I kept this journal thing when I first concieved of the novel I wrote last winter and I am reading through it and wow! I understand it before I understood it. This was the very day I thought of it, and I even knew how long it would be, somehow:
So the new project is a novella. It is fast paced, in a compressed sequence. First person. Narration by a character that just doesn't know better yet, and surely doesn't know all she thinks she knows - however she is caught up in beauty of decay. Personally, I love nothing better than an old house with paint peeling and a rotten porch - this is beautiful to me. I like our frailty. So she doesn't know enough to recognize her own frailty or the frailty of those around her, and makes mistakes that are not easy to fix. Like everyone does when, in every phase of our lives.
But the truth of the novella, I think, is in its details. What life is like for the rest of us. What it is like when we aren't safe in academics, when we don't have the ability to travel, when we are stuck in an ugly life. But we still find joy. It is a hyper-realism thing I am doing lately. I think it really does have a baseball bat to the face feel.
And that is what I started the project thinking about. The inspiration came when I was awake, late at night, and smelled my neighbor smoking. I knew that late night cigarette quite well. I could at once feel the story take shape.
So I am banging this project out. Will write on it here and there. Hopefully 500 words a day at least, even on busy days. Slower days will mean more. I average 2000 words a sitting when I have time. The whole project, as I see it, won't need more than 40,000 words. Hoping to have it done by the end of the year. Don't work from an outline or anything. I understand the main idea of where the thing is going, and trust the characters enough to let them write themselves.
I started it on the last day of November, and was done by February, but didn't write consistently. In fact, cobbled it together. By January 23, I was depressed, thinking the end of the project would never come. And then, somehow, it did. I read a passage of Lispector that changed my life. On Feb 1, I wrote this:
I got lax in the journal of the novella. It is done. First draft. The edits will take ages. Maybe a year. First I'll shape it all up again, and then each page will be addressed. Each verb. Everything.
But right now, it is printed and sitting next to me. With its document clips holding it together, and little flags for each chapter. It feels like a new kitten. I'm amazed. I've completed long projects before. But never one that meant to me what this one does.
So much will need to go into it again. It will take on a different tone in parts, that I know. By the end I figured out a slightly different pitch for the whole thing.
I don't know quite what to say. I think I used all my words.
This was true, too, all of it. It has taken so much in terms of edits, and to really give it the right polish, it needs to be edited along with the new project in a fusion edit of solar magnetitude. I need a residency in zero gravity to acheive what I hope to with these works.
I'm finishing up the next book length thing I'm writing and I never expected it either, though it is important. This is an important work for me. The most important I've ever done. I don't know how I know it, I do. I got an idea today that was so interesting and sad I was frightened, just by the idea. It will make the core of the segment of this work that very well might be the best I produce. Head lice.
I think I've willed this into existence somehow, I've imagined it, and just the thought of it has somehow made it so. The odd fact that many of the things I wrote about began to happen around me confuses me. It is like watching an interesting movie. Only, one that makes you wonder if you've lost your mind!
Interesting fiction comes from the brink. And also, read today Hemingway thought to work best a person needs to be in love.
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