On Writing

I've been working on my novel again.

Wait-- do I hear a reader somewhere begin to groan?

"Oh, God- no, Cupcake!" Please don't say you're going to be giving us snippets of your cheesy Chick-lit book. Haven't you learned, by now, that blogs and fiction do not mix?"

Fear not, gentle reader. I am not going to inflict the whimsical stylings of my story-telling pen upon you. At least not here. Maybe in another blog? I'm tempted.

I hadn't worked on the novel in some time, having been plying my craft in playwrighting, which is a horse of a different color. A novelist has it easy. If the character does something uncharacteristic, you can give the reader the inner thought to justify it. But in theatre, of course-- the character's motivation has to be externally obvious enough to make sense. Otherwise, the audience just gets annoyed.

In my play, one character is giving me trouble. I'm creating him, so I ought to know what he's thinking. But this guy seems to have a will of his own. He gets away from me, dancing in scenes where he ought to be mourning. Snapping at a woman who is kind to him. I don't know what to do with him, as though he's a misbehaving two year old I impulsively agreed to babysit.

And in the story, his thoughts must evolve convincingly. Since I am not sure what he's doing in the first place, I don't know how to poke him with my pencil to get him where I want him to go. I have to mull it over. I'll take a break.

It's like when pie crust won't roll itself out right, and you have to stick it in the freezer to re-think its stubborness. And for the butter to recongeal. And then you start over.

So-- play stuck in the figurative freezer-- I'm back to working on the novel. Fiction suddenly seems very easy compared to the Rubik's cube of drama. Marsha Norman wrote that you have to write plays twice-- once in your head and once on paper. Fiction lets you back-pedel more.

But that's not what I meant to write about. I meant to write about the actual process of writing, the way you stick your neck out the window into another world, shouting back over your shoulder, explaining what you see to your typewriter (which for the sake of this metaphor, takes dictation). Of how the best things I have written seem to have written themselves, because when I re-read them I am surprised to discover them laid out like that. As though I wrapped a package which, when unwrapped, is not the gift I remembered.

That's all, though, for the moment. The cardinal rule of successful writing is to write what you yourself would enjoy reading. And since I begin to wonder where I am going with this, I suspect you, dear reader, are wondering the same thing.

Just this: if I put up another blog with chapters of Dog Walker's Diary as I write them, would anyone read it?