What's Going On There?
Like Pearl, I have great faith in the sidelong glance.
When her legs are working, she uses it mid-charge, mid-frolic. It’s a feint. She darts to one side and then another, then absolutely stops, her gaze fixed at an intense angle away, then whoosh, starts up again in what seems (to her, at least) an unanticipated direction.
When the legs are stiff, there’s the more passive sidelong glance. This one that comes from the apparently resting Pearl, the glance that secretly watches the kitchen, always always always on the look-out for the opening of the fridge door, and then, for that distinctive swoop of cheese.
What I’m talking about here are ideas. How to get them when novelling, especially when doing headlong unplanned novelling; when in other words, you are stalled.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a bit stuck in my “novel”; the bi-furcated plot refusing to “unfurcate,” my two sets of characters on separate, unfeeling, trajectories–never, it seemed, would the twain meet.
And then, finally, yesterday having just passed through the old Helmsley building trying to shut out the sounds of UPS’s morphed version of “That’s Amore”, having just congratulated myself on my maturity for not checking my email when walking–I glanced it: the connection–closer than Kevin Bacon–and more importantly, with emotional heft.
I kept walking, not really daring to think–well, of course, I was thinking furiously–like Pearl darting around, but all the time also trying to keep my peripheral mental vision clear.
Sidelong ideas creep over the edges of consciousness unexpectedly, the “eureka” moment often surprisingly off-point.
Tips:
- If you want an idea to swoop down, you have to leave an open runway, that is, a brain that is not actively digitalized.
- When I don’t want to just wait for an idea to just swoop down, I find it helpful to think of random images of characters, and especially, dialogue. Yes, I do go through repeated plot possibilities, but these can have a very arbitrary feel. I am more successful (or at least excited), when I just let myself hear characters talk. Amazingly, all kinds of flashes of people and dialogue will arrive, which are somehow “writeable” even if I don’t know yet exactly how they will fit in.
- It is also helpful to give characters certain physical and vocal characteristics based on people I know, even if the characters are not really like these people. (They grow farther and farther away as the story progresses.)
- The sidelong doesn’t really like the “headlong” – either the rush of the intensely driven, or the overly-cerebral. Try to be a little less pragmatic with your characters; let them have a little space, wasted time. (Don’t tell them you may cut all of that.)
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