And this, and so much more?

Only one Fiction Writing class left, and I don't think I'm taking Advanced Fiction Writing next term. With seventeen pages left to write, I've become obsessed with Grand, a major character in Camus' The Plague.

Grand, like myself and others, finds himself writing slower and slower as he thinks about the precise implications of his words.

In Camus' novel, Grand has a fifty page manuscript dedicated to a single sentence, roughly: "One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrell mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne."

He wonders if "flowery" is better than "flower-strewn." He wants to tell a story, but he can't get anywhere because he's too self-conscious to get anywhere.

In real life, Gray spent seven years writing a 128-line Elegy; Plato left us at least seven versions of the first sentence in The Republic. So apparently this problem is well-precedented. May the almighty gods of English Literature help people like Prof Fritzell and Wittgenstein and Eliot, people who think/realize that signifier and signified will rarely, if ever, be the same thing.

Some writers have synesthesia, and give each letter a color and try to make the colors pretty. Some writers, like Tolkein, think about the sound of words independent of their meaning—Tolkein was the one who famously said that "cellar door" was English's most beautiful phrase, and he designed Elvish, first and foremost, to be melodious. Those people, with even more to consider, completely baffle me.

If I had stuff like that in my head whenever I tried to write a paper, I'd get nothing done.

(Prof Fritzell actually has this problem, but solves it by rephrasing/repeating/reiterating everything. He can't say exactly what he means, so he says everything he could mean. It gets repetitive, but the modernist in him will allow no less. Anyone who gets bored in his class isn't noticing Fritzell's bemused frustration with his own lectures.)

Come to think of it, I don't get anything done. I spent two hours writing tonight and finished about a page. I did, like Grand, obsess over individual words and sentences. That's why I don't bother with drafts, that's why I usually force myself to write the night before. I couldn't finish if I had the time to muse. Too many choices, too many connotations.

So I think I'll be in the library again tomorrow night, trying to write my characters out of wherever I trap them next.

I will take Satire. Writing, except for the effortless and time-consuming act of blogging, isn't as much fun as it should be. Next term will be fun, it won't take as much work, and maybe I'll enjoy writing an essay or two on Orwell and Heller and the like.