Wednesday, June 26, 2002
Wednesday, but somehow it feels like Monday. Yesterday was another bad day for writing and I only managed another 571 wds. on Chapter Ten. So, this chapter is officially off to a Very Slow Start. Being almost 1,000 wds. behind for the week makes me nervous (the goal of finishing this book by mid-August is, of course, all my own doing, but that changes nothing). As to why this particular chapter is giving me so much trouble, I'm not entirely certain. I have some thoughts, though. Low Red Moon will have either a double climax or a first and false climax; either way, the first one comes in Chapter Ten. So there's the intimidation of approaching events. Also, and perhaps more significantly, there's a lot of action in this chapter, which I hate writing. If I take these two elements, I really need look no farther for an adequate explanation for the slow start, though other factors may well be at work.
Have I mentioned how inadequate I find the medium of prose to the art of storytelling? Of course I have. Probably a dozen times so far. Just look back to that rather obtuse rant from 6/24. Anyway, last night I was watching Pitch Black for about the tenth time and I realized one of the things that it's almost absolutely impossible to do in prose. And it's a common feature of human dialogue, so the inability to reproduce it in fiction is a serious shortcoming. More than one character speaking at the same time. One voice layered over another. Or five voices competing for attention. Oh, I know I can tell the reader that Character A and Character B are speaking simultaneously. I can tell you Character C has just interrupted Character B. But one of my first rules of fiction-writing is show, don't tell. It's one of the few things I actually came away from those silly college fiction-writing courses believing.
More and more, as I write each day, I see myself as an artist moving away from my infatuation with William Faulkner and James Joyce, and drawn, instead, towards the simplicity and directness of Hemingway. Not because Faulkner and Joyce were inferior writers (they were probably, in fact, Hemingway's betters), but because writing the very specific sorts of stories that I'm writing isn't about lingustic acrobatics or word games, it's about relating a series of events, cause and effect, consequence, etc. And, for me, it's a given that prose is hopelessly handicapped in this task, so I don't need to further handicap myself by insisting that every goddamn sentence be a gem. I'm beginning to think it only annoys people. Anyway, now I have to stop writing about writing and just go write.
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