Fake Pirate Bones: Serendipity in Writing

Every now and then, while writing, there are magic moments where story mechanisms click into place and your project feels more complete than before. Those are joyful moments, where it feels like the disjointed windmills and chutes of your Rube Goldberg device whirr together perfectly, where your Frankenstein monstrosity picks a daisy and hands it to you with childlike sensitivity. I recognized one of those moments just recently and I want to share it with you.

[ Here there be mild spoilers and discussion of future plot events. ]

In the pages above, Katerina's little brother (who we've nicknamed "Pii Pii" for now), asks his sister and Alexandra if they want to see some pirate bones. Katerina is skeptical (maybe she knows he often makes things up) while Alexandra is so keyed-up on Pirate Fever that there's no room for skepticism. Regardless, they have nothing better to do, so they indulge him.

Pii Pii leads them to a secluded beach. (Along the way we get the first hint that Katerina sees herself in a different class from Alexandra, who is either wilfully or ignorantly blind to that element.) Pii Pii reveals the "bones," but they're not real. He's just arranged some sticks, a marked-up stone, and some boots to create that effect.

The girls playfully attack him for "wasting" their idle time, and ideally the reader sees this sequence as a little bonding episode between the three characters. 

Up until a week ago, that was my complete understanding of the function of that sequence.

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While I was out cycling I had a lightbulb moment. Not an "epiphany," because that sounds too grandiose. It's the mental equivalent of a stepping stone appearing exactly where you need it.

( These things most often happen while out for a walk, while cycling, or while in the shower. And this is not unique to me—people joke about it all the time, having a smart idea while in the shower, so they make "shower notepads" and stuff like that. I understand the phenomenon like this: once you have done the work to put all the pieces of a given project in place, if you give your stupid brain a stupid chance to quiet down all its stupid chattering, connections bubble to the surface. Connections are important, they make the work feel more of-a-piece. They can be anything: story themes, aesthetics, visual elements, simple dialogue callbacks. When they make themselves known, I imagine the gears of a story meshing together. )

Last week, the lightbulb moment was this:

Pii Pii made fake pirate bones. What if the entire pirate threat is fake, too?

- - -

I do not remember intentionally thinking, "I will include a scene with fake pirate bones and it will be thematically appropriate," but it is thematically appropriate, assuming the theme is "pirates pose a real threat," or "should we be worried about pirates?"

Either way, the fake pirate bones say, "the pirates are not a real threat."

Now, that's useful as-is, because the way I have the story outlined, the pirates are maybe kind of a threat, but they're not the real threat. That's the Provveditore, Vignelli.

Vignelli is stoking his town's fear of pirates for his own benefit (exactly how that works will become clear later). Vignelli wants people frightened of pirates. But I had not taken the next logical step and thought, "Vignelli might even fake the presence of pirates to increase the fear level." Maybe I didn't think it was necessary. Maybe I just hadn't put that much thought into Vignelli's actions yet. (There's enough going on as it is, yeesh.) But the Fake Pirate Bones inspired this notion that yes, Vignelli could be faking the pirate threat, and if he is, it does nothing except trim the sails or tighten the drum or just generally turn up the dials of the story.

And the Fake Pirate Bones sequence becomes foreshadowing for something that I did not know I wanted to foreshadow at the time I had written it.

This is all interesting to me because it says something about writerly intention.

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The way writing is seemingly supposed to work—according to some writing advice I have encountered—is as follows. I'm supposed to decide, "the pirate threat is fake." Then I'm supposed to look for interesting ways to tell this to you, Dear Reader. Maybe I think I am clever and I write a sequence where a boy sets up fake pirate bones and your English professor aims a laser pointer at it and says, "Look! Foreshadowing." And I pat myself on the back and pour myself a brandy and say "well done, old chap."

I feel like I have enough writing experience to call bullshit on that type of top-down, controlled approach to the craft, at least as far as my own working habits go.

Perhaps this is why I found George Saunders' ethos so appealing. He advised that we "listen to what we've written" and proceed accordingly. And so it has played out here.

I listened to what I'd written ("fake pirate bones") and let it inform my writing-to-come (fakery on a larger scale). I wrote a scene with one intention, and while reading it back and thinking about directions I'd like to go, made a new connection. The scene now has additional bonus meaning!

And this all suggests that (again, at least for me) the writing process is more improvisatorial than is commonly believed. I've often been tempted to imagine the writer as a clock-maker, carefully aligning cogs and gears. Meanwhile, my own approach seems to be to jam things in wherever they best fit, slam the lid shut, and hope the minute hand starts turning. I take comfort in the suspicion that my approach is more common than is popular to believe (and applies more universally than just to writing).

I wonder what it is like for the really great writers. Are they just very fast at generating Lightbulb Moments? Could we measure the quality of a work by the number of Lightbulb Moments that happened per page? Unfortunately, there's no way to retroactively identify them.

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Tangentially, I think this experience relates to why I have always hated writing English-Class essays. I always thought you were supposed to unpuzzle what the author was trying to say, instead what I now think is the better approach, of "saying what you see" and making a statement about what the book says, regardless of what the author meant. Inevitably I would reach a point in each essay where I would silently scream at the essay topic, "how am I supposed to know?"

I wish anyone had told me that—at least some of the time—the author didn't know, either. This whole "fake pirate bones" element could totally have passed me by. And there will absolutely be other connections that I will not make.

I suppose this is why Stephen King and so many others tell us that to be a writer you must be a voracious reader. If you are attuned the the themes of a story, if you are good at seeing what is written between the lines, if you can make sensible inferences—if you are a good reader—then you will be better equipped to apply those skills to your own writing, and writing, as it turns out, involves a lot more reading than was advertised on the package.

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Anyway, remember this post when you see the scenes in Chapters Three and Four about Vignelli faking the pirate threat. I wrote them yesterday! They were not part of the original outline!

THE GREEN BARS CLIMB

…if only slowly. It's been an "interesting" week. My partner's schedule has been unusual, our toddler has been doing this fun new thing where he actively avoids going to sleep. As my partner said, "they always tell you to build a clear, consistent bedtime routine to help your child sleep, but no one tells you what to do when your kid identifies those routine elements and intentionally fights against them," i.e., leaping away when it's time for pre-bed story time. Just another example of how someone else's advice will only get you half the way there.

Whew, thank you for joining me on this episode of Tony Thinks Very Much About Something. This Lightbulb Moment thing really is one of my favourite aspects of this whole weird pursuit, and I am happy to be able to talk about it here with a concrete example.

If you get your Lightbulb Moments in a weird place, let us all know in the comments.

💡
TC