Writings and the writers who write them

Doubt. Frustration. Discouragement. Hey! I know this feeling! I must be working on a novel!

Oh, but seriously, I almost killed it, because I fell way off the horse for a few weeks there. One good reason after another to spend time not writing. Those good reasons occasionally sandwiched some bad reasons not to write. It's hard to help yourself when you don't actively help yourself. Then when it came time to run out of reasons, I felt like the novel I'd started writing sucked ass, and I didn't like where it was going, and I didn't know where else to take it, and when you combine all that nonsense with the whole "I just reached 30 and I don't have a single publication to my name" whine party I threw for myself, I began to feel like I might as well just give up and become a missionary or a shoe salesman or a pornographer or anything that might actually make some kind of an impact on somebody somewhere someday. The worst part being when I realized it would be a perfectly legitimate choice, to turn my back on this life, because all that all the litblogs and all the book reviews have ever taught me is that "making it" is goddamned well nearly impossible. At best. Because there's always something else, somewhere else. So you might as well go mow the lawn or feed the baby or care about your day job or something. Something practical. Something that will make you money you can pour into the open and hungry mouth of your shiny new Nintendo Wii.

Then, I dunno, I guess I started working on the novel again. No reason, really. Which must make me completely friggin' insane. But whatever, right?

Today, I shall choose to blame Cormac McCarthy. Part of my problem with the novel I'm working on is that I think there's a violent act at the core of the story. Or at least at the core of the portion of the story I've hesitantly figured out so far. It's a senseless act of violence taken by a character who is probably insane for taking it, however well-placed his intentions are. It's an act that needs to be sold, though, for the story to work. I have to sell it to the reader, make it real. Make it, in my best Tim Gunn, work. But I haven't even sold it to myself yet so how can I sell it to someone else?

Then I start reading Blood Meridian in which McCarthy describes an army of indians attacking a group of warfaring Americans in a two-page orgy of violence and scalpings. Like: scalpings. Like, you read that portion of the book, and suddenly the whole "scalping" concept becomes far less of a concept and far more of a terrible awful no-good thing you never ever ever want to have happen to you. Ouchie. It's one of the most vicious scenes I've ever read, and it freed something up in me, because now I'm perfectly ready to throw this one character into the meat grinder of the story without worry about what it means or making it real. It'll make itself real, once I figure out the rest of the story. The rest of the story being the "Here there be dragons" stuff beyond part one, which I think is pretty well outlined in my brain. By which I mean I have a one-sentence prompt written for each of the next few chapters that I've got to expand into full-blown plot-and-story stuff. Writing anything beyond chapter 11 scares the hell out of me, but whatever. Dragons are there to be slayed. Or to eat you.

But yeah, so I'm working on a novel that I think probably sucks, and I'm not blogging enough which definitely sucks, and I'm playing a lot of Guitar Hero and I sort of suck, but whatever, it fills up the time between writing sessions with something sensibly insensible. It's either that or I go out and get myself a mortgage. And paying your mortgage on time is far less impressive at a party than creaming some poor Internet sucker's ass on battle mode in Guitar Hero.