progress

So I've gone back to the ol' outline, to see if that will help me road-map through this Dread Middle situation, and I'm finding that outlining is fun for me. I know some people hate it, but it gets me all excited about the puzzle again.

in which i despair

I don't know what the hell I was thinking, trying to write a novel. I feel like the goddamn hundredth monkey, banging out nonsense in the hopes that it will somehow magically come together into something coherent after about five million years.

And then, I retreat to the balm of Timothy Hallinan's page on the dread middle, and think, 'Yes! I can do this thing!' Until the next time.

The problem, see, is that I was born verbal, and somehow, at some point a few years ago, I decided this made me capable of writing a book. Today, I cast my wizened eye back upon that innocent time and say to myself: 'YOU IDIOT!' Being verbal no more makes me a writer than... than... damn it, if I was a writer, I'd have a great metaphor to put here. But all I got was raw materials. The things I really need -- the discipline, the energy, the curiosity -- all that crap I have to bake fresh every day, and most days it's a pretty ugly muffin I'm pulling out of the oven, lemme tell ya.

So what the fuck am I doing?

OK. Back I went to good old Tim, and read getting out of trouble. I'm fairly certain the problems I'm running into aren't architectural, but I'm not sure what they are.

Then my eye lights on this sentence:

"I suggest you write down, in no more than one paragraph, the central core of what your book is about and why you care about it."

And I realize I CAN DO THAT:

My book is about the human passions, and I care about writing it because I believe that as a species we fully misunderstand the meaning and importance of our passions. I want to see what happens to the people I've invented when they realize this. Some will find their way through to a truer understanding of themselves, and some won't. That's what's interesting to me -- the ways people understand themselves and their motives.

So we'll see if that helps. If it doesn't, I guess I can always fall back on this advice, from one of my idols:

“When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”
-- Raymond Chandler

crank this up loud

I've been needing to listen to this song by Ray LaMontagne daily for the last couple of weeks...

in which i come to my senses

No. No re-write. I'm revising.

I'm a writer; why couldn't I come up with that word?

in which i consider the unthinkable

Bloody effing hell! Out running errands today, I realized that although the physical construction of the story is more or less working, my main character is going in the wrong direction for most of the book. So I'm considering a fresh re-write.

It's a matter of voice and attitude -- the way she tells the story and talks about her experience of what happens. I want her to start out as a hard-bitten, somewhat shady character, who morphs into being more like her true self, which is softer and more compassionate than she likes. Part of the whole story is her learning to accept that about herself and give up trying to be such a tough broad all the time.

The way the book is now, she doesn't really come across as 'hard' at the beginning, she's more sort of sarcastic, and she gets more so as the story progresses, which is WRONG! I want her voice and her actions to start out hard-boiled, and gradually turn more humane.

It just seems too difficult to massage the 100-fucking-thousand words I've already written into shape. Starting over from scratch, using the current manuscript as my roadmap, somehow seems easier. But I just know, three chapters in, I'll be gnashing my teeth and shouting 'Why, WHY?' at the ceiling.

Of course, part of why I started writing this thing was to entertain myself, and having an excuse to do dramatic things like tear my hair and pace the floor is somewhat diverting. However, there's a big part of me now that really wants to have written and FINISHED a real, live novel. I don't know how much longer I can stand to have the thing lollygagging about.

For those keeping count, this would be fresh start number four, although the other three were much earlier in the work, with a lot less time and ego invested. What would Chandler do?

in which i am annoyed with myself

I'm not happy with my blurb about Nine Days. It's been niggling at me now for a couple of weeks. It doesn't, in my opinion, really capture The Book, and it sounds like the generic blurb from a generic book that I wouldn't want to read. But, damn it, how much time do I want to spend editing The Blurb, when I'm using every available moment right now to edit The Book? I guess when it starts bugging me enough, I'll fix the thing.

what's a metaphor? to put your cows in!

Just a note to confirm that I am not, in fact, dead. To the contrary, I am editing like mad.

I came up with a metaphor for my writing style the other day: I write like combing out your hair after a shower.

You know how (assuming you have hair, and that it's long) when you go to comb it, you start at the top, which is pretty easy to get the comb through, but then you hit the middle part where it's all tangly, and you have to kind of work your way through it, then maybe you go to the ends and work your way up again toward the middle? That's how I write. I start at the beginning and get it all smooth and tangle free, then I hit the middle, where it's like a god-damned rat's nest, give up and go to the end and work backward for a while, until I meet up in the middle somewhere.

I do not recommend this technique, from a psychological hygeine point of view. However, I'll let you know whether or not it produces a good book.