I was surprised last night to find that I once attempted to write a novel. In a box full of papers and junk from Tampa I found a stack of papers with a fully outlined, partly written novel of a dozen or so chapters. It’s about a sado-masochistic relationship between an older woman and a younger man. It interweaves elements from my life in 1992 with a story from a call made to the Apology Line around that time.
I remember almost none of what I wrote, but here and there are turns of phrases that I still use today. If not for the occasional recognizable sentence I might question whether I wrote this stuff at all. The quantity is amazing to me. page after page after page of stuff for which I have no memory.
It’s funny to recognize the elements. As part of the story one of the characters required a particularly unusual, distinctive name. I used the name of someone from my sister’s high school –someone I never knew for anything except her unusual first name. I couldn’t even tell you what she looked like, but her name floats through this story disembodied from its source.
Other characters in the book step from the page as people I worked with, people I remember but never knew, or those who are what the FBI would simply call “persons of interest.”
I question the integrity of leeching off reality for works of fiction. “Write what you know” is standard advice for anyone crafting a story, but at what point is one simply using the people in their lives for their own gain, or for their own reputation?
The writing is overblown. It is an avalanche of words. Where one word would suffice I use twelve. Where one short sentence would communicate the story I fill a full page with two paragraphs. Sentence after sentence sodden with multiple superlatives. Funny how this now-obvious weakness must have felt like a tremendous strength at the time. O lost!
But the story has its moments. The death scene is particularly interesting to me, as are other moments. Gonna think about this.
