The Synopsis Treasury (16 page)

James P. Blaylock

James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the Steampunk genre, has written some twenty novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles. His short story “Unidentified Objects” was published in
Prize Stories
1990, The O. Henry Awards
. His Steampunk novel
Homunculus
won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award in 1985, and his story “Thirteen Phantasms” was the first digitally published story to win a World Fantasy Award. About his novel
The Rainy Season
, the
Library Journal
wrote, “Blaylock’s evocative prose and studied pacing make him one of the most distinctive contributors to American magical realism.” Recent publications include
Knights of the Cornerstone
,
The Ring of Stones
,
The Aylesford Skull
and the soon to be published
Beneath London
.

I’ve always sold books via a synopsis, most often with two chapters included. My editors at Del Rey Books and Ace required such a thing back when I was writing my early novels. Today my editors no longer ask for it. Apparently they’ve come to assume that I’m competent to write the novel I promise to write. Despite that, even today, after thirty-five years of writing novels, I still work up a complete eight-or-ten-page synopsis, just to make sure that I actually have a story to tell and not simply a compelling incident or two.

That’s just what I was up to when I decided to write
Winter Tides
: I wanted to turn an incident that had occurred in my own life into a story proper—a “complete dramatic action,” to quote Flannery O’Connor. When it was happening to me (back when I was around eighteen years old) the incident looked as if it was going bad, ruinously bad. In fact the fates cut me some slack and it turned out well. I wondered ever after, however, just who I would have become if things had gone the other way.

Twenty-five years after the fact it seemed to me that a novel might come out of that incident. But I couldn’t see how to write it. I talked to my writer pal Lew Shiner about it, and it was Lew who reminded me that the incident wasn’t the story, but was perhaps the thing that happened to the main character—that would turn him into the person he was when the real story began, and which would motivate him to do what he was bound to do, given what had happened to him when he was young. I started the long process of taking notes and tossing around ideas on my computer screen, creating and dismissing characters, trying to get at the essence and atmosphere of the novel and the people in it.

This process of development usually takes me around six months. I’ve never been able to write a story until I can see it. If I’m writing a novel I have to be able to visualize enough scenes so that a coherent story is playing out in my mind’s eye, so to speak. From the start I could see the beach on that winter day: the rising surf, the obvious rip tides moving out through the swell, the two little girls wading knee deep in the rip—the details, in other words, that set off the alarm bells in my mind. I had been there that day, after all, so there was nothing to it, really. Like I said, however, that didn’t tell the story; it simply set into motion a train of incidents that would become the story if I put in the work necessary to bring it into focus.

I grew up hanging around Huntington Beach in California, and I had a real affinity for the deteriorating downtown—the antiques stores, surf shops, oil wells, liquor stores, cafes, and doughnut shops that cast a particularly romantic image in my mind in those days, especially on foggy mornings in fall or winter. But by the time I set out to write the book, much of the old Huntington Beach had been bulldozed and “modernized.” Progress was eating away at my youth. I decided to set the novel in an in-between era, not in the new, less attractive reality, but also not in the down-at-heels Huntington Beach I remembered fondly from the 60s. I wanted a place in transition, just as my main character Dave was a character in transition. I was building sets for a children’s theater in those days, and I knew I wanted an old, haunted theater, and I knew the ramshackle building on Walnut Avenue that would become the theater. I knew what desolate stretches of beach along the Pacific Coast Highway would be right for an atmospheric murder. I could picture the Huntington Beach pier at night in the fog, because I’d been there often enough over the years.

In short, when I could picture a dozen or so scenes and settings in my mind, one following another, with my characters moving sensibly among them, I knew that I could write the novel. By that time, I actively wanted to write the novel, because it had become real to me. Strangely, the places that I’ve written about, although sometimes largely imaginary, are often more real to me than the so-called real world. Saying why is a subject for another essay.

At that point I wrote the synopsis: eight or ten pages worth of scenes that followed one after another. It turned out (as it always does) that two scenes in the synopsis might require six scenes when they’re actually dramatized, and I knew from experience that the best stuff in the finished book would not have appeared in the synopsis at all, but would appear out of nowhere in the telling. A novel synopsis is a sort of totem—a representation of the thing I would write, but without any real power over it. I wrote out those scenes I’d come up with in the present tense, separated by page breaks. I omitted style (or, more accurately, voice) and opted for simple clarity. I wanted a mere synopsis, but in order for that synopsis to be colorful, it had to include some of the details that would provide that color. What I came up with is what you see here.

—James P. Blaylock

February 8, 1995

Dear Merrilee:

Well, here it is, finally, a couple of weeks later than I thought it would appear, but I’m satisfied that I’ve got the entire thing worked through. I’m happy with it on a couple of counts. First, I like it: I like the atmosphere, the characters, the pace, etc. There’s plenty of room for me in the book, so to speak—something I was a little worried about, since I was determined to have a higher regard for my audience in this one and for the notions of my editors. Anyway, I’m fired up, and have sixty pages of scenes and ideas piled on the desk. Writing this proposal, even as short as it is, required thinking the book through far more thoroughly than I’ve ever thought one through before. Second, I think this one doesn’t make the single biggest mistake I made in
Night Relics
, which was making the developing plot and the resolution too internal. And yet there’s some stuff in here that I think will be nicely artistic and intelligent, but without sacrificing the action and pace and suspense of the story. How do you like that?

Bold statement #1: This would make a good movie, I think, and wouldn’t require an eccentric director to see the potential in it. Is that something we worry about when the book is written, or do we try to palm it off as a treatment or something right now?

