Wednesday, April 09, 2008

on works (and people) in progress

Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky. —Anais Nin

Perhaps a little repose may restore my regard for a pen. —Jane Austen, in a letter

You know that phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees”?
Well, I can’t even see the trees. I get stuck on leaf stems.
Forest? What forest?

I know I’ve written a few times in this blog about my dreadful nearsightedness. And not what makes me wear contacts, but my tendency to stare at things—ideas, circumstances—from too narrow a distance. Once I squint and my eyes adjust, I see nothing else. And I don’t notice that anything’s wrong… I just run into things.

Well, it’s happened again.

When I came home from Calvin, exhilarated and exhausted by graduation, I knew I was coming home to start a writing life. (Life being the operative word.) So I wrote widely and read widely, although I was terribly nervous about screwing up. I dabbled with poetry, short stories, and two novel ideas, which grew to four, then to six (one of them possibly becoming a series, Lord help me!).

Then came the NaNoWriMo month, that first November, and I chose my story and dove in. The next spring was for researching (ha!), deepening storylines, and digging further into the work. And in the second half of the year, I turned out that crazy, long, rough draft.

And now, as you know, I’ve been revising, and revising, and revising Part One. (There are four parts ... why did I write such a long book?) Part One is roughly a hundred pages, probably more. I’ve worked all the way through it, very slowly, tearing out pages, rearranging scenes, writing new dialogue, creating new settings. Then I reread it, took careful notes (and a deep breath), and dove back in for another round. All this was going, I thought, quite well.

Yesterday, though, I had the tiniest of meltdowns.

I’ve just spent three days working on my prologue—it had been smugly intact for a year, and I looked hard at it, tore it to shreds, and rewrote it. Seven times. I like the current version much better. I think.

In the midst of that, I began rethinking my protagonist—there was something in Part One that just didn’t seem right. She was inconsistent, and I needed to understand why. After a lot of thinking, I figured her out—so, triumphantly, I turned back to chapter one…

You’ve had sinking feelings before?

This was something like the Titanic going under, with no time for the women and children to escape. Part One, I realized, would have to be written again. All of it. My protagonist was stronger and had better motivation, and this would influence her actions, her thoughts, the three biggest dialogue exchanges, and it would lay the foundation for everything to come…

But I stared at what I’d spent three months on, saw that I had to tear it apart again (was any of it salvageable?), and then I did something stupid: I looked ahead to work from Part Four. It made sense—I needed to see where my character ended up, so that I could write from the best starting point.

Only problem is, Part One, for all its troubles, has been scraped, scrubbed, and glossed.

Part Four, to put it mildly, has not.

I blinked at the document on my computer and thought: How did I ever, ever write this?
Next thought: If I keep working at this same rate, I’ll get to polishing Part Four in early 2010.
Next thought: If I haven’t been evicted.
Next thought: Have I really spent all this time on something so awful?

Next thought: What kind of shape is my résumé in?

Finally I closed down both document and computer, made some tea, and began knitting feverishly. (Like I said, knitting is my tangible progress, and therefore, consolation!)

Do you see the nearsightedness? When some would say “I’ll come back to this tomorrow with a clearer head,” I tend to say (finding myself perfectly rational and calm-headed) “The last two years of my life have been a waste.”

Dangerous thinking, to say the least.

After pouring out to my mom the tragic story of my absent talent and wasted months and the fact that I’ll be eighty before this book is done, she reminded me that I came to learn about a writing life. To build the foundation for a writing career.

And just as an accountant’s career is built on more than one project, my writing career has to be built on more than one novel. More than one piece of work.

My blank response: but if I do anything other than this novel, won’t it all just take more time? A lot more time? Then I’ll be here till 2015, I’ll be thirty years old… (I’m always so rational.)

But she reminded me of how much I used to write and love poetry. She reminded me of short stories, of pages full of ideas, of all the other projects I’ve worked on (and many of those I did at the same time). She reminded me that I could still spend some hours each day on the novel, and perhaps the other projects would help teach me. Broadening my writing life could help me work steadily on the novel, fix those character problems, change the dialogue, and make all of it richer, stronger.

Oh.

Still feeling tentative, I went to bed… and couldn’t sleep, because I kept having to write things down, like a poem that burst out whole (I haven’t written a poem in months), the seed for another poem, and a few funny phrases of dialogue to work in somewhere.

Wait, I’m supposed to be a writer?? Not just a one-project wonder?
How did I get so confused?

So now, everything is open again. I can wander a bit in this writing world, I am free to read widely again. And I must keep pushing my novel along, but working on other projects will help when I (inevitably) can’t see past the twig in front of me.

The Festival of Faith and Writing is just around the corner, and not a moment too soon! I’ve drooled over the schedule all week… I don’t know how I’ll decide between classes. Too many times they offer five things that I would love, all at the same time! But there are classes on C.S. Lewis, on writing for children, there are readings by poets and novelists, lectures by many brilliant writers, and more chances to learn about those enormous beasts we call novels.

Fantastic. It’s time to be a student again.—jl

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 04/09 at 02:01 PM
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