Ten years ago, I was living in Kerrville and working as resident director of Delaney Hall at Schreiner. It was a dream job. I paid no rent and ate in the cafeteria for free. I put in ten or fifteen hours of dorm-related work a week, tried to keep the emergencies to a minimum, and spent a lot of time writing. Or trying to write. Or thinking about writing. I spent some time talking about writing, too, but I was always suspicious of that because it’s dangerously easy to talk all the writing out so when you sit down to the page there’s nothing left.
I’d driven up to Garland for the weekend to visit family for the weekend. It was late Sunday, almost evening, and I was driving through one of the small towns on 281–Lampasas or Burnet or Marble Falls–where a rainstorm had passed through, leaving the streets wet and glistening in the orange dusk. My subconscious coughed up a sentence: “He came to town on the heels of the first rain we’d had in months.” It circled a few times, changed. “He” became “The stranger” because “he” is too vague to stand up as the first word in the first line of a story. By the time I left whatever town I was in–I think it was Marble Falls–I had a pretty good picture of the guy in my head. When I got home that night, I wrote the line down so I could see it on the screen, see it become real. A few days later I started writing to see what story would spring from that line.
The stranger came to town on the heels of the first rain in months. His backpack and jacket were spotted with the last raindrops the clouds shook off before moving on, and the toes of his boots shone with water kicked up from the road. Floyd Jeffers said he was trouble, but Floyd says that about everyone, especially now that he’s a widower and can’t see any good in anyone.
Once I got the rhythm of it, the story came out on its own. I finished the first draft in a few weeks. I didn’t show that to anyone. I’m not even sure I still have it, to be honest. It needed work, so I put it aside and started another story, then came back to it a few months later and started tinkering. It went from first person to third person. The POV character lost several years and got a name, became a ten-year old named Randy, and Randy got a story arc that carried him from a barber shop on Main Street to the front porch of the trailer house he shared with his mom on a lot two miles away. His mother was still at home when she shouldn’t have been. The lights were off, which they shouldn’t have been. And Randy was trying to convince himself she was just napping.
It sounded plausible, even possible, but Randy stayed where he was all the same. He couldn’t make himself go to the door and open it. It was simply more than he could face, like trying to climb the rope in P.E. It rose too high, swayed too much, offered too little promise of survival, and he just couldn’t do it. He never felt shame for not being able to do it. It was just too much to expect of him, and, until he was older, stronger, more in control, he wouldn’t even attempt it. Randy turned around and sat down on the top step. He rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in his cupped hands, and he watched the coming night brush over the streaks of light coming from the other side of the house. He sat there while the moon swelled on the horizon, bloated and red, and he thought about his bike, and how well it would weave between the yellow strips of a two-lane road. He sat there until Sheriff’s car rolled down the ruts of the driveway and threw white splashes of light across the trailer. He didn’t move until the Sheriff guided him gently down the steps, past his momma’s beat up Gremlin, to the back seat of his cruiser. Randy didn’t see the Sheriff go back into the trailer, didn’t hear the Sheriff mumble something about a call from a worried neighbor, didn’t notice the cold vinyl seats in the back seat of the car. He drifted instead, let his bike carry him away from Royal and down the roads to places Floyd and Harold and the Sheriff had only heard about, places where he just passed through, on his way to someplace else. Because there was better than here.
That was 2001. I spent the next four years adding to it, trying to find the plot, discover the characters, what have you. Everyone got their own chapters: Harold, Floyd, the Sheriff, Audrey. By the time I started graduate school in 2005, I had close to a hundred pages of the “novel” and couldn’t move forward without screwing up everything I’d already done. I figured the program would help me find my way. I learned a lot in the MFA program. I learned about character need and the pathetic fallacy and resonance and truth-telling; I was schooled in the Wedge, iterative perturbations, mountains, icebergs, and Moby Dick as toilet reading. I stuck with Randy the whole time, trying to apply what I was learning to his story while trying to figure out what his story was in the first place. I started over from scratch, salvaging what I could from the original story but beginning anew. I put together a hundred and twenty pages for my thesis and graduated.
Nine years I’ve been working with these characters in one form or another. I’ve spent the last two years talking about just finishing the damn thing so I can move on. Finishing became the only reason I kept working on it. I convinced myself that if I quit this novel, if I stopped writing and started something else, I was damning myself to never finishing anything and dying just another failed writer. It didn’t have to be good; it didn’t have to be publishable or even readable; it just needed to be finished so I could say, truthfully, that I’d written a novel and could move on to another project with a clear conscience. I kept telling JT, my office mate, fellow UO alum, and first/best reader, I would finish the first draft by the end of the summer. I made grand statements, steeling my voice to show my determination: “Two thousand words a day. I can do that, no problem. They don’t have to be good words, just words.” And JT would smile and nod and tell me how ambitious that was and wish me luck. And I’d take my writing implements to Starbucks and steadfastly not work on the novel. I’ve been doing that for months, now. I hate the idea of reading what I’ve already written so I can find my place again to continue the work. I dread the effort it takes to get back into that space, the commitment required to tell the truth. When done right, writing is expensive, and sometimes–often–I’m unwilling or unable to pay the price.
Back in early May, I’d gone to Starbucks to write (aside: I write at Starbucks because I can’t write at home. It’s all in my head, but that’s how it is.) and managed to get a few pages down. I was working on Randy’s storyline, bulling ahead in the absence of insight or planning. It wasn’t the best writing I’ve ever done, but that’s not the point. I finished the scene, wrote that last sentence, and had to go outside and bawl as discreetly as I could because that scene, that ending, cost me dearly. It doesn’t matter that it’s maudlin and overwrought or whatever. To make it better, to revise and rewrite, I would have to somehow jigger the words to connect my hurt to Randy’s hurt to the reader’s own experience so they could feel it just as sharply as I did. And that’s a whole lot of effort to go through for a story I’m tired of and a character I no longer give a damn about.
