Writing: 1,131 words
After spending the last five days rereading my 62,000 words worth of sunk costs, I was struck by just how much my novel reminds me of one of the free parking lots that I used on the campus of Temple University. I called that lot The Far Side of the Moon because it, like the fragmentary novel I just spent the week reading, was incredibly uneven and inconsistent and full of holes. Which isn't even mildly surprising; I've been writing this book for twelve years, after all. It's sort of become my White Whale. My Moby-Dick. Hell: maybe the Danger of Being Me will turn out to by my own Moby-Dick.
Walter Mosley assures me that the act of reading is, in fact, a form of rewriting (or, at least, that reading the current draft of the story constitutes a new draft of the novel). Reading the manuscript was an interesting exercise. It seems that over the last decade, my narrative style has evolved, taking on hints and flavors of the authors I've read. I'd like to think that I've improved as a wordsmith and a storyteller in the interim, but that might just be my own delusions. The nature of my prose has certainly changed in any event, and this manuscript in particular demonstrates the clear arc of that trajectory.
The oldest passages were composed all the way back in early July of 1998, shortly after I'd left high school. They were written in the kind of purple prose employed by novice novelists blindly in love with their own words. It might not be the worst writing in the history of American literature, but I couldn't go more than a paragraph at a time without cringing at its gaudy mediocrity. Later sections were written in a disjointed stream-of-consciousness almost certainly adopted around the time I was reading On the Road.
Other portions were written in a sparse, punchy prose that was assuredly picked up when I read the Sun Also Rises. I also remembered why I had abandoned this project in February of 2006 and hadn't taken it back up again for more than a year. That had been when I'd read the Catcher in the Rye for the first time (despite having been assigned it repeatedly throughout middle-school, high-school, and college) and had discovered the eerie similarities between my story and Salinger's. The last thing I'd written before my own Great Hiatus had been a short note-to-self in bold-faced 16-point Garamond font:
SALINGER WROTE IT BETTER
So I reacquainted myself with my own work. Or, at least, with the work of the kid I used to be. Precious little of it can be called great; perhaps one-tenth, perhaps less. Some of it qualifies as good; maybe a quarter. The greatest bulk - probably half of the prose - is merely serviceable, requiring massive revision. The rest, a ghastly 15%, is unqualified garbage that will have to be excised like a malignant linguistic tumor.
But the act of reading is, in fact, a form of rewriting. Going back over my own prose from a distance of, in some cases, ten years or more allowed me to recognize filaments of continuity lurking beneath the text that I hadn't intended or even noticed while writing it. I teased out those threads, noted them, and reconsidered segments of the narrative with them in mind. I amended certain jagged pieces of the story by weaving that heretofore unknown continuity through them, and formed a more cohesive whole in the process.
That discovery of new elements of the story within the story, in turn, rekindled my enthusiasm for this project. Not that I necessarily needed such motivation. I already decided that I'm not going to wait on inspiration to write. But it doesn't hurt.
The book can currently be split into roughly two parts: a Backstory, and a Frontstory. I think of the point where the two meet as the Collision, which is appropriate since that point involves a car crash. At the moment, both the Backstory and the Frontstory are each about two-thirds of the way written. That leaves two narrative gaps to be filled in: the completion of the Backstory to connect it to the beginning of the Frontstory, and the completion of the Frontstory to carry the narrative through to the end of the book.
So I set back to work on the dangling strand of the Backstory. I'd last left off halfway through a flashback scene. Tonight, I added 1,131 words to that scene, completing it. Meeting Stephen King's 1,000-word benchmark in the bargain, and bringing the scene to a respectable word-count of 2,215. And, quite unexpectedly, I came away from the effort with a startling sense of accomplishment.
There's an important lesson there, I think. That, perhaps, inspiration is sometimes as much a result of perspiration as perspiration is a result of inspiration. That achievement attained through toil can motivate further toil. That success can become self-perpetuating.
Walter Mosley assures me that the act of reading is, in fact, a form of rewriting (or, at least, that reading the current draft of the story constitutes a new draft of the novel). Reading the manuscript was an interesting exercise. It seems that over the last decade, my narrative style has evolved, taking on hints and flavors of the authors I've read. I'd like to think that I've improved as a wordsmith and a storyteller in the interim, but that might just be my own delusions. The nature of my prose has certainly changed in any event, and this manuscript in particular demonstrates the clear arc of that trajectory.
The oldest passages were composed all the way back in early July of 1998, shortly after I'd left high school. They were written in the kind of purple prose employed by novice novelists blindly in love with their own words. It might not be the worst writing in the history of American literature, but I couldn't go more than a paragraph at a time without cringing at its gaudy mediocrity. Later sections were written in a disjointed stream-of-consciousness almost certainly adopted around the time I was reading On the Road.
Other portions were written in a sparse, punchy prose that was assuredly picked up when I read the Sun Also Rises. I also remembered why I had abandoned this project in February of 2006 and hadn't taken it back up again for more than a year. That had been when I'd read the Catcher in the Rye for the first time (despite having been assigned it repeatedly throughout middle-school, high-school, and college) and had discovered the eerie similarities between my story and Salinger's. The last thing I'd written before my own Great Hiatus had been a short note-to-self in bold-faced 16-point Garamond font:
SALINGER WROTE IT BETTER
So I reacquainted myself with my own work. Or, at least, with the work of the kid I used to be. Precious little of it can be called great; perhaps one-tenth, perhaps less. Some of it qualifies as good; maybe a quarter. The greatest bulk - probably half of the prose - is merely serviceable, requiring massive revision. The rest, a ghastly 15%, is unqualified garbage that will have to be excised like a malignant linguistic tumor.
But the act of reading is, in fact, a form of rewriting. Going back over my own prose from a distance of, in some cases, ten years or more allowed me to recognize filaments of continuity lurking beneath the text that I hadn't intended or even noticed while writing it. I teased out those threads, noted them, and reconsidered segments of the narrative with them in mind. I amended certain jagged pieces of the story by weaving that heretofore unknown continuity through them, and formed a more cohesive whole in the process.
That discovery of new elements of the story within the story, in turn, rekindled my enthusiasm for this project. Not that I necessarily needed such motivation. I already decided that I'm not going to wait on inspiration to write. But it doesn't hurt.
The book can currently be split into roughly two parts: a Backstory, and a Frontstory. I think of the point where the two meet as the Collision, which is appropriate since that point involves a car crash. At the moment, both the Backstory and the Frontstory are each about two-thirds of the way written. That leaves two narrative gaps to be filled in: the completion of the Backstory to connect it to the beginning of the Frontstory, and the completion of the Frontstory to carry the narrative through to the end of the book.
So I set back to work on the dangling strand of the Backstory. I'd last left off halfway through a flashback scene. Tonight, I added 1,131 words to that scene, completing it. Meeting Stephen King's 1,000-word benchmark in the bargain, and bringing the scene to a respectable word-count of 2,215. And, quite unexpectedly, I came away from the effort with a startling sense of accomplishment.
There's an important lesson there, I think. That, perhaps, inspiration is sometimes as much a result of perspiration as perspiration is a result of inspiration. That achievement attained through toil can motivate further toil. That success can become self-perpetuating.