The Manuscriptist
April 22 It hit me while I was vacuuming the house yesterday. I was vacuuming the dining room with this new vacuum cleaner I just bought—my first time to use it. I got it on sale at Target. But never mind about that. I was vacuuming and letting my mind wander wherever it wanted to go, like a dog off its leash. I was in a good mood because I like to vacuum and also because I’d just finished another novel—my fourth. Well, I say novel. It’s actually my fourth novel manuscript. It won’t be a real novel until it’s published, of course. It won’t really count until then. That’s what I was thinking about in the dining room. I have three manuscripts finished and on the shelf, unpublished and gathering dust. And now I have a fourth one ready to send around to the same cabal of agents and editors who turned down the first three. I’ve even started working on number five. I was already at work on it yesterday morning, the day after finishing number four. I’ve always wanted to think of myself as a novelist, but yesterday in the dining room I realized I’m not one. Novelists write novels. Poets write poems. Playwrights write plays. I write manuscripts. I’m a manuscriptist. By the time I got to the kitchen and was running the nozzle along the base of the refrigerator, I was absorbed in imagining the life of a cockroach. What a restless bird the mind is.
April 29 The new manuscript is finally in the mail. Well, the query letters and sample chapters are in the mail. By this time in July, I’m sure I’ll have a new stack of rejection slips to add to my collection. That’s okay, though. I’m thinking about using them to paper the walls in the bathroom. It’s either that or buy some paint. I’m showing up again. See? Okay, okay. I know I should be working on the next book, but it’s not going so well at the moment. It’s the narrator. He’s being difficult. He keeps interrupting when I’m writing his dialogue. He keeps insisting on saying things his own way. It’s very disconcerting. I’ve never had a character act like this before. The son of a bitch. If he weren’t the narrator, I’d just write him right out of the story. Maybe I shouldn’t have made him a novelist. We all know what sticklers they can be about dialogue—hell, words in general. And then again, stories never turn out the way you expect them to anyway. They begin. Somebody shows up. Things happen. The words take on a life of their own—which makes sense of course. That’s all our lives are in the first place, just a jumble of stories bumping into one another like so many people leaving a stadium. It’s like Broadman said when I was in grad school and a bunch of us were sitting around drinking beer at Kirby’s late one Friday afternoon. He was one of my professors, and he was drunk. He looked across the table at me and said, “The last 30 minutes?” “What about them?” I asked. “The last 30 minutes you just finished living. That’s my story. I wrote that.” “Yeah?” “Yep.” “Needs more character development,” I said.
May 5 I’m showing up. I have one hour. I’m late by about nine minutes, I know, but I’m here and I’m still planning to work for the full hour. I figure I can go until 10:00 a.m. It’s now about 8:56. I opened the laptop at 8:54. I was planning to be here by 8:45, but I needed to clean up the kitchen and take out the garbage. I’m here now, though. I’ve showed up. It’s now 8:57 on a cloudy, cool workday morning, and I’m here for an hour. I’m here to make words. I’m here to catch them and stuff them in a jar with alcohol-soaked cotton balls, and then pin them on this screen after they’ve hardened into something dead and beautiful. See how I’ve spread their wings wide in this dull morning light? See how their iridescence blazes into a rainbow when you toggle them by the window? I’ve not been working on the book over the last several days because I’m still having problems with the narrator. Every time I try to write something, I keep hearing him in the back of my mind saying things like, No, no, no. That’s not the way to do it, you idiot. Don’t say, “The drive down from the city did me a world of good.” That’s so pedestrian. Why can’t you change it to something more interesting—like “The drive down from the city washed over me like warm rain rinsing away the dirtiest snow.” That’s too wordy, I told him. Bullshit, he said. This happens every time I pull out the novel and try to work on it now. In that last instance, for example, he just wouldn’t let it go. We argued back and forth about how to describe that damned drive until he finally pulled his car onto the shoulder and refused to go any farther until I changed the sentence. He just sat there with his arms crossed and the motor idling. I feel like I’m in some sort of weird schizophrenic movie. Excuse me. I mean I feel as if I’m in some sort of weird schizophrenic movie. See? He’s even correcting my grammar now. Before I know it, he’ll be telling me what breakfast cereal to pick out at the grocery store and which drive-through lane to get in at the bank. Like now. He’s telling me I should go back to that second paragraph above and break it into three paragraphs—at the end where I tell him, That’s too wordy, and he answers, Bullshit. I know, I know. You’re supposed to start a new paragraph every time a different person speaks, but this isn’t dialogue. It’s my journal, for Pete’s sake. If he wants three paragraphs instead of one, he can change it himself. Besides, this is my journal, not his. Let him write his own damned journal if he wants grammatically perfect dialogue.
