Thursday, January 07, 2010

Journal of the Novel

August 8, 2009

In what feels like a delicate and precarious place with the work. I have written up through some climactic stuff and now am at a moment that has felt so huge and important since the very beginning. And I am finding it very difficult to go there. I wrote one sentence hours ago and have been stalling ever since. People who love to read but don’t write would never believe how hard this is, how intimidating to make it up as you go along, page after page, after page. It feels like a walk out onto the high board. It never seemed all that high when you were looking up from the water, but from up there, it felt like the top of the world, not fun but terribly risky.

Today I read through some pages that I had not looked at for a long time, and did have that strange experience of hardly recognizing it as my own writing. That’s a crazy feeling. But often a happy one. Reading something I wrote myself and enjoying it as I would if it was written by someone else, is a good feeling. Also have wrestling with the plot (so what else is new?). I actually opened the MS in another doc and started trying to do something different, trying to excise the character of Sh_, and it was just hell. I think I need to keep her, but it still feels like the characters have far too many moments of being yanked hither and thither simply in service to my outline. It is such a house of cards, though, to imagine deconstructing parts. Scary.

Still wrestling with language. I decided that I will continue to use Mandarin translation for the few words I need. I will then vet those with J_—god bless J_, I am so grateful to have her on board to help. When the draft is basically complete, I will look into getting old Xiang (Hunanese) translation help—although I’ll probably have to pay for that. I also have to make a final decision on the name issue, but I’m not going to do that until I feel the story is basically finished. It is just too tedious to figure out right now, with the other writing bearing down on me.

Plot and character are so inextricable. Elizabeth Bowen once wrote:

“Action is the simplification (for story purposes) of complexity. For each one act, there are an x number of rejected alternatives. It is the palpable presence of the alternatives that gives action interest. Therefore, in each of the characters, while he or she is acting, the play and pull of alternatives must be felt. It is in being seen to be capable of alternatives that the character becomes, for the reader, valid.”

And I have found this statement of hers amazingly true:

“The novelist’s perceptions of his characters take place in the course of the actual writing of the novel. To an extent, the novelist is in the same position as his reader. But his perceptions should be always just in advance.”

This is so apt! Over and over I have found that I absolutely, positively cannot PLAN what will be the next thing a character does—the actions of my people stay in the unknown until I begin to excavate them by the physical act of typing the words onto the page. I find this a great mystery and the heart of the creative act. It is what I love and hate about this work. When it is happening and I am watching it happen, I am delighted and feel something akin to creative bliss. When I am at a sticky point it feels like trudging through a bog on a moonless night, no map in hand, no one to shine a light and call “Hey, over here!”

People, people, people

Tonight, I’m feeling pretty fed up. I know there are Nelson Mandelas and Desmond Tutus out there. There is a Dalai Lama and a Tich Nhat Hanh. There was a Mother Teresa. But man, those folks are few and far between, and they have to work inordinately hard to hold back the dark side.

A perusal of various forums in the cyberworld seems to point to a dearth of intelligence, a lack of empathy, an inability allow for ideas other than those one espouses. Civility, courtesy, and simple human kindness seem to be disappearing from the planet. American citizens use the most heinous racist language to talk about the President of the United States, his wife, his young daughters. Fortune and fame are lavished on the nastiest and most vicious social pundits.

It is as if our vast population has turned into a pack of dogs, overbred, overpopulated, reflexively biting our own kind. Our differences terrify us. We can’t share. We can’t allow. We want to overtalk, overpower. We use whatever influence we have to create the world in our own image. We hate each other. We kill each other.

Be kind.
(photo credit)