The Selkie (otherwise known as the other half of my writerly brain) sent me a link this morning about the costumes for the HBO show Deadwood. It’s fascinating stuff, if your machine can handle the flash.

I loved the first season of Deadwood (a friend had it in DVD, and I haven’t seen any more since we don’t have cable or even a regular telly.) I especially loved the episode that has Brad Dourif as Doc Cochran on his knees, talking to a God who has abandoned him. For the first time since watching Carnivale or old Twilight Zone episodes, I got chills.

What struck me this morning was the deliberateness of every choice the costume designer made. She had good reasons for every fabric choice, reasons for every pleat and ruffle. Each piece of clothing was picked for the character, and there were running themes and foreshadowing in the characters’ clothing. It was as deliberate as every choice a writer makes about a character’s clothing and physical characteristics, personality, or history.

Even in a novel, where one would think a writer has the most space, there is actually very limited room. Every piece of dialogue has to advance the story in some way, or you must kill it. Pacing must be deliberate, slowing the reader down to luxuriate (but not too much) or breathlessly pulling the reader forward (but not being too jarring or disconnected.) You have a limited number of pages into which to cram story, characterization, plot, pacing, subplots, character development, and other teensy things in. Each choice is as deliberate as we can make it.

Now, there are fortuitous accidents, like the Muse shoving a small point in and refusing to take it out–said point only coming into its own as a plotline three books down the line, or whatever. But the majority of choices we make in a manuscript need to be for good reasons, and that’s where an editor is truly a help.

An editor is like the Devil’s advocate in the canonization process. They challenge your proof, assumptions, and assertions; they find plot holes and inconsistencies and indiscretions. The job of the writer is to make each choice the editor challenges deliberately.

For example, it was a deliberate plot point in the Valentine books that psions were tattooed on their faces, and that some psions were lost to slavery. These two choices were very deliberate on my part. I wanted to examine the consequences of a subclass with extraordinary powers, co-opted for the benefit of the government but largely regarded as second- or third-class socially, marked to stand out from the common mass and also in danger of being sold as meat or slaves. If humanity ever develops such a subclass, this is very much how I envision human nature playing out; it also creates exactly the psychological climate I needed for Dante’s self-sufficiency and her refusal to believe anyone could truly care for her.

Her clothing and Japhrimel’s were also very deliberate. Japh’s cassock-like coat created a number of assumptions about him as a character balanced against his description and nature as a demon, both showing facets of his personality. And to have his clothes be both his wings and his shield was a very conscious choice. (After, of course, he surprised me by growing the damn wings during the penultimate fight scene in Working For the Devil.) Dante’s adventurer’s garb was very traditionally masculine because of her choice of jobs as a bounty hunter, but the care she took with her clothing and her weapons is almost feminine in its intensity. (Note: Don’t call me gender-biased. I am referring to traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, not my own personal views.) The tension created between those two outlooks created windows into her character I would never have had otherwise. And very cheaply too.

Every sentence in a book needs to accomplish multiple goals. The job of a writer is to cut out sentences that aren’t working hard enough and replace them with heavier lifters. Dead weight must be pared away, no matter how pretty it is. There literally isn’t room for a lot of stunt writing if a piece is going to accomplish its goal, whatever goal that is.

My advice to beginning writers on this issue is simple: listen to your editors and think very hard, while you’re revising your work, about each choice you’re making. This is why setting a piece down and leaving it alone for a while between drafts is so important. It is much easier to see where the work is misfiring when you look at it with fresh eyes.

The downside to this is that after this set of mental muscles gets strong, reading for pleasure gets a lot more problematic. You start wondering why a certain author made the choices s/he did, and you start working in your head to determine how and why you would do things differently. Once one hits that stage, books that carry one along fast enough to short-circuit the reflexive editing action (REA, now with 30% more red ink!) become fewer and farther between. It’s just the price one pays.

On the other hand, finding the books that carry you along without engaging the reflexive action feels just like Christmas, so I suppose it’s a tradeoff.

So, my dear fellow writers, my questions for the weekend are thus: how deliberate are your choices? Are they deliberate even in the heat of composition or later during revision? What choices do you find yourself making in earlier works that you wouldn’t now? What kinds of choices do you find yourself making over and over again, and why?