Author: Flynn

A Sprint to the Tape

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I fall asleep thinking about The Jane Austen Project, and I wake up thinking about The Jane Austen Project. I fall into it as if it were a cool, pristine swimming pool at the end of a hot day.  I am finally working as  I should have been years ago. But it may not be enough. I am on Page 112 of my retyping/revising/ smoothing project. That corresponds to Chapter 7 of my original draft, or about 1/4 of the way through.

My deadline is July 12. I am in serious trouble.  In the words of Boxer from Animal Farm, “I will work harder.”

July 11!

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That’s when the next manuscript workshop begins. I am determined to be ready for it, though the past two weeks or so have been bad for TJAP in nearly every possible way: houseguests,  illness in the family, reading of unrelated books (mainly Skippy Dies, which was fantastic! but so off the topic, except to the extent that it also involves time travel, or at least the idea of time travel, as a vehicle for longing).

Nonethless. When I finally went back to my manuscript after a nearly two-week hiatus, I was pleasantly surprised that my initial impression was that it was sort of enjoyable to read.  This was much more than I dared to hope. All I could have hoped for actually. One thing that no one really talks about in novel-writing is the challenge of creating suspense when for you, the creator and first reader, there can by definition be none. Well. The suspense of whether you will ever finish. I guess there is that.

Walking home from the dog park with Olive, I saw Liam recently. That is to say, the walking, breathing image of how I imagined in my mind Liam, the character, should look. He was walking his little son — or somebody’s son, I assume his own —  to school.   I tried not to stare, but it was hard — I had only a few seconds as we passed to try to memorize everything about his appearance and manner. The one time I saw “Rachel,” she was riding across from me on the subway, and I had a good while to discreetly study her.

The curious thing was, he did not look quite like I thought I had imagined Liam looking, but when I saw him, I knew  at once it was him. It seemed a favorable omen, a gift from the writing gods, and I was filled with hope for the rest of the week.

Plot Twist

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It turns out I will not be enrolling in a manuscript workshop starting on March 21 after all. I have learned from the workshop’s director that not enough people have signed up. The workshop is off, for this round.

My first emotion was surprise. In Brooklyn, where writers and aspiring writers are more numerous, if ideally less unsanitary,  than cockroaches, we can’t get five or six of them in one room with their manuscripts? People! Get off the couch! Cancel your Netflix subscription! If I, the laziest person on earth, can write a rough draft of a novel, the rest of you have no excuse.

My second emotion was … not disappointment.  It was something larger. I was crestfallen;  the air had come out of the souffle. I had not realized, until it was gone, how I had been organizing my mind around the prospect of March 21 deadline. Without it, I seemed to have lost all sense of hope and purpose.

At least,  for an hour or so I did. Then I decided to look on the bright side. I will continue with my plan to write a new Chapter 1, revise the whole thing, and fill in the missing parts. By the time Sackett Street is ready to offer the workshop, my manuscript will be a thing of beauty.

Anyway, that’s the plan.

In other news, the most recent online version of Persuasions is up! All of the articles are well-written and fascinating, offering a variety of looks at Jane Austen’s life and work. But the most personally relevant was a discussion by Linda Robinson Walker about whether Jane Austen might have died of a recurrence of the typhus that nearly carried her off at age 7. Brill-Zinsser disease, as the recurrent typhus is known,  is rare today, as is typhus, since it is carried by lice.

The End of the Beginning

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When I started this blog, back in June 2008,  I was just starting to write The Jane Austen Project, and I imagined that this would turn into a sort of diary of a novel.  Obviously, that did not happen. To the extent that it became anything,  it became a record of what I was reading when I was slacking off  from writing, which was much more often than would have been ideal.

Is a journal of a novel’s composition by its very nature an impractical idea, or did I just not succeed in making it work? One problem is that blogging and writing a novel cannot be done at the same time, and the hours are finite when you also have a full-time job and a needy dog. When I was not composing,  I was anxious, or reading, or procrastinating, or all of those things.  When I was blogging, I was not composing. When I was composing, it seemed foolish  to stop and blog about it.

When is the moment one attains clarity about what one is doing? If I could use only one metaphor about writing a novel, it would be the one about wandering through a dark forest. There is  forward progress (one hopes) but there is a decided lack of perspective.

Today,  winter turning to spring, at least at Latitude North 40.7111,  I am finally near the end of my draft, desperately trying to finish the last missing bits, write a new top (as we say in the newspaper business) and generally wrestle the unwieldy monsterliness of it into shape in time to start a writing workshop on March 21. I finally have some perspective. A little.  Maybe.

A thing I have learned: in  the end, it is not  any harder to just write than to find reasons not to. Especially  when writing big and loose and not fearing to be very stupid bad.

A Wallace Stevens Day

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The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

There is so much to like in this poem, but I can never get past that great last line.  Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. It still sends shivers of surprise down my spine, so many years after I first read it.

The Jane Austen Project? Not forgotten, not abandoned. Nor, alas, done. But I am getting there. Slowly.

The End!

~ Flynn ~ 2 Comments

You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

— John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

I think I finally see it. I thought I saw it before, so this might be a false positive, but I think I finally see what I have to do to get to the end. Yesterday I did something I have not done very often since I started The Jane Austen Project: I went back and read every chapter up to 26. (Chapter 27, as written, is dead to me. It is so clearly a mistake, in both incarnations, the original and the redo, that I could weep for all those lost hours I spent writing it, except there is no time for weeping.) I saw bright spots and missteps. I saw missed opportunities and strange passageways. I saw motifs. But the most important thing is, I saw it as a whole, something I have deliberately tried to largely avoid until now, for fear, I think, that there actually wouldn’t be a whole, that there would be nothing, out of all those words, that would really stick together to tell a story. But I need not have worried.

The end has to incorporate and resolve issues that were present from the start or that cropped up in the course of the story. Rachel and Liam have to do something they never expected in a million years that they would do, and it has to be completely believable. But also surprising, otherwise it is not fun.

They went for the letters, the ones Cassandra consigned to the flames before her own death in 1843. In the end, it is about the letters, and what they choose to do about them. About divided loyalties, past and future. Where do they, ultimately, belong? What is the right thing to do?