I wish you people could see the graveyard of abandoned posts I have in my WordPress drafts folder. It’s a very sad folder, filled with half thoughts, nuggets of ideas, and bits of wisdom I wanted to share, but never finished. They eventually became irrelevant or uninteresting to me or just lost. I think one of my new year’s resolutions should be shorter posts that I can finish writing in a single sitting. Not that that’s relevant to today’s post. I just wanted to mention it as I thought of it.
November has come and gone. November brought a fabulous turkey with even better bourbon-cranberry sauce, the remains of my pneumonia (which had me taking a medicine that I couldn’t take within two hours of calcium, which meant a crazed planning of the timing of my milky coffee, which meant I’d often not be human until close to lunch time), and of course NaNoWriMo.
Nanowrimo is done my friends. And, yes, I am a…
I confess, I had extra motivation this year. About halfway through I started experimenting with the program Scrivener. And I am completely hooked. I don’t even use most of the features, but the ability to easily jump back and forth between chapters and even scenes (as opposed to either keeping the entire novel in a single Word doc or opening forty Word docs and scrolling them individually to find my place) was amazing. But I used it on a trial basis. And had to win NaNoWriMo. Because Scrivener promised 50% off for winners (coupon to come soon!). So that was the motivation.
But happily, I didn’t need too much of a motivational push. Because I’m definitely into my new story. I’m loving my visits to the 1930s (the novel takes place in August of 1935). The research has been fun and it’s a new form of escapism, retreating to a world where my protagonist doesn’t even have a phone, never mind an iPad 2. The novel is a mess, in total disarray. I realized midway that I need to restructure it, but that’s what December is for. I need to step back and look at the arc of the plot and figure out how to play with the tension and form to get it where it needs to be. I actually was quite surprised at how the book turned out. I thought for sure I knew what my main character was going to do–if you recall I had actually plotted this out ahead of time–and she completely surprised me! That’s the best part of writing; when things don’t go at all as planned.
Now onward to December! Time to get my hands dirty ripping this novel apart. It’s not that different from all that purging I’ve been doing. Gotta make a big ol’ mess before everything finds a place!
Lately I’ve been in a Dorothy Parker state of mind (minus the suicidal thoughts). No matter what I do, it always comes back to Dorothy Parker. She’s appeared here on occasion in my blog, as long-time readers will note. I first discovered her in high school, and throughout the years, I’ve felt her lure. For my research on my next novel–which will take place in the 1930s–I’ve been reading a lot about the Depression years as well as reading of the Depression years, which of course includes old New Yorkers and Dorothy Parker.
Whenever I think of Dorothy Parker and the New Yorker, I think of my paternal grandfather and his stack of magazines that he worked his way through, reading them cover to cover even when they were decades beyond current. Reading things from that era, I can hear my grandfather speaking; his language had the same rhythms, the same refinement as the literature. People were erudite in those days, their vocabularies so much richer. If someone spoke today in the language of the 1930s, people would think he was putting on airs. Oh, excuse me. That phrase is not really used today, is it? They would think he was showing off.
Tonight, I revisited Dorothy Parker, but when I went to look for my trusting Viking Portable from 1980something, I couldn’t find it. I did, however, find a second copy that I didn’t realize I had, the seventeenth edition printed in 1964 (originally published in 1944). The introduction alone, by W. Somerset Maugham, is amazing, and a topic for another post.
Flipping through it, I saw that it belonged to my maternal grandmother, who is not someone I associate with Dorothy Parker. Yet when I started re-reading it for the first time in over a decade, I saw where my grandmother might have been drawn to it. All the pretense for society, the masking of true emotion. That was my grandmother. My grandmother always underlined her books, and I scour those notations trying to decipher what she related to, what she found interesting.
I have inklings, and I’ll draw conclusions when I finish the book, plot out all my grandmother’s lines. But I need to get into a 1930s state of mind. So I switch from martinis to whiskey sours (Dorothy’s favorite drink), place a hat on my head, and travel back to the 1930s.
*”If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me…” —Dorothy Parker**
**EDITED: My father insists this quote should be attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth. My web searches indicate it’s Longworth. And Parker. And even Gertrude Stein. So I will leave you with something that is definitively Dorothy Parker:
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
