Charlottesville Notebook #3
When a Book and Its Writer are Carrying Too Much: a story about scale
Afternoon, Lab Coats. I’m feeling ultra-inarticulate this week, so I hope you’ll bear with me in my wandering. All is well, just lots is occupying my mind re Charlottesville.
If you’ve read the latest Storybelly Digest, you know I had a recent epiphany about the novel, and I am starting over.
This is a logical next step, actually, and one I couldn’t see I needed until I sat with a couple of writer friends last week who helped me talk through the plot and see what’s missing.
I was starting in the wrong place, for starters.
The fact that I have so much material and several drafts already is a good thing for this new draft, which will be as much a restructuring as anything else. (Who am I kidding?) I’m excited about the work ahead — I have lots of good energy for it. (Not kidding.)
I’ll say more about this as I work forward in this new draft, but for now I want to talk about trying to carry too much into a book and just having to do it until you don’t have to do it anymore. To wit:
Here’s s…