Member-only story
You Have All The First Lines But No Time To Write
Don’t admonish yourself for not having time to write.
I collect their x-rays because I like to keep a record of the bones I break.
My way in to a story is always through a line. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first line — it just needs to be a line. A point of entry. Me elbowing my way in. Surveying the landscape, I consider the options. Do I want to be in the company of these people? With novels, you can’t just linger. You have to build a home around it, brick by brick. The bricks become a wall that becomes a room that becomes a place where you can take off your shoes, rub the ache off your feet, and set down the weight you’ve been carrying. A weight that bores so deep in your back that it nearly becomes you, but before the becoming, you look around your new home, the people that walk in and out of it, and wonder if you can bear it. If you can stay a while.
Poems are one-night stands in cheap motels that sell Twix in vending machines. Short stories are summer flings in rented homes that smell of strangers, salt, and fresh cotton, but the novel, the fucking novel, is the first blush of a honeymoon that morphs into a settling that invariably becomes the minor compromises you make in service of a shared life. The novel is two toothbrushes in a tin cup. It’s can you just do the…
