The Bits You Don't Get To See

I’ve written a lot over the years, but for every story or novel or screenplay I’ve done, it seems that there are three or five or ten other things I’ve started and worked on and then left unfinished. Case in point, this is about the sixth blog I've ever started. I’m still writing one of the previous ones, just in haiku, but with the private setting enabled, so it’s just for me (all mine, all mine, muhaha).

I write however I can; I prefer to use a typewriter for fiction, as it’s less distracting that the computer, which has games and the internet and so on. But if I have to, I use the computer, and my little folder marked WRITINGS is full of completed stories and half finished ones.

According to Wikipedia there’s lots of “trunk novels” out there. Nabokov’s “The Original Of Laura” is going to be published this year, against his wishes (he wanted it to be burned). Stephen King’s got a bunch, like “The Aftermath” and “Sword In The Darkness”, that petered out or were rejected and then stashed. Herman Melville wrote a novel called “Isle of the Cross”, which was never published and then lost. I’ve lost a few works over the past fifteen years, since I seriously started writing outside of the assignments I was given at school. My favorite lost bit was one I did in eleventh grade, where I wrote a sprawling 20-page story on the path of a Bible from printing to its burning in the parking lot of a gas station in Vermont. It was an assignment for English class, and I had a lot of fun with it.

I just “took out” out of the folder and read a rough draft attempt at writing a novel based on my experiences getting sent off to a boarding school in the tenth grade. I sort of disappeared from my public school after the first quarter, and I honestly don’t think too many people noticed my absence. I wasn’t exactly in the running for most popular. More like most likely to be the person you look at in class photos and go “who was that?” or “I hope that bastard’s working at a gas station”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If I looked back at my high school years as the Glory Days, I think I’d jump off a bridge. I wrote the novel until about page 125 or 130, then lost the energy when realized I was only on the second day. If I wrote all I felt I would need to write to give the full span of the experience, I’d be looking at a two-thousand page monster, filled with bits like this:

The swings, and the surrounding wooden playground, had been built before he had come to the school, and while they showed their age they worked just fine for the kids of the day and Patrick. With his greater weight came greater speed and momentum, and he soon found himself nearly level with the top bar at each side of the swing, back and forth. The feeling in his stomach flipped around from enjoyment to a sudden irrational fear of letting go and falling. He slowed the muscle movement that kept the swing moving so fast, but just for a few seconds. When the swing was about forty-five degrees up and he felt it could and would go up further again if he continued, he let go and pushed off into the twilight. His body glided through the air for what felt like minutes but what could only have been a second or two, and then he fell to earth and the tiny gravel pebbles that the school had determined would be safe enough for the children to play upon. He tumbled, as that is the only word he could think of to describe it to himself, and his hands and knees were bit red raw by the little grains he had walked and scuffed on so many times before.

Patrick lay on the ground on his hands and knees and felt the burning increase in the parts that had made contact with the ground. Small, hot tears formed in his eyes, but with the extra years of experience he found a way to blink them back, letting only one hit his cheek and only for a brief moment before being wiped away by a gritty hand sprouting blood from miniscule fractures on the skin.

Hm. I wrote this about two years ago, and I’d like to think I’ve gotten better since then. It's almost 300 words that could be cut down to 100. It’s got sappy bits, and while I like the “gritty hand sprouting blood from miniscule fractures on the skin”, the composition feels chunky, and I’d have to rework it. “Miniscule fractures OF the skin”? “[K]ids of the day” is just a stupid way to term schoolchildren. Whatever. It was a learning process, the writing equivalent of going to the driving range or batting cage. In the folder it stays. Perhaps I could print it out and stick it in a trunk.

Back 'ta Woik

Last week threw me for a loop, and I didn’t write much. It began with my mother-in-law visiting (a good thing), stress at work (a bad thing), and then went into my birthday (good), and on my birthday I found out my wife is pregnant with twins (doubly good!). I’ll try to adhere to Elmore Leonard’s dictum that exclamation points should be avoided, but that last bit is an unavoidable target for a slash and a dot.

