The second draft of the Undertaker story was going along very well until everything fell apart at the beginning of chapter eight.
It was my fault, really. Chapter seven suddenly got very preachy, so I cut out quite a lot of it without realizing it was merely setup for the pay off at the beginning of chapter eight. Which meant chapter eight no longer worked. At all.
I sat back for an evening and thought about chapter eight, what I wanted to say at that point in the story. I knew that I wanted to add in the new bit with the woman and the clothesline, and that I needed to get the undertaker (he’s never mentioned by name in the story) to Burke’s junk shop (which had already changed in my mind from the used book shop in the previous draft). And I wanted to say something about loneliness and solitude, about how the devotion to a vocation eclipses everything else.
But, mostly, I wanted to say something about the village and what it meant to live, as an undertaker, on the outskirts of life.
Chapter eight, however, was having none of it. Chapter eight doggedly refused to start, taking control of my fingers and forcing them to churn out absolute gibberish.
“Oh come on,” I said patiently, reading through the fifth or sixth stab at restarting the chapter. “Help me out a little bit, here.”
Chapter eight merely thrust its fists into its pockets and glared back at me, resentful as any abandoned child whose parents suddenly show up again as though the preceding fifteen years of loneliness and neglect had never happened.
Equally irritating is the Case of the Vanishing Idea. Each time I started the chapter over again, I’d remember that I that had a very important idea to put in there, something about the undertaker’s sister and her exile . . . something very clever and resonant for the rest of the story . . . something I could no longer remember
. . . something that took three minutes to reconstruct in my mind . . . something that I stupidly didn’t write down, despite having forgotten three times running . . . something I wish I had written down because I have forgotten it once more.
I owe you all a podcast, I know. I had every intention of doing it this weekend, but I realized that it was Chapter seventeen and I hadn’t really planned out how I was going to do the bit with the three-headed dragon and all three of his voices. Which means chapter seventeen has a total of seven different speaking characters, six of which carry on a conversation at once.
Tonight, though. I promise. Right after I finally beat the umpteenth version of that pesky chapter eight into submission.