Your experience is what I’m using as part of the dialogue with kriswest’s character played by Kathy Bates. Like you, she retired from a philosophy department and had witnessed the pretenses you mention. She is also the one that brings up the issue of how, at a certain age, it all gets to feel a little silly.However, unlike you, Kris, the real one, is a little more conservative. So I have to find a way to consolidate the two. The thing to keep in mind is that even though the character is inspired by both of you, she is not either one of you. She is a fiction. Also, like both you and Kris, her character took a piecemeal approach to gathering knowledge, like Spenser, kind of following her nose where ever it took her as compared to the more methodical approach to philosophy that is obliged to a certain reading list.
Also, reading your point about drinking, I’m thinking about putting in a little exposition on drinking and the writer, the final point being that d63 doesn’t drink because of some idealistic notion about carrying the weight of the world, but because he’s an alcoholic who is still functional enough to enjoy what he’s doing. It’s why he comes on The Board when he could be working on an article: as a form of play that reminds him of why he loves writing.
As far as your last point: creativity is easy and, being the same activity a child can engage in, doesn’t require a lot of patience. It’s the part where you turn all that raw material into a finished product that takes the work. Right now, I have all these ideas swimming around my head creating other ideas. It’s like it’s just coming to me. However, I find myself intimidated by the process of zeroing in on the details, of, for instance, turning a summary of what 2 characters discuss into an actual dialogue. This is made so by the realization that all the dialogue has to maintain a certain level of poetry like Kris’ character:
That’ll school ya, you son of a bitch!
Or Zen Candy’s:
You want me to kick him in the balls. I’ve thought about it, you know.
They have to reflect the character’s beauty without them seeming to try.
It’s like Coleridge said:
It’s alright to build castles in the air.
But at some point, you have to build foundations under them.
And trust me, given the postmodern ADD I’m dealing with, of no matter I’m what doing, of always knowing there is something else I could be doing, it’s not that easy for me either. But it’s the force of the initial inspiration that drives me. And its not just me. It’s not uncommon for novelists to work on several projects at the same time. Luckily I started off as a musician. And one of the things I learned from that is that you have to work from the small parts to the bigger parts. You have to break the bigger project down into small manageable fragments.
As it is, I have to deal with the possibility this may not get finished. And one of the biggest obstacles right now is the board in that it offers immediate gratification. It can distract you. Therefore, in order to get any finished product done, I have to make sure the first thing I do is work on that finished product. Because if I so much as take a peak at what is going on on the board: that’s it: I can pretty much forget about getting anything else done. Still, it does provide me a lot of the raw material of creativity.