I don’t write for a living (yet… someday…) but I try to write everyday. I’m an adherent to the idea driven by Stephen King and others that writing and reading should be regular daily occurrences. I try, but last week I just didn’t have the time, and I didn’t have it in me. A pathetic excuse, but a reason as well. Last night, however, I got down to business, and had an explosion of productivity that I’m hoping to match tonight. I’m taking a small breather from the novel, just until I finish a short story that I started as a writing exercise and have since continued on towards an exciting finish line I didn’t anticipate when I first got down in front of the typewriter.

One thing I changed in my habit was where I write, which I have found to be very helpful. Before, I had been writing in the mud room of our house, not wanting to disturb the wife and kiddo, but it was a rather depressing place to write, full of junk we have yet to sort, right next to the washer and dryer, with the powerful odor of Tide and Bounce coating the insides of my nostrils. Biting insects are able to get in there somehow, possibly through the small space between the door to the garage and the floor, and I’d finish my night’s writing with several red pea-sized lumps on my hands and neck from the buggers I missed killing.

I wrote last night in the living room on our green striped couch that the cats are slowly destroying the corner of, and I finished at midnight with three solid pages from the typewriter. When typed out and formatted properly (one inch margins, 12 point Courier font) the three typewritten pages come out to roughly nine manuscript pages. I’m always tempted to obsess over what is the right or wrong way to format a manuscript, but it’s a distraction, a type of procrastination that feels like you’re doing something, but you’re not. I just followed instructions and watch my tightly typed pages become manuscript pages of 250 to 300 words each, with lots of extra breathing room.

Tonight I’m going back to the living room, with the typewriter on the coffee table that looks like the crate from Creepshow, and finishing the story. I hope to finish in time to spend a little extra time on the couch, finally finishing John Irving’s Setting Free The Bears.

Fighting The Serpent

Last night I sat down at my “desk” (typewriter balanced on two Pampers boxes filled with my wife’s comics and some hardcovers) and tried to get to writing. The night before I skipped ahead in my draft and started rocking on a scene involving the narrator, his German exchange student friend who came back from Europe and is now a very proud American, Bob Dylan, and the Quechee Gorge. It was going great, and I had stopped writing that night after the equivalent of about ten manuscript pages. But last night? Stopped after a paragraph. Just had no energy at all, and while the tiny amount I wrote was good and fit in, my eyes were closing and before I gave up I started a sentence that didn’t make any sense.

I’ve had insomnia for a few years now. It’s a combination of not being able to get myself to sleep, followed by bizarre dreams and other factors waking me up throughout the night. I don’t want to take Ambien, as I have a kid and the last thing I want to do is pick her up and try to walk down the stairs while in a drugged kind-of-sleep.

The dream I remember from last night: I was sitting at my “desk”, writing on my typewriter. Nothing was being printed on the page, but I kept writing. My writing area is in the mud room where we have a red washer and dryer set, and I sit with them to my left. To my right are three stairs and the door to the garage. I was in the process of not-writing when the skeleton of a long, thick snake came out of an unseen hole in the garage door and wound its way up the stairs and into the large pile of crap my wife and I have yet to sort out and put away since moving here in December.

I’m afraid of snakes. Very.

My dream reaction is to run into the kitchen and grab a curtain rod, split it in half, and go back to the mud room to do battle with the snake. While I was gone, however, the snake has started going through changes, and when I returned it resembled a skeleton version of the serpent from R. Crumb’s Book Of Genesis in the latest issue of The New Yorker.

Apparently The New Yorker influences my nightmares. Not too many people can say that.

I woke up my wife with my thrashings, then got back to sleep, then woke again, and now am at my day job. Tonight I’m going back to the keyboard, I’m determined to finish the scene, and I’ll try to think of a better dream weapon if I get attacked again. Perhaps a car loaded with nitroglycerin…