I am doing that thing where I’m not sleeping again. I never quite figured out why, but it hasn’t hit me like this since Scotland. Too much thinking, not enough comfort, and the constant gear-turning of a mind that simply won’t shut off. If this continues through the year, I can’t foresee myself being a very happy girl. And this time, I have a feeling that the addition of a body next to me really wouldn’t make all the difference. Here’s to hoping I’m wrong, I suppose.
At about 1:30 a.m., I started thinking up a scene in my head which wouldn’t allow me to rest until I put it to paper. So I grabbed my computer and wrote for an hour sitting up in bed. It’s a piece, certainly, much to the flavor of my other stuff - my book, in particular - but I’m not quite sure where it fits into that puzzle, if at all. It seems silly to keep it from the outside of the novel when I imagine that it could decorate its pages so perfectly, but I’m not convinced. And since a little peer editing wake-up call, I really haven’t so much as revisited the 11,000-someodd words that I keep telling myself will be a book at some point, let alone added to it.
It’s among the most depressing things with which I’ve ever had to deal. The writer’s process is like swallowing sandpaper sometimes. And when that hope strikes, when something starts flowing from your fingertips - much as both last night’s piece and the introduction to my book did - there’s this glimmer of hope that I have found, up to this point, at least, is almost entirely misleading. I keep telling myself that I am ready to just write and not care what comes out, but I can’t bring myself to put something so fabricated, so sub-par down on the page, regardless of whether or not I can simply press “delete” in one fell swoop. It’s just not me.
Words are everything to me. My words, particularly. And when they’re stuck, when I’m afraid to touch them - it’s nothing short of debilitating. I want more than anything to be writing, to be going, but I’ve lost the confidence in what’s on the page as anything more than beautifully crafted disconnected frames. I am not a plot engineer. And while I don’t need to know how to build a bridge connecting the Brooklyn and Manhattan shorelines, I sure as hell need to understand the construction of one scene to the next.
M
