The Stumbling Stage (one week late)

I am in the stumbling stage.  About a month ago I got what I thought was a brilliant idea for a mystery (aren’t they all?) and settled in to let the idea percolate and my unconscious have time to work on it, to throw up opening lines, character samples, little plot points, and the like. I scribbled, tried things out, and waited. A sentence here, a character description there. And still I waited. 

 Ready or not it was time to start writing, so I did. I had the opening scene—it was riveting. Definitely riveting. It took me a while to figure out what would come next (I’m a slow writer), but then the obvious occurred to me and I went at it. Another riveting scene. I was chugging right along when again something occurred to me. I envy other writers who seem to have a narrative and trajectory all worked out before they put fingertips to keys and zip right along. At this point I realized more should come after the opening scene, and before what I thought was the second scene. So back I went. But then that originally second scene had to be revised to fit a changed plot direction, and suddenly the narrator was older but I needed her to be younger, but not too much younger. I was either traveling in a circle or a spiral, neither of which was good. 

When I was much younger my parents took us hiking and camping—anything to get outdoors in the woods and on the mountains. Dad just wanted to be with the trees, so we followed a map for walks through the forests, crossing and recrossing the Appalachian Trail and other lesser-known paths. One I remember vividly promised we’d end at a crystal-clear lake and could run straight into the water for a swim. After the expected period of upping and downing along the trail we came to the end—and looked down at the lake, where a man was climbing out of a canoe along the sandy shore. The only problem was the lake was below us, several thousand feet below us, at the bottom of a sharp tree-covered decline. How we had gotten so lost is beyond me. But Dad was undeterred. He looked at us, at the lake, at the mountainside, and off we went through the brush and over the rocks and down the nearly vertical mountainside, leaving a solid trail behind us. We did arrive at the lake and collapsed on the sandy shore rather than run energetically into the water for a swim. Dad always got to where he wanted to go. I like to think I take after him—at least when I write. At this point in the draft I really don’t know where I’m going even though I think I can see the end over there, somewhere. I know I just have to keep going, so I do.

I call this the stumbling stage. Another example of the stumbling stage is this post. I was scheduled for the fourth Saturday, which was last week. But deep into my life-is-a-haze phase I was surprised to find I’d forgotten the fourth Saturday post. So here it is. 

This doesn’t help me get through the stumbling stage in my manuscript. There’s nothing for it but to keep going, and so far I’ve revised the complications four times, making them worse each time—for me, not the reader, because I haven’t worked out how the narrator is going to solve all these problems. I could do what some writers do and finesse the worst inventions and hope no one notices. (I’m not that lucky—I’d get emails.)  

Redoing the text so far is becoming something I can’t stop doing. It’s all right that the narrator isn’t as upset as she expected to be after a particular incidence. Okay, that’s human. But I can’t leave it there. I have to come up with an explanation—note I don’t say reason, because I’m moving beyond reason. First she thinks it’s deja vue, but that seems too mundane. She starts to wonder if this has something to do with a previous life. But then she remembers she doesn’t believe in reincarnation—too complicated for her, and depressing. Then she lands on the idea of synchronous lives. Huh? How did she come up with that one? I don’t even know what it means, or even if it means something.

This is definitely stumbling and the problem with this stage is that I’ve brought it on myself. I had to complicate things, deepen the motives and actions and people and even the weather. So how do I get out of it? First I write a post one week late. Second, well, I’m not sure about the narrator’s stumbling stage. I could just delete a lot of pages and see where I end up, or what I end up with. That could be interesting. So far the stage seems to be winning.

 The stumbling stage is not to be confused with writer’s block, which is only solved by a crisis calling the writer elsewhere, to avoid which ideas and words begin to flow. Nor is the problem solved by declaring it graphomania or hypergraphia. Either one seems easy to deal with. A glass of wine. A good friend. A sunny day and a porch. That’s such an appealing scene I may give that a try. If nothing else, my narrator may get to take a break too and we’ll work out this problem together.