...in which I have a direction at last.
I've been just kind of writing my still-nameless NaNo, not sure where it's going or what's gonna happen, just introducing the characters who will go there and have things happen to them. While I've been waiting for whatever's gonna happen to happen, I've been filling time (and my word count) by exploring the ways in which my characters interact with each other, and also by describing them in more and more detail.
This is a new experience for me. I, like my narrator, am a short-story writer. And when I write a short story, it's because I've got an idea I want to share or explore. It's the idea that I'm writing about, not the people. The people could be anyone. I talk about their personalities, or allow their personalities to show through dialog, but I leave as much as I can to the imagination of the reader. Physical descriptions, in particular, I leave alone.
I like this, actually, intentionally leaving the identities of my characters vague, describing them only as much as is necessary to move the story along. In fact, several of my stories have had only two characters, and when that happens they don't even have names...names in that case are unnecessary to the plot, and it makes the characters even more anonymous.
By the same token, I don't describe settings that carefully, either. There's a window, a table, a brimming ashtray, a jukebox; but it's important to me that the story could take place anywhere.
I do this on purpose. I want the person reading my stories to imagine himself and his friends as the characters. I want him to see a flicker of thought or personality that reminds him of his brother or his girlfriend or his boss, and then mentally to insert that person into the story. I want my narrator to say something particularly clever or resonant, so that the reader will say, "Exactly. Exactly," and want to see himself there.
I want my reader to feel that the story takes place in her hometown, in her local bar, in the park on her corner, in her living room and bedroom. I think this makes the story more personal for the reader. I'm not trying to show them what the city of Richmond was like in 1993, or what my ex smelled like before her shower in the morning. I don't want to describe my experiences to them so much as to bring them into my experiences, a world where everything is just like the world they know and the things I'm writing could have happened to them yesterday, or might happen to them tomorrow.
But now, with a much larger project in the works, I've had to fall back on developing these characters in detail. And you know what? Suddenly I DO want people to know what Richmond was like in 1993. I want to bring that alive. I want my reader to feel like he's been there, that he knows Catharine and Pancho and Gwen and Grace personally.
This prob'ly seems very simple to you folks, but to me it's a bit of a revelation.
I'm not worrying about plot anymore. This novel is now about the people living in it. Who are they, what made them who they are, and how did they come to be here?
Fuck a whole big pile of plot. The plot is the pasts of these people and the way they interact with each other on one day, a day exactly like every other day. period.
Everything that's gonna happen in this novel has already happened.
And maybe no one will want to read a novel like that, but no one was gonna read this anyway. This is just me proving to myself that I can write in that way. I think it'll make me a better writer. Maybe I won't be always writing essays and short stories anymore. Maybe there really IS a novel in here...it isn't THIS novel, but this is the one that will show me how to find it.
Love and peace to all. I'm gonna go buy a bottle wine, and then I'm gonna write 5K words tonight or die in the attempt.
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P.S. This, of course, means no space monkeys. Sorry, V.