Simplify

[mallorys_camera]

"It's going to come back and bite you in the ass," Abe told me six weeks ago. "I don't know about you, but as a writer I need to keep my emotional life very simple. Otherwise, I can't write."

Prophetic words.

Since the store stuff has to be kept on hold until they give me the lease, yesterday I sat down at the computer and opened up Women Who Leave. Spent approximately five hours writing and rewriting the first paragraph. Inserting commas. Taking out commas. Drafting lame descriptions. I have this obsession with complex figurative constructions that maybe comes from reading too much Tom Robbins at an impressionable age. Dunno. But anyway, in my head I had the ghost of a sentence that juxtaposed "junkyard dogs" with "honkytonks." It just wasn't working in the here and now though. In fact, the whole process of writing this novel was kind of like using the Rosetta Stone to translate Anne Lamott into Aramaic.

Finally, I gave up.

Well, now I'm fucked, thought I to myself. Ben's a lying asshole, I have no job, the Cannery Row will probably track down my fourth grade teacher and she'll tell them all about the time I made my cousin David take off all his clothes and run naked down the halls of PS87 so they won't give me the lease. Plus I can't write. Feeling massively sorry for myself, however, was not the gooey chocolate sob-fest I'd been hoping for. More like being shot up with curare. I felt paralyzed. Numb.

So I called Mike Tyson.

I suppose if you don't weigh 350 pounds and talk like Tweety-Bird but your name is Mike Tyson, your only recourse is to become a therapist.

Which is what he did.

Annie recommended him. I'll see him tomorrow.

Then last night I went to my writer's group. I'd submitted the first three chapters of Saturday Night in the Sky and they had some good feedback actually – chronology very confusing throughout, too many flashbacks, no one totally sympathetic character, unnecessary coyness, lots of info that the reader really does not need.

"It's kind of like you have the beginnings here of three separate novels," said Ken, the bespectacled physicist. "That means you're asking your readers to do a lot of work."

Ken has sold a lot of stories to Asimovs and Analog. He knows from structure.

"Yes, well I was trying for a kind of Roshomon effect with four separate points of view," I babble. "I wanted the reader's metabolism to subtly shift each time a different character was center-stage."

Ken shook his head. "If you want this book to work, you're going to have to cut out a lot of stuff. It's just too confusing and it throws the reader out. You're going to have to streamline and simplify."

He didn't know it but he was really talking about my life.

Comments

[idylld.livejournal.com]

Your feedback sounds a lot like MY feedback, on the rare occasions I actually finish something. I know my own 'complex figurative constructions' are really just a manifestation of my desire to be Trollope reincarnated. I do so love a long sentence, but dread and fear the commas, just like you. Where DO you put those little buggers?

Keep writing. Hope Mike Tyson works out.