Limited omniscient.

19 August 2002—I’m stuck at the beginning of chapter six of the novel. It’s not that I haven’t begun writing the chapter; at one point I had maybe four or five pages of it. But I threw them in like Scrabble tiles suitable only for spelling names found in science fiction or fantasy novels, and besides, proper nouns aren’t allowed in Scrabble in the first place.

I’ve now had three false starts with chapter six. What’s surprising is that I know a great deal about this chapter. It’s mapped out fairly well: I know the beginning, the end, and a lot of what needs to happen in the middle. I understand the chapter’s themes and symbols, at least the ones I’ve worked out so far; I’m always open to a chapter turning out to be different than how I originally envisioned it, and I know there will be things that will arise as I write, and I’m completely content not to know them right now.

The problem, then, is the actual writing. The style, really. It’s probably the one thing I feel I should have decided on, going in. Now that I’m approximately 200 pages into the manuscript, you’d think that I’d already have decided on a style and be running with it by now. I have, I suppose: it occurred to me as I began writing the novel that the style should be somewhat journalistic, because its protagonist is a student journalist.

At the same time, I wanted it to be a little more informal, a little more personal. I decided I would aim for a style somewhat akin to the longer pieces in The New York Times Magazine. Those articles and profiles have personality to them, and there’s room for both humor and drama within that style.

The thing is, I’m just not sure how well the style translates to the novel. Having read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose and A.S. Byatt’s Possession in the past year, and currently being in the middle of both Louise Erdrich’s Last Known Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse and Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections, I’m feeling rather like my prose isn’t going to paint any large canvases, at least not with any conviction.

In the case of Angle of Repose, a story of the development (in a manner of speaking) of the West, Stegner’s prose can be claustrophobic, almost brash, in the present but lush and wide in the past. In Possession, Byatt’s mastery of voice has her creating a whole world of two fictional writers, revealed through their poetry and letters. In Last Known Report, a tale of a former nun who assumes and then inhabits the identity of a priest, Erdrich’s love of the quiet dignity her characters possess unwraps slowly from page to page. Witness this scene, in which the Actor, a bank robber, has just made an escape but crashed the getaway car in the middle of the countryside, and then in a standoff with the sheriff, shoots Agnes (the protagonist) and then tries to get away on a horse on which her husband, Berndt, had patiently pursued the getaway:

While Berndt jumped to her side, the Actor neatly grabbed the reins and somehow pulled himself onto the table-broad back of his horse. He dug in his heels, gave a desperate kick to the horse’s belly, and they were off, though the horse slowed at once just as soon as they entered the vast horizon-bound treeless wet field of thick gumbo. Berndt, kissing Agnes in a strange roar of grief, then followed the Actor, leaving the other two bank robbers and Slow Johnny and the deputy shouting back and forth and leveling their guns but not knowing whom to shoot. Berndt walked straight on. Just as he had when the car sped past, he understood his advantage lay in the increase of distance. He knew how exhausted his horse was, and he knew, too, that he, Berndt, could bend over from time to time to clean off his feet, but his horse could not. Either the Actor would have to dismount, or the horse would eventually slow to a stop, repossessed by the dirt.

And so it was — a low-speed chase.

So much is happening in the scene, and yet it unfolds slowly. It keeps coming back to Berndt, who displays infinite patience in his pursuit. He knows the land, as does Erdrich. So does Stegner in Angle of Repose, and, in a more literary landscape, so does Byatt in Possession.

The Corrections is different. Sarah and I are reading it together; actually, I am reading it aloud with her, though slowly and in fits and starts. And though I know Franzen is after something big, so far the story is actually rather small. Despite that, he packs so much into his descriptions, which make completely (at least seemingly) random connections between things, that you are convinced there is largeness in the smallness, and if you’re patient, eventually Franzen will pull back and let you see the bigger picture.

It seems to me that all four share a largeness of scope. The first three may be more lyrical (though in varying ways), the last more dazzling, perhaps, in its sheer will to show you every facet of a moment, comic and tragic, before the moment gets shattered. It’s breathless, actually, whereas the first three take their time in rolling scenes out before you. As usual, I want to achieve something in between, though still with that expansive scope each possesses.

Part of the challenge is in the timeframe of my novel, which is a week, well, eight days; a week if weeks are like baker’s dozens. It’s so short that it’s difficult to let the protagonist alone for even a few hours. I let him alone when he sleeps, for the most part. The point of view may also be stifling: except for the prologue, the protagonist is in every scene; the reader follows him around and sees most of the action from his perspective, though the narrator is third-person, so there’s some context to the action.

Hovering so close to him, though, I wonder sometimes whether the story will convey the largeness I want it to. And that’s now where I’m stuck. Sarah suggests that I go back through the chapters we’ve discussed, make my edits on those chapters and see whether I can expand the language in the first chapters. I’m happiest at this point with chapter four, which I think achieves that sort of largeness: even though very little happens over the course of the two days that span that chapter, there are bigger implications to what does transpire. If I can infuse the earlier chapters with that same breadth, perhaps the key to chapter six will finally reveal itself to me.

I’d like to try to stick to the schedule I’ve set, which means banging out the handwritten first draft of chapter six before the end of the month. It may turn out to be total crap, but I’ll have moved forward. At least I hope so.

This is one of those times when I wonder whether I’m in over my head. Not like it’s going to stop me from finishing, though — I just like to know where I am.