A Watched Pot

I am sitting cross-legged in my favorite armchair, waiting for the kettle to boil so I can make some tea.  The dog is at my feet.  She just emitted a gentle post-breakfast burp, and is now licking her front paws.  I can hear the warming pot hiss and burble.  Outside it is thirty-eight degrees, with a sky the kind of grey that it only gets in November.  Later today I'm going to meet a bunch of intrepid souls and mess around with sailboats.  If the messing around is successful, we'll put them on a crane, drop them into the water, and race them for a few hours until it gets dark.  I expect to be very cold.  I think I'll bring a flask of Scotch along.  Last time I did this, my hands got so cold that my fingers could no longer open the top of the flask.  I hope that doesn't happen again. 

The kettle just whistled, and now I've got a full cup of Earl Grey tea beside me.  The dog has her head down and is beginning to breathe deeply through her nose.  There are a bunch of things I want to write about -- the settlement of makeshift tents and tarps, a semi-permanent homeless community, that my walking companion and I stumbled upon yesterday; the political arguments swirling around me last night at a dinner party, all shaking index fingers and red faces and flashing eyes and bursts of angry profanity; further thoughts on the dating age gap between men in my peer group and the women they wish to date and how I feel about it. 

But now that my tea is made, I'm going to work on my fiction project.  It's kicking my butt.  I'm reasonably comfortable with my descriptive ability, but I've got no confidence in my ability to write dialogue.  And plotting is so very hard.  I'm starting to get a sense of my characters and the structure of the thing but there are huge, enormous gaps in what I know.  I also find that I'm terribly undisciplined as a writer.  I don't have a routine in place or a way to push through when things are hard.  It is a great exercise -- made possible by the ridiculously short time period, which lets me feel comfortable writing garbage, just so I can write something.  If I didn't feel like that was safe, I wouldn't be able to write anything.  I think the blog has been a little bit helpful in getting me used to writing without needing things to be perfect.  I think it has helped my sense of confidence in my descriptive ability.  But I think it has hurt me in that it hasn't required any discipline -- there need be no narrative thread, I write only about what I feel like, only when I feel like it, only for as long as I feel like.  Which has gotten me accustomed to writing in blurts and bursts of inspiration, until whatever it is I want to say is out, and then going and doing something else.  This fiction project is about writing whether there's a burst or not, and writing something that is connected to the things that come before it and those that come after it.  Whew.  It's kicking my butt, in a great way.      

Comments

[matt]

have you tried writing a scene, an interlude, even a story in which you don't have a predetermined destination in mind?

just putting character or two in a situation and watching what happens?

...i've never written a page on which something unexpected didn't happen, i've never had any creative work merely assume the form i expected before beginning, there is always serendipity, the unexpected, something ....more than i was aware of when i set out...be it painting, or cartooning, or designing buildings, or writing... and those moments, come to think of it, are usually the most wonderful occasions in the piece, they are the strong points..

i wonder what the dialog between Thoughtful Barbie and Overachiever Barbie would be if they were discussing the dating age gap... especially if one of them had just taken up with a 22 year-old... I bet you could write that.

[Sui Generis]

Out of all the blogs I read, yours is my favorite by far for literary beauty and reading joy. I figured you would be a natural novelist, and I bet you will churn out one hell of a book. Keep on writing!