‘‘Through my curtains I can see a big yellow moon. I’m thinking of all the people in the world who will be looking at that same moon. I wonder how many of them haven’t got any eyebrows?”
About ten parallel stories are colliding in my mind as I too ponder the number of eyebrowless people looking at that same moon Louise Rennison was looking at. I know I am sustaining a much longer story, yet it’s so tempting to start writing a low-commitment, fun new short story.Yesterday I realized I have to take a different route in my novel again. All along, I have been dodging the one essential point: what is the novel actually about? It is so hard to say. I know everything about it and I know nothing about it at all. I know what I am writing about, but I don’t know what it is that I am writing about. I have reworked the previous fragments and recycled them, gluing them together into one piece, but some of them just turned back into short stories. I am afraid of throwing away these ideas like the others, tossing them into the bin. I really wanted to stick with this last one to show my commitment through all the drafts and all the failures of not being able to figure it out.
So what now? What is it that I don’t get right? Did I sacrifice the plot for a particular mood or an image without a storyline? I thought I could find a form that could contain the type of writing I want to do.
The irony here is that my novel began to form in my mind during that summer when I couldn’t use my eyes for a few long days because of an injury. During that time of temporary blindness, I wrote about a character who… and it turned out that the way I was seeing my own life was my blindness. Will I ever be able to finish this novel?