First Date

My days, twenty-three days and twenty-seven chapters into this novel, are settling into a routine which I hope I can maintain.

At 25,000 words, I am perhaps one-third of the way through the first draft (each first draft chapter is written and rewritten and then polished).

I mentioned last time that I began each daily session with an inkling of what the next chapter should be (recall I am not pre-planning the plot but letting it happen).

Today, I didn’t have anything in mind except I knew my characters Lenny and Nancy (their working names) had to respond to Nancy’s request during their first date that they walk out of the Fox Theater one third of the way through the new film M*A*S*H. (M*A*S*H came out in the summer of 1970.)

This morning I successfully wrote, rewrote, and polished an almost 1000-word chapter.

Why mention all these statistics?

A novel is not a sprint but a marathon. Both are made up of many steps over a long time (two and a half hours for many for the run; perhaps three to six months for the novel (unless you are Donna Tartt: then it’s ten years).

This morning I ended with an interesting insight. In a story the writer is laying down cards by the choices he makes. As cards are laid down, they constrain the next choices. Cards must be revisited and developed and finally resolved. When all the cards are played out, the game is over and the novel is finished. The number of cards is decidedly finite.

Another way of saying this is the reverse of the Chekov principle. That certainly wise writing advice is, if there is a gun hanging over the mantle in the beginning of the story, that gun better come into play by the end. The writer puts the gun there because he has decided, in advance, to use it in the climax. The reverse is, if I put a bicycle smack dab into the beginning of the story without an ulterior motive, it better be darned important later on. Both the gun and the bike are ‘cards.’

In this novel, I have ideas I want to incarnate through plot. I never want to state them. I never want the characters to tell the reader what they are, but I want to leave everything to the mind of the reader to infer or even just to feel. A good plot respects the intelligence of the reader to fill in what does not need to be stated. I think the same is true for the truths a story can contain.

Here is a snippet from early in the evening before Lenny goes to the apartment where Nancy, her sister and brother, and her mom have moved to. Lenny is getting spiffed up.

Later, when Lenny told his mom about his evening plans, she kind of raised an eyebrow and smiled with the corner of her mouth.

When the time got close, he took another shower. He put on a clean pair of tan Levi cords, a sport shirt with a button-down collar, and a light gray sweater vest.

He combed his damp hair.

In the medicine cabinet he took out the bottle of Old Spice that had been sitting up there his whole life.

He pulled out the red stopper and smelled the contents.

He sprinkled some on his left hand, rubbed his hands together, smelled them, and patted his face, like on the commercial.

That smelled good, but faint, so he sprinkled some more and slapped.

That smelled even better, so he made a third application.

When he went into the kitchen, his mom was frying a pork chop. She looked him over and he was about to leave through the back door, but she said, “Hold up Romeo.” She got a clean washcloth from the second draw next to the sink, wet it, rung it out, and wiped his face.

“Subtlety is the key, my friend.”