Musings

The summer has been busier than I anticipated.  Though I read five fantastic books while at the beach, I'm way behind in my reading goals.  In addition, I've been sloughing through my manuscript, which is all well and good, but I'm so thirsty for new words!  My writing goals have also been suffering as a result of the tutoring and essay camps that have been filling my days, and I may have been giving into temptation a little more than usual when drawn to the playroom where a jigsaw puzzle and every episode of Friends are waiting at night (that is one fantastically written show!).

I've had several ideas for new manuscripts marinating in my mind for quite a while.  I find that my greatest struggles as a writer are finding the narrative voices.  For example, several years ago I experienced a horrifically difficult time in my life.  A piece of my extended family was fractured and then permanently disconnected, a piece that I had emotionally relied on for years.  When I came out on the other side of that mess, with the help of my husband and an amazing counselor named Alice, I was able to see that my story was one that needed to be written.  When it was happening, my husband and I used to joke that if someone wrote this story in novel form, publishers would laugh and decry it as "unrealistic"; it was more soap-opera worthy than literary fiction.  But I kept notes, my husband kept artifacts, and I allowed the story to sit on the back burner for a while.

I tried to outline a manuscript that developed the story, and I even wrote an opening paragraph once, but it just wasn't ready.  And any writer worth her salt knows you can't force it and expect art.  And yet this summer, as I was relaxing by the ocean, watching the tide come crashing in, I found it.  Or rather, perhaps it found me.  The narrative voice arrived in all of its complexity and emotional toil.  I always sought the voice in a modern day library or bookstore, or maybe in a small, country town.  And yet when she arrived, she arrived from the past, from the turn of the century in fact, and she arrived from the coast.  Whereas in Miranda, the protagonist disappeared into the water, in this new piece, she was emerging from its depths.

When I looked at him, all I saw was a shell.  The eyes were wide open and darting about, and yet the body was emaciated; the vitality melted away from the bones and through the sheets.  There were no more doctors, no more pills, no more antidotes and trials.  Death had won the war.  And though the eyes in those sunken sockets were desperately searching, I knew the look they conveyed.  It was fear.  Fear of a life ill-lived.  Fear of an eternity of wandering.  Fear of demons denied.

And thus we begin again...