[Image: photograph, Rock of Ages #15, by Edward Burtynsky: “Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991.” Click image for larger view.]
This Paying Attention series of posts has recorded, intermittently, one or another aspect of writing (mostly) the novel which I’m now calling Seems to Fit. Every now and then I remember something important which I’ve forgotten, in the flush of creation (or re-creation); and I want to “bookmark” it, so to speak, lest I forget it again. (By “it,” I don’t mean a fact or a plot point. I mean something about the writing or the writing process itself.)
I’d laugh to think of these as “writing tips,” because I have no idea if they’re important to anyone else — or (if so) just how important. (And yes, I know — I often use the second person in them: You need to do this and that, and so on. Just talking to myself, see?)
But it’s been a while since the previous Paying Attention post, and I’ve almost completely shut off the tap of posts about Seems to Fit in general. In part, this stems from what’s going on in the book at the moment: each main character gets his or her own “final” chapter in preparation for the book’s gigantic next-to-last one; so in these chapters — which I’ve been working on for two-three months — I’m sort of saying good-bye to these people, in a book that I’ve lived with, one way or another, for twenty years. (Do not assume from that sentence, btw, that I’m bumping them off.) So to me it feels like an extended private moment, between them and me.
In a larger sense, though, my silence about Seems to Fit flows from something which I think has distinguished my blogging from my writing of fiction: carefulness.
