• Writing a few pages of my forever-unfinished novel tonight after my girls go to bed.
• Seeing the last episode of “The Wire” tomorrow night (Thanks to HBO On Demand)
• Hearing no more about the Democrat primaries
• Listening to tales of Jeff’s trip to India
• Reading “Love in the Time of Cholera” on the subway tomorrow
• Adding more books to my account on GoodReads
• Seeing “There Will Be Blood” again
• The end of winter

But something else has kept me quiet: a firey guilt that singes the inner recesses of my writer’s mind. It’s this painful burden that brings me to the keyboard tonight. I have something to confess.

I speak fondly of different genres of writing from time to time. But, I have been almost exclusively a card-carrying member of some unofficial union of short-fiction writers, working our way into novels. In fact, I was working a novel lately. And, then I stopped. Again.

As well, I go on and on about the love-hate-love triangle that inflicts the writing process. You might think I’m seething in the midst of a hate phase right now, but you’d be wrong. I have been writing, and doing so happily. Lovingly. Passionately.

And this is where the confession comes in. For the past few months, I’ve been writing a TV pilot. It feels so wrong.

For years, I’ve been the guy on record claiming TV is the source of all that’s wrong with humanity. And here I am engrossed in an HBO-style one-hour television drama, and enjoying pretty much every second of it.

I don’t think I’m some kind of Stephen J. Cannell. I haven’t returned my union card. And I don’t plan to give up my novel or the short stories I need to revise or the new ones waiting for me.

The way I look at it, it’s all writing, it’s all storytelling. For some reason the idea of spending some time this summer writing a TV pilot script grabbed hold of my imagination and didn’t let go.

Besides scratching an itch, this exercise has had an added benefit. Playing with this thoroughly different genre has helped me hone in on things that I feel like I neglected while immersed in short fiction: like structure, rising action, tension. You know, those little things.

From what I understand, too, scriptwriting is a form that tends to allow for collaboration a lot better than fiction. I’ve been putting that to the test by writing this thing with my wife. The partnership has been productive and fruitful so far — nice break from the usually lonely business of writing.

If we keep at our pace, we hope to be finished with a first draft in a couple weeks. When that happens, this will be the first completed work I’ll have in front of me since finishing my collection of stories for my MFA.

I confess. If this does turns out to be wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Happy writing.

“Where crime comes into it for me is that I need a narrative engine to strap myself onto so I can write the book. ‘Cause otherwise, I feel like, “Oh, fuck, where’s this going.” And then he’s in the room thinking about things and the dust is blowing in the sunlight.” – George Pelecanos

I’ve been caught up watching an HBO series called “The Wire” on DVD. There is a pack of novelists who write for this show. George Pelecanos is one of them, along with Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane.

Just like a good classic novel, “The Wire” spans the gutter and the penthouse — Balzac does Baltimore. Characters are real, they change, everyone has a story to tell. It’s probbly the best TV show ever.

I didn’t know much about the writers on the show so I’ve been researching and reading about them. In the process, I came across the nugget of wisdom above and had to stop and think about it because I’ve been floundering with this for a while. What’s my narrative engine?

“Oh, fuck, where’s this going…?” That’s exactly the question that I’ve asked myself so many times.

In my writing, I have often played with subtlety and vagueness, because I thought a distinct narrative engine was maybe too simple, too easily disputed. I wanted to be mysterious.

On the one hand, I think this was cowardice: too afraid to really dig down in my stories and pull up real emotions, fears, passions, perversions, etc. But, to be fair, there’s also been something genuine — something inside me that truly likes the undefined and the blurry, that dust blowing in the sunlight that Pelecanos takes a dig at in the quote above.

But you have to latch onto something.

For Pelecanos and the other scribes on “The Wire,” crime is their engine. I can’t pinpoint anything so specific as crime — but it’s something close. Some literary miscegenation of people who look at dust in the sunlight and happen to get mixed up in very bad things. I’ve been playing along the borders of this for awhile, but was afraid to jump into it with full commitment. But, I think I just revved up my engine.
So this is where I’m going — for now, at least.

Where are you going? Down what roads is your narrative engine taking you?