Without revealing too much about myself, I will say this: most of my epiphanies about writing come in the shower. It’s there that I recognize the source of a problem, or come to some resolution of a dilemma. Yesterday, in the shower, I realized the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction: nonfiction tells itself in order. Fiction? Not so much. Nonfiction provides a specific, linear, chronological narrative. As a writer, you can choose to follow that narrative, or toss it out, but there’s no denying its presence. I was born, I lived, I died. Nonfiction gives you an “ending” or at least helps you understand you’re writing your way right up to the ending, and if you’re patient, the true “end” will reveal itself. Fiction? Well, most endings are gifts from the Gods. They appear, but you never know when.
All this came to me apropos of my new writing. My early mornings still offer promise, and, amid the hard work and plain old silly stuff like procrastinating over word count, some interesting twists and turns to this book I envision. There remains the pleasure of the pen across the page, stringing the story word by word, open to surprise, disappointed by dead ends, finding myself taking notes on plot points and character names later in the day when I’m not inside the work itself. First drafts are indeed like small children: a lot of work, a lot of obsession, a lot of promise. Let’s not talk about what happens when they take their first steps, and the mess and worry that involves. I’m in the infancy, baby, and it’s all okay.
Except it’s not. It’s confusing, and distressing. The problem that had me in the shower the other day (yes, another secret: sometimes I head into the shower to solve a problem) involved time–hence the insight into nonfictional versus fictional time. I worried I had created a character trait (“reluctant bomber”) for my protagonist that went against all I’d configured for her up til then. “No, she’s not a bomber at all! That’s been the point! The rest of them are, she’s not.” But I’d gone and done it, given her a new trait, and once that happens, there’s really no going back. Had I told something about her out of order? Did I need to include these details earlier? Was there now new plot that had to happen before the revelation?
A cardinal rule for me is that when drafting I never go back. If I return to the beginning, I’m like Penelope, endlessly unweaving the day’s work. So I let this new detail stand and thought more about what it showed me: fiction tells itself out of order. There is no getting around the disjointed, nonlinear, non-narrative aspect of the form. A good writer, having performed an outstanding revision (or a dozen), hides this secret from the reader. The overarching story may have a beginning, middle and end that carries the writer through that first draft, but the details, like my newly-discovered reluctant bomber, are a mess. Allowing these disjointed, out-of-time moments to inhabit the book, even if they make no sense at all, are what gives you the stuff you can then reorder and turn into magic.
I often tell my students not to be too attached to cause and effect; the relationship matters, but the order may be reversed. Instead of editing away that reluctant bomber, I’m letting her stick around, for now. Because, as always, the writing itself is about the process. When is it not?
“It was like Sturges’ maze; Luna had just found the center, as if all the way inside a bird had been singing on a branch for a month, day and night, only to hear its mate two valleys over call out, I’m coming, I’m coming. Now she simply had to find her way out, and over.”
Chicken car, La Canada, April 2010.
