Writing a novel is a lot like looking for lost things: There are a trillion and seven places where the lost thing could be, the predicament being that there is only one place where it actually is. Looking for where a lost thing is not is very tedious work.
An obstacle I have found (and continue to find) in writing a novel is this: There are a trillion and seven words that could come next, but I am only looking for one. Once published the novel will be immortal and unchangeable. It seems obvious, then, that the story was meant to be written and produced as that singular, clandestine train of words it has always and forever been. But how can one story be so different as to have nine completely unrelated rewritten beginnings? How am I able to write the same story sixteen different ways in a week? What is the meaning?
This: These words are here to contribute to a feeling, a mood.
Poetry is structured around the limited, the margins, the super selective. Novels, on the other hand, are an entirely different medium. The words are merely there to contribute to the feel, the mood, the message. If the old house is 'dreary,' then the old house could assuredly have a leak on the second floor and could sit beneath a sky the color of cement. The old house could be empty and strung with cobwebs and the echoes of a century's worth of dead dialogue. The old house could be slap full with miserable people. The old house could be alone in a wood or squashed between two pompous, modernly insulting houses in San Francisco. The old house may simply be an "old house," (as old houses, when left without any other supporting or altering adjectives, tend to be dreary enough in themselves).
Ask yourself, as I had to, how many ways have we come up with to say 'hello?'
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