On keeping stuff straight

Lately, thanks to the low company I keep (i.e., my fannish friends) (hey, their tastes are low enough they hang out with me) I’ve had a ditty stuck in my mind from an old Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that featured a Gamera movie:

Gamera is good to eat,
Gamera is full of meat!

Now while the first contention is at best unproven, the second is surely true. Yet I wonder how well advised one would be to sing that song in the actual presence of Gamera:

(thanks to: http://markvine.com/Photo_Kaiju.htm)

I mean, look at him. Looks a bit, well, cranky, doesn’t he? And never forget, he’s over 200 feet tall. Mightn’t singing such a song remind him that you yourself are full of meat, good to eat, and nicely bite-sized?

It’s important to think of these things. Yes? Yes?

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On what I hope’s a more serious note, anyway, I have a plea for all my friends and readers who are also writers – I know some of you are lurking out there. Really.

Which is: how do you keep straight the proliferation of facts – well, facts within your ficton – which you generate in the course of writing a book? Your characters, primarily: their histories, their traits, their interactions, their loves and grudges and weird little habits?

And also, since I like to create fully-textured worlds for my people to play in, what about those details? Is there some system, some software, to help keep it all straight?

I tend to generate vast amounts of notes in my writing. In the past I’ve let myself get completely out of hand, overwhelmed myself with note-writing. My long-awaited (by some, anyway; humor me on this, anyway) novel The War for America generated tons of notes. I must have, literally, a million words of notes. I also ground out 300K words of fiction before the motor seized.

Now one problem with this of course was that this book was an experiment in writing without doing a detailed synopsis in advance. Bad idea: lesson learned. While I can’t and constitutionally won’t tolerate too much structure I need some or I just get a vast amorphous Cthulhuvian mass … like the manuscript for WAR4AM. I can alter the framework, and indeed usually have to: I experience over and over and will someday (soon, dammit!) actually learn the lesson that I don’t really know the story until I’ve told it once. But without some kind of good idea where I’m going, I find I go: nowhere.

Anyway, I also know that note-taking, or rather, note-making, is a trap: it’s fun, and it’s easier than writing actual story. By which I mean: safer. No one will read it and *gasp!* criticize it. (Except I intend eventually to start making some of my note files available online to enhance the reading experience of some of my books, starting with DinoLords, for them as wants it.)

I of course have to walk a thin edge, teetering between not having sufficient depth and detail to make my worlds verisimilitudinous – no matter how fantastic they are, I want them believable readable with minimum suspension of disbelief – and spending all my time happily jotting notes that no one will read until I’m dead. At which point my literary executor will gaze upon their vast and pullulating mass, grunt, and hit “delete.”

Just kidding. I hope. I know it’s presumptuous to anticipate that anyone might care about my voluminous notes when I’m gone. Then again, if I wasn’t bloody presumptuous, would I be a professional writer in the first place? Think about it.

So I submit this question and plea: how do you do it? How do other writers you know of handle your notes, the sheer mass of fictional information?

I don’t restrict this plea to those who’re actual professional writers. I take wisdom where I can get it; and I take for granted my readers are an uncommon wise and perceptive lot. If you’ve even an idea, please hit me with it.

If I get a large enough response (fingers crossed) we can continue to discuss it here in my blog, or take it to my Forum (hint, hint.) Or if you don’t feel like exposing your thoughts to a cruel and wolflike Web, feel free to email me at “vicmilan at ix-dot-spammersdiediedie-dot-netcom-dot-com.” With, y’know, appropriate emendations to the address.

I’d really like your help, please.