I am writing a book. No, not here, though I know my entries are Entirely Too Long and have the appearance of a novella. No, I am writing a book Elsewhere, in my spare time.
Why is that hard for me to say? I don’t know, but it always is. It is hard for me to confess to, to admit. I am writing a book. A novel, to be precise.
Here is why it is hard for me to say: I am twelve years old. Maybe eleven. I know I look like I’m thirty-something, and I have three children, and have been married for (almost) fifteen years, but in reality, I am eleven years old. Maybe twelve.
And what twelve-year-old can write a book? What can she possibly have to say that anyone will find has any Real Significance at all? Why should I believe– or even imagine– that Anyone will want to read Anything that I write?
(Why do I have a blog?)
But I cannot help myelf. I am writing a book. A novel, to be precise. I have been working on it for a Long Time.
And it is coming along. Really and truly, it is. Or it was, until The Big Drop.
You see, in The Big Drop I suffered a broken foot, and I also suffered a severe concussion. And the latter, though it seemed mild to me at the time, was the more serious of the two injuries. It affects The Mind, you see, and The Mind is Far Less Dispensable than the foot. And a foot, believe me, isn’t really what I’d call dispensable. No. Not at all.
So, a few days after the accident, one of the many times I was lying in bed resting in the middle of the day, I thought to myself, using my Badly Bruised Brain (which was the only brain I had), that I would think about the plot of my novel. You know, just think about it a little bit. I mean, I had all this time on my hands– a new development– and so should use it well. And the novel and its plot occupy a large part of my brain, because I generally think about it Very Often and Very Hard, even though it may appear to my children that I am merely washing dishes.
What happened next was somewhat alarming, if only because it was entirely new: I found that I couldn’t think about my novel. Not at all. I could remember the names of the characters, and I had a distinct sensation of knowing what the story was about, but I couldn’t think about it. I found it was like trying to step firmly on a slippery fish: the story simply shot out from under me, impossible to pin down. I tried to press my mind into recalling what I had last written, but the plot turned itself sideways and slid through a crack in my brain. It refused to Hold Still.
I decided not to think about it (as if it were my decision); I decided not to try. I had had a severe injury, after all. Two of them, in fact. One shouldn’t expect too much. And frankly, I told myself, any interruption in the General Flow always made focused concentration on the novel difficult. If we had company, for example, or if we had travelled, or if too many weeks passed without committed work on it, then I might sit for hours in front of my laptop with notebooks open all over the place and only manage a paragraph or two. Or less. Or it would take me several hours just to get going. So this delay was No Surprise.
But then, a few weeks ago, I began to be bothered by this. Surely the story would be “back” by now. What could the problem be? And yet I almost had no interest in it. I had lost the scent, so to speak. I had the memory of being interested without real interest itself.
Scary.
So I took my first notebook upstairs and placed it next to my bed. And every night before sleeping I read a page or two in an effort to coax my brain into participation.
It worked.
And today, at least nine weeks later, I had a writing day.
It was good, and it was hard. I finished chapters 19 and 20 and began 21. That sounds impressive, but in fact I did a lot of reading of old stuff, and pasting that stuff in where it needs to go. And My! it was hard! I don’t know if it’s my broken brain (which I think is healed– the neurologist says I’m doing fine), or if it’s the delay in my work, or if it’s simply that as the novel gets longer it gets unwieldy.
It felt unwieldy today. I was flipping through notebooks, trying to find outlines, trying to decide what will work next and why. I had to remember anew why I had made the decisions I had made, testing them to see if they were the right ones, doubting my capacity to be the judge of that. The longer I worked, the larger the imaginary ball I was sitting on became, so that finally I was trying to balance on top of it while my feet had Absolutely No Hope of reaching the ground. I may have used that metaphor before, but Believe Me it has never had as accurate an application as it did today.
I worked hard for two hours, forcing myself to keep at it up until four o’clock, when I had to shut down to meet the baby-sitter. Already I had wanted to quit at least ten times, to return home where I could spread out my papers and notebooks and reconstruct my story in a visible, tangible, kinesthetic kind of way.
But of course when I got home, the children and I were immediately busy, and now I’m writing in my blog.
I need to work on the story Every Day. I’ve always known that, but I think that is more true now than it used to be. So I will work on it again tomorrow. I promise. And maybe it won’t be so slippery this time.
