I've started reading

this pulp novel called The Passage because I heard the author talk on NPR about his process for creating plot. Before he writes his novels he formulates plot like a blueprint for a house. He says that story is where character meets plot. First you have to have a plot and then you can fill it in with your characters. His ideas made me feel hopeful, like if I could just blueprint my plot I wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. I could understand my characters' lives as though viewing through a crystal ball without worrying about where they were headed.

However, the problem with The Passage is that it lacks magic. It's seeded in various tropes - the vampire, the virus from the amazons, and a girl that saves the world - which are some of my most favorite tropes in the world. There's even references to Of Mice and Men - rabbits, an uneducated man born into the rough and tumble who kills a lady who won't stop screaming. The plot thunders along, gives the whole damn thing structure and pulse and readability but after a while you start wondering why you should even care. You can have plot, but you have to have something more.

I like his idea but it seems to me that writing is more like an algebra equation with parts added and subtracted around an equals sign. It ultimately all adds up to the same thing. You can order your equation so that it's elegant and transparent but ultimately all the parts inform each other. What often drives plot is the unexpected magical moments that no one anticipates. Memoir writers have to locate those moments in the slop-snot that is their life. Fiction writers look for it in their imagined lives. It's difficult to conceptualize these moments - a unifying difficulty for both creative non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction or memoir. Interviewing as well.

I'm a huge fan of apocalyptic books and hope to write one someday but The Passage isn't True Blood or 28 Days Later. It's another mind abusing way to waste our lives. 700 pages and two more books to go? Really? That's just depressing. I think I'm talking myself out of even finishing the book. I hate it when I do that.