Two Fountainheads Better than One?

For months I've been at a standstill with my novel, which I started last October at a writers retreat. Even though it's always been on my mind and even though I've been working on it occasionally, perhaps too casually, I still felt like I was running in place, like on a treadmill. And for the record, I hate treadmills, elliptical machines and stairclimbers because I dislike the concept of stationary progress.

Yesterday, an explosion happened. I don't know what else to call it. I started writing around 4pm, tentatively at first, then manically. I cancelled all of my plans for the night telepathically, I'm hoping, because i didn't pick up the phone once. For hours my hands flew across my keys with the necessity of an impending breath. My head was a bowl of fireworks, uncanny synaptic connections resulting in unpredictable bursts of backstory and myth making. I made a decision on yet another major structural change and did more character development in one night than I've done in 7 months.

I spent all night putting out fires while simultaneously starting new ones. I wrote and deleted, switched around and tightened up until my eyes rang like bells signaling for me to go to sleep. I woke up this morning like a woman in love: obessessive and neurotic and here I am. I really am my own favorite audience.

I don't know if it's the fish oil capsules I just started taking this week, my sharing session with my dear friend Lightfoot who came and visited last week (who is also writing a novel), or the Ayn Rand book I'm reading now (The Fountainhead--fucking incredible!). Either way, once I decided to make a major structural change, which is to write the novel in third person as opposed to the first, all of these backdoors to my characters opened up, doors that I was never supposed to imagine.

The first person point of view was limiting me greatly and I had no idea how much until now. I'm in love with my characters now in a way that I never was before simply because I didn't know them--and I'm still learning them. They're now behaving with much more depth and I find myself really letting them be themselves, and letting them take risks in their decisions and in their behaviors. I love them in all of their beauty and ugliness. I love the things that I've learned almost as much as I love the things about them that I have no clue about yet.

As far as character development is concerned, I definately thank "the Fountainhead" for that. This is the most irresistable book that I've read in a really long time--no bullshit. Between this book and my manuscript, I can't tear my eyes away from words today (with the exception of my ex-lover's face, who I met for a brief margarita-involved lunch). Anyways, many of Rand's characters are utterly despicable but so fascinating. And how they react to each other is priceless.

What I like most about her characters is that I find myself unconcerned with their flaws and perfections. And by this, I"m talking about the characters themselves as people, not as chess pieces of craft. Rand's characters are much too round and much too developed for such preoccupations. I've found that it is only flat, underdeveloped characters, as well as the people who are the most one-dimensional to me in the context of my life (by my volition or by theirs) that leave me contemplating the extent of their perfections and imperfections when I know damn well that humanity is much too complicated for that.

Take for instance, when I meet someone, romantically let's say, I gauge whether or not I want him in my life singularly by picking out his flaws, because it's easy to do that when someone means essentially nothing to me. His flaws alone can help me make a decison. They're absolutely extricable from the rest of his person. Oh, his arms are too skinny? His breath a little tart? Well, to hell with him. However, when I've grown to like a lot or love, which I've been known to do, his flaws become inextricable from his good qualities and the rest of who he is. I've become more invested in the mediocre but oh so grand things that make him who he is. And the "flaws" are all wrapped up in it. That's the model for good character building, I think. Rand's characters are just unequivocably and unapologetically who they are: from her most defiant to her most insecure.

Ok, so I'm going back to my world. Just had to come out and say hello.