Wishing a very happy 200th birthday today to the one and only Charles Dickens!  Yes, he's been mouldering away under a stone in Westminster Abbey for 142 years, but his works still stand and his characters live forever.


Brief eulogy, yes, but I'm late for class!  Cheers!

Concerning Tangents

I've been revisiting Dickens lately.  To me, picking up a Dickens novel is the mental equivalent of curling up with a cozy blanket and a cup of cocoa.  It's the comfort food of the soul.  I remember the first time I read David Copperfield, feeling from the first pages that I'd literally fallen into its world.  (It always angered me when I read reviews saying Agnes was a two-dimensional character.  You don't often meet people like her, it's true, but I have met at least one, namely my mother.  Of course, everybody knows a Mr. Micawber, a Dora, a Tommy Traddles...)


Anyway, what always makes me a little sad is the realization that, in all honesty, no one would probably publish a Dickens novel now, or they would insist on cutting it down by at least a third to cut out run-on sentences, unnecessary dialogue, pointless description, etc.  In Nicholas Nickleby, for example, in Chapter Two, he devotes six pages to a Public Meeting concerning a United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company, which (so far as I can recall) is never mentioned again in the entire novel.  Then, at the end of Chapter Five, he overturns the Coach Nicholas is traveling in simply in order to allow them to stop at an Inn where two gentlemen spend Chapter Six telling stories completely unrelated to the plot.  I always love to imagine the public of Dickens' day, reading the novel in serial form, eagerly awaiting Chapter Six to find out what happens to Nicholas, only to be met with The Baron of Grogzwig.


However, I love Nicholas Nickleby, mostly, of course, for the central plot and characters, but in part because of the weird tangents.  I find all six pages concerning the UMIHMCBPDC particularly hilarious.  How tragic, should the editors at the time have decided to hack them away.

Inspiration and a Guileless Confectioner

The weekend has brought with it fresh writing inspiration, which involves changing the era and setting of my current project completely.  Excited about the changes and where they may lead, yet peeved about having to actually go back and change everything, I move ahead at last after a too-long term of creative stagnation.  The story is changing somewhat as well, and things are a bit scrambled, as things will be after a sudden and extreme transfer over several centuries, but the characters are the same.  It's always rather fun to take the same basic personality and throw it into a completely different era, just to see how it will fare.


Aaron is performing in his first musical this month, The Drowsy Chaperone, as a gangster posing as a pastry chef.  I like to think his character is a nod to Great Expectations and the "guileless confectioner" briefly mentioned on Pip's arrival at Mr. Jaggers' office in London:

"The window indicated was the office window. We all three went to it, behind the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an accidental manner, with a murderous-looking tall individual, in a short suit of white linen and a paper cap. This guileless confectioner was not by any means sober, and had a black eye in the green stage of recovery, which was painted over."

Life as a Novel

I like to think of life as a novel.  You write it, in a way, as you would a novel.  It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It's full of wacky characters, some of whom are so unique that if you wrote them into actual fiction no one would find them believable.  You choose whether to be the protagonist of your own life, or to stand by as a supplementary character while somebody else commands the stage and directs the course of the story.  You can be the hero or the villain, or merely a sidekick or flunky.  You may create an outline, but more often than not, the plot changes as the characters grow and change.  (At least, this regularly happens to me.  I do know some people who keep strictly to their outlines, but my characters nearly always change their minds about what they want to do at the last moment without consulting me.  And they are generally right.)


As in a novel, there are things that might happen, things that perhaps should have happened, things that you regret, but the trick is to make what does happen the best, the most satisfying it can be, even if, or especially if, it pulls at the heartstrings a little.


Most importantly, I think, you choose how the novel is written.  The same basic plot can be interpreted in so many different way.  It is because of the genius of Charles Dickens that the end of A Tale of Two Cities is a triumphant one.  Had he written it differently but kept the basic story the same, Sidney's death could have been a pointless thing, one more pointless tragedy in a particularly messy time in human history.  As it is, it is one of the most triumphant moments in literature, which actually makes it more heartbreaking.


Just a thought.