| 7/31/99 |
I'm very excited about this dare. . . although I can feel my anxiety
level rising as well. Just spent the last hour agonizing over whether my
outline is sufficient, whether this thing will sustain itself at novel length
or just get boring and end up being a disastrous waste of disk space, whether
my life has any meaning, whether there's any food in the fridge and should
I go buy some beer . . . .
So it's pretty much just like Clarion, except without the hall-hanging. |
| 8/1/99 |
Got some good ideas today for how things will fit later in the story; as
for the writing itself, having a little trouble finding the voice of it.
But I know from past experience that that will come. |
| 8/2/99 |
The bad news: only 281 words. Am I lazy? Am
I cheating? How can I give myself a day off so early? The
good news: I was wrong yesterday about not finding the voice. The
voice is there in the first 2000 words--I just didn't recognize it at first,
because it isn't the voice of the short story. It's a better one. Woo hoo!
("Voice" is the thing I require to write a story. If I don't find
the voice, I can't write the story. You have your quirks, I have mine.) |
| 8/3/99 |
So I don't know if the actual words I wrote today are of any quality or
not. Guess I'll find that out at rewrite time. Just get there. Just get
there. (Keep repeating.) Meanwhile, there seems to be a subtext lurking
around in the depths of my mind, creeping around the edges of the words,
flitting past, just a shadow and I'm not sure if it's my imagination or
if there's really something there. |
| 8/4/99 |
Once again, not sure I'm doing anything besides going blah
blah blah blah (although there are a couple of nice images in today's
work that I'm not displeased with; see if I still like them tomorrow, or
next week, or whenever--there's a fine line between evocative imagery--the
stuff that in just a couple wordstrokes paints a picture or a feeling and
makes you say yes, I am there--and cleverly worded phrases
whose only purpose is to sound writerly). As Scarlett O'Hara, one of my
very least favorite characters in literature or film (my review of Gone
with the Wind: Scarlett and Rhett deserve one another, and frankly,
my dear, I don't give a damn), said, "I'll think about that tomorrow.
Tomorrow is another day." When perhaps I will not be babbling like
this. |
| 8/5/99 |
Still plugging away. Starting to get into the meat of the story . . . I
think. Earlier today, I discovered a new major character, which will be
interesting to explore (at least for me--who can tell what the reader will
think, at this point??). |
| 8/6/99 |
Spent the day at the NY Public Library. What a perfect place. Wish I'd known
there were outlets in the tables...might have brought the laptop. As it
was, I did a little book-related research--not as much as I would have liked,
partly owing to a late start, partly owing to a wild goose chase Rob took
me on. Really should have gone there early, and alone. A day blown. (Oh,
I did do other writing, of the paying, nonfiction variety. But that is not
an acceptable excuse.) |
| 8/7/99 |
I thought this would be another blown day, spent as it was as a houseguest,
and then at a Mets game (Irish night: green hats and the pervasive aroma
of barf in the upper deck; there were maybe a half-dozen of us who noticed
there was a baseball game going on), but I came back and did a chunk of
writing late into the night. I'm not remotely satisfied with the quality
of the work. I crave (and that is exactly the right word) what John Updike
called "the hard blue glow of high purpose." Updike was actually
talking about Ted Williams, but it's the same thing that I am aching for,
and not quite achieving. |
| 8/8/99 |
And yet another day I figured was blown, as we spent much of it in the car.
But I got a couple of loose ideas, and a few words pencilled in, late in
the night. Still behind the pace, but at least in the race. |
| 8/9/99 |
I wouldn't think a flying lesson and writing would have much in common,
but they both leave me feeling like I've just run five miles being chased
by a bear. ("Exit, chased by a bear," Shakespeare's most famous
stage direction.) |
| 8/10/99 |
Excuses, assembling shelves ("easy, quick," the box lies through
its cardboard teeth), excuses, going for an airplane ride (aerial photos
of Cooperstown, which still doesn't get words on the page), excuses, existential
crises (some days I just wonder if I really suck at being a human being,
and what does that mean anyway?), more excuses = no actual writing. |
| 8/11/99 |
Aw, man, it was fun today! Writing a ball game, a game not unlike
one I went to in which Rick Reed pitched seven no-hit innings. Seeing through
the pitcher's eyes, as he zeroes in like a sniper readying to make the kill.
