From moment to moment, everything is forgotten. I think. (What was I saying?)
It’s not uncommon for writer-types to advocate the carrying of notebooks. Ideas, though they may seem as ineffable as the pyramids of Giza, are effing evanescent. (There’s a line for you!)
Case in point…
I’m clever enough to know that I am often interrupted in my attempts to pen the perfect novel. (I’ll be right in the flow of things when two parent-teacher conferences and a bit of emergency dentistry will pop up and knock the flow off track — what was it doing on the track in the first place?). You would think people would give me a nice smooth two-year patch so that I could finish the job, but do they? (They do not).
So, I write notes. (Sometimes quite dutifully).
In this case, I wrote the following sentence: “The Lady of the Bower gets to the point where she realizes who Durand is — but I’m thinking she……………………”
The dots (above) represent the moment when someone walked in. It was only a moment. But, when I looked back at my page — pen still poised — I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what, exactly, it was that she…………. And I still haven’t.
Amatuer students of psychology (with the same possibly-crucially outdated understanding of the field as myself) will recognize the oft-cited George A. Miller’s Seven Plus or Minus Two. I will include a reference to the relevant, ancient study (and not the Wikipedia article where I found it — a guy must have some pride).
For our purposes, it must suffice to say that the little jugglers of our minds can only keep so many big, jagged thoughts in the air at the same time before they lose a finger. And clearly, my little jugglers dropped one. (And I bet it was going to be good, too!)
At this point, I feel that there ought to be some sort of conclusion to this piece — something uplifted about how there are always more, better ideas. What care I for the transitory motivations of fictional persons?
But I had my pen right there! It was poised!
David Keck 