The Center Does Not Hold

It's two in the afternoon. I haven't eaten lunch yet.

This is bewildering. For most of my adult life, the current boss cat got me up at six and I ate (generally the same breakfast, which I could cook and consume regardless of how awake or how well or how cheerful I was - one soft boiled egg, hot or cold cereal, fruit, hot tea). I was working - whether at a soul-sucking day job or at my own stuff - by eight. Eating lunch at eleven was essential, as along about 10:30 I started getting hungry and by 11:00 I was going critical. My blood sugar would be doing things that blood sugar should never do and if I didn't eat anything could happen, from fainting to laughing jags to bursting into tears to hurling random things at people. (You think I'm exaggerating. Because you were never trapped in a soul-sucking day job with me. Nobody ever forced me to take a late lunch twice. I was fired, or my lunch hour was sacred. There was no in-between.) Afternoons I worked till three. If in a soul-sucking day job I'd stick it out till five, but nothing intellectually taxing I did after that could be trusted - I was bottoming out physically and proceeding on stubbornness and strength of will, of which I once had a considerable amount. If in control of my own time, I knocked off at three and that was time to read or play games or something. Sometimes I'd get a second wind in the evening - during soul-sucking day jobs I needed to, so I could put what I'd written on my lunch hour and coffee breaks into my word processor, and this was generally when I wrote absurdly long newsgroup posts and so on. Plus, reading. But I read all the time; the reading goes without saying.

And I want to do this now. Repeatedly I plan days based on the assumption that, as I always could before, I would spend the morning from 8 to 11 writing, the afternoon doing housework, sewing, researching, and the evening cooking and relaxing.

But it doesn't work. I may not start writing till ten - even if I sit down to do it. I may not be able to eat breakfast till nine, and it may only be the egg, or the fruit. Lunch is all over the map. Supper, which has always been a problem because Damon doesn't get hungry till 7:30 and I'd be hungry at 5:00 (so I'd get a snack), is a problem no more, except that I tend not to make such nice ones. Because when I do get hungry, I still have to eat right now; but, not knowing when it's going to hit, it's harder to make myself start eggplant parmesan, or spinach rice casserole, or anything that requires a lot of chopping and stirring.

Nobody prepares us, mentally, for the way changes in the diurnal cycle affect our intellectual output. I've always relied on my habits to carry me through. The old advice, write a page a day and you have a novel - it's good advice, but it assumes that you can declare a consistent time and place to sit down and write the page, and put your butt in the chair, and do it.

At the moment it is not true.

At some point, I'll adjust. Either I'll settle down into a new rhythm and build new habits; or I'll recognize the waves of capacity as they come at me and be prepared to seize them, to write now and get housework done now and now is the time to start cooking but now is the time when I can face writing queries and get this stuff back into the mail where it belongs. I will become flexible.

But I am not there yet.

Which is one reason the current project is the way it is. This is a book that can only be written flexibly, weirdly, from odd angles and at strange times.

Anyway, since no one talks about this, I thought I'd better bring it up. I'm certain I'm not the only one who has ever had to adjust like this.

I'm consistently peculiar, and in a thin part of the bell curve, but in a world so thickly populated, I never am the only one.

But I may be the first to speak. So this is me, speaking.

For what it's worth.

The Difference Between Fiction and Real Life

If it happened in a story, dropping a three-pound handweight on my foot would have had an aesthetic purpose.

It'd be symbolically or thematically appropriate; it would coincide and resonate with some other element of my life; it would be some sort of message or warning or trigger or - it would have meant something.

But because I live in real life and not in a story, it just means I had to spend two days with a baggie full of ice on my foot. Do you know how difficult it is to accomplish anything with a baggie of ice on your foot? Even intellectual work - "Yeah, since I'm sitting here anyway just open the damn file and focus, that's all I have to - oh, for crying out loud it fell out of the towel again better not leak all over the cables - Ow ow ow - oh, look, the color's really starting to come in now..."

We like narrative because it's structured and tidy, and isn't as full of irrelevant bits and distractions as real life. This is satisfying on a primal level; so satisfying, that people make up meanings for their real lives, in the teeth of the evidence, and try to structure Life so that it makes some kind of sense. Which leads to cruel absurdities like the theory that natural disasters are divine punishments for trivial manufactured "sins," or that bad things happen to us because we "deserve" them.

That's the big problem with "realism" as a genre. A truly realistic story would not be satisfying because it would have to be structureless, full of arbitrary boring meaningless crap that would anger the audience. If they wanted real life they wouldn't be reading the story, now, would they? Do not, ever, get so carried away with creating a slice of life that you forget to provide the primary pleasure of narrative.

All the writing advice you get about killing your darlings, not putting in anything that doesn't contribute to the effect, Chekov's gun on the mantelpiece - that's what it boils down to. Even stuff that's interesting or humorous or beautiful in itself, if it doesn't advance the story, interferes with the narrative tidiness and has to go. You can get away with more in a loosely-structured domestic novel than in a tightly-plotted thriller or a short story, but if you push the limits too far you lose the audience. It'll get bored or it'll get mad. One or the other.

You probably think you know an author who gets away with it, but it's an illusion. Even the great stream-of-consciousness works, the ones that swim in and out of your eyes as you read and make you feel like you're living in somebody else's head - take a step back and look at them. Mrs. Dalloway is as rigidly-structured as any Agatha Christie plot. It's just that the structure is cleverly designed to look structureless.

Personally I'm not very clever and have to do this largely by writing the story and then taking things out. And sometimes it's real hard to tell where to draw the line. Yeah, I can (and did) take out most of Len's food appreciation remarks in the lesbian western. I can convey the fact that Len's appetite is enormous without describing every meal she ate. That's pretty straightforward. But that bit where she gets lost on first coming into San Antonio - is the level of humorous detail I go in for there the right one for illustrating thematically how she has to feel her way through her life as a man, with the directions she gets from other people mostly confusing her? Or do I keep it because, as a San Antonian, I find it all so hilariously familiar?

I think it's the former, because every time I contemplate taking it out I feel like the manuscript has a big hole in it that can't be bridged by a sentence about nobody in San Antonio being able to give decent directions and what is up with the dang river? But will an audience feel that way?

(Will an audience ever get a chance to find out? She wonders, sighing and returning to the agent search.)