A Writer's Notebook, Day Thirty-Seven

I spent much of today attempting to write, but I did not get all that far.  I've continued work on the Bimble story, but the new story is proving difficult.  It was not entirely a wasted day, though, as I came up with a number of new ideas that I think will make for good stories in the near future.  It may be that I will work on one of those right now.  I also have a fair bit of development in terms of one particular character that will figure somehow in all of this.  Most of what I've been thinking about does interconnect and revolves around Florida, and I like having a sort of center around which to wind the ideas.

The second workshop in the course at FAU was this evening, and it seemed fine.  We didn't have any actual workshop to do this week, but I handed in the first chapter of my novel.  Honestly, that only occurred because I didn't get the writing done that I had originally planned, but it's probably for the best anyhow.  I think it might be useful to get some more direct feedback on what people think of that opening section, but I will admit to being a bit uncertain of what to expect.  It may be that I'll be pleasantly surprised, but I know it's a bit weird and not exactly traditional.  The style and voice are somewhat odd, so I am curious to find out how easily people get hooked into it, and whether it loses them in that strangeness.

Anyhow, in class, we had a writing exercise that I thought I would share here.  The assignment was to write a scene describing your walk to the building where the class is held.  This could be done as fiction or otherwise, and I wound up making it a bit of a character study.  For me, the limitation that helped bring it to life was considering the constraint of the walk itself.  I had parked within fifty feet of the entrance, so I didn't have a long ways to go, and it was considering how to make that short walk into something interesting that yielded the following piece:

They came around from the other side of the aisle in the parking lot, and I really didn't notice them until I was already parked.  They had been trying to get to the same spot as me, but that seemed silly, because the lot was half empty, and I assured myself that I hadn't actually stolen the spot.  Still, I waited in the car a few minutes, just let them walk past. Maybe it was in my head. I didn't look at them to see if they seemed angry, just noticed that it was two women and pretended to be busy in the car.

I got out when they were gone.  The parking lot was half empty, but their were a few cars driving around.  I saw a campus police vehicle, maybe just the parking enforcement, and a convertible with a young guy wearing sunglasses, both driving out of the lot.  Nobody else was walking, though. I locked the car, but I wasn't really sure it was locked, because there is not feedback the first time you press the button on the key fob.  I always have to press it again, so I can be sure that it is locked, because on the second press the car beeps. It is an angry beep, always seeming to say “you idiot, why did you press that button, don't you know that the car was already locked.”  I used to check by trying to open the door, but the new car door opens automatically if you pull it and the key is nearby, so that means I have to press the button twice.
So, once I had locked the car, that's when I realized that I hadn't taken my stuff out of the car, so I wound up having to unlock the car, and then I got my things and I went to leave, so I locked the car again.  I wasn't going to push the button twice, I mean, I was sure it should have worked, with me standing right there. So, I walked away from the car, and I was thinking about how I had to get photocopies made and wondering if that would be a problem, and suddenly I found myself wondering if I had really locked the car at all, so I decided to lock the door again, only now I was carrying my things and the key was back in my pocket, so I walked back to the car and put my stuff down on the hood, so I could free up my hand and get the key out, and I locked the car again.
I picked up my things, but I realized it hadn't been too smart to put them down on the car, because some of the pages were now smoky looking with trails of dirt they had picked up.  I tried to shake the copy, but the paper didn't vcme clean, so I would have to use that one. I almost got back into the car to leave. I didn't want to do that, with the dirty copy.  How could I have been dumb enough to do this? I mean, the car was probably locked, right?
But I didn't walk away, I just stayed in the car for a minute again, and then I got out and I pressed the button and locked the car, and I pressed again and let it beep at me because I knew that I wouldn't be able to leave if I didn't, and I went in with the dirty copy.


One thing that struck me reading it in class was how much humor people found in it. I wasn't particularly aiming at that, so it surprises me, but in a good way. I think that the humor in some of my stories is something that I often miss while writing. Looking back, often it is clearly there, but inside the process, it often just occurs organically. That is probably good, and I don't think that trying to make things funny would work as well for me. Of course, that's not to say that I don't intend humor in a story at all, but that I find a lot of the most impacting comedy moments I have written came to be without considering that dimension.

Also, it was nice to be forced to write in class. I had stared at a blank sheet too much today, and I started writing a few times and just got rid of the work, as it was not any good. I know enough about where I am going with that story to be able to recognize that certain kinds of mistakes in the work, slipping from the proper voice and perspective, for example, are not going to work. Even if I did leave them in, that would not be noticed by others, I don't think, but the actual problem is in the fact that I was so out of touch with the story that I was slipping so much.

Anyhow, I will get back to it tomorrow, and I hope to have a better handle. If not, I may start on another Florida piece instead, to see if that gets me pumping. The Bimble story is coming along, but it is going to take time, and it keeps complicating itself in strange ways that I am not sure the intention of just yet. It's a story that I am writing through a strange intuition, and I find that compelling. I also think the challenge of keeping at that while getting other work done is an important way of stretching myself. I feel very much on the edge of something, and I am eager to get across to the other side. Keeping the work going, that's the real key. The dedication to the work has to remain at the center. I have to trust that doing the work will get me to where I need to go, and the act of faith that demonstrates this is the daily effort I put into my writing.