Have to laugh; most of the content of this post is in the footnotes, the underwater section of prose. Sous vide means “under vacuum” in French, a cooking technique that uses vacuum-sealed bags. With this post you’re being sucked into the bag my brain[1]. So, there’s your warning.
I’ve been having a hard time writing toward the long project this last while because I’m frustrated during my usual early morning writing, its forced stuttered stopping and starting and stopping and starting, interrupted by having to clock in for the day job. It’s knowing the sabbatical shines there, waiting for me to fall into its outstretched arms…so close[2].
I’ve been writing other projects[3].
I’ve been practicing a lot of mind work. A LOT. Mind work to set myself up for …slowing down. What do I mean? Creative practice, as I’ve come to experience it, tracks a different cadence compared with the grease slicked gear shifting daily grind I’m trained to. Chained to. The writing I want to get better producing requires patience. Focus. Calm commitment. A loose openness. Love. The writing I’m chasing imbues vitality, an energy shimmer vibrating beneath-around-within-between the words, the sentences and the paragraphs. Writing that becomes a glowing whole when the project is finished. Writing that is a movement felt in the body and sparking the brain so it fizzes. And I know, from my years writing, the pace of this precise practice is plant like: seasonal, incremental, dendritic, efflorescent. [And perhaps, Suzanne, a little less adjectival? Or, at least, adjectival with intention as opposed to self-indulgent, as this paragraph, ahem, has now become.]
I’ve been practicing mind work because back in February I spiralled a tight anxiety worrying about…fucking this up. By “this” I mean squandering the time away from my day job to focus on creative work and not getting “a novel” drafted. I’m not going to waste time or space recounting that here. Anxiety wastes time and kills creativity. Crushes creativity’s esophagus with iron cold fingers.
Anyway, since then, I’ve been practicing how to enter this gift of time without expectation and fall into the joy of nurturing my story to being…even if it’s a nascent, beautifully crafted (and funny) chapter(s)[4]. And I’m ready[5]. And excited.
I’ve been playing around with coloured cards, trying to work out the narrative arc for the long project, this book length work. This puzzling has gone well (though, has taken several weeks of thinking…walking and thinking, sitting and thinking…a fair degree of daydreaming…it requires a looseness of the brain…a letting go). I now have a sense of “sections”—I think of them as containers—following a ring structure with its requisite mirroring.
Here it is, in first draft, rough, form (as a list because this must be read sequentially; in reality, the first half circles round and mirrors the opposite in the second half and we (the writer and the reader) end where we begin[6]:
- Prologue: introduces 2-3 siblings of the protagonist, the way they speak to each other using movie quotes. Also, the conversation they had one day when very young, predicting who each would marry. Of course, couched as an insult. The siblings teased the protagonist she’d marry an archbishop (said with a priggish English accent).
- Start Argument: Structurally, the argument is almost a second prologue. The fight that ends a marriage, “the argument” is the anchor point for each subsequent section round the ring, the narrative arc, returning the reader each time to the next section from digressions (side stories that are back stories, but collaged, not in chronological order). The argument is between Claire, the protagonist, and Fanboy, her husband, set in their beautiful kitchen[7]. Each time we return to the next section (signalled by being back in the kitchen in medias ras argument), the narrative builds out this couple’s life together and Claire’s experience raising their children[8]. The argument is a recurring one between this couple, Fanboy always accusing Claire of having an affair. This becomes a central question—did she?—driving (pun intended) the story.
- Section 1 – Claire’s idiocy in the affair department.
- Section 2 – Recipe for falling in love[9].
- Section 3 – Recipe for children bring people together.
- Section 4 – Claire falls in love with a man outside the marriage[10]. Though, she never tells that man; it’s an unrequited love. As far as she knows, he has no idea. But she decides, despite transgressive sexy action never happened, she has betrayed her marriage in her mind, ergo, she must end it.
