A large part of me loves isolation. I don't have to see a soul--I can just play with my imaginary friends. No interruptions. That's when fiction-writing seems to be going well, in the sense that I've produced my daily quota of words.
But when my imaginary friends aren't speaking to me--when I don't know exactly what they want--that's when the distractions I think I don't want tug at my heart. Why did I just spill 50,000 words on a heroine who doesn't, now that I've invented her, know what she wants? My heroine has to know exactly what she wants. In this way she'll be conveniently, satisfyingly, much more self-aware than I am. Sometimes she does know, sometimes not. Then there's the cast of thousands surrounding her. What am I to do with them? They can't just waltz around on their own, or if they do, my readers will be bored. They have to dance to her tunes, or in relation to her tunes, or in conflict with her tunes. Maybe even the ugly green building out the window is too much of a distraction. Maybe if I followed Thomas Mann's alleged practice of draping the windows with a dull gray cloth so that absolutely nothing could distract him would work. There's the problem that I am not Thomas Mann. But I do have a mightily interesting heroine and would so much like to see how she solves her problems.
Hoping answers will come to me in a dream--or a nightmare.
Just keep writing. Eventually she's going to want to do something and you will be there to transcribe it! (And then you can excise all the places where she was twiddling her thumbs... the joys of revision!)
ReplyDelete