“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought.
And then I did.”
― Charles Bukowski
20200112, 03:00
When I snapped awake something had passed, leaving a scalding, freezing path through the middle of me, and in my half-sleep I imagined I could see my breath. I shivered for a second and then knew it was -- a dream(?) -- and it had gone. But it left me something. I sat up and grabbed my notebook, my feet on carpet somehow surprised it wasn't dark, mossed stone, and while the real world reasserted itself, I wrote.
FINALLY I got an idea down without convincing myself I'd remember it till morning, and lucky you, the adrenaline rush drove me here to tell you all about it.
I don't know how it begins, how it ends, what the arcs are — but damn, it's a good one. A short story I think. Maybe more. Maybe nothing. I've got a kernel of an idea, that little flicker of gold against the black sand in the bottom of the pan, so small but glistening at me…I hope I don't lose it, don't drop it back into the swift-flowing stream of cottoned sleep while I'm trying to tease it out of the dross around it.
I hope it's enough to make something out of it.
For now, still sleep befuddled, I have a translucent, delicate, wet tissue of nothing, consisting of a Shakespearean quote that I think is going to be somewhere in the middle and two paragraphs refined out of that transient flicker. They make the hair stand up all over me, those two paragraphs. I think they're going to be the end. They presented themselves nearly complete and I frantically scrawled them into two incomprehensible blocks before they faded.
And so far, I'm without a clue how to get there, to that ending, if in fact it really is an ending, or anything at all. I haven't a notion how I'm going to stitch these bare fragments together and craft a story or, for that matter, whether I can. Right now they're a desperately incomplete Freytag frame occupied by a couple of paragraphs in a "catastrophe" block and some butchered King Lear bleeding raw and unconnected out in an unassigned middle:
"I shall have such revenges on you…Yeah, just read that in combination with the two bits I already have, and AGAIN the hair prickles. Fuck me, I hope I can pull this off — that was the fun part. Now comes the pain in the ass of actually writing something out of it.
I will do such things…
they shall be…
The terrors of the earth"
Time to go back to bed. If I fall asleep at the keyboard again, my neck and back will be annoyed, as will the Beneficiary.
I'll let you know if anything useful turns up, or if it goes into the "research" compost pile along with so many others.
20200112, 11:00
Re-reading. Heh. Just reading the handwriting was an experience, but I've got those fragments swaddled in typeset now, forever. Not the magnesium flair it was in the wee, dark hours, but still — yeah, that will work. I actually did manage to get something down, and it's pretty fucking good. Still no clue how to carve a path from here to those scrawled blocks, but when I read them, there's an amorphous — something — looming in the background. Whether it's a story remains to be seen.
In fact, the only thing I do know for certain is that I'm grateful I can't remember the dream it came from...
And now to the hard part.
Haven't done that in forever ... perhaps ever. But I am slowly and surely taking over my house as the memories recede and the empty rooms wait for redefinition, and I feel a backlit cloud of inspiration is likewise slowly and surely descending on me as it sees there is now some room for it.
ReplyDeleteIt's been a long time for me, too. Not the writing part -- I can update a blog a couple of times per month, or glue together instructions or write little chunks of nothing in particular, all good to keep my hand in the game, but none of which are the kind of writing weirdness that fucks up a weekend by dragging my ass to a keyboard for hours on end at the expense of literally everything else going on in my life.
ReplyDeleteI've expanded on the original nugget somewhat, but it's still pretty undefined. I know it has potential, end every time I read it I lose a half hour or so when my head wanders off with it -- but it's a long way from being anything useful. I figure about 50/50 odds of it nailing me down to a keyboard for hours or weeks when it finally tells me where it wants to go and whether it just wants to be a short story or something more expansive. (shrug) We'll see.
Glad you're reclaiming and redefining your house. A metaphor there without doubt -- instantly recognized by virtue of having been to periodic projects myself that involve everything from tidying up a room to tearing the whole fucking thing down to the slab and starting over. Life would be simpler if I could just get one of those TV contractors to come in once in awhile to rebuild the kitchen and deck while I'm off farting around doing something else.