- The Turn – Structurally, this is “the climax” of the story, directly opposite the beginning of the circle. It is the point at which the story turns and “repeats”, moving back through the previous sections, but following an opposite pattern (theory says the reader will “feel” this progression, as opposed to “know” it). In this section, Claire tells Fanboy she wants a divorce. But it becomes very clear Fanboy will fight for custody of their two young children (5 and 7 years old). Claire, for reasons there’s no need to elucidate right now (isn’t her name perfect?) believes he will win custody. She has a vision of what a separated family will mean for her children. Her choice is is suddenly crystal clear; she stays in the marriage.
- Section 5 (= 4’) – Structurally, the opposite of section 4. The man Claire fell in love with confesses his love to her, but she remains committed to her marriage. He marries a mutual friend.
- Section 6 (= 3’) – Children bust people up.
- Section 7 (= 2’) – Recipe for falling out of love.
- Section 8 (= 1’) – Claire discovers evidence supporting strong hypothesis Fanboy is the one who had an affair[11].
- End Argument: Structurally we return to the argument for the final time to move through to its inevitable end, the dissolution of a 25-year marriage.
- Epilogue – two wonderful post-marriage vignettes that I want to riff on ‘cause they’re just too good.
Each section will have associative digressions exploring stories inspired by my growing up, complete with sibling antics. I thought about trying to place these scenes on little cards attached to each section in advance, but I think that risks too much control. I gotta be able to keep the dream alive through this process.
So, there’s the recipe for the adventure, for submersing my shadow self. First recipe anyway…it will shift and move, but I’m diving in.
[1] Soux is a unique spelling of Sue. It is how I sign any artworks I create.
[2] Also, I’m moving at the end of this month to a delightfully quirky tiny cottage in a historic village walking distance from downtown, across from For Henry. I think I’ll be able to hear the cannons when the reenactments, their profusion of fireworks, are performed on summer evenings. It will remind me of Mexico. Though I’m sad to be leaving this beautiful Victorian apartment (it has held me, stoically, shepherding me through my grief), the tiny house has a second bedroom for when the girls visit. It also has a gas stove! This latter feature…my gawd….the current induction model I’m working with threatens a coronary, turning off in the middle of cooking whenever it feels like it, deciding only certain pot bottoms are worth its heat, and only on certain days. I’ve been cooking with an angry gremlin, and it threatens to turn me into one.
[3] Collaborating with a friend, a romance writer, on an essay exploring erotic writing. Originally, I thought the essay would be about comparing craft techniques along the erotic spectrum between porn and romance…how at one end it’s fewer story elements, all mechanical body bits inserting other body bits while at the other it’s more tension, narrative techniques layering emotional explorations of unrequited love and tropes. In writing the essay, the angle contorted delightfully (ha ha) and the categories, I came to understand, blur at the edges. I’ll expand further (oh yes, yes!) in a future post. Maybe. Reading a whole lot of erotica …a pleasure.
And I realised l will incorporate sex scenes in the long project …not for getting off but rather, they’re another (perhaps the best?) tool in the writer’s toolbox for exploring intimacy, relationships, power dynamics, the erotics of consent, the complications of shame… Yes, sex is actually a central exploration feeding the long project…not in the way you might assume, it’s much sadder. I feel ready to adventure through it.
Unfortunately, the erotic essay—even though the editor who suggested I write it said it’s “a great essay”—was summarily (and rapidly (instantly?)) dismissed for being “extremely academic” (including the voice….which…stung. Probably ‘cause that’s kinda true?).
It reminded me of the time then-husband and I went to a dinner party where there was a scotch tasting competition and I won the prize for identifying the different scotches in the blind tasting. When we got in the car to go home afterwards, husband turned to me and said, “You know, you didn’t have to guess all of them right”. Indeed, we were never asked back to dine with that group. Though, could have been ‘cause I was flirty with the husbands, but I digress.
[4] And this is the thing; I want the writing in this project to be BOTH beautiful and funny. When I explained this to a friend, she said, “does that even exist?”. Yes…James Salter’s Light Years (heavier on beauty but very wry); The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz; The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr (worth noting Karr is also a poet); The World According to Garp by John Irving…there are lots…listing only a small sample here. One on my list to read, because I’m trying to find more women writers in this space, is Iris Owens’ After Claude.
