I’m too analytical. And obsessive. I know this. Especially when things go wrong, I need to know WHY. I’ve even come to tell my students that why is my single favorite word. It’s like I’m three years old again. Why can’t I carry the cat around by his tail? Why can’t I play with the dead bird? Why does Daddy hide in the basement whenever Mommy crosses her eyes? It’s a powerful word, why, and I want my students to always ask it when they are writing. It is, I think, the single most important question a writer, any writer, can ask about their work.
Given my obsessive tendencies, however, it isn’t often that I stress out about the why behind a problem. It’s a puzzle that I enjoy trying to solve. Granted it tends to slow me down and throw me off schedule as I attempt to figure it out, but it is, after all, what it is. Recently, though, why gave me absolute fits with my writing.
When National Novel Writing Month ended last November, I knew I had a sprawling mess to try and fix. Hell, I knew it as I was writing it. I’m what some refer to as a “pantster” – as in I write by the seat of my pants. I’ll have a character or two, a line of dialogue, a scene, and a general idea of where I want to go. It usually means heavy, heavy rewrites, and normally if something starts to go off track, I’ll back up and try something new. But I couldn’t do that with NaNoWriMo because of the writing schedule I needed to keep, so I didn’t edit anything as I wrote it, even if I realized halfway through a scene that it would never work. I kept a notebook and jotted down page numbers and basic thoughts in it as I typed, or stuck quick revision ideas at the end of a scene or chapter. My plan was to let the manuscript sit for a few weeks while I finished up the semester and then get back to it over break. First I’d read through the whole thing, including all the notes, and then I’d use the notes I took to get me back into the story. It was a good plan, a solid plan.
But it didn’t work. I never even finished reading through the manuscript. The individual story lines were fine. They needed some work, certainly, but there wasn’t anything there to panic about. What got that inner why all fired up was the structure of the thing. Or, rather, the utter lack of structure. I couldn’t even see it. And in my frustration in trying to find the source of the problem, in trying to answer the why, something happened that has never happened before.
Everything shut down. I’d call it strange, but there were days that it was downright frightening. I started finding excuses not to write, knowing exactly that was what I was doing while I was doing it. I dove back into video games. I read even more than I usually do. I brought out and reread stories and screenplays and poems from ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. Material I only had hardcopy of I entered into the computer and saved in a folder titled “Beginnings.” I cleaned more than I cleaned in the previous twelve months. I cooked more than I cooked in the previous twelve months. I wrote less than I… well that doesn’t make much sense, but you know what I mean.
And it wasn’t just the novel I was avoiding. I tried playing around with these little things I call Snapshots, mainly, I think, because I was reading so much Lydia Davis back in January. I hoped they’d lead me to something more than just a quick vignette, but they never did. Nothing really held my interest. The only thing I was able to focus on, it seemed, was remaining utterly unfocused.
Six weeks of winter recess came and went, and not a single new page was written. Every night I’d go to bed cursing myself for not just buckling down and starting something new, anything new, and every morning I’d wake up and find new ways to avoid working on anything new. Worst of all, when my favorite word would start tingling in the back of my brain, I squashed it. I didn’t want to even think of the why that was behind my disinterest. And when school started back up at the end of January, it became even easier to avoid the writing.
But here I am, two months later, and slowly, ever so slowly the focus is coming back. I still haven’t let myself ask why, but I’m ok with that for now. Maybe my brain just needed to recharge. Maybe some of the ideas needed time to germinate a bit, and somehow, somewhere, I knew that without really knowing it. Either way, I don’t care anymore. It is what it is, it seems to be over, and it’s nice just to be writing again. I’m back to working on the novel, focusing on the structure first, working out mid-points and climaxes and the intersections of story lines. I’ve set aside my normal “pantster” ways and have become more of a plotter (and all my grad school professors cheer).
Eventually I’ll let myself ask why I’ve made this change to my writing style, but for now I’ll just go with it since it seems to be leading me in new directions. In the end, the only why I really care about is the one that revolves around my shutting down for almost four months. I didn’t like that feeling. Not. At. All.
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