Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden
Journey into a new novel
1. Inspiration
2. Hurriedly write opening grafs
Fred? tucked a Ziploc bag under the windshield wiper of his truck. It contained an envelope and he could only hope new snow would cover it until it was found. (This could be too obvious foreshadowing)
He slipped the straps to a small backpack over his shoulders and turned to trudge through a thin layer of newly fallen snow to the beginning of a trail cut up a hill into a deep boreal forest in its climax stage. Huge spruce and birch trees stood tall in the woods, many of them so old they were rotting upward from their roots through their trunks until those trunks and their roots failed to support them and a windstorm or until those roots and trunks could not support the weight any more causing the trees to collapse onto the forest floor answering an old philosophical question if someone is there to hear. Branches from the trees still standing reached high over the trail creating in summer something of a canopy, a tunnel even, but in winter an eerie tangle of skeletal remains.
As Fred stepped onto the main trail he felt its reassuring firm base packed solid my numerous snowmachines, beneath his boots. He stood for a moment focused on that trail and a question came into his mind, one he'd tried several times to answer in the previous year or so. Is this the last time I am going to do this? He'd asked it several times as he began to feel the differing signs of oncoming age, but never could come up with an answer. He didn't have an answer for it this time either. As he contemplated it again his mind wandered to recollections of other times on this trail to a day when he sang out loud. He couldn't remember the song he sang that day. Only one time? He searched for other times a song had entertained him on the trail but none came to mind. A song did, however come up as he took the first steps onto the trail and it took his full concentration to stifle his voice. In his head, the Rolling Stones sang "This could be the last time, this could be the last time, maybe the last time, I don't know owo…"
With the Stones shouting in his head he began walking along the trail, leaving the civilization of the trailhead parking lot behind as he progressed deeper into the woods. He paced himself knowing shortly he would encounter one of the toughest parts of the trail. That would be the steepest hill he'd have to climb; there were others along the way but this one rose quickly several hundred feet. He planned to stop and rest during the climb. He saw no sense in wearing himself out in the first mile, a concession to the age that worried him.
3. Racing into notes and more ideas
LATER BEATLES LONG AND WINDING ROAD AND MAYBE CHARLIE DANIELS LONG HAIRED COUNTRY BOY
4. Goes off in several directions
Under foot packed by machines.
Segments and thoughts
work between reality and thought process.
Last time you do something
Wondering if you will ever do this again
5. Becomes a confusing tangle too complex to control, ideas flying fast and furious, jumping days, months, years. even decades, backward and forward, wild thoughts, like a lifetime love that never really existed or a questionable course change on a long ocean voyage and on and on crashing into each other creating such confusion nothing made any sense and it scared me. Was this one of those signs as aging declines into malfunction? Suddenly it stops in a sweeping clarity and falls away with a realization:
6. The whole concept is derivative
7. Realize the literary masterpiece it's derived from
8. Slide the whole piece into the false-starts folder
9. Pour a glass of wine, lift the glass to Hemingway with a nod to Jack London, Then:
10. Never mind! Next!!!!
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