Days like this make the rest of them worth it. |
| 8/12/99 |
You would think the act of stringing words together into sentences--especially
describing a scene that already exists in my head--would be a simple, straightforward
process. Any idiot does it--makes sentences, tells stories--every day. But
if you think about the mechanics of it, the choosing of the exact word that
will let someone else see it precisely as I see it--that will let them see
into my mind--the matters of sibilance, rhythm, tone, structure, and how
it all fits into the larger picture . . . . I'm having a hell of a time
making the last out in the current chapter, both figuratively and literally.
I just can't seem to place it exactly where I want it. Perhaps I
am thinking too hard about it. |
| 8/13/99 |
I have nothing to say for myself. |
| 8/14/99 |
I realize I actually know the entire box scores for all the baseball games
mentioned in this story (even though only two games are going to be described
in more than passing). This is very comforting, and that comfort helps to
account for the good output today. I suppose I should write some of what's
inside my head down, but I would rather just spend my energy keeping the
story moving. (Meanwhile, I am subsidizing this adventure, i.e., making
something resembling a living, by copyediting a book ostensibly written
by a dog. I would prefer not to know what the dog got paid for it. Some
things a person is just better off not knowing.) |
| 8/15/99 |
I had really planned to crack 20,000 words today (which is still 10,000
words below where I'd hoped to be at this point in the dare--but this is
about as productive as some rookie comparing his pace to McGwire and Sosa's
home run pace), but I can barely keep my eyes open. When the characters
in the story start crying out for sleep (which they just did, and trust
me, the story gets dull if all the people in it are asleep), it is time
for me to do the same. This is what I get for staying up until six a.m.
last night/this morning for no discernable reason beyond a preference for
night over day. I did write a lot yesterday, though, finishing that big
bolus of words around four in the morning. That's always been my best time--midnight
to three or four--for writing. Too bad the rest of the world has trouble
accommodating my schedule, especially in this roll-up-the-sidewalks town. |
| 8/16/99 |
<insert sound of crickets here> |
| 8/17/99 |
I saw a fire today (nobody hurt, although the building is probably a total
loss). The imagery spoke to me, lit a fire if you will. Good an explanation
as any. Wrote a passage about standing on the field in the wee hours with
no light but moonlight, and hearing ghosts . . . |
| 8/18/99 |
The rhythm of the language is better . . . finding my stroke, so to speak.
Good news of seeing words of mine in print; at Barnes & Noble I found
the book on Joe DiMaggio that I have two essays in.
Tomorrow is our wedding anniversary; do I take the day off, or do I decide
that part of commemorating four years of togetherness is the quiet comfort
of working in my room knowing that my soulmate is there writing right next
door? |
| 8/19/99 |
I didn't take the day off. We had a nice day together, went to dinner and
a movie in the evening, and then I wrote 3000 words. Good news as we enter
year five: I can write and be married! In all honesty I have sometimes over
these past four years whether that was the case--whether being happy in
my life robbed me of the visceral edge that made it possible to be creative.
