Endnotes

Well, it is done. I wrote another five pages of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy yesterday and thought I had it finished. Except that the last sentence kept nagging at me. I ended up writing another couple of paragraphs this morning, and now I think I can officially declare this novel over.

It stands at 234 pages, which works out, in publishing terms to about 58,000 words. Quite respectable.

It all started out as an idea for a parody short story in about 1979. I then thought of it as an idea for a movie for a while. I tried writing it as a novel in the mid-to-late ’80s, but the result really stunk up the place. I then wrote it as a teleplay for a TV movie in the early ’90s, and actually got some interest from an agent. That deal fell through when she wanted me to change every damn to darn, every God to gosh, and wanted to remove every instance in which alcohol was used, which was plenty.

I then decided to try writing it as a novel as part of Na-No-Wri-Mo (National Novel Writing Month) in 2004. That November, I churned out a decent portion of a draft. That got put it aside for a year-and-a-half while I worked on radio scripts. I then started revising the chunk I had written, then kept writing more. I finished the first draft on March 9, 2007, and entered it in an idiotic contest on Gather.com. It foundered there, and I started work on the second draft, which mostly entailed rewriting the second half of the previous manuscript.

I also found out something interesting along the way: The book improved the more I took out the jokes. I had always thought of myself as a comedy writer who worked with serious themes, but it turned out that I was more of a serious writer with a well-developed sense of humor. Live and learn, huh?

I’m sure that there are parts that still need work, pages that will come back from an editor some day awash in red. And that’s okay. I’m willing to do that work. Later. Right now, I need a break. There are some short stories I need to give my attention to and air to breathe and life to live.

Writing a novel is a huge endeavor, and it mostly feels like you’re trying to swim from the White Cliffs of Dover to Coney Island. You spend most of your time alone and at-sea, and all you can do is to follow the sun over the horizon. I have now arrived, exhausted and out of breath. And by early next week, I’ll be thinking of writing the next one.

(This post is a mirror of one on my main blog, Are You Happy Now, Norman Mailer.)

Endgame, Perhaps

Yesterday, I started work on what I think will be the final chapter of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy, and the words came out in a torrent. At least, a torrent by my standards. I just pasted the verbiage into a Word document to get an idea of how much I actually did, and it came out to five pages. Now, you have to understand that, typically, one page of finished writing is a good day for me. Five page days come at rare intervals and are celebrated events.

The story itself is also taking an interesting turn. In the previous version, the last chapter wrapped things up in an ironic, almost actionless way. That is no longer the case. It’s in many ways a very traditional ending for a hardboiled tale and is kind of like the end of The Maltese Falcon and the chapter with Silver Wig near the end of The Big Sleep smashed together. At least that’s how it’s turning out. I honestly have no idea how it will end up.

(This post is a mirror of a post on my main blog, Are You Happy Now, Norman Mailer.)

Chapter 22 Complete

It turned out that I was just making the end of Chapter 22 of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy harder than it needed to be. As soon as I lightened up and let the story speak to me, it all came together in ten minutes. This is why writing is like trying to find the staircase in the dark. You’re going to bump your shin or stub your toe, but it generally works out fine in the end.

And so on to Chapter 23, which may be the last chapter or may not. The problem I’m having is that I’m not really sure what the solution to the mystery is yet. I have some ideas. I think I know. I used to really think I knew. But now it’s more bumping around in the dark.

Now let’s just hope that I don’t fall over that ottoman.

(This is a mirror post from my main blog, Are You Happy Now, Norman Mailer?)

Words to Live By

Authors have traditionally used epigraphs at the beginning of books or chapters to let the reader know what they had in mind while writing it. (There are exceptions. Max Shulman purposely misled his readers with his. In his book Barefoot Boy with Cheek, he gave a new epigraph for each chapter. The most memorable one is : “Mon oncle est mort.–Balzac.”) Well, I’ve finally dived in and joined the crowd.

Last week, while reading about the great dead French filmmaker, Jean Renoir, I came across the epigraph for my novel, Michael Drayton, Detective Guy. And I came across it with the posthumous help of Orson Welles. He had written an article for the Los Angeles Times back in 1979, right after Renoir died, and the one footnote in the Wikipedia article happened to link to Welles’s piece. I well remember when Renoir died. I watched his obituary on the evening news and was interested because he was the son of Pierre August Renoir, the Impressionist painter, and because Woody Allen kept mentioning him in his movies. (Grand Illusion is mentioned in Annie Hall in one of the scenes in LA and Renoir himself is mentioned in Manhattan. The look of both films is influenced heavily by Renoir.) A few months later, I took Film as Literature at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the professor screened Grand Illusion for us. It was brilliant. I was smitten.

So, there I was, reading Welles’s tribute to his friend and mentor, and suddenly Welles quotes a well-known line from Rules of the Game: “The terrible thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons.” And an epigraph was born. Or, rather, nicked.

The rewriting of Drayton grinds on. I’m finishing up the next-to-last chapter and am preparing to begin the final installment. Only I realized today that this current chapter lays out some material that could be spun out even further. And yet, I need to finish this draft by April 2nd, just in case it gets picked as one of the ten finalists in a contest being sponsored by the Creative Writing department of the university I work at. And maybe it doesn’t need to be spun out any further at all anyway. But that’s how writing goes. You feel your way through.

(This is a mirror post from my main blog, Are You Happy Now, Norman Mailer?