That is the question that has been hounding me of late.
Is there enough substance there?
You see, I have recently been readying myself for something, to send my first novella off to a literary agent with the aim of getting one such person suitably invested in hawking my wares to a publisher, and thenceforth onwards to the great wide world.
But there are a few problems that have lingered within the manuscript since the first draft was completed, nearly two years ago, which have thus far led to me delaying this grand send-off, postponing the day when I will stand at the dock's edge and smash an overpriced champagne bottle upon my story's hull, standing there until it has long fled my view and tripped across the blue arc of the horizon. Not least of which problems is that I'm now hideously worried that such an unwieldy metaphor as that may have somehow escaped my roving, pernickety, editorial eye.
More pressing, however, is the worry that it simply does not contain enough. Enough joy. Enough fear. Enough questioning. Enough answers. Enough characters. Enough passion. Enough prudish control. Enough reason. Enough sensations.
Fair enough, it is, and has been from the start, only a relatively short story (I am attempting, failingly at times, to resist the urge to refer to it as a book until it actually has been granted a wraparound cover and a spine), only about 34, 000 words as of the last draft. And, whilst it is perhaps not as common as it might be, there are numerous works of fiction I have read that have been about that length and thrilled me, connected with me, and challenged me immensely. Perhaps not much happens in some of them either. Like Of Mice and Men, for example. And yet, in some way, it seems to happen more deeply, more fully. Maybe that I do not see this entirely in my own works, whether I sought to weave it in completely or whether I was simply aiming for something lighter, is down to both an over-familiarity with the text and also to a lack of confidence or, rather, of having too much when I'm criticising and not enough when I'm creating.
Whatever it is, I cannot shake it.
It has recently been suggested, however, by one test-reader, that it would work better as a play, or, more properly, as a film. That the problems I am having with it are problems brought about by the fact that I have written it as a very visual, sensual experience (or have, at least, attempted to), and that, these days, people may be more willing to engage with it if it were to find such a form, rather than becoming a short, and possibly overpriced, book.
I have been thinking on this possibility for the best part of a week now, and, whilst it had crossed my mind how I might like to see it directed and framed and structured on a cinema screen in the past, I had always considered it in terms of being an adaptation, never really a straight-up, first-hand film. I cannot say I am not intrigued by this new turn, to the same degree as I cannot say I am not becoming bored with constantly re-editing it as a book and trying to maintain the restrained, though intimate and full-felt, style of it. It pains me to think that two years of work on it, constantly refining and re-defining my purpose with it, to get each sentence just so, to convey the missing parts of the main character just as surely as the faulty workings that remain, will be, essentially, left behind or otherwise transmogrified in this transition. That I would have to trade in words, descriptions, for pictures, sounds.
Because, as much as I love films, I have never truly made one yet, and yet I have written stories. I can write them whenever I want. I can even try and make them great. Whether that is a goal I meet, it is a goal I am free to try for. I have control when the tips of my fingers grip a pen, or press and hammer and simply touch words out on this keyboard of mine. Words are my chief medium at present, and so I am worried, perhaps, that if I were to leave them in some way behind for this project, I would be giving something of myself up.
At the same time, however, I am more than well aware that such not-much-happening stories can be made into films without ever seeming too short or too shallow, if done right. If one abides by the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, then one can easily understand why this might be the case. After all, though it can take a writer a great many sentences to fully convey a sense of one character's emptiness, or fear, or self-doubt and self-loathing, or self-love, sometimes independently of the machinations of what people may term plot, a film-maker can do it simply with one well-framed and well-timed shot of the character's eyes, controlling the lighting, controlling the sound - without having to evoke such things in a manner that may be taken in as many different ways as there are readers, some of which may miss the point entirely, and therefore end up not connecting with the character, not appreciating or enjoying the tale that is currently in the telling.
Of the two Wong Kar-Wai films I have seen, the latest was Days of Being Wild, and it illustrates this point brilliantly. In essence, the story is thin, vague, not, in a synopsis, packed with too many major occurences. A young man makes a habit of seducing women and then leaving them, living a raw yet curiously unfulfilling life. That is the meat of the story, and yet telling you that does not really give anything away, because the films chief revelations and delights are visual ones, aural ones. It is not as fascinating, electric and sorrowful as his In the Mood for Love, but it is absorbing nonetheless, and ascribes a depth to these characters' lives in a way that does not seem underdeveloped, as it may in a short book.
It is indeed, the sort of film I may well like to make.
However, this first novella is, likewise, the sort of novella I wanted to write, I am forced to conclude, or else I wouldn't have written it. If I have given off the impression that I am not proud of it, then I did not mean to, because I am. Rather, I think the problem is that I am just not sure other people would want to be involved in the story in that way - I do not think it would sell too well, if at all, as a book. And that, unfortunately, is what it comes down to, when you are trying to get published, it seems, when you are trying to get your work out into that great wide world. It is alright producing things the way you want to produce them if you do not intend to depend on them for your livelihood at some point in the future. But, if you do, then there has to be a point at which you give the audience more for their money... doesn't there?
And, if forced to choose a means of making a living, I can think of none I would choose above this - storytelling, whether with words or pictures. So, with that in mind, I suppose I must come to a conclusion soon about exactly which fashion I want the first voyage of this first big(ger) story to take.
Whilst that decision is being made, however, I intend to send another work off, a work that really cannot be anything other than a book, not right now anyway, because I have written into it a celebration of words and of personal honesty in art, in life. Curiously, it is not only about this, but about giving up, about moving on, about learning how to do both well. I should perhaps point out that it too is technically a novella, with around the same number of words as the first, although it is a couple of thousand words longer.
And, as they say, every little helps.
