For some time, bit at a time, I’ve been attempting to write a novel.  I’ve been thinking of it as a long term project. The core of the thing has been floating around my little brain for years and perhaps a year ago, I started organizing my ideas. While I do plenty of writing, my experience writing a book is limited to a small and unpublished manuscript called One Finger Gloves and Violins, which, written through the stories my father told me over many years, is I suppose, both a tribute to him and a story about our relationship in his later years. I’m considering publishing that manuscript as a serial on this blog sometime down the road.

A novel is another kettle of fish. I did a lot of planning up front. I tried to organize my thoughts using mind maps. I made some character outlines. I made a plot outline, and so on.  I know there are writers who can go through those mapping processes, build up outlines and then based on all that perfect planning, crank out a manuscript. Oh, if life were just that easy.

I’ve been making paintings for many many years, and my work has always developed during the process of painting, or out of the process of painting. I lay down an idea, destroy it, build it up again, it leads to another idea and I try that one on for size and so on. I recall reading something Philip Guston wrote that has long resonated with me. He talked about painting, and excuse me if I paraphrase poorly here, as being like bashing at a brick wall with a sledge. Each day you bash away at it and all that happens is little chips of brick come off. Then one day, you hit it just right and the entire wall crumbles and all that’s left to do is clean up. It’s like that for me and painting. Increasingly, my paintings require time. A fishished painting, if there is such a thing, offers up this history of ideas that somehow miraculously come together in a way I wish I could understand, when suddenly the painting seems to have a life of its own. It doesn’t need me messing with it anymore.

It turns out that for my attempt at novel writing, I have to struggle with a similar process. My story has shifted around many times. I’ve killed off and brought back characters. I’ve re-written chunks of it several times. As I’ve done this my characters are becoming more and more real to me. I’ve even found myself changing storylines because I’ve realized that certain characters would never do what I intended them to do.  There’s still a long way to go. Curiously enough, along the way I’ve created a few short short stories too, unrelated stories that I hadn’t considered writing, and even more curiously, I’ve hatched another seed that could eventually develop into another novel.

Of course, if I ever do complete this thing, I have no idea what to do with it. I don’t know anything about the publishing world at all, but I guess I can worry about that later.