I woke up in a panic thinking about the book. This writing a novel is so different from a short story for me. A short story is familiar ground. I can see where I'm going more clearly and I get there faster.I know fairly soon if it's good enough and what it needs to be a better story. A book is alien territory and there are just too many roads to go along. I feel a bit like a hyperactive child who has stepped into a favorite video game. I'm distracted by the sounds, the flashing lights and the jumping and falling and rolling. The colors are all too bright and I forget where I was going.
I have too many characters. They are unpredictable and stubborn and do what they want. I'm at the point where I need to be making some sense of things and following certain story arcs and instead I feel dizzy, trying to figure out who to follow today. The characters in the truck on their way to get the knives from the old man's house ? The crows who are very busy and everywhere and nowhere all at once? Or the smaller characters, who should not be essential to the story but who are absolutely charming me. One of my favorites is Slo (short for slow eye) who has a problem with anxiety and chronic hives. He is always itchy, awkward and is profoundly good. I like him too much. He is becoming more central to the story. I gave him a larger role. Something about those hives...
BY DAVID YEZZI
****
The itching wasn't the problem...or....the itching was the problem.
***
She reached out with shaking hands to... or... Her hands couldn't keep a hold of.....
***
This story begins with.....or... this story ends with
****
This is a story about ... or... This is not a story about
***
Itchy
Hard to reach, so you yank your clothes
getting at it—the button at your neck,
the knotted shoe. You snake your fingers in
until your nails possess the patch of skin
that’s eating you. And now you’re in the throes
of ecstasy, eyes lolling in your skull,
as if sensing the first time the joy one takes
in being purely animal.
It’s so good to have a scratch,
though isn’t it a drag living like this,
jounced on a high wire of impulses,
every wish the same programmed response
to another signal passed from cell to cell,
amounting in the end to a distraction—
if truth be told—from rarer things, thoughts free
from the anchor-chain of self?
For even the least sweetness, we
behave like the old man on the low wall
I saw outside the hospital today,
who had his hand inside his flannel shirt,
scratching at his chest, trancelike, agog,
his eyelids fluttering like butterflies
in a meadow of snowy Queen Anne’s lace.
I never saw him stop.
Such root satisfaction is like
the dying desert legionnaire’s in films,
when he finds, against all odds, a water jug
and, lifting it, delights to feel it heavy.
The score swells, his eyes relume. He tugs
the stopper out, then fills his mouth with sand.
Though, worse: we’ve seen the film; we know it’s sand;
we gulp it anyway.
Do any of these prompts capture your attention? A line from the poem appeal? I like the phrase root satisfaction- and I start to think about things more interesting than itching.
If none of this works for you -what's the last thing you remember thinking before you fell asleep, or the first thing you though of upon waking. If you can't remember you can make it up. I remember falling asleep worrying about my story. I'd rather have fallen asleep thinking of the way she looked at me when we said hello for the first time. You get to do that. You get to bend things, shape them, make them your own. Write about anything you want to for however long you want. Or pick a line and write for ten minutes or twenty.
Set a timer if that works for you I like a timer- right now I don't need one because I have story anxiety. I know exactly how much time I have to write before I get on a bus for someplace else today.
I hope today is good to you and your creative selves and that none of you get itchy.
No comments:
Post a Comment