what Rose saw

Oh, I did it. I DID it. IdiditIdiditIdidit.

For 4+ years, my book about Greenland has sat on my hard drive with this dangling sentence at the end of 26,000 really decent words: “Rose saw”. I came to that point and I realized that I did not know what she saw. I was thoroughly blocked from whatever was going to happen next, stuck there, mired, how many synonyms can I come up with for this? The story was immovable.

I’ve worked on other projects since then, written some of a horror novel, experimented with copying Edgy Literary Fiction, etc., but that unfinished sentence has haunted me. I’ve tried to force the images to come to my mind so that I can describe them, I’ve tried to outline the plot of what comes next, I’ve tried a lot of vague and equivocating things to try and release the block and none of it has worked.

Last night I reread this (and yes, it’s the third time in a few weeks I’ve linked to that. It’s REALLY GOOD):

Writing is hard for every last one of us. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

So I dug. I sat in front of my laptop and I went one word, one shovelful, at a time. First she saw the road, laid with stone, then she saw the small houses with their peaked roofs, and then the curving road again, leading through the merchant district and around to the back of the cavern where the king’s house sat. Over there to the west was the lake country, and beyond that there’s another cavern (but she didn’t see it just yet). And then I thought up people for her to see, women who’d recognize Rose’s mother, and then they began walking down the road toward the king’s house, and there it was – the rest of the chapter. It took me three hours, but I blasted through the block and I wrote to the end of what Rose saw that day in the cavern.

When I closed the laptop to get to bed, I felt pride on a level that I’ve rarely felt about my own writing. I deserved to feel proud, I thought. There was no doubt creeping in about whether I was being arrogant or overblown. This was an accomplishment, writing through that block after four damn years of the dangling sentence. Maybe no one but me and BF will think it’s much of a big deal, but I know it’s a big deal.

I don’t want to venture that the hard part’s over, because I know that block is not the hardest part about writing this book. (Revision will be. It always is.) But I have really returned to this book, gone back to the laptop, and I will not let the inertia of my weirdening life keep me from finishing [a draft of] this book. Before December. I can do it. I will do it.