Bold statement #2: As you know, Susan and Lou chatted me up at the ABA and over the phone a couple of times since then about my career, specifically about this being a Putnam’s hardcover and a Berkley paperback etc. All this makes me very happy, and I’m exceedingly willing to promise more of this type of book, if Susan and Lou want some consistency for the sake of sales, etc., and if we can move my career up another big rung. I’ll admit, though, that I’m really fond of
All the Bells on Earth
, and I’m convinced it’s a good book in ways that this one won’t be. And I don’t mean this one won’t be a good book; I mean that in
Bells
I affected to be Charles Dickens, and I can’t do that here. You know what I’m talking about. Now, if the money were purely even, I’d opt to write the eccentric book far more often than the straightforward suspense book—I’d write to please myself and take a chance on pleasing anybody else, which is what I did for ten years. What that boils down to is the bold statement that, this time, the money can’t be even. To stay even I’d need 30 thousand, since I took 25 nearly four years ago, and given inflation and all … But I can’t afford to stay even. I’m taking Lou and Susan seriously.

So, how much do I want? I don’t know. I’m not going to be a nut about it, but I’m perfectly willing to turn down an offer and walk, especially if the alternative is to stand still. I guess we should talk about what constitutes nutty and reasonable.

If there’s anything in particular that this needs before we show it to them, I’ve got to know. There’s ghosts in it; do I need to explain my notions about how ghosts work? The atmosphere of the book is part ocean, part Phantom of the Opera, and part toned-down, ripped-off Shakespeare; are the colorful aspects and plot aspects of those things vivid enough, or should I add a paragraph explaining that I’m going to make them vivid? I plan on making this book a little bit upscale, so to speak; should I add BMW’s and designer clothes and dinner at Spago’s? Actually, I wrote out several explanatory paragraphs in order to swear to all this, but then I scrapped them because I was convinced that the proposal already carries the day. If it doesn’t, I’ll add and subtract until it’s right.

That’s about it. This whole thing makes me both happily anticipatory and edgy as hell.

How’s life in the mom lane?

Cheers,

James P. Blaylock

Winter Tides
By James P. Blaylock

(plot summary)

On a deserted southern California beach in mid-winter, Dave Quinn swam out into the ocean to save two drowning girls—identical twin sisters. One of the sisters died, and in the years since, Dave has been haunted by the memory of his half-failed heroism. Now he is more literally haunted—by the ghost of the drowned girl, by his love for her sister, who has been drawn back to California all these years later, and by the schemes of a sinister and increasingly violent rival for her love.…

Winter Tides

A Novel Proposal by James Blaylock

Nearly fifteen years ago, on a deserted southern California beach, Josh Sanders swam out into the winter ocean to save two drowning girls—identical twin sisters. In spite of his best efforts, he was able to save only one of them; one of the girls drowned. And in the years since, Josh has lived with the memory of his half-failed heroism.

Anne Hawthorn’s landscapes are hung in galleries in Laguna Beach and Mendocino now, as well as in Edinburgh and London. Real success hovers on the horizon but has so far eluded her, though she has had increasing prospects since moving to California from England. She suspects that her sister Elinor would have grown up to be the better painter of the two of them, although Elinor’s paintings, the few of them that still exist, are bleak and morbid—leafless trees and shadowy moors—even though they were painted when the twins were twelve years old, before their fateful holiday from the midlands of England to the southern California seashore.

Although she keeps it a secret, Anne is certain that she has seen her sister, or the ghost of her sister, several times in the years since Elinor’s death by drowning: watching from the woods as Anne painted on the shore of Lake Windermere, shadowing her through the deserted halls of the Tate Gallery, disappearing with a backward glance around a corner of a city street. And on certain occasions, Anne seemed to feel Elinor’s presence—an overwhelming tide of jealousy, as if the ghost of Elinor were pure, distilled emotion. Finally, incidents involving this semblance of Elinor actually grew threatening enough to compel Anne to move away from her childhood home, just to rid herself of her sister’s shade.

But Anne’s move to California isn’t quite as simple as that, and she knows it. It had been Anne that had coaxed Elinor into the winter ocean at Huntington Beach fifteen years ago, despite Elinor’s not being able to swim. Was Anne in some way to blame for Elinor’s death? Could she somehow have subconsciously desired Elinor’s death? After all, Elinor had been malicious, deceptive … talented.

Elinor had drowned and Anne had been saved—why? It could very well be that when Anne fled from her home in England she was fleeing from something more deeply appalling than Elinor’s ghost; she was trying desperately to rid herself of doubt and guilt, and was ultimately drawn back to southern California—right back to the scene of her childhood tragedy.

Returning home one rainy night to her apartment near the Huntington Beach pier, Anne finds on a canvas in her studio a hastily-scrawled painting uncannily like something of Elinor’s.

Josh Sanders builds sets for the Earl of Gloucester, an immense, rambling old theater props company owned by Earl Dalton, the father of Casey Dalton, Josh’s oldest friend. For years Josh and Casey used to surf together, up and down the California coast. But since that chilly morning when Josh failed to save Elinor Hawthorn from drowning, he hasn’t gone back into the ocean, despite Casey’s advice and reassurances. Casey prevails, finally, and in the cold north swells of the winter ocean, Josh will begin at last to face his own fears.

Casey is very much like his father—artistic, eccentric, essentially lazy—and very unlike his brother Edmund, who is venal, grasping, and ruthless. Edmund hates his brother for being his father’s favorite, but he hides the hatred. Casey is naively supportive of Edmund, who, Casey insists, simply has a different way of looking at things. Their father’s health is shaky; when he dies, the sons will inherit the Earl of Gloucester and the rest of their father’s assets—potentially millions of dollars.