Sunday, May 17, 2009

i can't keep myself and still keep you too

I wasn't as productive with the writing as I wanted to be today. I spent six hours staring at the laptop, but only produced 2000 words; I should have produced around 4000-5000 words in that time. I blame it on the fact that I'm at a turning point in the novel, and so I did spend some time brainstorming/plotting out a rough outline of what the second half will look like. With the second half sketched out, the writing went a little faster later in the afternoon, but I'm still far from being done with the first draft. I did break the 40,000 word mark, though, so that's a great feeling -- if I could get to 45,000 words by the end of the weekend, I would be halfway through the first draft!

I spent the afternoon writing with Adit at Coffee Bar. I had an amusing realization as he was showing me some computer-generated 3D models of hearts that he was working on for his PhD defense -- he and I are both focused on the human heart, albeit from very different angles, which may be why I find it somewhat conducive to work together in cafes. We did briefly discuss whether I should rename the "city of sin" tag to be "city of feces"; the last two times we've hung out, we've come across large, nearly human-looking piles of feces on the sidewalk. I think I'll stick with the sin over the feces, but he has a point.

After Adit and I parted ways, I went to the gym, then picked up a takeout chicken schwarma sandwich and mint tea from the Moroccan place down the street. After consuming that much deliciousness, I was in no mood to write or do much of anything else, and so I decided to take a break in anticipation of tomorrow's efforts. I picked up Kasuo Ishiguro's AN ARTIST OF THE FLOATING WORLD, which has been sitting on my to-be-read shelf for ages, and ended up reading the slim volume straight through. I probably should have read REMAINS OF THE DAY instead, since it's a bit more relevant to my writing in that it's set in Britain instead of Japan. But, I think I was in the mood for something that was as far away from romance novels as I could get -- and the elegiac first-person narrative of a retired artist in post-war Japan fit the bill.

The book was quite good (and I'm apparently not alone in this feeling, since it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread), although I'm not sure what I think about it -- and perhaps the definition of a good book is one that lingers, one whose characters you think about long after you've put the book away. The protagonist spends the book reflecting on his past, his faded greatness, and his role in creating the Japan that was destroyed by the war. He's a clear example of what my creative writing teacher this spring calls an "unreliable first-person narrator" -- he remembers things a certain way, but it's never quite clear whether his perception of a conversation, or his memory of a chain of events, is really accurate. I found this to be highly effective, even if it's too subtle for me to use in romance novels. If I ever write literary fiction someday, I think I would play around with unreliable first-person narrators. We're all unreliable narrators of our own existences, embellishing, glossing over, or cutting where necessary to make the remembered thread of our lives better/more exciting/more bearable. What becomes a defining moment for one person may not even be remembered by the other person who was there at the time, and I think that's all totally fascinating.

Anyway, enough about books; it was a v. nice break, and one I need to take more often, but I should really go to bed. I figure I have about ten hours of work for the day job that I should do tomorrow, and I want to try to cram it into six so that I can do some writing too. That won't happen unless I have a clear head, so it's time for bed!

But one last thing...happy birthday, Michael! He now has to share May 16 with our niece's baby, who was born this morning -- but he said that he would rather share his birthday with a family member than with a national tragedy [my birthday is 9/11 for those of you who don't know], so I guess he has a point.

3 comments:

non-bridezilla said...

Someone should probably wear some kind of pattern - we wouldn't want to look Bland.

Sara said...

@non-bridezilla -- I can fulfill the pattern quota. I will bring several dresses and you can dictate which to wear :)

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