[5] I’m also practicing “writing silly” …not always, but sometimes, in response to the writing prompts we work through each week in the writing sessions I facilitate (volunteer), I try to let myself respond with humour and even ridiculousness (e.g., How to walk among humans, when you’re an alien. A multiple-choice test). In these sessions, there’s a live audience responding, like, actually saying how they feel about the writing, in real time and we enjoy laughter together, there’s delight…there’s an instant relaxation when a roomful of adults experience childishness (not in a puerile way, but in that innocent state of wonder or in the way of that underdeveloped sense of understanding that can be so charming with how children view the world) or self-deprecation (I’m good at this). A recognition. A vulnerability. I’m practicing this…cause my project needs it…it’s the oxygen it breathes. And also, because I’m such a serious fucker too much of the time…so much, I almost feel like I have a split personality. No, of course, not diagnosably.
[6] I’ve waffled about whether to write details about this long project on the blog, fearing it risks…what? Giving the plot away? Having too much here that it could never be published? Someone might steal my brilliant ideas ha ha ha? But then I think, this is a teeny tiny corner of the internet, and writing out my process here, over the years, has been extremely helpful to me. And I do read my earlier entries, especially when you ping them. Often, I’m stunned by what I’ve written …as if I am learning from myself. I guess I am; they guide me. If I looked at this drafting process as I would a qualitative research project, this blog would be my “research diary”, a record of decisions and ideas to be able to iterate and build toward a final “meaning making”. Plus, how the hell can I write about the process of writing a novel without referring to details? That would be tedious for any blog reader. And plus, plus, even if someone “stole” this idea, they would never be able to write it the way that I am. Writers: the way we think, is unique. Like a fingerprint. And plus, plus, plus, publishing…what is this now anyway? The industry quakes along the fault line of its foundation at 9+ levels, it will be interesting to see what topography surfaces afterwards. I’m doing this writing for fun. And…because I sing to you, you’re reading it (wink).
[7] Claire is my middle name. It’s the right fit for this character in many ways. I toyed with the idea of calling her Zannie (this is what my mum calls me…and still remembers, despite her advancing dementia). I liked Zannie too for its playful nod toward a combination of the words zany and insane, as well as its historical allusions to Zanni, the trickster character in the Italian commedia dell’arte. But Claire is a better fit tonally and Zannie does try a little too hard …at least that’s my present thinking…I’m allowing all these decisions to be flexible. Incidentally, Nyree, when I made her suffer my disquisition of coloured index cards on my dining room table said that when this book is made into a movie, she wants her character (who is remaining Nyree, at her request btw) to be played by Amy Schumer. I admitted, a perfect cast. And who would I be played by? She thought about it…went out for a smoke/toke…came back in, pointed at me and smug, said, Kate Winslet. Another friend, when I relayed this casting story, suggested it needed someone more shambolic, Rachel Weisz. Neither of these suggestions were received as a compliment. Fanboy is a serendipitous autocorrect discovery. It’s perfect. A reminder: the project is becoming fiction. It’s a new genre: Becoming Fiction.
[8] Yes, I will be reworking previously written material from an earlier blog I used to write, Food by the Gearhead’s Wife. I had thought I wouldn’t …but there are lines and stories in there that are funny and bring me right back to those experiences of exhaustion (and yes, depression) and I have your blog pings to thank for guiding me to reread these regularly. I will be weaving in the race car stuff and…after savouring Salter’s sentences in Light Years recently, I’ll be including food writing too. It’s as much a part of me as anything else. Did you know Salter wrote a cookbook with his partner? I wish I’d dined at his dinner table before he died.
[9] I don’t know why I am referring to this as “a recipe” but it came to me as a breezy idea and my instinct kicked in so I’m keeping as this for now.
[10] I have not assigned this guy a name yet…still thinking about it.
[11] Like, a sexual affair but not one of the mind …which leads one to question, what constitutes an affair? Is it only physical? And shouldn’t our minds remain our own to indulge fantasies? These are interesting questions…intersections with the essay on erotica, but these footnotes are getting ridiculous.
Process Peace 