The March Hare

Because I embarrassed myself in the last post, I will try to un-embarrass myself now by writing about something other than nude photography, mucous-filled head colds, and Clurg farts.

I don't like Poets&Writers anymore, but I was reading a recent issue today and stumbled across an article called "Talking it to Death", about writers who spoke often and at length about book projects that were basically unfinishable, thereby forcing themselves to work on books that they couldn't write until they all died.

The article implied that the act of talking about the books was what had drained the creativity from the projects; too much talk, not enough action to back it up. This worried me, because I always talk about my writing projects. (Because really, what else is there to talk about. Don't answer that, it was rhetorical.)

I had this great idea last week. I had just read a biography of Shirley Jackson, and I was riding home on my bike thinking about it, and it hit me. Two years ago I wrote this novel that's hard to describe. There's a girl who's writing a book about a wunderkind writer who died fifty years ago, only as she's writing she starts to unintentionally novelize it, even unto changing the ending so that the writer lives instead of dying. What if I took out the whole girl-writing-the-book story, and just wrote it as a biography, only letting the novelizations slip in here and there, in footnotes, forwards, the occasional dramatized scene. A transparent biography, through which one can see the also fictional author putting things in the order that suits her own needs best.

Now that I've written about it, have I cursed myself? Is this why I have only finished three separate 150-plus page versions of my new novel which I love like a baby, only to have to start all over again, because I told someone about it?

Poets&Writers always makes me paranoid. Oh my god, I have to get an MFA. No one will love me without a terminal degree. John Updike doesn't do anything the way I do, I must be utterly worthless. Someone else got their first novel published, and it tanked! Now they have to write under a pseudonym! Maybe if they could lay off the practical advice and just focus on interviews with good writers, it would be okay. Because the act of writing is intensely personal and everyone goes about every part of it differently, because the world of publishing is perhaps best left unexplored, because really, shouldn't writers stick to making art, just for the sake of it, because if they don't they run the risk of letting business dictate the type of writing they will do.

I will talk my novels to death, and they will rise from their graves, maybe a little rotten and gooey, but still mine.