What am I doing instead? All writers have their favorite forms of procrastination. Jigsaw puzzles are my weakness, especially these elaborate wooden jigsaw puzzles from Liberty Puzzles. Carla introduced me to these puzzles and now I have my Dad hooked on them. They are mediative, where I allow myself to sit and think and not expect myself to be busy or productive.
Writing a novel (for me, anyway) is somewhat like doing a jigsaw puzzle. I have lots of small parts put together but I don't see how they are going to fit together yet so the whole thing is kind of chaos.
I have written a bunch of scenes about my main character, Betty, but I am not sure what the full picture will look like. Betty is very loosely based on my best friend from college who is wicked smart but then married a venture capitalist and now plays tennis as her vocation. (Perhaps that makes her even more wicked smart, that she found a way to get a luxurious life without needing to work, but the jury is still out on that.) The real Betty immigrated to the US from Taiwan when she was seven and didn't have an athletic bone in her body. Betty the character and Betty my friend both suffer from lack of problems in their lives, which is then actually a problem. In a sense, Betty is the opposite of Job, a biblical character who suffers every sort of indignity and still maintains his faith in God. Everyone has problems, but most of Betty's friend don't see her problems as real: How can someone so beautiful and wealthy with well adjusted sons and a well meaning husband actually suffer? I've known Betty for so long, I know she has struggled and she does have problems, especially with her mother-in-law, who is just plain wicked. I find it fascinating. I want to figure it out so I am plodding through a novel about her.
"Betty seems superficial," my writing group has said at times. I struggle because at times that is the point. How then does Betty grow from that point of perceived vacuity? My writing group has a point, though--readers need to be relate to Betty otherwise they won't bother reading about her.
Considering I am fighting two crises at the same time--one with the Boy and the other with Jack, I am having very little patience with Betty the character whose life floats by. The real life Betty is fine, but she is not the first person I call when I am having a hard time. When she had problems with her husband, she told him she was going to leave him and poof! he went to a therapist, got his head out of his butt, and everything is hunky-dory.
Betty and my lives were very similar until we turned twenty-eight. She had a baby who is now in college, and I had a baby who died. She has kind and supportive brothers (except one, but she has two others who are.) My brother is insane. Betty's kids are stable and productive. I have a kid in treatment for anxiety and depression. Betty's husband is smart, hard-working and attentive. My husband is smart and hard-working. Her husband is finance and money can't love you back so he spends time with his family. My husband is a prominent physician who is adored by everyone he works with who gets most of his meaning from his job.
I still love Betty in spite of her easy life, even though it would be easier to dismiss her instead. I know what she doesn't share with her friends who are wives of Silicon Valley leaders. When she was growing up in Texas, she was a black haired girl in a sea of blondes, that in spite of her traffic-stopping beauty, she could not get a date in high school, that she would love to have a day with with green eyes and an Anglo name like Lauren Jennings.
So I go back to my jigsaw puzzle, trying to find the bigger picture, to see where this is all heading. Unlike life and a half-written novel, a jigsaw puzzle has a tidy solution. I know the puzzle will work. I wish I had such faith about the book I am writing and my personal life.
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