March 12, 2009
Thursday

I am almost ready to get down to serious work. At left you see my Novel-o-meter, a decorative device I created with a white board and some words from the magnetic poetry sets I used in the classroom. There are also some decorative magnets, including one showing Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind, at her typewriter, with the caption, “In a weak moment, I have written a book.” I got that on my first trip to Georgia, in 2006, when I took the beginnings of this very same manuscript to a week-long workshop at Emory University.

I didn’t write a word about that experience in this space. The director of the group, novelist Jim Grimsley, had gotten back from Europe only the day before the workshop started. I think he had jet lag. That would explain his apparent lack of engagement and air of boredom, at least toward me. He gave a slash-and-burn assessment of my manuscript in my private session with him and concluded that I didn’t seem very interested in my characters. (He also had forgotten my name on the last day when I asked him to sign my copy of his novel, despite the fact that there were only six other participants in the group.) I took his remarks in stride. I am, after all, a survivor of a slash-and-burn session at Bread Loaf. I did learn from the Emory workshop, did some revisions before taking the material to Bread Loaf a few months later, and am still carrying the idea and the characters and the commitment I had to them then.

The piece was at about 5000 words in 2006. It stands at about 10,000 now. As you can see from the picture, I hope to have 30,000 by April 5, the day my fellowship ends. That means that I have to produce in three weeks twice as much text as I have managed to bring forth in seven years. That’s around 1000 words a day, or about four pages. I’ve been that productive, but never for more than three days in a row.

I haven’t done any work on this manuscript since February 11, when I set my mind to finishing a short story for my Bread Loaf application. This afternoon I made a list of the scenes I already have and a list of the scenes I know I have some ideas and details for. Then I re-read the pages I have, so that I could begin to see and hear my characters again.

And I came upon this passage, one of the earliest I put in place, in which Brenda, my main character, has been informed that her niece, Megan, has not shown up for work:

Brenda hung up the phone and turned back to the counter where the bread still lay. She could see that the top was drying out. She was still holding the bowl and the towel she’d been using to dry it. Her mind raced through the possibilities — Megan had forgotten she was supposed to be at work and had gone shopping; Megan had started out for work in the morning mist and had somehow rolled her car into a ditch and was lying in it unconscious while traffic whizzed by above her; Megan had been kidnapped by a robber at an ATM who had thrown her into the trunk of her car where she was gasping for air while he went on a spending spree with her credit cards at Circuit City; Megan had, for the first time in more than a year, tied one on and was lying in a stupor beside empty bottles of Jack Daniel’s.

Circuit City, a once popular chain of electronics stores, went out of business last week.

Make that 1002 words for tomorrow.

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