May 9 I swear I think the narrator is rewriting my novel when I’m not looking. For instance, he no longer has salt-and-pepper hair. It’s now a light brown that streaks to gold when the sun hits it. When I saw that, I thought, streaks to gold? What the hell is that about? I changed it back to salt-and-pepper, but I haven’t looked since then, so I don’t know if he’s changed it again or not. He’s also made himself taller. I know this sounds ridiculous. I mean, how can a wholly fictional person typed into an aging computer do that sort of thing? He can’t, of course. But I don’t have any other explanation—other than maybe I’m going crazy. But that can’t be. I was out of town when he changed his hair and height. Maybe I’ll go back and make him bald. That’d show him.
May 11 Okay. Now I know something’s up. “Bobby” has changed his name to “Bob”—through the whole manuscript. I don’t want him to be Bob. I picked Bobby because my best friend in junior high school was named Bobby. Bob is too artless. Too curt, somehow. I told him that, too. We had a big argument about it—all inside my skull. He said Bobby was a kid’s name. So when was the last time you saw your old Buddy Bobby? Years ago. Decades even. I don’t remember, I said. Well, I’ll bet you 50 bucks he doesn’t go by Bobby anymore. Robert, maybe. But more than likely he goes by Bob. That’s what happens when you grow up. You don’t know Bobby, I said. I don’t have to. If he still goes by Bobby, then he probably never did grow up. He’s probably a loser. He probably works somewhere with Bobby stitched over his shirt pocket. Don’t be a snob, I said. I’m not going by Bobby, and that’s final, he screamed. Then I heard a door slam, and he was gone. What the heck, I thought. If he wants to be Bob, let him be Bob. Some things just aren’t worth the hassle. Besides, he’s probably right about Bobby anyway.
May 23 “Bob” has run off one of the other characters. I discovered this when I sat down to work on the novel yesterday morning. I was reading back through the last couple of pages I’d written, and I ran upon a woman at his office named Jessica. I remembered writing about a woman in the cubicle next to his, but I didn’t remember naming her Jessica. And I certainly didn’t remember writing that she had long blonde hair and long legs to match. Then it hit me what had happened. Bob had been stirring around in my literary soup again. I leaned back in my chair and worked to remember the woman I’d written in there last week. Catherine. That was her name. It all came back to me. She was a sweet woman. Early forties. A single mom with a couple of teenage daughters at home and a father in a nursing home. Her husband had died of a brain hemorrhage a couple of years earlier. She was a little overweight, but she was a hard worker and took good care of her girls and her daddy. She was a born-again Baptist, as I recall. This Jessica woman sounds like a whore, though. The first morning she shows up, she’s fighting a hangover after a wild night with some law student she barely knew who told her he’d just passed the bar. She’s standing in Bob’s doorway wearing a short black skirt and a blouse that’s unbuttoned down to her bra. He’s written her so that she’s talking in this low sexy voice like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not and speaking in double entendres and acting slutty. By the end of the dialogue, she’s inviting him out for drinks after work. Even the cubicles are gone. He’s written both of them into fancy offices now. When I confronted him about Catherine and Jessica and all the other changes he’s made, he just shrugged. He said he didn’t like Catherine—said she had fat ankles. And the kids and the church thing were just not going to work. What do you mean not going to work? Look, she’s not my type, okay? So I made a little switch. To Jessica? Yeah. She’s hot. You can’t do that. Sure I can. I’m the main character here. That means I get to have the people I want. Besides, I’m going to fuck her later in the book. He actually used that word. He actually said he was going to fuck her. In my book. I couldn’t believe it.
