It feels weird writing this. Just last week, I was completely wrapped up in the potential direction my words could take; now that momentum has gone from me. Which is expected, it happens all the time! But I still have the words floating around in my head, waiting to get out. But now, coming to write them, they’ve escaped me. Maybe because I didn’t sleep last night and my brain is half melted 🤷♂️
I have the timeline mapped out, as far as it needs to go: Birthday visit, granny drove me, except she didn’t, I think that was the funeral. So now I have 2 streams of history floating around in my head, and the urge to write them both. It was better before, when I had the singular drive, I think I left it too late. I need to remember why it’s important to write it all out when it comes to me.
It’s weird, writing. I guess it’s kinda like conversation, where you have a tiny seed of awareness for what’s coming next, but you don’t necessarily know what will follow, just a self-propelled nudge towards a corridor of potential.
I’ve already written that granny driving me and the birthday were the same event; I might try to play with that. If I’ve said that I was driven there, but finish the birthday section by saying that I have to take my train back again, what happens in the readers mind? Is my approach so dense that it’s hard to keep track of it, or will the reader notice? I kinda hope they do. Maybe check back. I like the idea of playing with the meta reality there, where you as a reader can go back to something and inspect it thoroughly, an action that’s that’s not possible for the narrator, who just has these jumbled histories in their mind.
If I do that, I’ll need to have a feisty hook to draw them back in, after they’ve thumbed back through the pages to see if they’re right or just going a bit mad.
And there’s probably plenty of other things you can do with what constitutes a “book”. Maybe I’ll have footnotes that don’t point to anything, or that form their own story. Maybe there’ll be a page with reversed text, so you need to hold it against a mirror to see it properly, or hold the page up to the light to read it from the other side. Maybe there’ll be missing pages you can only get by mailing off existing pages!
I do have one idea I’m very fond of: To have 3 authors. Doesn’t matter who contributes what, still 3 authors, each of us just as responsible for putting this thing together: the hand; the spark; the kindling.
With all this in mind, I’ll be thinking about other ways to disrupt the experience; other artistic devices to help spark reflection on the nature of memories and recollection, and how we see ourselves within those spaces.
[Edit: I may have changed the text this refers to since. There are better ways to play with a reader's perception than to simply be an unreliable narrator]