But enough with the morbid metaphors.
On the one hand, I do think of my projects as living beings; bodies which grow, learn, and love, but on the other hand, their growth is only determined by what readers put into them or take away from them. And though I am aware that a text is somewhat stagnant, a zombie plastered to the page, craving brains to sustain its myopic life force, the creation process, however, is the exact opposite. Creation breathes, moves, thinks... creates. This is what people talk about when they say to write is to become a god, or some extremist cases, God. I am in control. I make my characters move, speak, react. I control the weather, the stock market, the length of a baby's gestation period.
But what to do when the creation is almost complete and riddled with sickness? Psychoanalysis teaches us to find fault, identify the root cause, the thorn in the proverbial side. And of course, inevitably, the fault lies with the author. It's my fault that my novel lacks emotional resonance, fleshed out characters, a sound and interesting enough plot to keep eyes from wandering. And what about wisdom? There must be some reason I want to write. I must have something to say that's worth reading, worth sharing, worth writing. Lately, I seem to only care about silence. I want to coddle my neurotic side and cuddle up on the couch with a good book, a better book, and pretend I'm soaking up valuable information, that I'm listening, when really I'm hiding from everything that I don't want to encounter. Not waterfalls, or tornadoes, or boogeymen, but those subjective, parasitic moments of nausea, when the world peels back and reveals itself as some ugly spectrum trapped inside a concept, or worse, when I peel myself back and only find a vague, Sartrean nothingness hellbent on qualifying, interpreting, and ascribing meaning to itself... myself.
This is where self-confidence becomes eroded, corrosive. And the things I wanted to say, suddenly aren't worth saying.
Maybe I should end this here. Give myself a blue star for the day and move on. But I want to edit. I want to change the way things are going, change my thought patterns, change my novel, give it chemotherapy. Make sure it has a fighting chance. The problem is, I haven't located the problem. I said it's a bone problem only because my novel seems skeletal. But it could also be heart failure or kidney failure. (Because, after all, an anorexic does have organs.) If it's the former, then I am screwed, done for, and the novel is not worth saving because then it would need a new heart, and a new heart pretty much equals a new novel, and this novel has already undergone two transplants. I'm not sure if it will survive another. But if it's the latter, and just cannot dispose of toxins properly, and this has gone on long enough to give it an emaciated look, then a quick kidney replacement should flush out what needs to be flushed out and in that find the strength to put some meat on its bones. Let's hope for a kidney transplant, a much safer operation.
It's like Henry James said in a letter to H.G. Wells, known better to me as part of a Mary Englebreit painting my mother hung on my wall as a child of a little girl scribbling away. You can still see the faded marker where she transformed the little girl from a blonde to a brunette:
"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process."
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