"Off the Black"

Always fascinated by a performance of Nick Nolte's, I watched "Off the Black" last nigth (2006: directed by James Ponsoldt) and was equally fascinated by the performance of young Trevor Morgan. The movie opens with Trevor on the mound taking a very long time to deliver the next pitch. He shakes off two signs then seems to think forever about the next one before pitching what umpire Nolte rules a ball—the one that walks home the winning run. Though baseball is (was) the only sport I could call my own, I never heard the phrase "off the black," which I take it means close, but not a strike.

Dealing as the movie does with communication between father and son (and between father and stand-in son) and with a father's death (and with things being not quite a strike), the movie will probably haunt me for a few days. And would probably haunt you it you made a point to watch this highly commendable example of storytelling art.

And a good example, for Nanowrimo participants, of the story that dwells at home and next door.

Tied to a desktop (for Nanowrimo)

Overnight I realized that of course even a first-person narrator who hardly ever leaves his or her house can get involved in a compelling story. Miss Marple, for example (Agatha Christie's second favorite detective, after Hercule Poirot), observed and became involved in at least one murder in her quiet little village of St. Mary Mead.

I say "first-person narrator" for indeed I find myself drawn to write a story moored in the consciousness of one of its characters, if not of its main character.

Hmm, thinking of Christie just reminded me of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which she exploited an unreliable narrator by outrageously having the murderer himself tell the story (and, of course, not reveal whodunit until the end).

As I said yesterday, gearing up in public is fun. But I'm tired after dealing with some stuff that came up this weekend, so that's all the fun I'm going to have for the moment.

But if I have more thoughts on November's novel writing project today, I'll come back later and share them....

Nanowrimo

If you've never heard of Nanowrimo, I wouldn't be surprised. I hadn't heard of it either before some friends mentioned it to me last fall, just as National Novel Writing Month (November 1-30) was about to begin. A couple of those friends participated, George producing 50,000 words that he thinks sort of cohere, Bart producing ones that he doesn't think do.

Well, Bart and George are gearing up to participate again, and they've got me to thinking about doing so as well. My first thought was what a drag it would be. I wrote a 60,000 word novel in one hundred days in 1974 (following Dick Perry's prescription in One Way to Write Your Novel, Writer's Digest, 1969), so I know the discipline it takes. I didn't like to contemplate the fact that my daily blogging would surely suffer.

But then something occurred to me.

At lunch with Bart and George, I happened to mention my writing hero when it comes to producing a novel very quickly. Georges Simenon wrote several hundred novels, in fact, and he rarely spent more than two weeks on one. He even wrote one while sitting at his typewriter behind a Paris storefront window.

Right...what I'm thinking about doing is writing my daily two thousand words and posting them on Moristotle. A way of emulating my hero. Ha! Fat chance of that. I've read a few score of his novels and each one is a gem. Simenon could not only write fast, he also had the genius to do it brilliantly. Nevertheless, the idea of pretending that my daily post takes place in a storefront window appeals to me a lot.

I discovered this week that "post-modernist" seems to apply to me. I've long enjoyed self-referentiality, not only in logical argument having to do with "God" (as illustrated in a number of my posts back two or three months ago), but also in fiction writing. I'm thinking along the lines of a "real-time" story in which the daily act of writing plays a crucial role in the plot. In three days of thinking I've already realized that I can pretend I'm writing on a laptop (I've never owned one) and thus travel to whatever fictional location the story leads me to (or wherever I lead the story).

Damn, it's fun. And if I'm actually going to do it in a storefront window, I might as well get the feel of gearing up in public too....