to regenerate, to join him, to turn to the side of Good and join him. He won't, and his loss is as heartbreaking as the loss of a family member.

This seems to be a biblical principle: there is no criminal so bad that I do not resemble him. And there is no criminal so lost that I should wish for his destruction rather than his redemption. 
 

The Doctor is Jesus

On that note, I have written about literary christology throughout Doctor Who. I don't think I need to say much here; it's so obvious, and so well developed, in this story. Two quotes stand out for me in relation to this theme:

“I didn't come here to kill him; I came here to save him”

and

“You know what happens now....You wouldn't listen... Because you know what I'm going to say....I forgive you.”

I don't think any commentary is required! 


 

It's The Story that Saves

There's another biblical parallel going on in “The Sound of Drums” and “The Last of the Time Lords.” Martha leaves, and the viewer is horrified: Where is she going? What is she doing? How can she leave the Doctor and her family for a year? When she returns, she claims to have been seeking out the components for the one gun that will kill the Master. When I first heard that, I was kind of horrified, kind of skeptical. The Doctor wouldn't ask her to do that, would he?

And of course, he didn't. So what was she doing?

She was telling a story. Just telling his story:

I travelled across the world. From the ruins of New York, to the fusion mills of China, right across the radiation pits of Europe. And everywhere I went I saw people just like you, living as slaves! But if Martha Jones became a legend then that's wrong, because my name isn't important. There's someone else. The man who sent me out there, the man who told me to walk the Earth. And his name is The Doctor. He has saved your lives so many times and you never even knew he was there. He never stops. He never stays. He never asks to be thanked. But I've seen him, I know him... I love him... And I know what he can do.

What a wonderful way for that season to end.

Now, further up and further in!

The Doctor Diaries III.10c:

“Blink” and you'll miss it

 

As if I haven't written enough about “Blink,” here's one final go. It's such a good episode, it deserves all this attention, I think. I want to touch on one more topic.

You know the saying “Blink and you'll miss it”? Well, as the writers of Doctor Who so often do, they took the concept behind this phrase and literalized it into plot and characters.

In the story, if you blink while looking at a Weeping Angel, you will be taken out of your proper timeline and put into another: wrenched from your life, your loved ones, your possessions, your ambitions, and your work. In Billy's case, his life was put back just so far that he could then see, after opening his eyes from the blink, what he had missed. He was 40 years away, and could glimpse the life he should have had.

In our lives, doesn't think happen? We “blink” and find we've missed something huge.

We've stopped paying attention, and children have grown up and we've missed their childhoods.

We've looked away, and found a marriage or a friendship has died from lack of care.

We've gotten busy, blinked, and suddenly discovered we're too old to have kids, or to go back to school, or to run a marathon, or to learn how to dance, or to climb a mountain.

We blink, and we're on our deathbed, never having repented, though we meant to, we meant to, we meant to change and live a good life and love God and others.

But we blinked. 

 

The Doctor Diaries III.10b: “Blink”

The Trouble with Time-Stories

C.S. Lewis has ruined Doctor Who for me. Well, not really, obviously. But Lewis made one simple statement about time travel once that has spoiled ever other time-travel story I've encountered ever since. So I'm going to share that with you, then talk about a couple of time-travel stories and their problems.

The Dark Tower and the Problem of Bodies

Even if you are a super C.S. Lewis fan, you may not have read The Dark Tower. It is a fragment, just the first few chapters of a projected novel. [There is an interesting controversy about this novel]. I do recommend reading it; I love it and am distressed that CSL didn't finish it. If he had, it would have been a powerful part of his extended Ransom cycle, along with Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, and The Screwtape Letters. In fact, if Tolkien had finished The Fall of Arthur, all of CSL's Ransom books and everything Tolkien every wrote and all of Charles Williams' Arthurian poetry could have been mapped on to one another in a massive multi-layered totalizing mythology. But that's a totally different topic!

