1:58pm October 3, 2014

NaNoWriMo

So here’s what I think I’m writing about. Obviously, details may change in the course of the telling.

It is going to be about the relationship between a pair of 20-something sisters who live a very isolated life with their parents in the redwoods. Their parents run an antique shop (you would not believe how many antique shops there are along Highway 9 alone, and I’ve been to them all) and the family lives in the back rooms of the shop. The sisters live in an attic room. Both sisters are severely disabled. One is bedridden, the other is autistic and has no formal communication system. Their parents have refused to allow the state to care for their daughters, especially because they would be split into two different service systems, and their daughters share a very strong bond.

The narrator and POV character is the autistic woman, and I have tried to make her much as I would have been without what I sometimes call the gift of Seshat (the combinations of gifts and curses that make up hyperlexia and hypergraphia). Like an alternate universe version of me – but not so much like me that she isn’t her own person. But enough like me that I can comfortably write from inside her, and know that she is an authentic type of autistic person, not the usual mishmash you get when people write about types of autism they have no clue about. Many people don’t realize that there’s only a hair’s breadth between someone like me and someone like her, only the slightest difference in fate could have meant that I was her, or that she was me. At least in terms of autistic traits (and however pervasive autism is, there’s always more to an autistic person than their autism).

She has the same relationship to the redwoods that I do, as well, and a large part of the book is taken up with that relationship, which I take just as seriously as her relationship with her sister.

The book is about relationships and characters and setting and, to some extent, being a sensing person in a very non-sensing world – perception and cognition. It’s not so much about plot or conflict, although if plot and conflict happen, which I’m sure they will, that’s not a problem. There’s no antagonist that I’m aware of. I anticipate possibly a nonlinear structure to the book, because that’s how I think, and I think she will think even more that way than I do.

One theme throughout the book is the artism that runs in the family. The father’s job with the antique store involves driving his pickup around and getting stuff for the shop. But he always ends up picking up stuff for his rather eccentric sculpting habit, too. The mother is a painter who paints fairly conventional amateur-painter stuff, but really makes it come alive. Martha, the sister, is a poet and writer, as well as doing line drawings and various fiber arts. And Voicy (my working name for the main character) arranges objects, mostly stuff she finds in the forest but also stuff she grabs from the store or the pickup when people aren’t looking. But nobody but Martha really recognizes Voicy’s art as art, or as communication for that matter. And people get far more pissed about her stealing stuff from the store than they do when her dad does it.

Anyway the two main relationships in the book are between Voicy and Martha, and Voicy and the redwood forest. Voicy and Martha are in the same boat in a lot of ways, they’re both severely disabled and both being taken care of by their parents without a lot of choice in the matter, and have mixed feelings about that. The idea of them living in the back of an antique shop comes from an actual antique shop I visited where an elderly woman was taking care of her 30-something or 40-something disabled son without outside assistance. That popped into my head when I was wondering where, exactly, in the redwoods I would have them living.

Anyway the story itself is going to unfold the way the characters want it to unfold. And I’m not going to be posting it as I write it or anything, because I want to reserve the right to change things, and because I don’t want to do all my writing in front of an audience. I just really hope the book works out at all. For some reason, I’ve never had this feeling before, but I’ve got a feeling it really could work out, and could serve to convey a lot of things about how I and others experience the world that wouldn’t work in nonfiction. It will be interesting having the narrator be someone who can’t speak, read, or write. Just in terms of writing the thing. I assume I’ll have to treat it as a translation of her thoughts.

Notes: