Novels and other things that I fantasize about.
I spoke with a fellow teacher today about novel-writing. He's working on one of his own, which I will not describe here in order to protect myself from being sued when he publishes it and becomes rich and famous. (Maybe he'll become a patron - hint, hint.)
I was ecstatic to finally have a conversation that was...oh, I don't know, not Rocky Mount. I've begun to feel limper and limper in the brainpan region. Noodles just boiled beyond al dente and wiggling towards my earhole.
I've been having trouble with one of my stories for several years. I keep writing the first five chapters over and over again. (I've got one particular scene and dialogue worked to a perfect pitch.) I don't know why I can't finish it. I don't mind admitting that the idea is fantastic. One character - the almost main character, the sort of foil to the main character, the soul of the story - is all his own creature. I know his history from birth onward. I know which leg is a prosthetic. I know what color his ex-wife's teeth are. I know exactly how many hairs are on his head. I adore him. He's lovely and fat and obnoxious and extraordinarily wise. He wears too-tight black cowboy shirts and too-tight black slacks and too-pointy black snakeskin boots. I hate not finishing the story more for his sake than for mine or my damnably elusive main character's.
I love writing novels (even though I've only finished one and she remains exiled to a folder on the hard drive, waiting eventual editing or deletion) because I love the little planets on acres of white paper. The idea that words can move from the mind to paper to mind again, from one complete form with bicycles and window-boxes full of geraniums in my mind to black symbols that don't even represent ideas but instead represent sounds which represent ideas to another mind where it re-emerges as a complete form, though slightly different from its original self - perhaps the geraniums are a little wilted or the paint less chipped - is amazing to me.
Kind of like radio waves or cell phones. But I guess I'm simple like that.
I was ecstatic to finally have a conversation that was...oh, I don't know, not Rocky Mount. I've begun to feel limper and limper in the brainpan region. Noodles just boiled beyond al dente and wiggling towards my earhole.
I've been having trouble with one of my stories for several years. I keep writing the first five chapters over and over again. (I've got one particular scene and dialogue worked to a perfect pitch.) I don't know why I can't finish it. I don't mind admitting that the idea is fantastic. One character - the almost main character, the sort of foil to the main character, the soul of the story - is all his own creature. I know his history from birth onward. I know which leg is a prosthetic. I know what color his ex-wife's teeth are. I know exactly how many hairs are on his head. I adore him. He's lovely and fat and obnoxious and extraordinarily wise. He wears too-tight black cowboy shirts and too-tight black slacks and too-pointy black snakeskin boots. I hate not finishing the story more for his sake than for mine or my damnably elusive main character's.
I love writing novels (even though I've only finished one and she remains exiled to a folder on the hard drive, waiting eventual editing or deletion) because I love the little planets on acres of white paper. The idea that words can move from the mind to paper to mind again, from one complete form with bicycles and window-boxes full of geraniums in my mind to black symbols that don't even represent ideas but instead represent sounds which represent ideas to another mind where it re-emerges as a complete form, though slightly different from its original self - perhaps the geraniums are a little wilted or the paint less chipped - is amazing to me.
Kind of like radio waves or cell phones. But I guess I'm simple like that.
posted by Autumn at 8:21 PM
3 Comments:
i am reading a novel right now about a man writing a novel and he has just left his main character stranded in a dark underground room with no hope of escape, save for trite "and then he woke from the terrible dream" type scenarios he has to write somethign else because he needs the money but feels tormented at the thought of having his character stuck in that room and unable to get out ...
Autumn, i finally got my new computer and can finally read your novel....
i'll let you know....xox
Scott, I think that you must have loved "The Neverending Story" as much as I did when I was a kid. I always wished that I could have an adventure like Bastian. That I could participate in the unfolding of the stories that I read in a more tangible way. That I could whisper into the main character's ear that I'd just detected an ominous sort of foreshadowing in the description of a cloud or tree to warn them of impending danger.
I've also been thinking about one of the character's from Sartre's novel Nausea. I think she was a character in that novel. (Isn't it funny how, after years of reading, all those characters set up homes in your brain, residing in the crests and valleys of you rolling mental foothills, interacting with one another, dating, arguing, forgetting which book they hailed from in the first place?) But there was a girl in this novel who hated museums because she couldn't touch the art. And she felt such a visceral desire to impose herself on the work, to somehow break into it, she couldn't tolerate the separation of that bastard red rope.
Thinking about it now (why it never occured to me before, I don't know), that is a pretty accurate description of how I feel about other people. And, as art is another person's attempt to express that inexpressible part of themselves, it makes sense that art, in one way, would feel like another, more tantalizing, boundary from others.
You get the impression that here it is, the secret code to another's inside, but then your own perceptions interfere with and muddle the code. There's the art - the welcome doormat to another's soul, and you can't help but track mud on it, affecting the entire scene.
What was I talking about?
Sorry, in retrospect, that makes no sense.
Yay! Thanks, Natalie. Take your time. If you're as crazy and busy as I am right now, I'll understand if I don't get feedback for another year. (The book sounds great! What is it? I just started Sarah Water's Affinity. So far so good. It does make me a little sad that almost every review of her books has to say something like "great lesbian literature" or whatever. I mean, I'm not a lesbian, but I think that I would be offended if every novel that I wrote had to have that qualifier. I know I'd be upset if every book that I wrote got a review that said, for example, "For a single, working mom from North Carolina, it's pretty good." You know what I mean? How limiting.)
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