Anyway, The Dark Tower is a creepy story about a scientist who has invented a "chronoscope" with which he can watch some other time period. He doesn't know what time period it he is watching, whether past or future, and as the story progresses, the characters watching this time unfold start to suspect it's more like a parallel time, or the same time in a parallel universe, or perhaps even a glimpse into Hell. The action heats up when two characters are apparently exchanged between Othertime and our time, with a wild chase ensuing. It breaks off in the middle of a sentence, just as things are getting exciting. The best bit, from a literary-philosophical-science [fiction] point of view is this discussion (which I was delighted to find already transcribed here):

“Of course,” said Orfieu, “the sort of timetravelling you read about in books -- time-travelling in the body -- is absolutely impossible.” ...
“Absolutely impossible?” said Ransom. “Why?”
“I bet you see,” said Orfieu, glancing towards MacPhee.
“Go on, go on,” said the Scot with the air of one refusing to interrupt children at their play. We all echoed him.
“Well,: said Orfieu, “time-travelling clearly means going into the future or the past. Now where will the particles that compose your body be five hundred years hence? They'll be all over the place -- some in the earth, some in plants and animals, and some in the bodies of your descendents, if you have any. Thus, to go to the year 3000 AD means going to a time at which your body doesn't exist; and that means according to one hypothesis, becoming nothing, and, according to the other, becoming a disembodied spirit.”
“But half a moment,” said I, rather foolishly, “you don't need to find a body waiting for you in the year 3000. You would take your present body with you.”
“But don't you see that's just what you can't do?” said Orfieu. “All the matter which makes up your body now will be being used for different purposes in 3000.”
I still gaped.
“Look here,” he said. “You will grant me that the same piece of matter can't be in two different places at the same time. Very well. Now, suppose that the particles which at present make up the tip of your nose by the year 3000 form part of a chair. If you could travel to the year 3000 and, as you suggest, take your present body with you, that would mean that at some moment in 3000 the very same particles would have to be both in your nose and in the chair -- which is absurd.”

And that has ruined it for me. Right there. With his usual clean cuts, CSL has sliced open the heart of time-travel fiction and revealed its emptiness. Really, I can't see any way out of that difficulty. Can you?

There are, of course, many other problems with time travel.

The Blue Yonder and The Problem of Infinite Recurrence 

 One problem is the simple fact that if you went back in time and changed something, well then, it was changed in the past, so it would always have been that way. There would be nothing for you to change.

 Nearly any time-travel movie or show would work as an example. I'm going to use The Blue Yonder, one I remember vividly from childhood. In this film, a little boy grows up knowing that his grandfather had died while attempting to make it across the Atlantic in a solo flight. Then the boy finds a time machine, goes back in time, and changes the past so his grandfather makes it.

Here's the difficulty. If the boy had done that, then since it was in the past, his grandfather would always already have made it, and the boy wouldn't know any differently—so then he wouldn't go back into the past to make that change, which means it wouldn't have been made, and he would have to go back, and we've got ourselves stuck in a strange loop.


Another big problem has to do with the way in which time-travel stories are told.

Harry Potter and The Trouble with Narrative

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the perfect example of this problem. Here's how it goes.

It is important to understand that there are two passes in the narrative: two trips, as it were, through the same period of time, the same three hours one evening. (Watch this great split-screen presentation):
 

Narrative #1. Harry, Ron, and Hermione go to Hagrid's hut to console him over the upcoming execution of Buckbeak the hippogriff. Events unfold all the way until the moment Harry and Sirius are about to have their souls sucked out by dementors, when Harry sees a young man across the lake. This person sends out a stag patronus, which scatters the dementors and saves Harry.

Narrative #2. This is the second pass. Keep in mind that this is the same three hours as described in #1 above. It is another narrative—another story told to the reader/viewer, but it is the same set of minutes that the characters are passing through in linear fashion, 4:00, 4:01, 4:02, etc. Harry and Hermione go back in time, conveniently acquiring a second set of bodies in complete defiance of C.S. Lewis' principle described above. But they travel a different path physically, though it is the same path in time. Events unfold again, the same events, just seen from a different perspective, until Harry and Sirius are about to have their souls sucked out by dementors. This time, Harry is on the other side of the lake, waiting for the young man he thinks was his father. At the last minute (at the same minute as in the sequence before), he realizes he saw himself, so he sends out the stag patronus.

