Don’t call it a comeback

Amazingly–considering not much is happening in my life–lots to discuss this eve…

-The Fourth Floor is launched, and no, we are not famous yet. I’m actually not too sure if anyone outside of our friends and family have even seen it. And I definitely have no clue if people like it. I think overall, it’s been a fairly positive but slightly tempered response.

I don’t have a firm grasp on how I feel about the project yet. I think it’s good. Not great, but very solid. I think it’ll only get good-er and solid-er. I like that we’ve done it, and I like that we’re going to continue to improve our craft and hopefully expand our fan-base. And the launch party was fun. And Roosevelt Island loves us.

-To make me feel better about all the non-writing i’m doing, I posted 3 more chapters of The Kings We Are tonight. Then, to maybe rouse my creativity, I read those 3 chapters for the first time in forever. The work for re-writing the novel has mostly consisted of me trying to outline a more cohesive, interesting, and (being totally honest) existing plot. I know these characters and I know what I want them to do and what (for the most part) is going to happen to them. The thing is though, I’ve been ignoring the actual writing part of it. The style, the pacing, the diction… You know, the good stuff! So i think it was good to go back and read through more than i have been. The writing itself is what the agents and editors liked1 … it was that aforementioned lack of plot that fucked me.

Anyway, since i love plot-lacking, i’m gonna move on sans-transition to my next thought… I’ve been wondering if i should focus on the re-writes or on starting a new story. And it’s boiling down to a basic tenant of any art… what am I trying to say? This is a concept that, for me, becomes proportionally more difficult to remember with the length/size of the piece. A blog entry bitching about morons? Easy to stay on point. A rambling, 360-page novel about life, friendship, wisdom and eating… it gets difficult. 2

But if I think that Kings is the best vehicle for getting my theme-of-the-day across, then I think that’s where I should focus my energies. It’s rare for me to get a centralizing-ideal that I can go off about. I’m good at coming up with random scenes and conversations, disjointed ideas that may or may not fit into a bigger puzzle. But finding that common thread that sews them all together? There’s the rub.

This has all been pretty random, but I guess this is my blog, soooooooo bite me.

I’m gonna cut short my other digressions for this entry, cause i’m tired. I will say that after work today, I came home and debated whether to practice playing guitar or to practice playing Guitar Hero. There’s something symbolic in that debate, but, since I ended up rocking out on Guitar Hero and leaving the real thing sulking in the shadows, I don’t think I want to ponder it further.

1 this is from the actual, true and amazing story of my “career” when i first moved to new york, and i think i may share it one of these days. It explains why, years later, I haven’t succumbed to law school.

2 A rambling, 500-word blog entry at 2 in morning written while watching sportcenter and eating a honey n’ peanut butter sandwich?… Priceless.

Like this:

Be the first to like this post.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 2:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to Don’t call it a comeback

dizzy says:

January 31, 2008 at 12:52 pm

I have two comments, which are both about Michael Chabon, and which are really only one comment, and a long winded one at that. Talk about a run-on.

Come over to my house as soon as possible and ask me to borrow The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon. I think you’ll find it inspiring. Read it NOW. Read it when you are up at 3AM. Read it when you are on the bus. Hold off on the PTI podcasts for now. When I read it, it reminded me a lot of The Kings We Are, very loosley of course, but it’s one of the greatest coming-of-age stories ever written. The plot is focused, the characters are dynamic, and it is just a great piece of work.

Staying on the Michael Chabon note, I think that it may be time to put the Kings to bed. There comes a time when a good story just can’t come together for whatever reason. In light of this, I refer you to Wonder Boys, which was based on Michael Chabon’s experience trying to write his second novel. Or, I quote from Wikipedia:

Struggles with second novel

After the success of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon spent five years working on a second novel. Called Fountain City, the novel was a “highly ambitious opus….about an architect building a perfect baseball park in Florida” that eventually ballooned to 1,500 pages, with no end in sight. The process was frustrating for Chabon, who, in his words, “never felt like I was conceptually on steady ground.”

At one point, Chabon submitted a 672-page draft to his agent and editor, who disliked the work. Chabon had problems dropping the novel, though. “It was really scary,” he said later. “I’d already signed a contract and been paid all this money. And then I’d gotten a divorce and half the money was already with my ex-wife. My instincts were telling me, This book is fucked. Just drop it. But I didn’t, because I thought, What if I have to give the money back? I used to go down to my office and fantasize about all the books I could write instead.”

When he finally decided to abandon Fountain City, Chabon recalls staring at his blank computer for hours, before suddenly picturing “a ‘straitlaced, troubled young man with a tendency toward melodrama’ trying to end it all.” He began writing, and within a couple of days, had written 50 pages of what would become his second novel, Wonder Boys. Chabon drew on his experiences with Fountain City for the character of Grady Tripp, a frustrated novelist who has spent years working on an immense fourth novel. The author wrote Wonder Boys in a dizzy seven-month streak, without telling his agent or publisher he’d abandoned Fountain City. The book, published in 1995, was a commercial and critical success.

Reply

Elevators Go Up