A Few Obvious Observations

Fairly frequently I forget that this is my book, and I can do whatever I want with it! I can write about what I'm interested in! This may sound obvious, but the truth is that while you're pounding out some scene that you don't, as of yet, have a particular investment in, it's very easy to forget that this is something you're supposed to enjoy, and not something you face with a grimace, like clipping your grandmother's toenails. I'm learning that if I don't enjoy writing a scene, or if the writing feels forced, that chances are I don't know enough about it yet. I haven't explored well enough the psyche of the character that I'm writing about, or the reason behind the unfolding action. The feeling is akin to trying to bluff your way through a test in a foreign language that you don't know well. Thinking your knowledge of cognates will be enough to get you through (My Spanish teachers must have had a blast grading my papers). False cognates. They are not true!

Today I'm very excited, because I managed to nail down a key part of one of the character's psyches. I'm using sleep as a sort of motif/linking trait for all the characters in order to demonstrate their relationship to beauty. Each of the characters have peculiar sleeping habits that speak to how they understand beauty's relationship to their lives. The protagonist is prone to night terrors, for example. The mother stays up feeding a baby and chain smoking all night. And so on and so on.

It's fascinating though, because while I knew that I wanted sleep to be important, and while much of the writing thus far deals with elements of sleep (alcohol abuse, morphine drips, dreams, even crying babies), there was still a gap between intuition and knowledge. Intuition is what placed those scenes in the book. Knowledge is what wrote them out. The gut understanding of the material, however, was still missing. I'm now looking forward to revisiting those scenes and re-writing them with my newfound understanding of their weight and significance.

Yesterday I posted a video of babies laughing and said you should watch all of it. Why? First of all because it's adorable! A ray of sunshine in your day! Second of all because laughter is infectious! If you weren't laughing at the beginning I bet you were laughing towards the end. Laughter is the only disease that's good for you! (I'm mildly obsessed with laughter, a story for another time). Also, my job is to babysit infants and toddlers. My job is to make children happy. How great is that?

Off to work!