The Discussion

A few days ago I completed writing on "The Discussion." I wrote this novella, if I can term it anything like that, entirely by hand, in a small journal. The pages are about the size of index cards, and in sum total, it's about 300 pages. 

I didn't "fill the page," however, which is always a kind of burning desire of mine when I look at blank page. Get something on there, my gut tells me. That page is naked, by god, clothe it.

For some reason, perhaps as a result of all the "challenges" I've done through the years with my good friend Pete Duval, I forced myself to write one sentence paragraphs. So literally, what you have here, is a series of single sentences, which somehow managed to tell an extended story. No kidding, there are no multi-sentence paragraphs here.

I'm reminded, in some ways, of a Larry Brown story from Dirty Work; but that was really a poem, and this has no poetic quality to it. 

Anyway I'm pleased that I've finished it, and I wanted to tell you about it. Am I pleased with the story involved? I'm no so sure, but tonight I started a reading of it, like picking up a strange book off a shelf, encountering the thing as it's totally alien to me, as I would any other book; and I've found it curious so far. The whole piece takes place over twelve hours, in essence an intense conversation between lovers on the verge of estrangement, in a remote hotel in the north Georgia mountains. The whole thing is charged sexually, and there's an eerie side story involving the unusual son of the older woman. Okay, it reads like a modern French novel. Does it say as much? Or as little? I'll know on subsequent readings and writing.

The next step is to type the damn weird tale. I've started doing that, and I'm retaining the one sentence graph structure, which is so ridiculous it makes me laugh. But who the hell knows, maybe this is the start of my true nature as a writer -- the essential experimenter. Or, perhaps, it's the start of a new process for me. It does occur to me that the one sentences are nothing more than the beginning of paragraphs I've yet to write.