1,500 words

I have about 1,500 words to write today.  When they are done, so too will the latest draft of my book.

I am re-writing a scene that has already been written twice before.  This time, I hope to nail it.  I am, in fact, very much looking forward to doing this, but I procrastinate over starting because, well… I get a bit sad about finishing big projects.  Maybe it is like watching a child you raised finally go out into the world.  You have to say goodbye.

In working on this novel, I think I have returned to the understanding of stories that I had when I was about five years old.  I have rediscovered what is important:

1. Excitement

2. Laughing

3. Things

By excitement, I mean to say that whenever I look at some random page of my book, I want to find something that is interesting or intriguing.  I don’t want to find throw-away lines, or merely functional lines.  Every sentence, in and of itself, should be exciting.  It should have an electric charge to it.  Sometimes, I like to run grammar/spellchecks, not just for the obvious reasons, but because MS Word isolates the sentence in question and presents it to you in bold.  It forces you to look at the sentence out of context.  Sometimes, when taken out of context, you realize that a given sentence is kinda silly.  Or boring. 

Excitement is inherently important to any storyteller.  When I was young, I liked to watch Buck Rogers.  My earliest stories were about my hero and all the evil baddies that he took on and defeated.  A little later, I became obsessed with the Hardy Boys.  These books are exemplars of structural efficiency and drive.  Each chapter ends with a cliffhanger.  The initial incident is always revealed at exactly the right time.  The characters are consistent.  Lovable Chet and his jalopy can always be counted on to give the Hardy Boys a ride somewhere, and to deliver some comic relief!

And that brings me neatly to humour.  I don’t know if there are too many humans alive who do not like to laugh.  So in revising Blind Spot, I was aware that if I increased the number of laughs, I would increase its appeal.  Children are the most open to unrestrained laughter.  I am glad that as I got older, I learned to laugh more, even if my own particular laughter is rather girlish and embarrassing.

Things are also very important.  When you are a child, you are in love with your “things” and the exciting stuff they can do.  I liked my stuffed animals, my lego, my microscope.  Each thing had an inherent excitement to it.  Especially my bicycle!  The world is your oyster when you have a bicycle.  How quickly you can get from place to place.  When I was about seven, I threw this kid’s boomerang incorrectly and it never came back.  He was a nasty, violent kid and so, in order to avenge himself, he took a stick to my bicycle and smashed it.  It was a traumatizing experience. 

People  never grow out of loving things.  Even the most virulent anti-consumer enjoys things.  They might, for example, love their potted plants.  Things root every human in a recognizable reality.

Therefore, whenever I notice that my prose is getting murky and sort of unfocussed, I simply start naming things.  If you start naming things such as, cat on the bed, you have immediately given the reader a picture.  The characters of any story are naturally going to be surrounded by things all the time — unless, of course, they have been placed in solitary confinement in Guantanamo Bay.  So it makes sense that writing should include the abstract equivalent of actual things… Nouns. 

And lots of nouns.

Now I am going to get back to writing.