I’ve never worked to an outline, but for the last two manuscripts I’ve written, I’ve had a climax to work toward. The climax has been a kind of lighthouse to guide me.
On this current manuscript, I have no idea where I’m headed. The process has been more halting this time, more baffling, and significantly more intriguing. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a scene that didn’t work. Too subdued, the character at a significant remove from the action, and strangely silent about the goings-on. Yesterday, ages later in the text, an unrelated scene with different characters, and somehow the earlier scene clarified. I saw her stiffness, understood her distance, and the opportunity of both.
Is it trust, trust that allows me to keep going, to spare myself the DELETE button? Or some artistic patience that figures, in the end, it’ll all sort? Maybe it’s just momentum. A drive to keep pressing forward before the editor sneaks in and shuts the whole thing down.
Though not a consciously formed understanding, some part of my brain does know where it’s going, what it’s after, and the threads are weaving together with that objective in mind. Anyway, I fucking hope so.
The perseverance you have not to hit delete—not to scrap it all and start (or not start) again—I couldn’t say where that comes from. That’s up to you entirely.
But I’m beginning to realize that the “editor” is different things. It’s the voice that says: “Too trite!” or “Your character would never do that!” Or worse, and more personal: “No one will find this remotely interesting.” Everyone will see through what you are doing.
There’s the ugly voice of the critic inside of us all, writers or no. The sabotage.
I once wrote a short story where, as always, the critic tired to subvert the whole thing; I hated it even as I wrote it. Even as I pushed on and said, “No, it’s good. I know, somehow, this will be good.” Even as I doubted it every second.
I was sweating by the time I finished the final scenes. I was actually shaking from the truth of it. And I agonized for a week before hearing what the group thought of it. (I know you know what I mean.)
Is it important that they loved it? No. Well, to my ego, perhaps, but really, no. It’s the most complete thing I’ve ever written, but it had no direction home. Had no end, it seemed. I hurtled toward a page count, but somehow the strength of the story beat me to it.
That’s where it sounds like you’re going with this. If you asked me, I would say: don’t bother with what part of you knows it—just accept that somewhere, part of you does.
It’s funny, but what I hear, when the illumination occurs, is the conscious thought, “Oh, that’s why you did that.” Spoken, I can only imagine, to some other part of my brain.
The unconscious artist-brain is submerged deeper than all reckoning. And I’m endlessly surprised by its ability to create in the dark, and make connections to things the rest of my brain hasn’t even begun to imagine. Anyway, that’s the way it feels when I realize what has come together, the purposefulness of it.