The Shape of Days

I passed the 4,000-word mark this morning. I know, I know. I’ve been working on it for more than two days now, and I’m just breaking 4,000 words. I write shopping lists longer than 4,000 words. This pace is a humiliation for me.

But this is different. The words aren’t gushing out like a flood, like they usually do. My narrator is reluctant, you see. Reluctant, misanthropic, fed up and hopeless. He’d be angry if he weren’t so jaded by now. So every time I sit down to write, it’s a little bit of a struggle. I can’t just give him control of my hands, like I normally do, and let my conscious mind go out for a smoke or some sushi. It’s an interactive process. I have to pour him drinks, get him talking, draw him out little by little. He wants to tell the story, he really does; but he’s also so tired, so full of pain that runs so deep it doesn’t even feel like pain any more. He doesn’t give a damn about himself or about anything else. Hell, in the first chapter we find him lying naked on a beach, waiting for heat exhaustion or dehydration or the sea to take him away. Getting him out of that hole, getting him to come inside and pick up a pencil, takes some doing.

But it’s happening, little by little.

You know how I write a novel? I take a blank piece of paper and fill it with randomly selected words, left to right, top to bottom, every line. Then I cross out all the ones that don’t look like my story.

Sometimes the process goes more quickly than others.

• Alone
• Discovering normalcy
• There’s advertising inside my advertising