It is my fundamental view that the world is a grim and evil place, and that
is where I think my best work comes from. (Not that everything I write is
grim; I also believe that the ultimate purpose of art, and perhaps life,
is to slam the realization of the world's grim-and-evil-ness right up against
people's faces so that they feel compelled to react, not only to the work,
but to the reality, the latter by actively not letting the evil win.) |
| 8/20/99 |
Now the trouble is that I have written as far as the outline goes. I do
know where the story goes beyond that, having written it as an entire short
story, and also having made other notes. Still, I feel a little more blind,
a little less prepared. I could go write more outline, but I don't think
I want to do that. I think I want to feel around in the dark a bit, explore
the unknown, and see where I end up. There's a certain sense of adventure
in that--like travelling alone, without an itinerary, in a place where I
don't speak the language. Total immersion works. (Of course now, having
reminded myself of that, I just want to go to France again.) |
| 8/21/99 |
Five consecutive days without an off-day in the writing! Flying blind, without
an outline, and pretty darned happy about the outcome! The Cubs win (a fleeting
upward blip in their season's plummet to ignominy, but we'll take what small
consolation we can get)! What more can a girl ask for?? |
| 8/22/99 |
Getting spoiled by these 3000 word days; I was disappointed to run out
of fuel at only 2000 tonight. Had a fright last night--right after I did
the word count and posted it, the computer crashed, and I appeared to have
lost part of the day's work. Thank God for autosave--I was able to retrieve
all of it. And immediately backed it up elsewhere.
I looked at the original story. The dialogue there is much better. I
will have to work harder on the voices of these people; in the story, every
time a person speaks, you can not only hear them, you can see them, and
the world they come from. Need more of that, I don't know, presence, I guess
I'd call it, in the current work. There are people I could listen to, that
listening to their voices will help. |
| 8/23/99 |
I feel like I just won the fucking World Series. "Hey, Pam, you
just wrote 3000 words! What are you going to do now?" "I'm going
to DisneyWorld!"
Some people say it's hard for writers to be married to each other, but
when it goes like it did tonight and it's 2:30 in the morning and Rob is
trying to go to sleep, and here I am squirrelling around in a run-on sentence
of exhilarated exhaustion, shaking him awake with announcements like, "Santiago
Lopez lives!"--then it is good to be married to someone who accepts
this incomprehensible non sequitir and opens his eyes long enough to cheer
for me, rather than doing the sane thing of tossing me out onto the porch
to annoy the anonymous neighbors so he can get some sleep. |
| 8/24/99 |
This is cheating: I changed the diary entry. The other one was pointless.
I went to bed and as I started to doze off I was abruptly, sharply (enough
to get me out of bed) aware of useless information about my characters,
to wit: Santiago Lopez has an apendectomy scar. The surgery was performed
in Cuba, in the spring when he was 18. Jeremy Elliott had three wisdom teeth
removed when he was 22, but not the fourth. The remaining one is the upper
left. The thought of wisdom teeth got me poking around in my mouth to remember
which one of mine is gone--upper left. What does this say about complementarity
of author and character (he is much that I am not), or is this just the
rambling of a four o'clock mind? |
| 8/25/99 |
Something I have learned so far in this process: even though I have flexibility
in my schedule, my optimal writing time is still from midnight to three
in the morning. If I don't write then, it's a lot harder to do it at all.
I was proud of my sister tonight. She hadn't thrown a ball in ten or
fifteen years, but her pitch looked as good as what a couple of the Utica
pitchers were throwing. And they lacked the excuse of being six months pregnant. |
| 8/26/99 |
Jeez, I feel disappointed that I only wrote 1500 words. And to think that
at the beginning of this adventure, a thousand in a day was an immensely
productive outing for me. Unless there's a miracle, I won't make 60,000
for the month--but that doesn't matter, because I've found an immensely
productive rhythm, and that doesn't have to end. (And I'm playing kickass
skeeball, too, which to us city kids is considered an actual sport . . .
.) |
| 8/27/99 |
Another new character has snuck up on me. I didn't think she belonged, thought
she was a purposeless aside who would probably be cut in the rewrite. But
tonight she grabbed me by the throat, slammed me up against the wall, and
showed me her place in the story. (Yes, she is a little bit terrifying.
