Saturday, October 22, 2011

Accidents & Postcards #1

Okay, so here’s the explanation of the idea behind the first Accidents & Postcards post. I think this will be sort of a long post, partly because I need to see what kind of shape I’m in for National Novel Writing Month, which starts in just a few short days. In order to get to 50,000 words by the end of the month, you have to be able to kick out almost 1700 words every single day. That is a monstrous pace, one to which I have not been adhering over the course of the eleven months since the last NaNoWriMo. This particular post was probably going to go a little bit long anyway, because it’s a long way around getting to the crux of the story; and by making it a tune-up of sorts for NaNoWriMo, I may have to add more to it than I had originally planned. (By way of example, this first paragraph is around 170 words, which is one-tenth of what you need to stay on pace for NaNoWriMo. I’ll have to kick out nine more paragraphs of roughly this length in order to get to 1700 words for the post.)

I’ve started this previously on a couple of occasions, but have not finished it because I wasn’t sure exactly where I wanted to begin. Do I try to go back to the very beginning, where the idea first took shape; or do I just jump right in at the present, work my around to the beginning, and then double back to the present? The latter, non-linear form, would feel much like the first two Tarantino films, and I think it would probably feel slightly more organic, since I could bring things up out of order and then sort of fit them into the context of how I came to think about them with respect to the original idea. The former, of course, would be more organized, but I’m not entirely sure I would get everything in just the right place; and the idea of going back and forth to make sure everything is put together in just the right way is slighty maddening to me.

(Yes, I understand that this is the way in which novels get written, and that it is perhaps my inability or unwillingness to work very hard at this that has kept me from becoming an actual novelist. But it’s just not the way I work. Everything has to come out mostly the right way the first time, in mostly the right order, or I’m just not happy with it. This in contrast to John Irving, who has said that he still desperately loves the work of constructing a novel. But to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, I am not John Irving, nor was meant to be.)

Which leaves me no closer to knowing whether I want to start at the beginning or jump right in with the right now and try to get myself back to the point where I decided to start writing the story that bears the name of this post (minus the enumeration). I’m just not sure where the goddamn beginning is. But for the sake of argument (and because it’s getting late and I’d like to have this done by two in the morning so I can get some reading done before I go to bed), let’s say that the beginning was when I read a literary magazine round-up in Poets & Writers, many months now in the past. One of the articles in the magazine (I don’t remember which issue, but it’s not more than a year or two old) had agents or editors or some other group of people in the business offering little blurbs about which literary magazines they were reading or were interested in at the moment. Several of them mentioned a journal called n+1, though the reasons each of them gave for why that particular journal was interesting at the moment I no longer recall. (It’s possible that I will go back later and shore this up with some actual quotes or references from the issue of Poets & Writers in question, sort of like the way Eliot bulked up “The Waste Land” with notes.)

As I have alluded to before, going in search of literary magazines in Indianapolis is something of a fool’s errand. It was no slam dunk when Borders was still around, and is even less of a slam dunk now that they are gone and Barnes & Noble has dramatically reduced the titles they stock. Nonetheless, and this was before Borders closed and Barnes reduced their inventory, I went out looking for n+1 and found a copy of issue number 10 at the Clearwater Barnes & Noble. (I’m not going to get into what the journal is about. You can get a good idea of that by checking out their website and reading some of their online content.) It was $13.95, which is more than I like to spend on literary magazines, but I picked it up anyway, took it home, and added it to the pile of journals I have bought (few of which I have gotten around to reading, but that’s another story, too).

I read part of it at once, because one of the features was a series of four responses to Freedom, the new novel by Jonathan Franzen. And now that I think about it, I must have picked up the copy of n+1 sometime last year, because I read the responses to Freedom before I read Freedom, which I started late last December. I started the issue of n+1 from the beginning some time after that, and was close to finishing it when we left for Kansas City for my brother’s wedding, at the end of April of this year. I finished it in the car on the way to Kansas City, and one of the ads near the back of the issue was for another journal, called Black Clock. The blurb for that one listed a number of authors I admire, so I made a mental note to check out their website when we got settled at the hotel. Once we were settled, I fired up my laptop and hooked up to the Marriott’s Wi-Fi (and would you believe that the Marriott charges $10 a day to use their Wi-Fi?) and then brought up their website. Print issues of the journal cost $13, but PDF versions of those same back issues were only $3, so I ponied up for the most recent issue, which at that time was #13.

And it took me a long time to get around to reading that one, too. I still haven’t read the whole thing, but one of the pieces I did read was an essay called “The Sting of Irrelevancy,” by Joanna Scott, which had originally been published in Black Clock #7, from Fall 2007. The essay describes, among other things, how seemingly irrelevant things can in fact be very relevant, if only the writer can manage to take note of the irrelevant thing without losing focus on the matter at hand. This, at least, is the way that I interpret what I read. It struck me as interesting, so I filed it away in that part of my active mind where I keep things that I want to remember without having to think about them all the time.

In the essay, Scott writes, “If an openness to experience is maintained, then the most irrelevant experience can contribute meaning to a distant story.” This is in the same spirit that Stephen King describes the process of having an idea, in the novel Misery. The main character, Paul Sheldon, relates that he often goes out for a walk in order to clear his mind and prepare it to receive whatever ideas may come to it—as opposed to actively trying to “Have An Idea,” which he describes as somewhat akin to the idea that a watched pot never boils. It is also in the same spirit as the idea of not being able to see the forest for the trees, though in this case Scott describes it within the context of writing.

The idea has had a dramatic impact on the way that I look at the world, especially when I’m out on walks with Jackson on Wednesday afternoons, or when I’m at a bookstore—or even when I’m just at work. I transmuted the nebulous concept of irrelevancy into the more concrete example of accidents, making an adjective that is subjective into a noun that is objective—and in some cases, an actual object. Sometimes it’s a chance encounter, like the girl at the mall who at first was looking for the food court and then wanted to bum a cigarette. Other times, it is, as I say, an object—a postcard stuck in the pages of an issue of National Geographic in the clearance section at Half Price Books. I wove both of those things into a long story I just yesterday mailed off as a contest entry, along with fictional versions of a dominatrix Steve and I ran into once at the Chatterbox, an evening of backwoods stargazing during my freshman year in college, and the time I had to drive one of the bartenders at the Slippery Noodle home because she drank too much during her shift.

If not for a series of seemingly irrelevant episodes, maybe that story never gets written. I don’t know. But I loved the way all of those random things came together, and—like John Irving, for once—I loved working the original draft down into something that was much tighter and more coherent in its final form. It took a long time—I started it over the summer, finished the first draft just a few weeks ago, and then did two sets of revisions, both for length and for content. I worried over the ending for a long time, and finally hammered something out because I thought that where it stopped before I tacked on the ending wasn’t a good place to end; but it turned out to be just the right place for it to end. When I got to the end of the second set of revisions, I realized that my tacked-on ending was completely unnecessary. A few little tweaks turned what was originally an abrupt stopping point into a haunting little ending.

So there it is. I compressed a few things in this version—the postcard in the National Geographic for one—that took up whole paragraphs in the first version; and it’s a bit after two in the morning as I am wrapping this up. But by the time I get to the end of this, I will have put down over 1800 words, in less than an hour.

National Novel Writing Month, here I come.

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