The Shape of Things

(Left: Kennington Gasworks, London) 

 

A woman once found herself fascinated with structure. She was entranced by the bones in her feet and her hands and her head, she photographed the undersides of bridges and the shapes of buildings, and just about any hunk of naked substructure she came across in her travels. And she wondered endlessly why things were made the way they were. “A paramecium not only has no brain,” she told herself, “it hasn’t a single neuron to call its own.” Yet she knew that a paramecium manages all the actions that define a living thing, from eating its lunch to making the beast with two nuclei with that hot paramecium next door. It could do those things because its one paltry cell had lots and lots of microtubules that served it as neurons served her. Different structures, similar functions. Fascinating. “My brain has about a bazillion cells, by actual count,” she said to anyone who would listen, “and yet much of what I do, especially on Mondays, isn’t a great deal more complex than that to which any paramecium might aspire.” Her lunches might be more interesting, she decided, especially leftover Indian food. And the chances were excellent that of the two of them, only one could write.

Writing has plenty of structure, even if you can make yourself forget those sentence diagrams that were burned into your retinas in seventh grade. Beyond the outline – and you might as well know now that I do make outlines, though I never actually follow one – every book has a shape that when we find it helps us understand how we might proceed to tell our story within it. Some resemble clockfaces or calendars or Route 66, or a map of Hell, or the contents of a box found under the bed. My latest venture, for which my subconscious is even now searching for a title, is shaped like an infinity symbol or a möbius strip. This shape is described in the opening paragraph, though not named, and it was this description that revealed the story’s shape to me. So I know that it will begin at some point, curve on upwards and over and back down, meet itself in the middle, and eventually come back to where it started, which point will by that time be somewhere completely different, since nothing stands still. This is a tremendous help to me in figuring out how certain events will unfold. Beneath this shape is an infrastructure of stories within stories, but the actual ironwork is still a little out of focus. If I squint, I can see tiny little people crawling around in there, getting to know their way around. When they do, I hope they’ll clue me in. 

I love writing about writing, or writing about anything, really. I could do it all day. It’s so much easier than telling a story. I’ve been critical of using writing about Stuff That’s Interesting to avoid writing The Stuff That Hurts if You Don’t Write it, and Also Hurts When You Do, and I’m not backing down from that stand here. Talking, Blogging, and Journaling, live or dead tree varieties, are none of them the same as writing fiction, so if writing fiction what you burn to do, don’t make the mistake of thinking anything else is an acceptable substitute. I’ve blogged and journalled, played games, called meetings, gone to lunch, swept floors, even cleaned ovens to avoid writing, so I know from avoidance. I have a story I want to tell, so I’m getting it down where someone can read it and hopefully buy it. I’ll do it on the days that are easy, and I’ll do it on the days that are hard. That’s my promise to myself and anyone who’s listening.

So here’s the rule: if I don’t write, I can’t write about writing, or write about anything else here. I won’t write here every day I write, ’cause hey, got a life, and when I do I’ll often write about things that seem unrelated to writing, but of course nothing is really unrelated. To anything.