Past Tense

I have finally figured it out. For months, maybe even forever, I've been struggling with a way to write my book. "Just write it," Alisha says. I understand fully. All the time.

Yet, more often than not, I feel I can't. I may feel that way tomorrow, but tonight, I think I finally have an answer. It came to me on the train ride home tonight.

I'm on page 139 of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. I will read everything he has written. It's a story told by an omniscient narrator, the kind I've always been drawn to, more interested as I am in telling a story from an "experienced" vantage point.

But it's a memoir. So shouldn't it be in "I"? I'm sure at some point I had the idea, but the influence of Chabon's sentences, which emit this subtle control over the story, put an idea in my head. The past tense. It's me, the "I," but looking back from today.I wanted to rush home and start writing, placing myself in the past tense, as my memory sees it, right in the middle of some action. But I didn't. I'm outlining. Whether it's a good idea remains to be seen. In outlining, I'm trying to avoid another start and stop. I've had too many already. I've become obsessed with the perfect beginning. Already handicapped then.

My outline deadline is one week. Then I will begin. Again. Looking back with an omniscient voice at myself. Narrating in the first person. I'm thinking it will lend a semblance of control, which I seem to lack when in the present.

Or maybe it's too much control that stifles me from moving freely in the present. I'm gonna see what happens. There is a level of excitement, which I feel when it's nowhere to be found. But I will force myself to take some time with an outline. A map that I have given myself license to adjust if the occasion arises.

Now if I can only have Chabon's vocabulary.