Pragmatik

I did it. I wrote a 50,000 word novel during November. I’m fully aware that being unemployed made that much easier than it was for some people. I’d only respond that the vocation-less-ness kind of sadness is its own obstacle. And I’d leave it at that.

I needed to prove that I could do it one day. Hemingway talks so much about the discipline of writing that I thought I could never write anything not school related, because I’m not exactly a disciplined kind of guy. But I did it. I created a world and people and let them do their thing, then reigned them in to do my thing and explore what I wanted to explore. Now we’ll see if I have the gumption to edit it and try to find a literary agent. And, and if it’s any good at all.

Writing something of that length (officially longer than my dissertation) was a strange experience. I started with the idea of wanting to write about a lot of men I know who wind up with crazy partners, and how they ruin each other’s lives. Yeah. I was going to title it Crazy Bitches. But I really wound up exploring the notion of responsibility. Whether we are responsible for who we wind up with and if everything they do to us really is our fault because of the amount of control we give them. If it is even possible to give someone control over your life, or if that’s just Sartrian bad faith. How much we owe someone to keep them from ruining their life. The nature of “tough love.” And there’s a wedding shooting, so that’s always fun. And two giant helpings of local Baltimore flavor, including a sort of upcoming-utopian version of the city that could totally happen in five or ten years. And a love affair involving the Mayor. The entire book is very dirty. You have no idea. I think it would make a cool movie.

But I’m glad I finished the draft, at any rate. It’s good to finish something hard. And I can always say I have an unpublished novel now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Personal, Reading, Web, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.