I’m in a serious process conundrum.
Maybe a week or so ago, as I was closing my eyes and trying to get to sleep, a narrative voice piped up in my brain and started writing sentences. She spilled out an opening paragraph, and gave me excerpts from a couple sections further along in the story line she brought with her. Her voice was simple and her style staccato. Her story was the narrative of a lifelong friendship, told backwards from the vantage point of old age.
My response? Aw, shit.
For one thing, I was trying to go to sleep.
For another, my laptop was really far away. Ditto my notebooks. The lights were off. I told myself that I didn’t want to—couldn’t—type it in my phone.
For a third, I told myself, I had just started reading Jenny Offill’s The Department of Speculation and suspected I was just hearing her strong voice in my head.
Fourthly, and perhaps most significantly, I wasn’t on the lookout for another project. I’ve got projects. And this one, I sensed, would be messy and challenging and maybe emotionally icky-sticky.
So I pushed it away and fell asleep. I thought, even at that moment, of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, and her story of the impatient, wandering Idea. In her case, a novel about the Amazon abandoned her wholesale to become Ann Patchett’s novel about the Amazon after a long period when she wasn’t paying it enough attention.
That night, I wished this voice good riddance and, using Liz Gilbert’s logic, urged it to find a more receptive host.
Only now I’m regretting the poor management decisions that my sleepy, stubborn, horizontal self was making when she really had no business calling the shots — she’s meant to be the nightwatchwoman, not the CEO of my writing life.
Yesterday, an episode of Grace & Frankie nudged the idea back in my direction. This morning, I typed 500 words.
I can’t tell if it’s the same voice. I don’t think it is — the nighttime visitor’s voice was so clear, and this morning’s is a little more ornate and self-conscious. She’s trying to be smart. But I can’t say for sure. The opening gambit is still there, the structure is still viable.
But I feel like my access to that voice is blocked, boarded up. I can see the top of it if I stand on my tiptoes, so I know it’s there, but I can’t see any more.
Can I break through to it?
Can I lure her back with pistachios or pinecones or spells?
Does anybody know? Liz Gilbert?
