A fun piece I wrote while trying to tame one of my novel-beasts.
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Somehow, I’d driven into Missouri.
Missouri did not appear on my MapQuest printout. The purple line shot straight from Wichita Falls to Eureka Springs, that spot in the Ozarks where I’d sit alone for days and figure out what was wrong with my novel.
I blame Stephen Hawking for my misdirection. I had listened to The Theory of Everything until my brain had liquefied. I had hoped the ideas of a brilliant physicist would make my novel sound smart. But smart people do not drive randomly into Missouri.
I switched off the lecture, realizing I lacked the mental acuity to manage quantum mechanics and Interstate 540 simultaneously. I arrived at Lake Leatherwood and pitched my pup tent. Two days of driving, a detour through the Show Me State, and panic that my private work time was wasted on highway meanderings all led to me, a lake, and a 400-page novel that had also deviated from its outline. I settled to work, spreading a printout on a picnic table.
Then the birdwatchers arrived. Four elderly gentlemen in a Lexus.
“Whatcha doing out here all alone?” one asked. I might have considered this a pick-up line had the man not been 80, clutching his binoculars in a trembling hand.
“Writing a novel,” I said, trying to prove I was from the Friendly State but returning to my shuffle of papers to show I was not to be interrupted.
“This here little gal’s writing a book!” he exclaimed.
“Ya need some characters?” another one asked. “We’re some characters!”
I tried not to look up, not encourage them. One of them was, fortunately, impatient to commune with birds and hurried the others along.
Alone. Finally. Just me and my book. I wrote summaries of each character, noting changes to scenes and dialogue.
Dusk descended and I tried to work by flashlight, but the insects flying at me forced a retreat to my tent. As I read through the first scene, the side of my tent lurched at me, something recoiling against it with a squeaky snarl. I scrambled to my knees, knocked over my flashlight, and novel pages scattered. The creature slammed again.
Rabid raccoon? Killer squirrel? The third time the tent wall popped inward, I closed my eyes and bumped it lightly with the end of my solid steel Maglite. It connected and the creature ran off into the night.
I shoved the papers, now hopelessly out of order, to one corner and curled up with my flashlight. Like hell I was going to turn it off now. The glorious vision of a hotel shimmered in the white cone of illuminated tent wall. But I had sworn I’d stay away from the siren call of hotels and the Internet--MySpace, email, Blogger--procrastination devices that had led to this crisis. Three weeks until I met with an agent, and my novel was about as straightforward as a pundit’s polemic.
I settled down to sleep. Maybe when I put the pages back together in the morning the new story structure would have arranged itself, like tea leaves, like a lucky roll of dice.
Nope. By dawn the pages were limp with condensation. I thrust the clump into my bag and drove to the Eureka Springs Public Library for a rare free wireless connection.
And I surfed, web-drunk, to Wordsmith.org to make anagrams out of “scary raccoon.” A scar coon cry. Acorn car cosy.
The librarian stopped by.
“I’m working on a book,” I announced.
She nodded knowingly. “We’re closing in five minutes, but you can still get a connection out on the porch.”
I was an addict, jonesing the Net.
I drove through town and picked a camp without a forest around it, settling at another picnic table. There I summarized the book again, then again, first on full sheets of paper, then on colored note cards.
No Internet. No distractions. I mumbled my mantra. I laid out scenes on 79 cards. Flashbacks pink, current time blue, narrative green. I numbered the corners with the original order and doled them out again, this time chronologically.
The first fat drop of rain hit a card, but the ink held. I hurriedly renumbered the cards and retreated to my tent. The shower passed quickly, and my exuberance grew. I marked each scene with a blue slash of highlighter for a quick read, or pink for slow. I returned to the picnic table and laid out the cards, checking that the book paced properly and tossing every pink slash possible.
Finally something was working.
The camp manager sat across from me. “Watcha doing?” he asked, running one hand along a protruding belly and the other through his scruffy gray beard.
“Working,” I said.
“I’m Bob,” he said, extending a hand.
Sigh.
Bob showed me around the camp and extolled the virtues of the wild mink that ran loose. “You sure are an attractive girl,” he said.
I suddenly wished my tent locked.
Thankfully, Bob took off when two friendlier girls arrived. I had to start revising, rearranging the digital file according to the cards. The battery died before I finished, but I went to sleep knowing the hard part was over. All I had to do now was fix the transitions, rearrange some paragraphs, and smooth over any bumps in the narrative.
As I drove home, I realized the problem had never been the Internet, work, or other distractions. There would always be birdwatchers, raccoons, and Bobs.
Amidst my daily schedule, I simply hadn’t sunk within the work deeply enough to see where it ought to go. I shot down the highway through the Ouachita National Forest, no longer caring if the road I traveled took me to Texas by way of Missouri.
