I looked a little bit at my notes from late 2005, when I was trying to figure out what to do with the half a book I had written to that point. I realize now I have gone about this all wrong. I tried writing a novel off the top of my head, and while that got me a great start, it did not stand me in a good stead for the second two-thirds of the book. On the other hand, "Knock Yourself Out," which I already have a few thousand words for, does not have a good start, but a tortured, slow, feeling, which is the way I write when I'm doing nothing more than feeling my way. I supposedly know what KYO is all about, in terms of most of the plot and the theme. I started "Bangalored" (the fourth title the book has had, by the way, after "The Moony Trail of Starry Shine," "Dear Prudence," and "Mango Rain") with a notion, a flavor, a voice -- but no idea what the book was really about. I really must work to integrate the two.
On the third hand, I started "Make Nice" with much less of an idea of either. I just had the two characters of Bobby and Gene. But that was perhaps the best way to start, with a strong character who could simply live.
Perhaps that's the real lesson I have to learn from this experience -- start with characters, not a plot, a setting, a theme, or a feeling. Or if you start with those things, don't go any farther until you really know who the characters are.
Anyway, I have to make something of this damn thing, for the third or fourth time. (Actually the last completed draft was draft 6, for some reason.) I have to remind myself that I'm further along than I was a month ago -- even if I'm little farther along than I was three years ago, judging by the degree to which I really know the characters.
I'm going to try to start notes without looking at any previous notes. I know these have gotten repetitive this month, but I feel like I have to constantly refresh and reinforce my conception of the characters, their development, and how the plot reflects that. (In real life, people -- characters -- react to events. In novels, the author must secretly shape events to help the characters develop. But not too much, or it won't be believable.)
... thinking ...
Perhaps one of the fulcrums is Doug's state of mind at the moment he arrives in Bangalore. He is carrying three, no four, loads of psychic baggage:I think most of those have been clear up to now except the last one. I haven't understood what he wants, much less fleshed out notes on it, much less written it into the novel. That's why he seems so passive and listless and indeed unrelated to Stella. Good! Let's unpack that, as theoreticians say. There are actually several parts to it -- his relationships with women, how they have affected his family, and how they have affected his career.
- His history with Betsy and with Stella
- His former career and fame as a journalist, and his career as a professor and how that career ended
- His intentions to save his career and write a book about Bangalore and the depredations of globalization
- His intentions to have a closer relationship with Stella as a way of somehow salvaging his self-regard as a man, having fucked up his relationships in general with women and having just fucked up his career as an academic
Q.
What are his relationships with women like as a young man?
A.
He is attractive and intelligent, and growing up in the 60s and 70s (he was 25 in 1977) he had lots of sex with lots of women. As a creature of his time, he only learned a little about feminist attitudes toward sex second-hand, i.e. from the women he was fucking or working with (often the same people); he learned how to continue to get sex in that period without really adopting any enlightened attitudes toward women and sex. When Stella was born (1978), he had a sentimental conversion to feminism, because he wanted her to be liberated, but he didn't really change what were by then pretty hidebound attitudes. Perhaps most importantly, when it came to settling down with Betsy as a family, he never even considered it. They weren't living together in the US when they were fucking and Betsy became pregnant; when Betsy returned to the US to give birth to Stella, he didn't come back with her. He stayed in Central America, only coming back to New York from time to time. Maybe he would see Betsy and Stella twice a year, at the most, though he did send child support with regularity. Thus they never married, never lived together in the US.
Q.
When it came time for Doug to return to the US (1984), did they consider living together as a family then?
A.
No, because he had a job offer at Cornell (which has a well-known journalism school) and Betsy was ensconced at a TV station in Chicago.
Q.
Was there ever a time when Doug "left" them?
A.
No. That doesn't mean Betsy didn't feel vaguely abandoned.
Q.
What were Betsy's attitudes?
A.
By becoming a war correspondent and then a TV reporter, she was rebelling against her family's Midwestern expectations; she bolstered her ambition with simple 70s feminist principles that a woman doesn't need a man, etc. But because she was a child of the Midwestern middle class, she had deep-seated feelings about family and home, and she finds reasons to resent Doug that fit into her feminist principles (he was childish, didn't take responsibility, was selfish) but which have their foundation in an unconscious feeling that he should be home with her and her child. She will only admit to feelings that fit in with the ideology, so Stella grows up sensing Betsy's resentment of Doug without understanding it.
Q.
What are Doug's attitudes toward Betsy and Stella?
A.
When Betsy gets pregnant, he really is selfish -- he assumes that anyone with sufficient ambition would not let a pregnancy stand in the way of her career and that she'll get an abortion and their relationship will be exactly the same as it was before she got pregnant. But when she decides she wants to bear the child, he shrugs: he thinks of it as her decision and something that no longer has anything to do with him. (I remember this clearly from the mid-70s, even though I was a bit younger. Since any decisions about what happens to a pregnancy were supposed, by the feminism of the day, to be entirely up to the woman, a man who gets a woman pregnant was absolved of responsibility -- an unintended consequence of feminism and one that has caused some refinement of the dictum "My body, my choice.")
Q.
But still, she is resentful.
A.
Yes, for reasons she doesn't quite understand: her unconscious belief, which she can't square with her ideological analysis, that the father of a child should be part of the child's family.
Q.
How does this affect Doug?
A.
He is annoyed at her expectations, however unconsciously she holds them. Because he understands exactly how she feels -- he knows, without admitting it to himself (much less ever discussing it with her) that she feels he should be close by and support her in some greater way than he ever does.
Q.
Don't they ever talk about it?
A.
No doubt they argue about it when Stella is a child, but they never resolve it.
Q.
So how does that affect the way Doug views Stella?
A.
It creates some guilt, and causes him to compensate for the way he treated Betsy by treating Stella extremely well. In fact, Stella gets a hundred times more time and attention from Doug than Betsy ever did, because Stella lives with Doug during the summers from 1985-1992 (she is ages 7-14, he is ages 34-41).
Q.
All right, what about his time as a professor (1985-2007, ages 34-56)? What are his attitudes toward women then?
A.
On campus, all the girls are feminists, except for the cheerleader types. And a good number of the faculty (though not so much in the J school -- I suppose I could check that, but it's not a fact I really need to know) are women. So when he starts at the university, he has to re-work his attitudes, at least on the surface. He becomes supportive of equality for women professionally. This is also reinforced by his having a daughter.
Q.
What about his sexual attitudes?
A.
These are also influenced by the campus attitude, which at that time is pretty unfettered. The girls, all embracing sexual freedom, are fucking right and left. Of course, it's also the time of the sex wars, the Take Back the Night marches, and the time when, if you were a real feminist, you'd be a lesbian (at least Until Graduation) and there's a lot of suspicion of men. Therefore, the students who fuck their professors fall into a few types, all very much minorities: the fucked-up ones who use sex to prove to themselves they're attractive, the cynical ones who consider it a quid pro quo to get grades, and the intelligent, independent but naive ones who use it to experiment with what they think are adult relationships. Stella herself fits into this category when she has an affair with a professor. So when we get right down to it, the students who fuck Doug are much like his own daughter.
Q.
That seems like something to examine much more closely.
A.
Yeah.... yikes. I had already had that idea but it was more an intuition, I never thought it through to quite that extent.
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