If It Was Good Enough for Gide

I lack vision. I've known this for a while. It's hard for me to see ahead even a few days, much less that fabled 'five year plan' (as if!). This has caused me a lot of problems. When I was a teacher, it was like pulling teeth trying to create a syllabus. I was terrible at it. All my classes screeched to a stop half-way through like a car reaching the edge of a cliff.

Now I'm writing a novel, and again I'm stumped by the process of planning. I have characters, I have some conflict, I have an eventual denouement in mind but I have no idea how to get there. So far, my characters just talk a lot. They call each other on the phone and talk, or they go to one of their apartments and talk. Okay, two of them have sex at one point, but that's it for action so far.

Well, maybe that should be it -- more talk, and more sex. After all, Gide did it. But all that talk eliminates the fun tradition of 'action reveals character.' That's one of the great pleasures of narrative -- following what a character does and hypothesizing about what it means. The epitome of this 'pure action' approach is one of those New Yorker stories where you follow some affectless characters around Florida or the midwest as they go in and out of parking lots, supermarkets and double-wide trailers, and you never know what the point is but it's fun to guess. Sometimes I read the story over and over, combing it like a detective for clues. (Hey, maybe it means THIS!) But you never know.

It's common in art-lit circles to sneer at plot, but I appreciate a good plot, so I don't want to deprive my readers of one. I love those books where a sensitive, idealistic heroine marries the wrong man (Middlemarch) and her life becomes a mockery of what she thought it would be (Portrait of a Lady). Maybe I should just grab that plot! I have thought of stealing from George Eliot but it seems to me it would be so obvious as to discredit me. Anyway, I had a vague idea for a plot in mind. The problem is it remains vague. It's like a shimmering castle on a distant hill that disappears if you look at it directly. It involves treason ... and Hegel ... and the fractured American left.

Oh God! That doesn't sound like very much fun. I'd better get someone married to someone awful, fast.

Meanwhile, my characters remain stuck at the equivalent of T.S. Eliot's coffee-spoon party, talking their fool heads off and never doing anything.