deeplyshallow // ze literary tightass

ze literary tightass

After much ado — ado-run-run-run, ado-run-run — the weekend has arrived. Here in my world it is Friday evening, 1955. At the end of a day much longer than its eight hours, I come home, check the mail, walk through the front door, am greeted with kisses and a ~~martini~~ tumbler of Southern Comfort. I feel like William H. Macy in Pleasantville. I feel like Dick Van Dyke. I feel like Darrin Stephens. Cue monochrome. Cue brass section and light-as-air theme song. Come Monday I’ll be rushing around again, but for the moment: ahhh.

Cue weekend.

What to do with myself? This feels like the first weekend for which there are no real plans. There are no boxes to be moved, no errands to be run, nothing much of anything at all. And so, goals: I shall work on Eleanor. I shall furiously watch The Wire so that D. doesn’t have to wait any longer for season one. I shall finish reading the book about Democrats and politics so that I can read the other book about Democrats and politics. I shall, at long last, see There Will Be Blood with the little lady. I shall attempt a nap if the urge strikes me. (It shall.)

I have been thinking an awful lot about Eleanor this week. Without significant blocks of free time during which to write, my progress has been stalled. So I’m establishing a schedule in the hopes of sparking the… well, the urge to write has never been the problem. It’s always been an issue of free time, of clearheadedness, of uninterruption.

Today it occurred to me that it has been six years since I began working on Eleanor. I spent much of the first year writing and rewriting the prologue and three chapters. The prologue, the heart of the novel in many ways, has survived, though it is now longer and richer. The three chapters have not. Six years is more time than it took for me to write my three previous novels altogether. It took less than half this time for me to write those books; most of the time I forget they even exist.

Writing her has skewed my ability to read fiction. Every novel I read, I find myself holding Eleanor up to it in comparison. Am I writing something compelling? Am I true to the character? Why doesn’t writing my novel feel as easy as I imagine all of these other novelists’ processes to be?

Somewhere along the way I have lost the sentimental attachment I had to the things I wrote before. I keep a digital archive of my work, all of the stories I’ve written over the years, and when I look at them I am not critical, or moved; they don’t mean much to me at all at this particular moment. There is an offline archive of journals I’ve been published in, a book or two, and I feel much the same about these. I almost junked all of it a few weeks ago, actually. As far as the writing segment of my brain is concerned, there is Eleanor and Eleanor only. I am incapable of writing anything else. I have tried, and blown it.

When I was eighteen and writing my first book, and when I was twenty and writing the second, and when I was twenty-two and writing the third, working on novels was easy. It didn’t matter how rough a day I’d had, or how much I had to do; I would sit down at the keyboard, my brain would refresh, and I would write for hours. These days I can’t do it; there seem to be so many criteria that must be met before I can write with that kind of effortlessness. Meeting those requirements gets complicated; I can’t take a week off every time I want to write a few chapters. And it’s bizarre how many other random things prevent me from writing. I can’t write unless the apartment is clean. I can’t write if it’s too bright, or too dark. I can’t write to music, which means I can’t write in any sort of ambient environment, like a coffee shop. I can’t write if I’m interrupted, because the moment of interruption is the moment everything dies on the page. This is maybe the only aspect of my life in which I am this anal and uptight. I think that’s alright. But it sure makes things complicated.