Paris on my Mind

I just paid for most of my trip to Paris this morning, plane ticket, everything. I’m a little shell-shocked, realizing what I’ve done. I now have an apartment and a plan. I’m getting on a plane in less than two months. Geeze!  I’ve been reading Richard Holmes. He wrote the definitive biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley and is a huge name in Romantic studies. His book is about living in Paris and hunting down some of characters that are hovering in the wings of my book. I’ve been focused on the musicians, but Georges Sand is big and of course, she’s part of the literary scene. That’s where Holmes is focused and I feel myself being tugged in his direction. In fact, in some ways, my book is more up in the air than ever.

I’m a little ahead of the curve here, but I did turn in the opening of my manuscript to our local writers conference fiction contest.  It took second place. Of course, I’m pleased to take second place, but my response to the fact that it didn’t take first, has been to look at the opening with a very critical eye. I really think it needs to be so good it does take first, before I say it’s “right.”  It’s actually more than the second place. The other concern is a structural thing, down the road a bit. I can’t figure out an elegant way to include two events that I really want in the book. The idea that I would “flash back” to capture them is distasteful because the whole book is really a flashback, so it would be a kind of flashback inside a flashback, which strikes me as confusing and inelegant.

For awhile I’ve just thought I would lose the pieces I couldn’t figure out how to include, but the 2nd place, got me thinking that maybe I haven’t started the book the way I actually should… yet. So I’ve begun a new version of chapter one, which is actually six months earlier in time to the one I had. This allows me to have both of the pieces I wanted without flashbacks, as they both took place in those six months. The book, instead of opening in the midst of the July 1830 revolution, with its street violence, is now starting on opening night of Victor Hugo’s, Hernani, which is a play that many say was the most important theatrical event of the nineteenth century and marks the opening of the Romantic epoch in Paris. How can I not include that in my book?

But, now, instead of a four-year-old Tori with her mother, I’ve got the guys… the men (and they were almost entirely men) who were part of Hugo’s circle and who were responsible for the historic nature of Hernani’s opening in Paris. They were all dressed as hippies and acting out as wildly as any San Francisco hippie of my day ever did. In fact, it’s almost shocking to me to realize that everything I thought we “invented” had been done in Paris a century and more before… the clothes, the hair, the communal living, the utopian politics in general, and, of course, the preoccupation with art, being an artist, and with philosophy.

Amazing—and part of the story I want to tell. So, it seems to me part of what’s happening is I’m rethinking the thrust of my book. It had to come, but it’s a bit overwhelming. I wanted it to be simple and unfold in an orderly manner. Don’t think that’s the case, exactly, though it still feels more straight forward than Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein, which was, you know, a fifteen year project. God help me if The Appassionata takes even half that long.