A PUZZLE

I keep promising myself to come back to The Buddha Diaries but it doesn't seem to have happened recently. I'm easily distracted. This past week has been devoted to my annual tax preparation, putting together all the information that my tax guy needs to get the forms filled in and submitted by the April deadline. I suppose I should be able to do this myself after all these years, but my math skills are abysmal--have been since school days!--as is my understanding of the finer points of the tax coade. Better leave it in some one else's hands than risk screwing things up myself.

And then there is this book that I still keep trying to finish. It's a piece of fiction. I thought to have finished it a couple of times already, the first time as a "novella." Then a friend read it and made some rather astute comments about a dark side to the story that remained unexplored. She was right. There was much more work to do. So I set about the work and thought to have finished it yet again, this time as a full-length "novel"; and had in fact sent it off to this same friend for a second read when I stopped short and realized that I still had a very basic question that remained unanswered: what was the point?

That's a pretty fundamental problem. It was something I had "known" all along, with a kind of uncomfortable awareness, but without the kind of clarity that would have helped me recognize and address it. I had all these events taking place and people participating in them without any particular reason for doing so. There was a story, in other words--well, a string of stories--but no "arc" to connect them, no initial issue for which to provide a resolution at the end. It lacked the kind of necessity that's required for compelling reading.

And with the realization of this problem came the glimmer of a promise for its solution, a change in the early pages of the book that could motivate my characters and provide a reason for them behaving in the way they do. With it, they would have something to gain and something to lose by their actions. There would be, in other words, a point.

It has been several weeks now since I arrived at this insight and I have still not found the kind of energy and motivation it would take to make the changes. It's as though I have so thoroughly worked through what the book was asking of me that have no longer any reason to actually write it. It's a curious and uncomfortable place in which I find myself. I have given myself leave to sit with it a while longer to see what happens. Meantime, I keep promising myself to come back to The Buddha Diaries--which, today, I have!