I’ve had little time for writing lately. But the intention, and the work when time allows, is to return to the brain of my novel in progress. At intervals, when I approach the stack of notes, outlines, and diagrams, I find scrabbly handwritten pages, still to be typed up. Today, three such forgotten pages included intricate ramblings that I don’t remember writing. But based on the single sheets on which the words are written (not in the notebook, not on yellow legal paper) I recall now rushing to my daughter’s creative movement class, realizing I brought no work to do, and finding scrap paper. The words on the paper were extra crazy and weird, abstract and also specific, really just a spew of stuff about the textures and elements of this novel. If the last novel was water and air, this one is earth, metal, fire–so this is what the windings on those found pages contain.
“Just make some shit up,” my husband and I often say about writing fiction, part joke, part true. For now, when it’s hard to get back into the novel’s essence, I am grateful for these odd scrabbles to type up. Because I can always type. And I trust the Wexlerian principle of just putting it all in, pile it on, see what fits.
The junk yard of words is in no hurry, will wait for me.
Rebecca Kuder 