The Dotted Yellow Line

Okay, it’s clear to me that I need to speed this up a bit. Lately, I’ve been running a chapter a month instead of once every two weeks. Part of that is that my regular in person writing group hasn’t been able to meet as often. The bigger part is that I’m fighting my usual tendency to start something then veer off in multiple directions. It could be way worse, I could still be sitting around thinking about what to do with Chapter 2.

I’m okay with where things are story wise, but I’m feeling like the story is still about to happen and that’s not really a good thing. No, I’m not trying to write a thriller. It’s just that I want to stop feeling like I know where it’s going and what scenes eventually have to happen, but I’m still choosing from any number of routes for getting there without quite being there. In very loose terms, the best stories push forward and outwards all at the same time. It’s a bit like Einstein, as you approach the speed of light mass gets bigger which prevents you from ever going beyond the speed of light.

The other twist I threw myself was the bit about Absalom Absalom which I haven’t read in like thirty years. I’ve always had Absalom in mind along with One Hundred Years of Solitude, both books that are in one sense about the rise and fall of small towns in remote places. I’d mostly left it to the side (where it belongs). Now that it’s slipped in, I need to at least make sense of the saga of the Sutpen family and its impact on Quentin Compson as he tries to explain his world to northerners. So will I divert myself into studying Faulkner (an endless task) or will the wikipedia suffice?

I am pleased that two characters who I’d avoided Jan Grady and Marie are both moving forward. I’m still not sure whether I have the grooves slipped in for the more fanciful bits of the story, like the ghosts.

In the meantime, every week that passes is another crisis of confidence. Writing this has always felt uphill and I’ve imagined that there would be spots where the process would coast. I don’t think it’s straight downhill once you hit a point in a draft, but most of my own writing that I’ve liked acquired a kind of momentum of inevitability. As I’ve written sections of this I have had that, but writing a draft is like choosing a single highway and I keep wanting to go off on one of the side roads or at least see them before I step on the gas pedal.