THE DEATH OF A MANUSCRIPT Im calling it Draft 00 and Ive abandoned it. Its fronting, bad. Thats right. Im not the first novelist to cut three weeks worth of work and 20,000 words. It had to be done. It was suffering, I was suffering... I had to put it down. But I know how to resurrect things, bring them back from the dead. This is fiction, remember, and Im known for my magical world view. ;) Its buried under pretense and disguise and fear of vulnerability, when thats exactly where any potential authentic power comes from in writing, whether its fiction or not. You know how theres that cliche in movies: a character agonizes over a speech, rehearses in front of a mirror, loses sleep, shuffles his index cards nervously in front of him and then at the last moment, as hes about to panic and flee the stage and the audience is starting to either glare or nod off… he abandons his notes and just speaks from the heart. And it ends up being a rousing monologue full of magic. Yeah, thats what I tried to do today with this manuscript. Saturdays #wordcount is 588. Five hours of hand wringing and hair-pulling and about 30 minutes of actual writing. I have officially started over with Draft 01 of THE ANGEL AND THE RAVEN. No surgery or moving things around in Scrivener and over-complexifying my outline to death. I just started typing, an old school letter to my audience, with the sensational, confessional, autobiographical tone with which I have told this story to the few people who have heard in its nascent oral form. Its the preposterousness of the main characters (not the narrator, but the objects of the books title) the facts that are stranger than fiction, the campy cant make this stuff up quality that has always gives the bones of this story something that makes the listener smile at me hungrily, shake their heads in chuckling wonder and say Oh my God, youve got to write that! So, Im returning to that tone, that almost Gatsby-ish reminiscent first-person that is a natural voice for me -- gossipy, tall tale, big fish, the updated Southern Gothic unreliable narrator and his claims of questionably deniable magic in the world. And Im not taking it into Scrivener and outlining it in Chapters and Parts as I do with my non-fiction works -- Im writing it as I successfully began, scribbled, flowed, and finished CLOUDBUSTING last year -- in Evernote, the digital home of my imagination in the cloud. So, lets begin again. I have a story to tell you. About a psychic who was hired to work for a superstitious, paranoid drug king pin, an eccentric man who believed he was an emissary of the archangel Michael, and another who had a demonic attachment, a great dark wing, a black bird like thing that followed him into rooms and huddled in the corners of walls, and then crawled across the ceiling upside down, reminiscent of bats and broken umbrellas.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 18:07:04 +0000
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