I adore her. I want to be her when I grow up.) |
| 8/28/99 |
I guess some days one is not destined to write. Visiting Pat Y.: couldn't
find the right sort of outlet, then had computer problems and finally an
unrecoverable disk error. Fortunately, that happened after I had only written
a paragraph; I took the hint, watched videos (October Sky, which
they should have called Rocket Boys as the book was called; and Bull
Durham, because Rob was in the mood for a baseball movie--I could see
some of the seams in October Sky, where a life had been trimmed and
tugged and reshaped to fit the harsh figure of the seven-point plot outline;
Bull Durham I've seen before, but this time it felt like a different
movie, for reasons I am ill-equipped to explain). |
| 8/29/99 |
I tried to recover the lost paragraph of last night when I realized that
what had then felt like filling space, warming up, had depth and significance
for the story. Alas, the disk is dead, and the paragraph is gone, but I
think I got to what it was about in tonight's work; except tonight it is
probably obvious and heavy-handed, as opposed to the naturalness and subtlety
of what had just come along all on its own. I think I want to go lie in
bed and watch more movies (and dissect them: an occupational hazard), but
it's nearly three o'clock and our VCR isn't hooked up and if there is such
a thing as a 24-hour video rental place, it sure isn't in this little town.
You can't always get what you wa-ant . . . |
| 8/30/99 |
The dreaded middle . . . I am floundering. And only one more day on the
dare. I know where this book is going (I think); I'm just not entirely sure
how to get there. Will I continue on in September, as if the dare is still
going on? Should I take some time off to figure out how to get through the
middle, or will that kill my momentum? I don't know, I don't know, I don't
know, and there is nothing in life I hate so much as not knowing . . . . |
| 8/31/99 |
It's over, but it's not over . . . I didn't get to 60,000, and even fell
short of 50,000--could have pushed farther today, but I was writing way
off on a tangent, what I'm sure is a very dead end, so I figured better
to stop for now, get myself back on track for tomorrow.
I did, however, get the answer to yesterday's question. (I actually knew
it in my gut, just needed Aimee and Cynther and others to say it for me
to realize that.) Habit, momentum, and a fully realized story are not to
be set aside lightly, even momentarily. Take too many days off, and you
get rusty. (Ask Turk Wendell--too many days without pitching, and he gives
up a grand slam tonight. You could just about see his heart sink down to
his toes.) I am taking tomorrow off (maybe; we'll see) but basically continuing
as if August were a realllllly long month, until this draft is complete.
Keep those e-mails of encouragement coming . . . . |
| 9/3/99 |
Two days off, recovery time and time to think about how to get through the
middle. I think I'm starting to have a handle on it. At least I'm a little
more focused--less likelihood of steering myself into another dead end. |
| 9/4/99 |
Some days this is exhilarating, transcendent, suffused with a spirit I can't
lay claim to as my own. (I think I said something like that earlier; it's
just nice to have another such day, especially when I have felt so suffocated
lately. Ask, and ye shall receive.) |
| 9/5/99 |
It's coming in smaller bites, but it's coming. Satisfying. I'm writing well.
This makes me happy. (Elliott is happy today, too--almost giddy. I usually
find it dull to write happy characters, but Elliott is feeling a little
bit mischievous, a lot eager and hopeful. He is full of promise, and it
is too bad that he is going to die.) |
| 9/9/99 |
Way off the pace, and days away from the writing. Been on a backwards schedule--working
at night and sleeping during the day--while doing paying work of varying
sorts. Only a little written today, but it is better than nothing.And the
middle is okay--changed point of view for a chapter, which freshened things
up enough that Santiago Lopez explained to me what the hell he was doing
in a scene a chapter or two ago where he had no business being. (I like
when characters just start talking on their own. I guess it's like watching
your kids turn into actual, autonomous people.) |
| 9/10/99 |
Still not producing much volume, but I guess I'm proud of myself for continuing
to push on, despite the fact that it is the middle of the night and I am
exhausted and overextended--and there are things happening in the text,
about death and life and invincibility and fragility, that I am not unhappy
with having written. |
| 9/11/99 |
Starting to feel like I'm never going to make it to 60,000, much less the
end of the book, which is still a goooooood ways off. Is this the Zeno's
paradox novel--where you keep getting halfway, and halfway, and halfway,
and never quite arrive? |
| 9/12/99 |
This town has a couple diners, but not the city kind, not the kind of places
where you can sit undisturbed endlessly, with cops and other regulars coming
and going, and gum-chewing, cigarette-scented waitresses refilling your
coffee without asking. (The Golden Angel Pancake House on Lincoln Avenue
a couple blocks below Lincoln Square in Chicago, across from where the old
guys play bocci well into the summer night, is such a place. I miss it.)