A few days ago, I decided it was time to give up. I moved the folder containing Jar of Change from the “In Progress” folder to the “In Limbo” folder. It’ll stay there for few years or until I decide to reorganize my writing folders again. Jar of Change is no more. I don’t care what happens to Randy anymore. I don’t care to know how he copes with losing his mother or entering the foster care system. I don’t care what happens to the Sheriff or Harold or Audrey or the drifter who started this whole mess. The only character I care at all about is Floyd, and he’s not going anywhere. I think I’ll come back to him, but right now he’s bound up in the novel that spawned him, and I can’t see him elsewise. I need time and distance to figure out how to extract him from Randy’s story and help him find his own. In the meantime, he’ll stay in limbo with the rest of them.
It’s a shame, really, because I really like Floyd. I like how he talks to himself and thinks himself a damned fool for having feelings and succumbing to them. I like that he sits at the breakfast table and smokes and uses a saucer for an ashtray so he can remember his wife nagging him about using her good dishes for his filthy habit. I like that he feels both older and younger than his 63 years and isn’t bothered by the negative capability it inspires. But none of that means anything if there’s no story for him to inhabit, no means for him to grow or change or not. Part of me insists I just need to keep slogging forward, one word at a time, until I reach some place that could be called an ending. There’s also a certain comfort that comes from having an unfinished novel, a novel in progress: I always have something to talk about–cagily, to be sure, so I don’t offend my own maxim of talking the writing out–when I’m out with my writer friends. It’s always there, full of potential, just waiting for me to give it my attention.
“Slow,” I can say when asked how the novel’s coming.
“I’m making real progress. It’s really opening up to me now,” I can say when an idea for a new direction has occurred to me and I need to practice describing how that idea changed everything once I actually write it down.
And the really sneaky thing about all this is that, in many ways, it’s legitimate work for a novel in progress. All this thinking and talking and stopping and starting can actually be part of the process. Sometimes it’s even necessary. But the problem is you never know what was legitimate and what was a waste until you’re well past it. Even if you don’t finish the novel or the story or the essay, all these elements still go into your toolbox for later use. Or so the thinking goes. I both believe it and scorn it. This works for me. It’s time for me to move on to other projects, to stories I’m excited about and characters I care about. I’ll find them as I go.
In the old days, before thumb drives and cloud backups, writers had actual physical copies of their aborted or failed or terrible novels and called them trunk novels: Works stuffed into a trunk to never see the light of day. This is my second trunk novel, and I’ve learned a whole lot more from this one than I did the first one. By traditional thinking, a trunk novel should never be shown to anyone lest the author’s shame be exposed to all (as is more often the case, pulled out and sold after the author has achieved some success, not that this is a good idea). I should probably abide by that tradition, but, predictably, I’m not going to. I’m going to paste in one last section, not because I want to show off or elicit praise or shocked demands to not deny the world the brilliance this novel could become (though I would entertain such reactions with suitable humility and gratitude), but because I think it deserves a respectful burial, a chance to stand on its own merit–or not–just once before disappearing into the trunk.
Right now Floyd needed to tend to the tablecloth he’d left soaking in the sink. With a grunt, he pushed to his feet, felt his feet protest as they took his weight again, then headed back to the kitchen, trying to limp on both aching feet. He kept asking himself why he was doing all this, what he hoped to accomplish, and he kept telling himself to shut up.
“Needs doin’,” he mumbled, again.
He pulled the plug in the sink and watched the dirty, gray water seep away, then ran cold water over the mass, pushing on it to make sure the water rinsed it well. Carefully, he began wringing it out, surprised by its water-soaked weight. It was one of Irene’s winter projects, a crocheted table-cloth that covered the huge dining room table. It was made from fine thread and had intricate patterns of loops and whorls that made a field of precision white flowers. Floyd marveled at the craft of it, the work Irene had put into it over the years’ worth of winter months. She’d crocheted for hours, and the next thing Floyd’d know, she was ripping it out again, her tongue pink at the corner of her mouth.
“Now what’re you doin’ that for?” he’d ask, frustrated for her.
“Missed a stitch,” she’d say. And before he knew it she’d ripped out all the progress she’d made and more. She’d known best, he knew now.
He spread the tablecloth out on the table, a layer of towels under it to soak up the damp. It was damn near perfect as far as he could tell. A click of grief turned in his chest, and he looked away. Then he turned back because this, too, needed doing.
“Oh, darlin’” he breathed. “I miss you so much.”
Tears brimmed, fell, and he let them come, let them take over as he wandered around the table, feeling the time-threaded strands that held the tablecloth together, tried to feel it the way she’d felt it. But his fingers were blunt and told him only that she’d touched this, too, not what she’d known as the thread became a stitch, a tileover, a purl. He swept a hand over it, light, felt the rough pattern on his palm, the tug as a callus caught a thread.
His breathing finally eased, stopped hitching in his chest, and he wiped his eyes with the heels of his palms. The hard knot behind his sternum loosened, and the ache that had plagued him for three years ebbed, almost to nothing. He took a deep breath, felt air reach places long starved, felt his chest swell and creak like an under-worked muscle finally stretched and flexed. Floyd stared at the white field of the tablecloth, grateful, suddenly, to have it, to have taken the time to reacquaint himself with it. The moment passed, time moved along, sucked the juice from it until it was just a memory, still fresh enough to help but gone for good.