Now, here's the problem with the unfolding of the same narrative twice, or two narratives in one time period. In order for that to work—for Harry to mistake himself for his father—he had to have traveled through story #1 FIRST, then through story #2 (the same way in which the reader/viewer encountered those stories)—but it's time travel, so the two stories happened at the same time. There was no first story and second story—that's only a convention of story-telling, not a chronological reality. Harry could just as well have gone through the second story first, but really he went through both at the same time, so he would have known the figure with the stag patronus was himself, not his father, because, well, because it was himself and he was doing those actions at the same time.


I was of Two Minds

There is, of course, another enormous problem there with both the narrative and the bodies: what about the mind? If you somehow magically got an extra body to run around in the past with, watching your other self, what about your consciousness?

In Harry Potter, the reader is led to assume that time-travel creates two consciousnesses, one for each body (the “past” body that is going through its timeline naturally, and the “present” body that is going through its past timeline by unnatural means). But then these two consciousnesses are unaware of one another. Even supposing, for the sake of the fantasy, that time travel did create two bodies (and thus two consciousnesses), why does that then mean that the two consciousnesses would be unaware of one another? Why would they not be in communication? And why would their memories be different? The “past” body contains a consciousness with a memory up to its current moment on its natural timeline, while the “present” body that has traveled back contains a memory up to the moment that it left its natural timeline. Why wouldn't traveling back in time erase the memories back to that previous point? Or why wouldn't traveling into the future dump “future memories” into the consciousness of the traveling body? Or why wouldn't traveling either direction give unlived memories to the non-traveling body?

Well, again, simply because of narrative. Simply so that the story works, so that the story can be told.

“Blink” and the Causeless Circle

Now, “Blink” is one of the better time-travel stories I've come across, and one of the best episodes in all of Doctor Who from that point of view. But there are some problems.

First, the Angels chucked Billy back in 1969 so that they could consume the life-energy he would have had if he had kept living out his years naturally. So, there's just random extra life-energy waiting for him in 1969? That doesn't make sense.

And there's another problem that's actually a beautiful one: it's really quite a lovely philosophical conundrum rather than a flaw in the story. Let's see if I can express it—this is a tough one. Here goes.

Sally reads warnings that the Doctor left for her on the wall. He traveled back in time from the future to leave those warnings. He knew she would be there at that time and place because he had the advantage of the future, so he could “look back” and warn her. OK, so far so good. Same thing with the letter from her friend Kathy.

But then there's the whole bit with the dvds and the transcript. I wonder if I can do this, talk through it – it's quite difficult! Here goes.
- Billy got kicked back into 1969.
- He sat down with the Doctor and recorded the Doctor reading that transcript.
- Sally watched the dvd and had a conversation with the Doctor.
- Larry transcribed the conversation.
- Sally met the Doctor and gave him the transcript in 2007.
- The Doctor got chucked back to 1969 where he met Billy and recorded the conversation.

Did I get that right?

OK, so you see how neatly that loop avoids the problem created in The Blue Yonder. It's not a strange loop, because Sally didn't change anything. Nobody changed anything. Instead, they acted out a series of events that would have gone otherwise if they hadn't had information that relied on time travel for its transmission. Very good, Moffat!

The problem of bodies is averted: each person's one body is taken from a time period and put into another. There aren't two bodies. (Of course there are in other episodes, in which the Doctor meets himself, or Rose or Amy meets her younger self). Sally stays in her time period, and Kathy's and Billy's bodies move from one era to another without leaving a body behind. (Of course, that doesn't answer the question of where they got the molecules to make up a body in that period, though). Decent job, Moffat.

They don't have two minds, then, either: as a matter of fact, the way the story works depends upon the limited knowledge of a single, time-bound consciousness for Sally, and a single, time-moveable consciousness for the Doctor. Nice work, Moffat.

So then, what's the problem? Well, it's that the events in “Blink” constitute a nice chain of cause-and-effect, but that the final effect is the cause of the first cause. 

 Aristotle would not approve. Or would he?

