The Writer’s Fugue
I’ve been working on my third novel for the last few weeks (which I won’t give details about, if nothing else, I am superstitious) and have found myself in a strange, hazy place. I started the novel in early 2005, but it was lurking around in my head long before that, as far back as 2000 when I first visited Ireland and stood in a blue bedroom with a dead crow on the floor.
It felt like something lost, something written by a strange hand, something foreign to me. I knew the story. I knew I had written it. But I had no actual memory of the act of writing it – late at night? rainy afternoons? – or of creating the language that stared back at me from the white page. And so I wondered, is there some kind of fugue that comes with the writing of a novel? Is it such a grand undertaking that if we, as authors, really remembered the process, we would never attempt it again? Or, rather, do we work in a heightened state that becomes only a distant possibility after the fact?
I haven’t decided yet.
What I do know is that now, I am a different person, living a different life, and a different writer. Our voices are similar – there’s always those words that slip in too often, ‘enough’ and ‘imagine’ and, in this novel, ‘cerulean’ for some reason - but now the challenge is to blend these voices together and really see the novel.
So I’ll be rereading it. And writing. And finding myself in that lovely fugue again.