Don’t you hate it when you’re 70K words into your novel and just then figure out what the book is really about?

I haven’t been able to write much in the last week or so because I didn’t know where the story went. The big climactic section has to more or less make sense of (or at least with) everything that came before it. Right now, I’ve got 70K words that constitute the plot, but not so much on what it all means. But I’m slowly figuring that out. I checked out some Jung and Freud from the library and it’s helping—helping the novel, not me personally, I swear!

Anyway, this novel started as a meditation on Theseus and other Greek heroes and how they weren’t really that nice. It’s no secret most myths and fairy tales in their original form are really pretty nasty. So I guess I’m trying to write a modern story that’s at once mythic and yet simultaneously nasty, so you get this “Man, that dude is bad ass” along with “Erm, wasn’t that just mass murder he committed?”

And after reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a book I read as being largely about the magic of books, I realize that my book wants to say something about fantasy; about why we desire the fantastic, why the nasty bits often make it better. That’s where the Jungian and Freudian stuff comes in handy as a handrail with all the archetypal hero stuff. Horribly, however, it doesn’t help me with my ending.

My project for this week is to try and work through that, to just write an ending that doesn’t need any meaning whatsoever. There’s the big showdown, lots of explosions and fireworks, death at every turn, that kind of stuff. It definitely needs a twist or the stakes raised or something, because the ending as I envision it is pretty straightforward and predictable. But once again, the lesson that I’ve learned over and over again while writing this novel is that the only thing that counts are the words on the page. Of course it needs to be reworked (probably pretty heavily in fact) but that can’t happen until there are words in sentences in paragraphs in chapters to tear apart. Waiting for the right answer to pop into my head is not a good solution.

Rolling up the driver’s window in the Jeep yesterday caused it to break. There was a grinding noise and the window fell as though it had just been dropped and, amazingly, no amount of pressing UP on the button would make it come back up. And wouldn’t you know, after weeks of it looking like rain, today it’s actually going to rain. Perfect.

A quick note: Brazil 3, Argentina 0 in the Copa America final? Who’d have thunk it? Far from a classic and, regardless of what Phil Schoen and Ray Hudson said, you can’t call it an upset. Yes, Argentina were playing silky football heading into the final and Brazil was stop-n-start, but c’mon—I don’t care if it’s a team of 6-year-olds playing against pros, it’s never an upset if the Brazilian team wins.

And I have a love/hate relationship with Ray Hudson. Sometimes he says stuff that makes me laugh, and he often makes astute points about the game, but often he just won’t shut up and Phil Schoen just feeds into it. Check out his over-the-top commentary parts one, two, and three, courtesy of YouTube.

Current Mood: Peevish |