Forgive me again, dear readers, for dropping off of the face of the Blogosphere.  It appears that Elizabeth Bishop was very much in the right: about two weeks ago, I completed the reconstruction of my witch manuscript and, in pure, unadulterated exhaustion, decided to put off the back-up-athon until the next day.  You can see what’s coming.  I plug in my external hard drive to begin the back-up process and: yes.  It is gone.  The hard drive had crashed.  The past two weeks were spent first in an attempt to get my data back, which failed spectacularly, and then in an attempt to reconstruct my reconstruction of the witch book from a series of print-outs with partially illegible notes and slashes scrawled all over them.  This tragedy, however, turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as most are — I had planned to work from a previous draft, but, after re-typing the first poem, I realized that the poem changed a great deal, and for the better.  I ended up re-typing the entire book, including the notes, and am very happy with the resulting product, which is now backed up in no less than eight places and is ready for visitations to publisher’s desks.

This process has set me to thinking a great deal about narrative construction, a topic which has also come up quite often in my creative nonfiction class.  We’ve spent a lot of time talking about beginnings and endings.  I think that there’s a tendency, at least in early drafts, for writers to spend too much time on these parts of the story or poem.  Marie Howe, quite brilliantly, called these on-ramps and off-ramps: while they might be necessary for the writer to get into or out of the story, they’re not necessarily up to speed with the story itself.  What interests me most is why we, as writers, have this tendency to elaborate on how things began and tie up all of the loose ends when it’s over.  Perhaps the answer to this lies in the fact that this is a power we have in writing that we do not have in life: it is not always easy to pinpoint and explain how a thing began, and it’s generally impossible to make sense of an ending.  Perhaps we spend so much time on on-ramps and off-ramps because this gives us a sense of control, a sense of active agency over our own lives that we’re lacking in our real lives; by over-explaining a beginning and neatly wrapping things up in an ending, we are able to control and name our experiences in a manner that is, more often than not, impossible in real life.

But these beginnings and endings, more often than not, seem inauthentic to me, at least in my own writing.  In Essays in Idleness, Yoshida Kaneyoshi (or Kenko) writes, “In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting.”  I beg to differ.  Beginnings are predictable: the glance exchanged, the introduction, the phone call, the awkward conversation in which both parties try to reveal and conceal just enough.  And endings are both predictable and disappointing, and simply take us back to beginnings, where, hopefully, we will apply what we have learned, though we so often don’t — as Dylan sings, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”  In all things, it seems to me, it is the middle which is the most interesting: the behavior, for instance, of two people who know there’s a significant chance that things will go sour, but keep going.  Or, perhaps, the moment after he has first seen her and before he wishes he had never seen her, the moment that brings Catullus to say “Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, / and let us judge all the rumors of the old men / to be worth just one penny!”  Or consider, for instance, fear, which seems to be much more interesting when it is just a fear — when the fear is realized, it becomes a part of life, something to be dealt with — how much more interesting is the time when it’s a possibility, and the things we do to keep this possiblity from becoming real?