The Website of Author Marina Budhos

Endings & Best Laid Plans

 

My plan, this summer was to force myself to write to the end of my historical novel, a book I have been working on for a number of years, off and on, while I completed other projects.  Summer is my best writing time, when I am home, puttering around my house, the children off in camp, and no teaching responsibilities fracturing my attention. My aim, then, was to bring this all to a head, especially since the end of this novel is meant to be very dramatic and also violent, a crescendo of so many parts, voices, themes.  And yet even the most thoughtful of plans have a way of upending.

Set against the crumbling backdrop Laboratory of late 19th century British Empire my novel-in-progress is about the unlikely friendship between an Indian woman and English woman—a bond that is threatened when they move from India to a Caribbean sugar estate, and violence starts to sweep the plantation.  It is most certainly my most ambitious book to date, if wholesale nba jerseys only because I am juggling multiple points of view, along with foreign and historic settings, politics, even technical information about sugar growing that I must make vivid to a modern reader.  Up to now, I have written rather slowly and carefully, editing as I go, trying to pay attention to all the richness that is necessary to building wholesale mlb jerseys up this world.

This summer, I had an besognes image of getting deep into the space of this novel, and like a dream, it would mount and mount until I wrote to its dramatic conclusion.  Especially since the challenge of these kinds of endings, or perhaps all endings, is they are a kind of tidal wave that is slowly mounting, ready to curl, and yet one must also pay attention to the water  particles. SLIDE And yet one still builds, Khan scene by scene, moment by moment, even as you are aware of these huge forces compelling the narrative forward.

To my surprise, the ending, the denouement, a series of fast paced acts, is coming swifter than I expected.  There was no deep rumble in my consciousness, no mounting wave of creativity.  Mostly I find myself sketching out plot—one bad event and bad decision, leading to another, and hopefully mounting to tragedy.  This is somehow vaguely disappointing, and runs counter to my more romantic vision Post of the summer’s work.  But perhaps this is what I need to do—work more as an architect, a bit more cerebral—setting down the structure.  Then the deeper, unconscious swells will Fiyatlar? emerge once these decisions are made.

This is what I tell myself cheap nba jerseys now, as day by cheap jerseys from China day, I write event-driven material, the pushing toward the end.  Sometimes we need to ride the waves.  And sometimes, we must navigate with a plot compass, trusting that instinct and fever-dreams will return.

2 Comments

  1. uma

    This sounds wonderful, Marina! Sometimes you just have to get through and past the mechanics of events, and trust that in the next round the depths will appear. I can’t wait to read this book.

  2. admin

    Thanks, Uma! Am still working as the architect …

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