Marginalia (9), or Counting the Scales on My Major Gators

[netpositive]

Many people hear voices when no-one is there.
Some of them are called mad and are shut up on rooms
where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called
writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
Meg Crittenden

After several days in a row of producing words, last night
I was sociable, so all I got done late at night was working
on research. I have a monster spreadsheet of timeline rows
vs. character columns, and I pick my way through a swamp of
autobios and bios and campaign memoirs and battle analyses
to try and locate people, or events, at a time and place.

If you know me (or if you don't, and you want to know):

There's something ironic about the idea that I, with my
terrible memory for dates, am writing something where dates
and timing are often paramount in understanding what happened,
and what must happen next.

There is something amusing about the concept that I, with my
vague sense of spatial location, am writing something where
places and distances are going to be crucial in interpreting
what could have happened, and what could happen afterwards.

There is nothing, however, surprising about the fact that
what I want to write about is what happens to my characters.
I could not spend this much time with them if I didn't like
something about them. I went into this knowing a bit about
Meade, a little about Hooker, and nothing about Marcy; but
now when I write about them, at the best rare moments it's
like their spirits ouija my fingers on the laptop keyboard.

So last week, when I was squinting at a handwritten diary on
a microfilm reader, and I decipher "ran into General Marcy"
in a time and place where I did not expect it?

A snout, poking out of the swamp! I felt like I saw a friend
and received a wave of encouragement across three centuries.

It's an odd sort of dusty, dry excitement. But it's mine, and
whether you share or even understand it, it's I who have it --
and it impels me to try to share them with you, the reader.

Now I'm hoping to snare yesterday's words as well as today's.
I'm alternating being present in 1862 with a presence in 2008:
awake, computer, vote, chai, research, manicure, write, dance.
Sometimes the juxtaposition is not so bad, even if moments of
transition are disorienting. I have my personal goal of words
per day [which I compare with others and try not to weep at how
slow and unproductive I am] [and dread the revisions to come].

At present, all I can do is go forward, in order to go back.

All right, my friends. Hold your horses, I'm on my way--

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
Thomas Berger

Comments

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

I once had a math teacher who, (I was told later by her English teacher sister), was a very good student in many subjects, but went into math because it was the area she was least proficient in. She wanted to be able to understand why her future students were having trouble learning, which she would not have been able to do in a subject that came easily to her.

I perceive you concentrating on the space and time details because they don't come to you naturally and easily, therefore you realize that they need to be carefully herded.