…Or how I can fuck about with two lines of writing for hours.

I’m writing a story (which is now a rough 6000 words with no end in sight, so it’s going to be a fairly long story), in which I originally had this in the first paragraph:

“In due course the mountains had become peppered with temples, monasteries and retreats; perhaps only difficulty of access having prevented these from growing as plentiful as blackberries, he thought, resting his eyes on a distant serpentine line of blue-tiled roofs winding up through the pine and cedar forest like the twists and turns of a dragon.”

First problem - either “serpentine” or “twists and turns of a dragon” is redundant. I thought of “the twists and turns of something bent on escaping pursuit”, which I like, but I want a Chinese legend feel, and I want to flash an early signal to the reader that the character has wandered into some sort of mock-up of the mythical east. So I’d better stick with the dragon, and see if I can fit the other metaphor in later on. So “serpentine” has to change. But to what? “Sinuous” is obvious but seems a bit common. “Tortive” and “tortile” are needlessly obscure (I generally only use obscure words in places where I’m willing to send the reader to the dictionary, and in a scene-setting paragraph I’d rather not), and ugly, and not quite correct in any case. “Wavy” is very tempting - a simple no-frills word that should have an ameliorating effect on at least the next two paragraphs. When you tend to write in a rich style, studding it even sparsely with words that a child would use can save it from becoming heavily purple - or so I’ve thought as a reader. However, “wavy” doesn’t seen quite right for communicating the sense of the roofs snaking up through forest - it would be better for a ridge of rooftops on a hill.

(Speaking of which, I Googled “ridge of rooftops” and found a poem in which it was used, along with criticism of the poem. One person said: ‘ “Ridge of rooftops” is questionable. A rooftop has a ridge, but I’m not following what you mean by a ridge of rooftops.’ I thought it was obvious - a line of rooftops, silhouetted or half silhouetted, perhaps, their contours forming a ridge. Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova - or at least his translator - uses the line here:

Slow down and stop. The sentence falls apart.
The ridge of rooftops fits in with the dawn.
The snow is talking, the fire backing it up.

Sounds fine to me - reminding me that you have to listen to critics with a critical ear.)

However, my line of rooftops really isn’t a ridge. It’s on the face of a mountain. Its bends are not broad enough to be called meandering, and in any case I want to use “meander” in the next paragraph.

Perhaps “line” is the problem. “Procession”? No, no good - a procession is made of many elements, a dragon is one continuous element, and the metaphor and simile would clash. To the thesaurus, then, where I find “file” and “train”. “A (bendy adjective) file”, “a (bendy adjective) train” - both could work. But since I’ve got “winding”, do I even need another bendy adjective?

I like “train”, however, it’s a world with railways, so like us the character would associate the word “train” with a locomotive and carriages (and that’s why I like it), whereas in a world without railways it would only mean a trailing line; but “train” will compete with “dragon”, and I don’t want a clash of elements just here. I might use it later, though. But “trailing” - how about “a trail of rooftops”? Nope, that isn’t the sense I want.

“A sequence of rooftops/roofs”? Now, that I like. I like the rather technical feel of the word, it’s the sort of word the character would use, and it counterbalances the fantasy feel of “dragon” without bothering it too much.

“In due course the mountains had become peppered with temples, monasteries and retreats; perhaps only difficulty of access having prevented these from growing as plentiful as blackberries, he thought, resting his eyes on a distant sequence of blue-tiled roofs winding up through the pine and cedar forest like the twists and turns of a dragon.”

I might still put another adjective between “distant” and “sequence”, or perhaps a different verb than “winding”, but after the immense effort of changing “serpentine line” to “sequence” I feel like working on another paragraph for a while.

But before I do that, there’s the temptation to be a little more physically exact in the description, for instance, “a sequence of blue-tiled roofs winding up through the pine and cedar forest on a squarish mountain side in the distance like the twists and turns of a dragon.” I quite like the slightly more tightly focused physicality, but the sentence is clumsy; the dragon bit will have to be moved –
“a sequence of blue-tiled roofs winding, like the twists and turns of a dragon, up through the pine and cedar forest on a squarish mountain side in the distance.”

Or even:

“a sequence, like the twists and turns of a dragon, of blue-tiled roofs winding up through the pine and cedar forest on a squarish mountain side in the distance.”

The latter arrangement has an arse-backwards sort of almost elegance I guess, but that isn’t the right place for the simile in the overall flow of phrasing. I really do want it at the end of the sentence. Or do I…? Do I want the sentence to resolve there at the image of the dragon, or do I want it to resolve in physical geography? I’m actually not sure. I will leave both as options.

I’m aware that I often try to construct prose like music. Which parts should be loud and which soft? Where is the melody and where is the accompaniment? Do I want legato here, staccato there? Is this the right place for a discord? And I always feel I’m failing, but then I sometimes think that if you’re not failing you’re not trying hard enough.

In any case, it’s time to refer this paragraph to the editorial committee in my subconscious and get onto the next one:

“He had paused at the scenic spot at an outward meander of the trail [–steep, grudgingly narrow, slippery with mist and moss that wound along a narrow gorge which afforded a view of ??] dark forest falling into a solid mist below and pinnacles losing their heads in clouds above, and in the middle ground the still, time-halted picture of trunk and bough, branch and needle and pine-cone, a great [round?] boulder-face with lichens dawdling over it, a lone wild cherry sapling breaking out in bud, to gather a mental impression that he could take with him.”

Right. More coffee. Then onward, to the stupendous matter of whether the boulder-face should be round or not. (Will “round” conflict with the echo of “squarish”, if I end up using it? Do I want a word less lazy and general than “round”? But sometimes you want a lazy, general word, otherwise the writing becomes exhausted. Maybe a “shapeless boulder-face…?)

Fuck it, I’m going to the pub.

Ok…didn’t go to the pub. Read a bit of To the Lighthouse (and Woolf’s punctuation is going to infect me, I can feel it), made a cup of tea, and now I see that it’s best as:

“a sequence of blue-tiled roofs winding up through the pine and cedar forest on a squarish mountain side in the distance like the twists and turns of a dragon.” - and I will add more specific details when he next looks at it, something like “the train of buildings on the squarish mountain side” - letting the concrete accumulate slowly, like things appearing as mist clears.