A Writer's Notebook, Day Eighty-Eight

My afternoon and evening writing today almost 2000 additional words, and the novel is now over 21,000 total at this point.  I still felt a bit slow today, really, but I got a fairly good chunk written, and I think that I am on track.  There are many ideas that are clarifying around the book, and I have a strong sense of things that are coming.

There are still things that surprise me, even as i write them.  I began working on some parts not really understanding what they were about.  I was writing something about construction, and the idea of the pyramids, and it took me a few moments to even recognize why the idea of tombs might be in the mind of this character.  That is probably, I think, a good sign, really, as it means that I am, as I've said, inside the mode of the character's thinking, where these ideas seem to come out organically.

I believe that writing this book is teaching me a great deal.  First, about character, and the revelation of character through small detail, though thoughts without the context.  There is also a great deal in terms of controlling voice that I have found challenging, but rewarding.  But one thing that really seems significant, oddly, is a deepening of my notions about story and plot.

This is rather odd to me, since this novel does not have a strong plot or story.  It is largely driven by the internal aspects of the character, as said before, but still, I keep having to consider what makes a story and what makes a plot.  To me, a story is a principle of organization, like a graph.  Each point has two main qualities, what happened and the time and place it occurred.  The plot is the relationships between those points, the way that they interact with each other.

In this book, there is actually a great deal of plot, in some sense, if one things of it in these terms.  The plot, however, is a subtle element that exists in how each event is pushing the mind of the character, and the responses that leads to.  So, for example, the plot can consist of internal actions and response.  The character takes a shower, and as they do, they feel the warm water.  The feeling on the body is a reminder of being alive, which is a reminder of impending death.  The interconnections are all internal to the character, but still exist.  In addition, these elements are not always directly communicated.  It may be that the reasoning for this or that is only partly explained or even understood by the character.  In some cases, the events are shown without depicting how they link, directly.  In doing this, I am hoping that the reader will actually need to find that information in the text.  The goal is for it to not feel as if the information is missing, but that it makes sense.

The book is also exposing a vulnerability as well.  There is something deeply personal at the core of it, though that would not be apparent from the outset, I don't believe.  I didn't understand quite what I was getting into, really, but that is fine.  The issues the book is making me deal with are difficult, but the journey is one that I am glad to be taking.  As well, it is good to know that I can tackle things that require a willingness to be personally exposed in the work.  That is, again, not literally the case, but I do feel very much close to this in a lot of ways that I had not expected.

The challenges, then, are many, but I feel that I am at a place where I've really been learning from those things and am definitely developing my capacity as a writer in response.  I don't have any idea of what this book will be like for a reader, and it may well be something that will never be fit for publication, yet, already, I can feel how it is helping me to develop into the writer that I seek to become.