Confessions

I don’t think I’ve ever had a story receive quite as much contradictory feedback as my “Julie” has—and this after the 5 distinct drafts I put it through, changing elements of the plot, trying on endings like hats. To have so many people each like a different part of it, each have their own take on what should be cut and what actually works, has been intriguing but also exhausting, and this story has already exhausted me.

This weekend I was so frustrated by Talassio that rewriting “Julie” seemed the lesser of two evils, so I went back to it this week. And instantly condemned myself to one of the more exhausting stretches of time I have known. Contemplating wholesale revisions, trying to feel my way through a dozen or so critiques, many from people I know, people whose opinions have served me well in the past . . . and all the while aware that as per usual that first finished draft (number 5) was long, far longer than any market I could envision for it, much less the one that had kickstarted the idea in the first place.

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(Yes, that scene. That scene.)

The end result of it all?

There are now two “Julie”s, in addition to her namesake, in addition to the Joan from the Confessions. In one “Julie,” the story continues on after her first transformation; in the other everything is compressed, kept tight, though it too ends in that bookseller’s.

And, unfortunately, I like them both. They make the same choice, they reach the same end, but they travel slightly different paths which puts a different spin on their choice. They say different things, but everything they say feels important. Would that I could send them out into the world, side-by-side! They’re like fraternal (sororial?) twins. My two Julies, my two angry girls. I cannot chose between them; therefore they’ll both have to find a way out there, somehow.

so now i am Back, trying to finish rousseau, and digging into writer-friends’ brains for ways to fine-tune the omni pov that is in most of the book . . . some months ago i had stuck this quote up here, part of my little collage of pictures and sayings and whatnot:

Only the evil man lives alone. – Diderot

so last night i found it again, in rousseau. except that he put it in his confessions because he thought it was a personal dig at him, natch. ( i am in old, paranoid rousseau now. it’s getting a little wearying.)

but he does expand on his upset, pointing out hermits and thinkers who have withdrawn from the world, how when diderot writes “alone” he really means “not-paris”. i grew up in new york, so this rung a chord: i still know people for whom the world ends at either river, for whom moving to brooklyn is just “too far away”.

and it made me think, again, about the importance of connection in the novel. how it has turned out thus far, with no conscious planning, that it is the solitary characters who are twisted and mad, the engines of violence. an instictive decision? writing is a solitary act, after all, and downright violent much of the time . . .

it relates too to the pov question, how one close third just didn’t work for this, though i have written that way for much of my life. too narrow, and without the complicated, greater context of europe in this time. i was always presented with rousseau the great thinker, rousseau the champion of equality; i never knew of rousseau the rapist, rousseau the purchaser of 12-year-old girls. current categories and understandings imposed on the past, to be sure; but that is part of the dynamic here, that what we would see as depraved was the norm for many, and not just a noble elite either. hard to convey in 100,000 words or less, much less one character’s head. perhaps it is not that the evil man lives alone, only that the solitary man is much more clearly perceived as evil, that once you are acting among many, like or against them, any such judgment becomes complicated?

Julie.

little synchronicities, again