Against Hubris

nataliedee.com

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime fortune cookie, that.

So, May 1 my first review will run in Kirkus Reviews, and I’ve finally signed contract for the second novel and movie people are talking to my agent and the designer is bouncing ideas off of my editor for covers I’m 3/4 the way through the third novel and I’ve hit a wall.

Well, not too much of a wall, I guess, it’s just the sort of startling realization that the novel I *thought* I was writing isn’t the story I’m telling. This is something completely new.

I can’t tell you how much I hate it when this happens.

It usually doesn’t. Usually I know what story I’m telling.

I’ve been trying to excise a ghost — ? — or something from my head for years. A childhood friend died a violent and senseless death, and I’ve been writing around the event that effectively ended my childhood for years. For. Years. And, after a soupçon of success, I finally thought I was a “mature” enough writer to take the shards of the previous attempts and unite them into a revised whole, and maybe get to the point of the dancing around the event — and Tell It. I honestly really thought I could. It’s been ten years now.

I’ve …kinda done that. I’ve created dynamic characters and situations that are making my writing group, at least, twitchy with worry over what’s going to happen to the characters. I’ve done what I could, creating the realistic, small traumas that make up the daily bricks in the Huge Wall of Awful About To Fall On You, but I’ve found something out — it’s all gotten away from me.

Right now, I’m looking at my main character and asking, “Beg pardon, but WHO the HELL ARE YOU!?” This must be what it’s like to have children, to wipe their noses and butts every day and pick up their crap and finally get around to teaching the amoral little beasts to stop blackmailing you and speak nicely and pick up their own crap, and then you look at them and they’re not the ones you started out with; they’re some other exhausted shrew’s get and look remarkably like the postman and you think, “Why are you in MY house?”

And they give you that insouciant shrug and flash each other a look that says, “She’s on the bottle again,” and they all detour in a wide circle around you every time they see you.

Not that I would know what that’s like. *Cough*

But, that’s what my characters are doing. They’ve morphed into being someone else’s puppets, and now I have to make a choice: do I change my original intent to suit who I’ve got, or do I keep planing and puttying and trimming and sculpting their resistant little story lines until they’re who I wanted them to be?

Unfortunately, I already know the answer to this.

Maybe what I really want to know is why. Why can’t I write the story of this senseless death? Why can’t I get my fingers ’round the taproot of this tale and pull it ’til it’s all out? Probably for the same reason that people can’t easily separate salt and sand; because it’s become part of me.

The ghosts live behind my eyes. And they’ve made up their minds to stay.

Mememento mori. Remember you must die. If you see the ghosts, don’t flinch. They’re just Telling It true, in a way that I can’t seem to manage.