June 4 This is bad. Bad, bad, bad. I’m thinking I may have to delete the whole novel and start over from scratch. That’s more than 40 pages of hard work, but I don’t know what else to do. Things have gotten completely out of hand. He’s taken over, and I have no control over anything anymore. The worst part is that he’s stopped talking to me. No more arguing about this or that. He just does whatever he wants. Changing his hair color and his name, giving himself a plush office, even bringing in a new girlfriend, I can deal with all of that. But after witnessing his latest crime—and that’s just what it is, a crime—I’m starting to think he’s capable of almost anything. It’s turning me into a nervous wreck. Look at me. I’m shaking as I write this. I guess it’s my fault. I guess I never should have brought Catherine back. I guess I thought if I let him keep Jessica, he wouldn’t care if I wrote Catherine back into one of the cubicles down the hall. I liked her. She was wholesome and earnest, and she worked so hard. He could have erased her, just cut those two little paragraphs I tucked in toward the end of yesterday’s writing. That’s all he had to do. But no, not him. He has to turn everything into high drama. So he kills her. Burns her up in a house fire—and not just her, but her daughters, too. Then strikes down her father with a heart attack just for kicks when the nurse brings the old man the news. All because she had fat, Baptist ankles, I guess. The man is brutal. If he does any more stunts like that, I’m pulling the plug. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to delete the whole story. I swear I am.
June 7 I’ve been up all night. I can’t sleep. I shouldn’t even be writing this down. I know he’ll see it, but I don’t know what else to do. I’m terrified, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I wasn’t going to look. I’d decided I was just going to ignore the whole thing for a few days. Give myself a little time to get over the mess with Catherine and her girls and the old man. But something compelled me to boot up the computer and open the file anyway. First of all, he’s changed his job. He used to be a mid-level editor at one of the bigger publishing houses who wrote novels on the side. Now he’s an executive with a corner office on the top floor, and he just sold the film rights to his first novel for a million five. Fine. I thought. Let him have the big swanky office and the glamorous life of a hot shot novelist. I don’t care. But then I saw where he’s added another character—only this one isn’t some oversexed bunny. It’s a failed novelist, a graying writer who’s never published a book, even though he’s written four already and is working on his fifth. The impudent bastard. He’s writing about me, I thought. He even inserted parts of my journals in the novel—even things from my handwritten notebooks. How did he manage that? And how has he been able to make so much progress in such a short time? He’s doubled the book to 120 pages in less than two days. It took me the better part of the afternoon to read everything he’s written since Tuesday. The part that’s ragged me out the most, though, is what he’s written about me—about the novelist, I mean. First of all, he throws in a weird plot twist where the man’s latest novel gets picked up out of the blue by a major publisher. A friend of his shows a copy to a friend who shows it to a friend, and bang, he’s getting a letter with an offer to publish it. From there, his life turns into a good-news-bad-news joke. He gets an above-average advance for the novel, but the very next morning, he wakes up feeling short of breath. As the day wears on, things go from bad to worse. He feels dizzy. His ribs tighten like shrink wrap around his lungs. His heart starts racing. He finally decides to go to the emergency room after dinner. They check him over for a heart attack but can’t find anything wrong, so they figure it’s stress and shoot him up with something to calm him down. He feels better. He goes home. The next day, he signs a book contract and deposits the advance check in a brand-spanking new savings account at his bank. Then in the middle of the night, he wakes up so far out of breath that he thinks he’ll suffocate before he can dial 911. The rescue unit from the fire department arrives less than 10 minutes after the call comes in, but he’s already dead. Natural causes. See? Good news, bad news. Except that there’s more good news. Or maybe it’s bad news. That’s what has me terrified. I’d just finished reading the part where he goes home from the emergency room when the phone rang. It was an acquisitions editor for a big publishing house in Europe. He told me he’d gotten a copy of my novel from a friend of my brother’s. I guess Sam had made her a copy of the one I gave him. The editor said he’d just finished reading it and wants to buy to it. He’s offering a very nice advance. He’s asked me to think about it overnight and call him in the morning. He said he loves the book. That’s all good. But ever since I got off the phone with him, I’ve been having a hard time catching my breath. It’s as if all the oxygen’s been vacuumed out of the room. My ears are ringing, too, and I’m dizzy. Even my chest hurts. Surely I’m not having a heart attack. A heart attack makes your left arm numb, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s something I ate. I’m going to have to finish this later. I feel like shit right now. I’m going to go lie down for awhile.
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(photo by Amanda Waits) |