Aristotle wrote about how every effect must have a cause, and that this is one way to go about pondering God's existence. In this kind of reasoning, God would be the ultimate Cause of all things: He would be the one who got everything going. He started the first effect, which caused the next effect, and so on. He is the Unmoved Mover who got everything else moving.

In “Blink,” there is no Unmoved Mover. The last mover moves the first mover in a circle. It is not an endless circle, however: it went around once. And that's where I have a problem. Wouldn't it either have to go around infinitely, happening over and over again, or else have an outside force breaking in at some point along the circle to get it rolling?

So you see what I meant when I said this is a lovely philosophical conundrum rather than a flaw in the story. It's more a question about how things—time, events, causation—work, rather than an action plot that uses time travel as a cheap device. Brilliant work, Moffat.

The Doctor Diaries III.10a: “Blink”

The Best Episode?

“Blink” is the favorite episode of many connoisseurs. It is really a perfect episode: perhaps the quintessential single piece of Doctor Who. If you had to pick just one episode to watch, ever, or a first episode as an introduction for a new viewer, this might be the one.
Its narrative perspective is great as an introduction to the Doctor, because [nearly] the whole episode is from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about him, and who is justifiably confused by the strange events in which she is involved. Sally Sparrow is a sweet, loveable, beautiful person, too (played by the charming and talented Carey Mulligan, more recently of The Great Gatsby fame): someone whose narrative position we are happy to inhabit.

The dramatis personae is stocked with delightful characters: Billy Shipton, Larry Nightingale, and Kathy Nightingale are all tons of fun, just a little bit cooler than people you know. Again, they provide a way into the story: they are like us, or like what we want to be, or like our friends, or like how we imagine our friends to be. This takes us into the plot so that we get wrapped up into it.

Its story-arc is ideal: It is contained within one 45-minute episode, but it has a long, slow, carefully-developed exposition. For a very long time, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Doctor. This connects with the narrative position, as both Sally and the viewer gradually get to know about powerful, mysterious, dangerous forces at work in time and space, and about the one Person who can control them. But he cannot: he is trapped, and needs the help of ordinary little humans to set him free again. That is the conflict: can Sally help the Doctor escape from his time-trap without being destroyed in the process? {wow, that sounds like a cheesy back-of-the-box blurb. Sorry}.

And the tension ratchets up higher and higher, with a delicate handling of fear and creepiness not often matched in Doctor Who, which frequently relies on simple race-against-the-clock and race-against-death matches with superbly unsubtle monsters and disasters. This one takes a more sophisticated approach, with a slow, patient introduction to one of the worst enemies ever: the Weeping Angels.

Now, I had the misfortune of watching “The Time of Angels” and “Flesh and Stone” first, in my crazy backwards introduction to Doctor Who (remember I watched series 5, 2, 1, 3 in that order). I LOVE those two episodes. I think they are amazing. I do not mean to disparage them at all, as the writing and acting of those two Angel-episodes are superb. But since those angels are even more dangerous than these—those kill you, these chuck you back in time somewhere so they can consume your life-energy—and since Amy's terrifying encounter with them is drawn out and amped up, I found the Weeping Angels in “Blink” much less scary than I would have otherwise. Because, really, their terror is far greater, because so much more subtle and psychologically realistic. Amy meets them on another planet, in another time period, as just one more horrific enemy that wants to kill the Doctor in a long chain of horrific enemies who want to kill the Doctor. Sally meets them in her own time period, during her ordinary linear life, in a very creepy old abandoned house. Whereas Amy's encounter is (from her point of view) clearly science fiction she is caught up in, Sally's is a nightmare come to life.

Do you see what an enormous difference that is? Meeting terror in a foreign situation is pretty much expected; expected as a genre convention, and as part of life. We expect to meet monsters in a far-away jungle or on a far-away planet. But meeting something ordinary—a garden statue—in your ordinary life and having it turn out to be a monster? That is much, much worse.

Then, finally, there is the plot: the time-story. It may be the best and most convoluted time-story Moffat ever wrote. If you've seen the episode, you know it, so there's no sense my summarizing it: if you haven't, I won't spoil it here. But tomorrow's post will be about time-stories, using this one as a point of discussion, so I will spoil it there. So go and watch “Blink,” then come back tomorrow!