Anyway, diner or no diner, I went out for a burger and sketched out the
rest of the book. I feel a lot less lost as a result, but I worry that by
planning the future I've sucked the spontaneity out of it. I hope I didn't
just kill the characters and make them into puppets. |
| 9/13/99 |
I crossed the sixty-thousand mark! (Nearly two weeks late, but in the scale
of a lifetime, that's pretty negligible.) And, we are entering endgame,
I can feel it. Just finished a chapter resolving a subplot with what Ben
Adams likes to call the Hodgson Emotional Catharsis (tm). I still have a
lot more story to write, but I know exactly where it is going. And it feels
satisfying. It feels complete. It feels right. |
| 9/14/99 |
Just wrote a few words for the sake of the habit, on a day spent on feline
medical concerns (Thomas is at the veterinary hospital as I write this,
awaiting determination of what is riddling the bone of his rear leg--severe
infection? Cancer? Mr. Hobbes is noticing his brother's absence, and, surprisingly,
not liking it one bit). |
| 9/19/99 |
Been out of the rhythm for days. Seems like my September progress is creeeeping
along (because it is). But at least Thomas doesn't have cancer, and Rob
was surprised for his birthday. But I really need to learn to keep up with
the writing, even in the face of real life. |
| 9/20/99 |
I am very tired, can barely keep my eyes open. But there's some pretty good
stuff happening in the chapter I started tonight, and I stopped in a good
place for picking up. The end of the story is effectively set up, I think.
I suspect this draft may top out shorter than I thought, but that leaves
room for a lot of things I will probably add on rewrite--color, as well
as pieces that need to appear earlier to support what I have lately discovered
in the story. |
| 9/21/99 |
It has not escaped my notice that I have too many characters with names
beginning in J: Jeremy Elliott, Jamie McGrew, Jonny Roth. Unfortunately,
these are their names (now I know what Damon Knight means about asking characters
their names, and they tell him). I am not changing any of them. |
| 9/22/99 |
Sixty-six thousand words--strange to end the day on a round number, but
that's where I ended up today. Jamie and Elliott are living through their
Catharses. (That's the plural of catharsis, right? And gosh I am grateful
to Benno for giving a name to what a story feels incomplete to me without.)
Next, I will get them to the next level, then step back into the past to
resolve things there . . . There is much to be resolved in the past. |
| 9/23/99 |
This is it. I don't know what that
means, I just feel it, and know that it's true.
Wait--I just figured it out--one of those blazing moments of clarity
that sear the inside of your eyelids: this book will be done by the World
Series. It will end with the season. |
| 9/24/99 |
Even in a shabby motel room outside Detroit, with the smell of cigarette
smoke from past guests draped over the place like a dirty blanket, stiff
and tired from the eight-hour drive, I managed to make a little progress. |
| 9/27/99 |
The last couple days I didn't write, I just took in Tiger Stadium. The Cubs
last played in a World Series in 1945. It was the Tigers who defeated them.
I didn't work on the novel tonight, but I did write an essay about the fine
old ballpark. I wish I had known the place sooner; I would have spent a
lot of time there eating up the history. As it is, I will miss it. |
| 9/28/99 |
Style. Voice. Lapsing. Where to find them? Argh. |
| |
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