character

What is it about you that makes you unique? We have to see you wake into the world. This will be all of a paragraph. We need to see you take in these new facts of your life one by one as first, you attempt in vein to flirt with the nurse, the pretty nurse, the one that you would turn to first in any circumstance, your irritation that it is the unnatractive nurse that has the most time for you. The thing that irritates you most is that you have no control over something, perhaps it is just that the painting is skewed or that the un-lovely nurse has mispronounced a word and that he can't correct her mistake and that she does it several times until he is livid with his inability to put it right, this one thing. This scene this little unveiling will introduce him to you so that you know he is pedantic, confidant in his ability to charm, used to holding court, used to being someone who is being listened to, uncomfortable with listening. All this in a page, a short introduction to a man. This is what I have been needing for the beginning of this thing.

I need him to be fatally flawed in these ways and I need his first interractions with the world to show us this. I am supposed to read Gatsby. I have been told this by my friend - a friend I trust, and also by James Wood in his book How Fiction Works. I will read this book. I need input at this moment. I have run out of things to keep me centred. I need input now. This book will be a beginning for me. I will read it and respond to it and eventually I will work my way towards a beginning.

It is furiously busy at the day job and I am unable to find even my morning routine time. This morning I slept in and was late to work. I am grabbing a moment after work to find some space for this book I am trying to develop.

I must not fall into predictability because it is easy to do so. I must not be so tired that I write on automatic pilot. I must find this man in small moments that are surprising to me but that make so much sense of him.