It'll Make Sense in Time

It’s beautiful. You wake at 8 A.M. on a Sunday morning. You’re healthy, 24 years old, and you have no other obligation today other than you have to write.

You stay in that meandering, foggy limbo between sleep and dreams for a bit knowing that you should get up and write. You think about your work. How the end goal is to become a super writer. Something like the Six Million Dollar Man, where your writing is the cleanliness of  Hemingway’s prose (without the deeply entrenched misogyny) combined with the energies of Kerouac, the metaphor and dream state of  Murakami, paradox of Kafka, sense of place and lyricism of Dybek. You’re going to write the next great American novel, start a literary movement where even the people you’re loosely associated with become famous. They’re going to coin a new term after your style and you’re going to spearhead the next cannon of American writing, just so long as you wake up. But your bed feels so lovely, almost like it’s made out of cotton swabs and billowy wisps of clouds that drift by on a sunny day. You’re going to accomplish so much, you just need a little more sleep.

12 P.M. You wake up feeling that drugged, heady feeling that comes with having overslept. You certainly can’t write in this state. You put coffee on and take a warm shower during which you wonder why you don’t grind your own beans and really is there much of a benefit to doing so. Doesn’t that decision mark the turning point where you become a coffee snob. The type of hipster we all love, who, when ordering coffee at a cafe winces after their first sip and says, “the stuff I brew is a million times better,” yet they go to the same cafe everyday.

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Early in the new Murakami novel, a young writer named Tengo edits/rewrites a novella, originally written by a teenage girl, to win a debut literary prize.  As the novel progresses, the world he lives in changes to resemble the world Tengo embellished/ created in his work.  Notably, he describes two moons in the novella, and lo and behold, eventually he notices there are two moons in his world, and the second moon looks exactly how he described it.

On occasion, I’m struck by the similarity of something in the real world to something in a story I wrote.  Am I special person, like Tengo?  (I’m aware Tengo is a fictional character) Or did my sub-conscious give me the idea, which I used in the story, and then noticed in the real world?  I lean toward the latter.

I tried NaNoWriMo this year.  I failed.  I wrote about 1,500 words my first day, but decided they were so bad, and I mean really bad, that I couldn’t bear the thought of pounding out 48,500 more terrible words.  (NaNoWriMo seems to work for some people and that’s great)  I share this because in those first few pages, my main character hits a little girl with his car on his way to work.  It’s not his fault.  The girl darted out in front of him, but he feels guilty, and wonders if he could have prevented it had he been paying more attention.   Read more »