The Panic Room

The Panic Room: it's not just a bar in Bay Ridge.

Somehow I have thirty pages of new material to write in less than thirty-two hours. At my fastest collegiate rate, I could write two pages an hour. Should this hold true, I should be safe twice over if I don't sleep at all until Thursday at 11:59pm. Should two trains leave the station in Brooklyn, New York, one called My Procrastination at 5pm headed for The Looney Bin, and one called Bocce Practice at 8pm headed toward Hangover, at what time will the two collide and I get nothing done at all?

Hold on while I work this out.

Carry the two...

If only I knew what the hell I wanted to write about. I started a short story about a 10-year-old with a learning disorder, a drunk mother, and a singular Christmas experience, but that fell flat. Then I tried my hand at a flash fiction piece on three high school kids who light a homeless man on fire underneath an old Ohio bridge. Nope. Nada. Both seemed so harsh, so crude - more in style, even, than subject-matter, and I felt neither showcased any of the deft language, sublime imagery or pure magic that I love in fiction. Bludgeoning. That's what these pieces felt like. Bludgeoning, bullying, brutish prose.

I'm heading back to the novel. The conventional wisdom is to submit short stories as part of your manuscript -- not an excerpt from a novel. Apparently sending in a sliver of a novel can show off character development, establishment of scene, point of view, and language, but gives no real insight into how well a writer can develop plot.

I really think I can develop plot. I just need 300 pages to do so. This 15-page wrap-up drives me nuts. I have never solved a damn thing in 15 pages. I'm at 26 years and I'm still 95% loose ends.

Come on, 5%. Write those thirty pages. Change the world. Find the plot. And own it.