`The Actors'

My latest female character is 40, married for 15 years, and has a husband that for the most part ignores her. Mrs. Ghosh (the character in question) is the secretary and part-time store manager of Selbeck Inc., and in the course of her routine has cause to meet with and speak to Jonathan Sweetwater, former bartender and current Selbeck Inc. employee. Their interactions, as seen (in third-person) through both Mr. Sweetwater's and Mrs. Ghosh's eyes, will form the first part of The Actors (the title of the novel that I will attempt to begin over the next several months). I'm of course not very sure as to where The Actors will take me; this is my third novelistic attempt in as many years, and none of the previous ones have amounted to much if measured purely by word-count. In fact, much of why I'm writing this novel has little to do with my being convinced that I have something substantial to say. I find myself gripped by a consternation nowadays, a certainty that my lack of novelistic output is a natural result of an inability to express myself rather than (as I would like to hold) a reluctance, and my beginning the The Actors is more directly correlated with an immediate need to dispel such a consternation than (say) with a burst of meaningful creativity that is supposed to propel such fictive pieces.

I have some goals for this novel. I want to finish writing a second 100000-word-ish novel with a greater consciousness of structure than was evident in my first. I want to mime a free indirect speech style that does not degenerate into character slang at any point (thereby drawing attention to itself) but instead is content to stay in the background, gently framing characters using their emotional adjectives (and adverbs, which, contrary to my unformed notions in the past, can be very important esp. when they are owned by a character) rather than the author's. I want to leave behind, for now, the obsession with the unreliable narrator that gripped me all of 2008, until I understand exactly what kinds of unreliability are interesting (as opposed to simply gaudy). Above all, I want to see if I can tell a story that draws my characters more sharply than any combination of descriptions, psychological or otherwise, can do. The last will possibly be the greatest challenge, because it seems more a structural aspect than a purely metaphysical one, bringing about questions of economy (like `is this paragraph appropriate here? or at all?') and organization (`What chronology is best?' `How will the present tense be used?') that are strictly external to any conception of character. I have, needless to say, ignored structure so thoroughly in my survey, these past many years, of modern literature and its precedents, that to now internalize its concepts seems daunting.

Speaking of metaphysical questions: I have one such here that I have been unable to articulate for sometime now: On a plane of pure consciousness, do males differ fundamentally from females? That is to say: it is unquestionable that both genders are capable of feeling, but is it possible that we not only feel about different things (like men about sports and women about jewelry) but feel about the things we feel about in different ways? (I can't explain this any better, I'm afraid. Perhaps a discussion would help. :) )