I reached it today. I wish I could describe how I feel right now. Like someone who puts the last piece in a 1,000-piece puzzle, except this was a 150,000-word puzzle.
Like — is this it? Really? As Rickie Lee Jones would say, Is This the Real End? A strange mix of exhilaration and anticlimax.
And it’s not like it’s really the end. Revision will be needed. Maybe a lot.
I can’t wait to see what my colleagues at the writers’ workshop, who I already feel closer to, in a strange way, than some people I have known for years, will say.
But then, I kind of can wait, for what if this novel really bites?
I had given myself permission for years not to ask that question. Now it’s done, and I have to. The question virtually asks itself, though fortunately or unfortunately does not answer itself.
I look forward to rejoining the world of normal people, people who go to movies without guilt, though I don’t think I belong there anymore.
About Writing
Page 350
Rilke said it best: “I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
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A Sprint to the Tape
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.”
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July 11!
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.
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Plot Twist
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.
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The End of the Beginning
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.
The Jane Austen Project: A Novel 