Unifying themes in the novel

I mentioned awhile back that I am working on a novel. I haven't said a lot about this novel, but interestingly enough, it is the one thing I haven't totally dropped the ball on during major deadlines in work.

I have reached a point in the writing process where I have 35 scenes lined up, some real characters, and some real themes developing. I know the next step is to work on the narrative, bringing the scenes, characters, and themes together in a plot. But I was struggling a little bit on the overall message, something at the tip of my tongue, but not quite out yet... until today.

Let me start by talking about three themes that I have been pursuing.

The first theme has been there since the beginning. I call it the tie-theme. There are three primary types of personalities that I am interested in pursuing: the person who wears the tie they are meant to wear, the person who wears the cool tie without even trying (the one you want to emulate), and the person who wears the wrong tie (let's say the awkward, eclectic type). Right now I have three characters, each one aligning with one of these personalities, but how that plays out internally and externally is somewhat 'grey'.

The 'grey' theme is based on the notion that we all have moments when we realize the world isn't black and white (I have been exploring this theme in the blog). We have to find a way to accept this. And if we are truly be happy, we have to find a way to embrace this. This is playing out through one of the main characters whom I have based on my perceptions of my young daugher's personality, and how she will begin to grow up in this world. As a young child, she and her mom have a moment at the end of each day (which I am planning on doing with my daugher) where we talk about five good things that happened and five not so good things that happened in the day. There is a point in the narrative (which may be very close to the start of the novel) where this young girl starts to genuinely struggle with the process of dividing the good and the bad. Things just don't seem to fall into these categories any more. And she feels a crumbling, a genuine struggle.

The third theme, the hardest of all, is the one that I knew I had to get right in order to be able to bring to the novel a message, an idea, something that I intrinsically feel to be true, and that I want to bring to my daughter's life as she gets older. I have known for awhile now, that I wanted to push against Virginia Woolf and her intense desire to seek the internal in her narrative, to move away from the external as the reflection of self, and see self as something far deeper than the surroundings. Virginia was, of course, pushing against writers like Henry James, who used surroundings to capture the internal essence of their characters.

You must know that I feel a serious connection to Woolf, one that is developing so much more as I transform into a writer of fiction. (For those of you wondering, I did get the Woolf tattoo which I will share with you in a separate account.) And I have been trying to come to terms with why I want to push against this writer that I feel such admiration for. But every part of me knows that it isn't liberating to be stuck in a room of one's own, alone with our thoughts for hours on end. It isn't empowering to be stuck in one's head, and particuarly dangerous to remove one's thoughts from the intensity of environment.

Perhaps it has come to me today, this beautiful thing, precisely because I have spent the last few weeks with my head deep in concentration, in a study in the back of my house, away from life, working intensely toward deadlines in work. And today, on this most glorious California spring day, I said feck this - I am going running, I am going to feel the sun, I am going to be outside of my head, I am going to experience the senses of the world around me.... Shebang!

The main character in her struggle to make sense out of the grey has these moments of being stuck in her head, and no matter how hard she tries to make life explainable in the binary sense, the more she is unable to do so. The more she tries to curb her senses, to try and think her way, to reason her way around the external spaces, the more she will be removed from self.

There will be moments when she is able to experience the world, when her memory and her ability to reason with herself will seem to make sense, literally, her physical and her mental will start to feel a sense of harmony with each other. And I can see something similar playing out for all three characters (just in a different way based on their personalities).

This is where it gets very technical. I wrote a paper awhile back on memory and the connection with fiction - the same part of the brain that is responsible for writing fiction is aligned with that part of the brain that is responsible for memory. The neurological memory theory is that the more senses one can attach to a memory, the more likely that memory is to be true... I will very much use this as my push against Virginia.

That in becoming self, this young woman will have this moment when she is feeling so much around her, when all her senses are heightened, and she realizes why she was able to make those lists as a child, and why she cannot seem to do it now - that as a child, what her senses perceived were absolutely aligned with the way she analyzed the world. But as she got older, there seemed to grow this disconnect, that sometimes she could feel good sensually about something, but not so good mentally. And yet, in this awesome moment of sensory perception of self (we have all had these amazing moments in our lives), she once again reconciles that which is inside with that which is out.

I am ready to name this character. She is Gracie.

Dad, how amazing is that?!