Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars

“They didn’t tell you about the curse?”

At that moment she realized she would have to hide the lighter for the rest of her life.

She sounded like she had been gargling cigarettes.

That was before she lost her job as a David Lee Roth impersonator.

(It’s time to return to this exercise, as descibed here.)

There’s been none over the past few weeks. None.

The novel, of course, is a hobby, a side project, a creative endeavor, far from my reason for existence. It’s not my pay-the-mortgage work and it never will be. I really enjoy my paid work, but there’s a lot of it to do and I have to do a lot of it to be any good at it. Something has to give. Recently, it’s the novel that has given. I hope to have renewed progress to report next week. But I don’t guarantee it. Especially when there’s eelgrass everywhere.

In a throwaway line in his review of The Band’s Visit, ace critic Anthony Lane nails what I’m trying to write a novel about:

“When in doubt, strike up the band.”

If I had a monitor, I’d tape that quote on it.

“Don’t? Or won’t?”

A bit more on the same topic:

When you’re deep into a project, so deep that objectivity was gone long ago (i.e., when you’re writing a novel), you have to find a way to look at it with a fresh and new mind (a “beginner’s mind,” as the Zen masters — and today’s productivity bloggers — put it). It’s hard to do that as a critic — the whole point of being a critic is making judgments informed by experience — and the jump from critic to novelist is high indeed, at least for this one. Critics can refer to anything; the best novelists create their own world and ignore anything that doesn’t fit into it. It’s rare that someone (I’m thinking John Updike) can do both with equal authority and style.

Since I first read it in The New Yorker more than a decade ago, I’ve never gone more than a few months without rereading Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain,” later collected in his The Night in Question. I read it again in January, and — while ruminating on the difference between interpretive writer and creative one — this line, regarding the critic about to meet his untimely end, jumped out at me: “He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.” That’s the blessing and curse of the critic: he can call on all he knows, but he’s limited by his knowledge. That knowledge is crucial to his calling, but it prevents him from creating with a “beginner’s mind.” I don’t want to sound like a parody of a Jedi master here, but I’m trying to call on everything I know — and then set it aside so I can do my job as a would-be novelist.

(See this post on Leaf-Stitch-Word for a more interesting take on the benefits of being a novice.)

I want to know everything.

If I want to be a competent novelist, I have to stop.

Here’s why. Sherlock Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet, let Dr. Watson know why he doesn’t care that he doesn’t know that the Earth revolves around the Sun: “What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the Sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.”

I want to be up-to-date on all political, geopolitical, business, and technology news. But none of that will help me write a better novel. None of it. If I want to be truly creative, I have to put on blinders.

Back to it…

People sometimes ask me for rules about writing and I claim I have none. Well, I don’t. But someone in my house does.

Last year, when Lydia was in fifth grade, she came home with an index card she had filled out at school.

In 20 syllables, only three more than a haiku, she elegantly and authoritatively states what is to be done.

Onward!

UPDATE: As Lydia notes in the comments below, the index card was a fourth grade project, not a fifth grade one. Senior moment?

“Hello, 911? Yes, I have a Shania Twain song stuck in my head.”

“How do you define ‘real date’?”

No one thought to stop the fighting, because it looked like part of the act.

“It’s only a song.”

“But you wish things between you two were that way?”

“Of course. That’s why I wrote it.”

“And?”

“She’s my sister.”

The little black rock bounced off the side of the casket.

The butler said that Mister was out back in the teepee.

It wasn’t funny the second time either.

It was words, as usual, that got in the way of saying what he really meant.

As she hummed “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” it all became clear to him.

And that was the last time a road manager ever woke him up like that.

“Wait: This isn’t Warwick, Rhode Island?”

“That’s not the way people talk.”

It was, she reasoned, the last time she’d ever have to do this.

Upside down, everything looked different.

He looked at the bottle.

“That, my dear, is when I knew.”

He pulled the rubber band off the rock and unfolded the paper.

Despite his care, he cut two fingers on the glass.

It turned out, to his surprise, that a hip-hop musical comedy about lawyers was exactly what the Broadway audience wanted that season.

“And, if we do it in the manner I’ve suggested, there’s no way the Tolkien estate could sue.”

It’s more fun posting a single line of dialogue than any description. So I’ll do that for a while.

“No, it’s Agnes Moorehead.”

I’ll send a free something to the first reader who gets the reference.

“It’s like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Wanna play?”

“I am not delusional,” he said. Twice.

For a long time Jack used to go to work early.

“Honey,” she said. “You are old.”

He realized there would be more terrible records to defend, so he kept quiet.

As many of you know, I’ve been trying to write a novel that doesn’t stink. I’ve considered several ways to track its progress (or lack thereof) here. I thought of delivering daily reports (”Figured out a plot point, but now I have to redo that transition scene in Chapter 7.”) or maybe numerical updates (”Wrote 1,403 words, 263 of them worth using.”)

Jane led me to a better idea. She said I should post excerpts, which I’m not ready to do. But I am ready to post a sentence a day from my writing each day. I will present those sentences completely out of context, giving no real clues at to what’s happening in the broader text, but I wonder whether, a year from now, after you’ve read 365 disconnected sentences, you might have a tiny idea of what I’m trying to do. At the very least, it’s a structure that will force me to show at least some progress every day, even if I share only a sliver of it. So, here’s today’s sentence:

“I wanna be like that.”

Seeya tomorrow.