It's pretty early and a giant woodpecker is outside our window, tapping out nature's stamp of perseverance and necessity. Just kidding! It's 1:30 and a jackhammer is drilling away in the brick factory that is our backyard, just like every other weekend. This is mostly irrelevant except for offering a Time and a Place, and to say that I've tried to wake up early to write and never do, and yes we have a brick factory in our backyard and also a railroad track which the LIRR comes through about three times a day to pick up bricks and turn around. It's fairly Wild West in this sector of Brooklyn.
A bunch of writers I've talked to say that the wee hours are when they get their writing done. I just don't--I can't--wake up early. I hate paper and pen and everything but my bed. When I was growing up my parent's favorite phrase was "the early bird gets the worm." To prove it, my mom, on weekends, would sometimes wake me up, then take me out to breakfast very early before any of my brothers were awake. This ended up backfiring, because I would be in my parent's room at 5 AM with shoes on and teeth brushed asking when we could go eat.
Besides this being an awesome (and heartwarming) tradition (thanks Mom!), I'm now realizing that I associated these morning breakfasts with hot cocoa, and how I now associate worms with hot cocoa. Brains are strange. Tangent.
I got my first school assignment. It was an essay entitled "Dysfunctional Narratives" by Charles Baxter. He starts off with an anecdote about Richard Nixon's testimony during the Watergate Scandal. He then goes on to say that the way in which Nixon passively places the blame for the scandal upon a variety of other variables sets the tone from which most American fiction springs. He says that Nixon's refusal to accept or place blame creates a political climate where ambiguity is the norm and responsibility is given to no one. Story telling, therefore, by merit of its ability to imitate truth, is severely limited--for there is no truth in such a climate. No moral truth, no personal truth. No convictions of the universe or the individual to use as guidelines for telling the story. The narrative cannot see clearly through to the root of people's actions. The plot revolves around displaced aggression. Characters are not held accountable for their actions. Protagonists don't make mistakes; they are the victim of various circumstances. Concrete antagonists or villains have disappeared off the radar, to be replaced with obscure, untraceable social and personal circumstances. It's a Bermuda Triangle of cause and effect.*
I'll stop here, for the article says many interesting things and I feel I'm not doing it justice by offering a hasty summary. But I will say that Baxter raised a couple of points that tie directly to what I'm working on right now. First of all, I unconsciously have been trying to preserve the innocence of my narrator while exposing her to morally complex situations. This just isn't going to work! The need to allow your protagonist to make mistakes is masked by the urge to keep her "safe." The timing for reading the article was opportune because I'm about to start working on the part of the novel where the protagonist has to make some concrete decisions of who and what lies on what side of the dividing line between good and bad.
Other than that I'm excited to spend an entire Saturday writing. Woo hoo!
*I'm not sure what this sentence means but I like it for now and am leaving it.**
**It's impulses like these that made me a bad paper writer in college.
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