I spent many hours driving this weekend, listening to one song on repeat as my thoughts attempted to take shape into something like eloquence. Night driving sends me into a singular focus: as the reds and yellows of the sunlight deepen into blue and then to black, what I can see narrows to the repetitive streaks of white that keep me on my path, the dark outline of trees rising on my left and right, the occasional pair of headlights coming and going on their own journey. I feel so alone. It’s quite comforting, this rare stretch of time where I don’t talk to anyone, where I’m just listening and letting the music blasting from the radio inform the tone of my thoughts.
I had to go back to my outline last night. The plot changed somewhere along my journey into something more satisfying on a character level. I still don’t know exactly where it will end, but I’m tempted to leave it alone for now and see where the story takes me. Once I get to that point, I mean. It’s somewhere in the indeterminate future of this writing process I’m on. I’ve barely left the gate (although the horse race analogy I was envisioning in that sentence doesn’t necessarily make much sense for such a solitary undertaking).
But for those interested, by the end of this week I hope to have a little part of the beginning polished for consumption, though I can’t guarantee it will be lengthy. I can only use my boyfriend as a sounding board so much before I have to just put it out there for someone less biased to see. We’ll see how it goes…
In Quotation Marks 