Monday, June 9, 2008

Derrida and the Mermaids

I read my novel again this weekend. I am amazed at how separate it is from me even though it is my distilled experience of Brazil. The novel became what I ultimately wanted of it— a story unto itself. I remember how at times, during certain tumultuous relationships in my life, new obscure chapters arose. I was trying to please someone else and completely ignoring the natural progression of characters in the story. Thankfully, I threw out those wretched chapters when the relationships were over. What was I thinking? (I wasn't thinking.) In the end, it was a relief to cut 5000 words here and there and never look back.

But imagine cutting 500 PAGES of your work. I attended a summer writing workshop at Humber in 2002. I recall Nino Ricci talking about his first novel, and how it was originally 700 pages and if I remember correctly, it involved a lot of references to Jacques Derrida. When Ricci finally examined the manuscript, he found that the story was only about 200 pages and didn’t require Derrida’s approval. Ricci’s novel became Lives of the Saints and it won him a Governor General's award.

All those words. That's a lot of muck. It's like diving in a Canadian Lake. You navigate with a compass because the silt is all stirred up.

You must trust the compass because it's so easy to get turned around. I wasn't following any compass when I wrote those extraneous, superfluous chapters. I ended up at the wrong end of the lake. And it's hard to get out of the lake with all your heavy scuba gear.

So the book is done. It's up to the literary agent now. (The new agent.) I'm hoping she uses a hovercraft to skim across the lake to get my manuscript to the right publishers. And I must don my scuba gear again. It will be a different experience this time writing a new book, more like the clear water of the Caribbean—over 100 feet of visibility. I’ll still use the compass of course, but no more crazy mermaids stirring up the silt.