15,000 words in . . .

I began this new novel (working title is Ordinary Life) with a plan to write it the way Dean Koontz does. For years I’ve shown my students Dean Koontz videos in which he describes his writing process. He begins with some notion, then starts with the first page and revises that first page perhaps twenty or thirty times until it is perfect in his eyes. Then he moves on to the second page and repeats the process. That is how he says he makes it through the novel. He says he does not know where it is going.

I began the same way, with a 16-year-old boy on a Gitane Tour de France ten speed.

I have found I can’t yet pull off dozens of rewrites per page, but have settled into the pattern of one chapter per day, drafted and then revised twice.

Like Koontz, I also do not know where the novel is going. I have not outlined at all and have no idea of the ending.

I have discovered something remarkable though, perhaps a gift I keep getting.

When I finish a chapter–I have done fifteen so far–I have a tiny inkling of what the next chapter will involve. Then, as I write, the chapter appears before my eyes. The invention just happens.

This phenomenon is maybe something like what Robert Spitzer describes as Bernard Lonergan’s horizon of complete intelligibility. Lonergan offers an explanation for why we can ask every kind of question and how we know when we ask a question and get an answer, that that is not a complete answer, but there is more out there to know. In other words, how do we always know we don’t know everything and that there is more to know?

Lonergan posits that there is the one, unrestricted intelligibility that is the answer to the complete set of questions about the universe. With our rational intellects, we share in a very limited way, that unrestricted act of thinking.

My writing experience these past thirteen writing days (I take off Sundays) is that each little inkling when incarnated in words, opens up the next little inkling.

For example, today, I know the thing the next chapter must lead to, so I know how to begin tomorrow.