Precisions, precisions.

28 January 2002—It was a good weekend: I saw an old friend, saw that George McKibbens play I said I would, ate well, slept well, went to a nice party, went to the gym, relaxed with Sarah, talking together, reading together (we’ve decided to give The Corrections a shot–holding interest so far), and, um, other fun stuff together.

Oh, yeah–I wrote, too. I dug back into the novel. I’ve been going through the first chapters, getting them in a shape where I’m more or less OK handing them out for comment. So far, I’ve given out the first two, the first to Sarah and Clare, the second just to Sarah. The feedback has been encouraging–at least I feel like I’m generally headed in the right direction.

And somehow, as I sit down to coax chapter three into a state of presentability, that buoyancy floats away. Chapter three is its own untenable slum, littered with too many mismatched chairs, none of them fit for sitting on. It doesn’t matter that but for a few remaining edits I’m reasonably satisfied with the previous chapters (for now, anyway). Those chapters are put away; this chapter is what’s in front of me now.

This weekend I spent most of my writing time (approximately five hours) working the same page or so. Something major got edited out of chapter one, and I had written a sort of revisit/payoff from that encounter into chapter three, a payoff that now had no setup. I’m glad the setup is gone–it made an antagonistic character too cartoonish. But the payoff was good, because it sets up an even bigger payoff later in chapter three, and now I have to sort of release the first payoff, reshape it to fit the world of the novel as it stands now. Damn.

There’s also the question of when I want to explain of the history between certain characters. Will it be too confusing to show animosity between two characters, an enmity obviously based on some shared history but one that I don’t want to explain just yet? I swear, chapter four holds a lot of keys. Is it too much to ask the reader to wait that long for crucial pieces of information?

That’s part of the problem of being so deeply intertwined in the novel. It’s been part of me for so long that I have no idea how a reader coming into it fresh will see things. Plus there’s the added complication that all readers are different.

Aside from the larger novel questions, there’s just the problem of the words on the page. I was critiqued by one of my friends a few years ago for having been too careful with my language; she liked roughness around the edges of sentences and situations. Careless things should be thrown in here and there to enrich the landscape.

I, however, have always seen carelessness not as spontaneity and dimensionality but as clutter. I have one demand of art, in whatever medium the artist uses: everything for a reason. The work should be unquestionably of its medium; there must be a reason it’s a novel and not a play, a sculpture, or a symphony. Even its most seemingly insignificant pieces should reflect something deeper in the work; the tiniest raindrop magnifies whatever it covers.

There is, therefore, nothing for me to savor in careless sprinklings. This presents a certain problem: I can’t let anything go. I was stuck on a particular few paragraphs this weekend. I couldn’t resolve the issues, couldn’t get the rhythm right. The smart thing probably would have been to leave them for later, move on to something I could do some good with, then come back later when my head was clearer. Couldn’t do it–I would have those paragraphs dancing around in my head, clouding my vision until I could work them out. I know this because when I had to put them away Saturday night and make my way across the bridge into San Francisco, they were dancing around even then. The only thing that made them go away was that I suddenly encountered a dead-stop due to a horrible accident up ahead. (Plus someone nearly rear-ended me because of the abruptness of it all, so my thoughts were suddenly elsewhere, more in the realm of thankfulness I was still alive.)

So when I returned to those paragraphs Sunday night, I resolved to work them until I was done. One thing has continually surprised me during my writing of the novel: events I make up or imagine have a way of either coming to life around me or revealing that they already have. That this phenomenon keeps resurfacing is likely the major reason I’m still writing the novel: there must be truth in what I’m trying to write. Thus, if it’s important to me to keep those paragraphs, they must be necessary. Finally, if they’re necessary, there must be a way to find and arrange the words to reveal their significance. If I can summon the words and their order, I imagine it might be like an incantation, where the sum of the words is greater than their individual meanings. And if a transformation can possibly take place, why would I want to be careless? I’ll have to ask my friend April about it—she’s a witch, she’ll know.

I’m not sure if I finally found those paragraphs’ full potential, but I did mold and remold them until I was happy–a happiness which lasted until I reached the next problem spot in the chapter, a more troublesome one than the last. So it goes. I closed the computer and gave myself the rest of the night off. Tonight I meant to get back to it, but I felt like writing this instead. Tomorrow I’ll be ready.