Word After Word

I’m in my nest with my manuscript and we are freaking each other out.  On the page, as I read it out loud, the book is nothing like the book I thought I wrote! It’s so confusing. It’s so like marriage. It’s so like adulthood. It’s so like travel.  “You booked a trip to Italy but you get off the plane in France,” my friend LML. says of this part of the process. “It’s just very disorienting.”

I want to write, like you, a perfect beautiful amazing book with no mistakes.

What’s wrong with my book is a lot: there’s long gabbing sections and the reader doesn’t know what the deal is. What’s important? What’s to worry about, what main thing? (I’m writing about disorientation and confusion.  I wish I had a different topic. I know things have to be made more clear.)  There isn’t enough, I think, reflection and explanation (I hate explanation so I under-write it).  I fear it’s just hard to piece it all together. I want crisp, brief, singing sections, absolutely fulfilling. I think I’ve made a mess.

It’s very hard to a) know what is wrong and b) what needs to be there instead. I don’t feel smart enough to write the book I want to write or dumb enough to let the right one fall out.  I’ve gotten locked into chronology and these narrative streams, these chunks, and I can’t see how to break them out, re order things.

Revising requires staying calm and standing back and redreaming. This is hard to do when being with the manuscript at all is like being in bed with a hive of live bees.

It’s Saturday night. Enough revising. A walk in the woods, which today are featuring mist and a palette of edible yellows–the damp leaves are spot-lit by dull sun and I can see: order. The dog sniffs, guns go off, November writes itself perfectly, without distraction. A stop on the way home at Blockbuster for a distracting movie: bad news. PAPER MARIO has been auto-billed; fifty two bucks to go to the next level. Well, I have Pop Eye at home, and Bluto, and Betty, in their early original unreconstructed forms.

Revision. I wish you were different. I wish I could change a little and it would mean a lot.