I’m drafting the last chapter of the novel now. Actually, there’s an epilogue after, but I finished that awhile back. Next Wednesday is my due date; and I am still confident that I’ll make it.
I’m writing in a weirdly-unconscious place now. I guess it’s natural that, having never-written in precisely this mode before, I would discover new responses within myself. Never in my life have I sat down so consistently for so many consecutive weeks, with such singular focus on one project. And I have never written anything this big, full stop. 2013 is already in the running for the most productive year of my life in terms of writing output, and it’s still April. That’s downright alarming.
But these days, when I open up the latest chapter, this astonishing hostility kicks in. All I can think is: “You again?!” I don’t hate the book but I feel oppressed by the familiar unfinishedness of it. It’s not the same gray rut you might feel from clocking in at a job you don’t like; maybe it’s the impatience of such a long and laborious incubation. I wake up each morning to find that it’s still just a Word doc, with a blinking cursor taunting me from the tail of an incomplete sentence, and I am enraged that it hasn’t turned itself into anything else in the night.
There’s little brainstorming left to do. I am catching up to and transcribing the inevitable narrative output of an equation I already wrote. A warped argument in my brain is trying to even deny to me the satisfaction that I’m creating anything at all in these sessions, other than hopefully-smooth sentences.
And so each day I am convinced that I can’t do it. I won’t do it. Today will be that Mulligan day I built into the schedule, when the great choking gunk we call The Block will win and I will wave the white flag and I fart the day away with a Frappuccino and video games.
And I go over what I wrote yesterday. I don’t even remember half of it; because I was writing unconsciously that day, too. I make some snips and corrections, I bring myself back to that blinking cursor, and then, somehow…I just start typing. Because whatever thought is on the page isn’t finished.
I grump my way through a sentence at a time, building a moment, orchestrating an epiphany or a reveal, trying to come up with a single damned metaphor that doesn’t barf with pretension or go limp from obscurity. Using adjectives. Hating myself for using adjectives. Reminding myself that F. Scott Fitzgerald used adjectives and survived.
Sooner or later I reach the end of a sequence; the trance snaps, I look at the word count down in the corner…and somehow I’ve written my quota for the session.
Then I think to myself: “Well, sure, you got lucky with the morning session; but this afternoon you’ll be screwed…”
And I never am.