The Index Cards Are on the Scene

It needs to be said because it may very well be inevitable: Project Guernica may be my debut novel. There is a good possibility that I will query this book when it is done. One of the comp titles will be Pan’s Labyrinth. But I am getting ahead of myself, because so far, my protagonist has done….nothing in this book. Truly. She reacts to things, but she needs a quest, and that my friends is Epiphany 42877 in relation to Project Guernica.

Let’s back up again.

I’m finally feeling excited about what Project Guernica represents and what its plot entails. It is my weakness as a writer to have characters feel a bit powerless in their own narratives. They do not act; they are passive. With Project Guernica, I’m trying to snip away the tangled roots that lead me to this staleness in my writing. As I am in the drafting phase, I’ve done it: I busted out the index cards.

Every time I go to Walmart, I get more cards. Then I gobble them up with ferocious appetite. I’ve scrawled my Japanese hiragana on them, my practice questions for the GRE that I never ended up taking. I love index cards. Now, as I plot the second book in my series as well as Project Guernica, I am hungrier than ever for them. They help me to organize my thoughts, because I can pick one up and move it to a new syntax in the story.

Specifically, with Project Guernica, I have two storylines that bump up against one another but never interweave. They can’t, and I don’t expect for now that they ever will. We have Character A, a woman, and Characters B, a chorus. Characters B have been the focus of much of my attention for these past few weeks, giving them a series of threads that are plentiful in number and yet still lack any specific depth. That’s fine, this is a first draft. But Character A has been so neglected. She suffers from what I am now calling Rivasian Passive Aggressive Syndrome. It’s like regular passive aggressiveness, but in a fancy bow of character-who-needs-to-make-some-damn-decisions-of-her-own-every-now-and-then.

I’m adding in a certain. modified quest for this first draft. The book is thirteen chapters long at present. The index cards are to help me with her want — to become a scholar — to what stands in her way. That part, you see, still evades me. And, yes, I am feeling far more passionate about this project than I was even a week ago, I still have to figure out what it is that Character A is doing as the time passes throughout the novel. What triggered this was thinking about Labyrinth, not the Pan variety but the David Bowie film that my friends and I watched faithfully at every sleepover. While there is no literal labyrinth in Project Guernica, there is a woman in need of a good old fashioned storyline. Character A will, as I have said of the book in the past, get a life.

I’m having a fun time with the index cards with ideas scrawled in my shaky calligraphy. I am addicted to blue stick pens these days. I love the way the words come out smooth as jazz on the thick papers. Character A’s path my not yet be properly lit for me, but at least I know that I have to put her on a path, one lined with moony flowers and pale, bloodless pebbles, in the first place.

Then Epiphany 51083 came a few nights ago. I was thinking about what the speculative element of the book would be, because everything I write is speculative. And then it hit me, almost like a physical sensation (“Oomph”). Project Guernica is more fantastical than I realized. Magical realism is a bit more subtle than the speculative elements that I need, at least for now. Is there a magical animal familiar? Talking weather? What is happening?! The index cards say, “Slow down, Rivas. You’ve got to go through us to get there.”

I suspect that soon I will update this blog with the word count of the first draft. That is exciting itself. I think that the first draft will be so different from whatever version ends up the querying draft that it will be shocking to me when I look back on this journey to writing Project Guernica. I don’t think it will be as long as my first novel, the one that may never find an agent. And I’m setting myself the task of translating the book into Spanish when I am able to finally master object pronouns. I have so much research for this book that I don’t know what to do with it all, aside from buy another box to hold my notes. The realization that I will be penning another query letter, setting my queried document to zero again, is actually exciting. Even though it won’t be ready overnight, I am still hopeful that it will be a bit more palatable and cohesive than the first novel’s sprawling limbs and habit of gobbling up every single story that stood in its path.

It’s leaner, in a way.

With the book that is dying on querying, I got up early. I stayed up late. I chugged black tea. I took classes. I workshopped it. I did everything that I could humanly do to improve, to be better. And yet publishing is a merciless realm — it doesn’t care. Everything I threw into my book, the industry shrugs off. If I have to try again with Project Guernica, I am more than willing to do so. It just hurts a smidge. So that is why I have to love Project Guernica with everything in me. More than anything, that is the one item of necessity that I hold with this current novel. The passion. The heart rendered in black ink on a page.

With my headphones on, I blast Cher’s “Believe.” That is what querying feels like: A broken heart. I need songs to remind me that it is possible to love again. Thanks, Cher. I’m humming your truth as I line up my index cards.

I think I can love again, Project Guernica.