deeplyshallow // eleanor goes to camp

eleanor goes to camp

On the road home from work tonight with a steady stream of sad music going. Patty Griffin, Mindy Smith, Ryan Adams, Ray LaMontagne; the iPod served up nothing but mope songs, and I absorbed every bit of it. The mood meter plunged into the black before I even made it to downtown, and I drove home frustrated with myself for failing to have written Eleanor by now. A series of sketches, a manuscript stagnating at twenty thousand words, does not a novel make. The writing ain’t been easy lately, or for awhile.

I’d always read that Stephen King wrote his novels with AC/DC jacked up to eleven on the stereo, so I thought about trying that. Music influences me far too much when I write, though. And to be fair, when King was listening to AC/DC that religiously, he was probably also doing a line of coke after every page. So instead I thought I’d try the old writerly standby: I’d drink, and see what happened.

What happened was two pages’ worth of new sketches, the merits of which I won’t be able to judge until I give them a read tomorrow. They’re minute scenes in the big picture, the ones I never wanted to write because they required me to slow down and pay attention: the first time Eleanor awakes from a dream that’s essentially her ‘experience’ on repeat; and a young Eleanor visiting a church looking for God, who of course isn’t there to reward her naivete.

This is nothing. Two pages is nothing. At the same time, these two pages are everything. There’s a lot of rustiness in them, but in one or two places I can see a glimmer of what writing this used to be like for me. Even I have to look past some clunkiness to find it, but there is a small bit of hope here.

Through most of my adulthood I have established the habit of giving myself a birthday present. In years past I’ve mostly taken road trips: a small one to see Michael Chabon lecture; a long one to see a movie. This year I may do something a little different. I am contemplating (thank you) renting a cabin for the weekend, and shutting myself in with nothing but the laptop and some consumables, and giving myself some uninterrupted time to work on the novel. Two days, like those two pages, is nothing, not a damned thing. You can’t get much done in two days; that’s not my goal. What I hope instead is to find that with some undivided attention, Eleanor will come alive for me again, and give this little motor a jump.

That’s the idea, at any rate. I imagine it’ll be very much like checking into rehab. Either those two days are going to be nothing but detox, and virtually useless to me, or I’m going to make leaps and strides and declare myself valuable to society once again. I’ve been sicker than I thought over this; that this novel which means so much to me has taken such an obvious back seat for the last few years is disheartening, embarrassing, discouraging. I made myself a stupid promise when I was eighteen years old, and that was that I’d be making a living off of my writing by the age of twenty-five. That day came and went a couple of years ago, and gets further behind me with each passing day. I accepted long before it came, however, just how unrealistic it was. There were no big buzzers from the sky signaling my failure. There was just me, recognizing that the world was a little harder than I’d given it credit for. I am still learning about defeat, and I am still making dumbass mistakes, but this is the one place in my life where, with a little polish, I can really shine. This is the one thing I refuse to believe I’m not capable of. This is the most important thing that I will ever do. It’s time to stop fucking around.