My muse doesn't seem to know how to take 'no' for an answer. After resolving yesterday to work on my novel, I grabbed my printed ms and opened my Word doc and...
I just couldn't do it. Editing old stuff seemed pointless because all the old stuff seemed tedious and ill conceived. New material? I know I need to bridge some gaps. But none of the bridges I could think of had good footings.
While I don't see Wealth Effects being a tight, 300 page novel along the lines of 'Choke' or 'The Contortionist's Handbook,' I also don't aim to end up with a monster along the lines of 'Underworld' or 'Mason & Dixon.'
Not always, and I think not in the case of the DeLillo and Pynchon novels mentioned above, but generally the epic novel is the product of lazy writing. Pat Conroy, for instance, has even copped to being horribly overwritten and incapable of being concise in interviews. And while I can't take away from his commercial success, I don't think his is the stuff of classics.
I'm not just talking out of my ass when I criticize Conroy. I've read quite a bit of him, and there's some patterns that emerge. The Water is Wide may be his most original work. While all his work is autobiographical to a great degree, I'm not knocking that because that's true of all fiction writers. Even in far-fetched cases, a fiction writer is in the confessional. Even when their material is drawn from other people, they're filtering that person through their own sensibilities and life experiences.
Lords of Discipline had some hokey elements to it, but was pretty solid as Conroy's work goes. It escapes into some vengeance fantasies in exposing 'The Ten' and so on, but I don't doubt the extreme hazing Conroy portrays is authentic and drawn from his own Citadel experience. And the cruelty inflicted on the first black cadet, before my time, rings true because I remember what they did with their first women.
Why anyone would voluntarily go to a college that is less humane than prison escapes me. But I don't understand people who volunteer for military service either. To the extent that there are bad actors in the world who can only be dealt with in forceful terms, I'm glad there's volunteers to do the job.
Besides, didn't The Boo cover the material in Lords of Discipline adequately?
Getting back to Conroy, he seems to me a victim of his own success. Prince of Tides was a hit, but artistically that's no excuse for Beach Music basically saying the same thing. Both suffer from an overdose of Romanticism.
The Great Santini explains why Conroy can't write an authority figure who's not a total bastard.
Topping off the stack, he wrote a memoir, My Losing Season, which basically explains the shortcomings to his books.
The man needed an editor, badly.
Basically, I don't expect a reader to pick up someone's unknown first novel, see that it's 900 pages long, and dive in. Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Tom Wolfe and the rest can go right on stringing giant books together, but for me, if the books going to be a long one, every sentence has to count, same as in a short story.
Even The Man Who Fell in Love With The Moon, by Tom Spanbauer, which is no small beer, is tightly written. In terms of word count, it's a lengthy work, but it's a thoroughly rewritten and edited work, with no fat on its ribs.
So my novel writing yesterday, well, it didn't happen.
Instead I wrote a rough draft for a short story that's been rattling around in my head for a long time. My muse has been working it over in my melon, and I finally just wrote it in an eight hour fit of hypergraphia. I'm sure it has a ton of problems that I'll need to iron out, but it was a cathartic experience writing it. I just couldn't let go until I had it more or less the way I'd imagined it.
3,000 words, which is a good day of writing, but it left me completely wiped out. Emotionally drained.
But now that it's out of my system, back to this ugly heap of a novel I've been working on for way too long. For all the flaws I find with it, I know, intellectually, that worse gets published all the time. And sells.
Which doesn't mean I'll be sending query letters before I've exhausted my capacity for revising and refining it. There's just too much work involved in even getting this far to go trying to pedal what I know to be less than the best I can come up with.
Since it's not likely to make me a dime, it's got to at least be something I'm proud of. Kafka asked that his manuscripts be burned upon his death, but Max Brod claims he was asking the one guy who wouldn't do it and that Franz knew it. But at its current stage in development, If I die today, all traces of 'Wealth Effects,' all the print outs and backup disks and the hard drive on my computer: nuke it, flame it, destroy it.
The short story I wrote yesterday, I don't know about it. Right now I'd say it's my best work to date, but it's also new. I'll probably hate it just as much in a few days...
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