beginnings

I swing back and forth between possible characters. A few weeks ago I was so fired up to start this book. I was ready to write, but I still had my memoir to complete. I put the energy on hold. Now I seem to have lost my way with it.

I know that beginnings are difficult but I always forget how difficult until I try to begin something new. I am up and down with it. I think perhaps I need to sit with the books about brains, quietly reading for a while but this might also be an excuse.

I write:

Chris, Christopher, David, John, Jonothan, Frank, Gerard, Gerald, Paul.

I write:

You have a name that is short and practical. A workman-like-name. you have just turned 32. You are full of unearned confidence. You are deeply insecure.

We meet in our insecurity. We meet in our alienness, in the dammage in our heads. We both fail to communicate. We meet with our inability to accept the truth.

I am reaching into my guts yet again and searching for my own failings because a character must be floored. Without these floors we can not see ourselves in them. Whoever I become when I write this book, I will be cobbled together from my failings. Only with this beginning can I find some change by the end of the story.

For some reason I remember books I have read by T C Boyle. I don't want to write a book like this, although I enjoy them. Perhaps I am following the wrong path with this. I think about Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx and Ondaatje and I feel myself hovering at a twisted road shrouded in dead branches. I want to push through the lantana scratch and snarl. I want to find my way through. I want this path, not the clean and obvious one. I know that I am making life difficult for myself, but I will go to the shop now and buy a new McCarthy and begin to read it. I will find my way to this story via and different route.