WIGGLY.
Today's written product came out wiggly. It came about in a wiggly way, too. Many years ago, I interviewed a friend about his days (nights, mostly) of running nightclubs and performance venues in San Francisco and Manhattan. This interview helped me write a detective story I finished at the end of 1996, which was set in a nightclub, and featured arson as the crime. Fortunately, I held onto the interview cassette. There was a section on the tape about local corruption that didn't make it into the original project, but it sure came in handy today, as I was working on the right-brain novel.
I have thrown away, given away, and sold countless tons of stuff over the years, yet I have held onto nearly everything I have ever written, sketched, or recorded, whether the material seems raw or polished. Sometimes I have to wait years for these creative trinkets to pay out, yet every so often they do. So I encourage anyone who considers herself a creative worker to think twice about tossing out anything that might make good creative fuel down the line, even if it's unrealized now. You can always toss it later, but you can never get it back.
My writing was wiggly because it was part of an unexpected plot twist and because it involved some wiggly words. Actually, I think it is some of the loveliest language in the book. A fair amount of the novel's text is in a highly poetic, allusive, multilayered style, but I have to be in a certain frame of mind to write a lot of the heavier stuff. Today was the right day; I was a bit wiggly from the combination of the morning coffee and the long-term emotional fatigue of this project. It's just part of the deal, the fatigue. I'm glad I have lived long enough to write about some heavy topics in longer work. I wasn't ready for this in 1996.
In the right-brain novel, the characters and situations are hewn more from whole cloth than dirty laundry. Either can make the better fabric for a story, of course, and I have done both. In the case of the latter, I've long since learned to change first names. I screwed up on that once and it's not a mistake I'd care to repeat. And in the instant case, the characters are so fabricated out of my imagination, or are such fragmented bits and pieces of the past's amalgam, that the amalgam would not be recognizable to anyone else ... and someday, perhaps, not even to me. Such is the nature of invented reality. Yet is well-rendered fiction substantially different than real life, which is also invented as we live and then relive it? Of course not. It's all wiggly, see?
We had intermittent rain throughout the day, which made my regular walk (often a source of creative inspiration) a wiggly proposition, so instead I sat on the bed in hubby's room and chatted with him as we watched the sun go down. Snoopy slept at the foot of the bed and dreamed his wiggly, twitchy-cat-paw dreams.
Bill's Left-Brain Novel,
as of July 15, 2007:
|
69,885 / 90,000
(77.7%)
[unchanged] |
Bill's Right-Brain Novel,
as of July 15, 2007:
Today's net gain: 1,474 words.
Wishing you a beautiful day,
Bill Brent
[this page last updated: 2007.07.15, 9:55 p.m. Hawaii time]
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