Tag: narrative

This season of reflection…

–from Karen

Happy Holidays Friends,

It’s tough to write now, especially when you’ve got little kids. School concerts, church pageants, snowy playdates, and the pure joy of encountering the season with them take over. And you know, I think they should.

But for those wrestling with works-in-progress, here are a few thoughts. Anyone rewriting–peeling away the layers of a narrative to drill down, discover, and embellish the real true thing, the core of what you want to say–may especially appreciate this. Rewriting isn’t easy. But keep pushing, and you’ll get there. Don’t look away. Trust the process. It will take you where you need to go. Maybe not where you want to go, but where you need to go. No one ever glimpsed the truth by glancing away at the critical moment. The great James Baldwin put it much more elegantly that I can:

“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out.”

Keep trying, keep finding out, be honest in your efforts. Don’t be afraid to stumble and try again. The pay-off will be incalculable. This is how great works are made.

Peace.

mistakes

 

 

 

 

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Multiple Points of What-Am-I-Doing

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Okay, so who told me to write a novel with multiple, third-person points of view? Three, to be exact. I’ve never attempted multiple viewpoints. It’s a whole new narrative world.

While I’m enjoying the separate viewpoints, I’m not so sure I’m merging them in a very, um, skillful way. But that’s what revision is for, right?

I’d forgotten what it’s like to be smack in the middle of a first draft—when the thing is unfolding, but you don’t know where it’s taking you. First drafts are a hot mess—as the current lingo goes—an untamed rush of great flailing promise, over abundance and poor judgment. I’ll worry about reigning it in later.

When I’m feeling especially lost, though, I recall the great novelist E.L. Doctorow’s words on first drafts. Doctorow passed away this month at the age of 84. R.I.P.

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

–Keep the faith, friends,

Karen