Woke up feeling lighter and although this has in part to do with the housemate feeling better, I suspect I have been more tired and rundown than I realised at the time. A good night’s sleep works wonders.
So took out my new fiction outline and plot notes and launched into Nanowrimo 2012, glad to have some November novel-writing friends keeping me company. Let me know if you’re doing it this year, writing support is a help when writer’s block descends or a charcter runs away with the plot.
This drafting and dreaming up a story is always the honeymoon stage of writing, the flow and excitement of early drafts, planning and talking myself through snatches of dialogue and scribbling away happily in notebooks, jotting down random scenes and mumbling dialogue to myself and a host of characters in the bath, making up sentences as I walk the dogs. The struggle will come with the second draft, weeding out and reworking and seeing what is going to be hard to fix and then setting it aside for a few months and trying again. But that is the way I work and I can’t seem to do it faster or more simply.
A biography has just come out on Thornton Wilder, an American writer (celibate most of his life, hardworking, a ‘steady if not self-destructive drinker’) and acclaimed literary figure now often overlooked, who won three Pulitzer prizes in his life. His myth-themes?
“How do you live? How do you bear the unbearable? How do you handle the various dimensions of love, of faith, of the human condition? How do universal elements forge every unique, individual human life? And where does the family fit in the cosmic scheme of things?”
That last theme alone could keep most of us preoccupied for a lifetime.
