The Maze
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| aMAZEme Book Maze In London |
This
is writing a novel for me.
There’s
always been a debate between whether to outline your novel or wing it. I wouldn’t
say I fly completely by the seat of my pants, but I never outline. Generally I
know the structure of the book – the maze – only I exhaust every possible path.
In the case of my current novel, I may have started making new ones. I began
work in earnest on this novel a year ago, around the time I finished The Book
of Elizabeth. The seed of the idea came three years ago, in 2009, during a trip
to Chicago. I jotted down a page of notes on this novel, excited to bring it to
life. The day I returned from Chicago, my uncle died. The idea got lost in the
aftermath of his death, and the water torture that became Elizabeth’s route to publication.
As I started to develop the book, which takes place in part on a planet where
night only comes once a year, I started to fill in the architecture of this
world with details from a long dormant series of books that I had started
working on in 1995. I thought, here’s a chance to salvage some of these
concepts and ideas that I still liked. And then, those ideas took over the book.
The new novel suffered an identity crisis from the get go – is it the novel I’ve
been wanting to write since 2009? Or 1995?
I’ve
spent the last year trying to figure that out. There are four different
versions of this book, all mostly from different POV’s. I got 200 pages into
one version, completed a draft of another. A couple weeks ago, I finished this
draft and thought I was done. And then I realized I wasn’t. This path led me
nowhere. You do a lot of backtracking in the maze. At times I feel like the
work regresses. You come on your own tracks, and your spirit sags. You’re never
going to get out. No one is going to come and find you. What happens as you
backtrack though is you avoid repeating the same mistake again. This is
critical, metaphors aside; if you outline or wing it, if you are making the
same mistakes over and over again, you will not escape the maze. You will not
know if you are making these mistakes unless you see your tracks. The most
important thing a writer can do is become a scout. A tracker. Learn the
landscape. READ. Listen. Watch. If you’re content with being Garth Marengihi,
your maze is your home.
This
last draft wasn’t the way. My tracks told me where I’d been, where I’d gone
wrong, and where I had yet to go. At this point I’ve exhausted the paths this
novel can take, and either the one I’m on now is the way out, or there is no
way out. That sounds fatalistic, but sometimes novels come to nothing. A
smarter, better writer would avoid exhausting so much time and energy on this
method of writing, but for me it’s not a method; it’s a way of being. There are
cons, which I’ve mentioned. The pros are less obvious, and less easily found,
but they exist. First among them is the joy of discovery. Believe me, when you
see daylight, you will have discovered something. You will also find things
along the way that you could not have if you knew the way out from the start.
Miranda from The Book of Elizabeth is a prime example of this – I planned to
kill her at the end, and she became the book for me.
Still,
if you hear me screaming for help, feel free to shout “Over here!”
Comments
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم تقدم لكم شركة الكمال جميع خدمات رش المبيد يجميع انحاء المملكة بافضل انواع
المبيدات للقضاء على جميع الحشرات الطائرة والزاحفه كالصراصير والفائران والنمل الابيض والبق
والذباب والناموس
شركة رش مبيدات بالطائف
شركة رش مبيدات بجازان
شركة رش مبيدات بحائل
والسلامه عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته