Well. Four days till I go back to Iowa.
At the beginning of the summer, my goal was to revise chapters one through five of the novel, and I really thought it was a reasonable goal. Sure, they totaled 250 pages, but it was all in pretty good shape, and even the changes I did need to make were straightforward and clear in my mind. Now August is almost here and I’ve only revised chapters one and two. Not only that, but they’ve ballooned to one hundred and fifty pages total, which means that if the other chapters take the same course (and oh, you know they will), the novel - which is only very slightly plot-driven and takes place over the course of two and a half months - will be almost five hundred pages long. Now, I’m not freaking out about the length itself. The most common comment I’ve gotten from workshoppers and my agent is Give us more, we need more, there’s not enough here. I read an interview with Ha Jin once in which he said that he almost never cuts, and that his novels always get longer with each revision. And a massive manuscript doesn’t necessarily mean a massive book. Double-spaced 12 point Times New Roman is pretty big.
What’s freaking me out about this development is the amount of time I now realize this is going to take to finish. A year ago, when my vision for this book was a short, swiftly moving story (a novelina, if you will (Chris Offutt gets credit for the term)), I wondered if I could maybe finish it in two years. Now I’m hoping I can finish it before the upcoming school year ends, but I’m not setting goals anymore. If I begin to think about the overall project, I shut down. If I even think about an overall chapter, I shut down. The only way I can keep working is by focusing on each individual scene, and hoping (for now) that they’re strung together in a convincing and natural way.
It could be the environment that’s got me so frustrated. Have I mentioned that I hate Irvine? That I hate, hate, hate Irvine? In Iowa City, I can always find an excuse to walk downtown if I need to get away from my desk and clear my head, but here, there are some days when I don’t leave the apartment at all. What am I going to do? There are no bookstores that I can go to to remind myself why I’m sitting in front of Word four hours a day, and no nearby cafes or coffee shops that I particularly like being in. There aren’t even any nice neighborhoods where I can take a walk. Once you get outside, you’ve got 100+ degree fossil-fuel incubated California heat, almost no shade, and a six-lane street in between any two sidewalks. Going outside usually isn’t an option. Tom and his friends are great, but mostly it’s just me and my novel, and after two and a half months of sitting together at Tom’s kitchen table, we’re sick of each other.
I just really want to finish this thing. I want to finish it before I stop liking it (as weird as that’ll sound after I’ve just spent the majority of a blog entry complaining about it). I’m afraid that if I take a break from it, I’ll never go back to it. I just need to push through, right? And then I’ll bask in all the rewards.
Anyway.
Hey, just to prove that I’m not a total solipsist, how about that Israel, huh? I feel almost silly writing that entry last month about how badly Palestine was acting. Amos Oz has described the Holocaust as “poisoning Israel’s heart” (or something to that effect; I don’t have the book with me) and I think that’s a very incisive way to look at it. Israel is like an abused child who grows up to abuse his/her own children. You look at it and wonder how it managed to forget what abuse feels like. You wonder how it can justify pushing its kids down the stairs when a simple grounding would do. You wonder if all its intelligence and self-awareness got beaten out of it in its formative years.
