Walk a Labyrinth to Get to a Straight Line

I finished the bare bones of my novel yesterday in that I have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  No, I haven't reached the 50,000 words yet but I'm not worried about that: my main concern was not having a complete story come midnight of the last day of November.  You see, dear readers, I have this internal voice that scolds me, 'If you don't have an actual beginning, middle, and an end that make some kind of literary sense when you reach the 50,000 word win-point, you haven't really won because you didn't really finish a novel.'  I was driven by that reasoning to the point that I only typed the absolute bottom line of information in each paragraph to keep the story going. I'm so happy that I have time to go back in and wordsmith it, fill out all the little bits and pieces that add flavor to the mix. I can now add all the goodies that I felt I didn't have time for if I was going to actually have a coherent, logical story in a month.

I re-read all I had written and surprised myself; I saw such an improvement in my writing from the first paragraphs to the last and I think that after a round or two (or ten?) of revising, my book will be a notch or two above mediocre - perhaps even good - which is so much better than my original impression of this jumble of words.

I did learn something on this journey through the wilds of writing madness. I like circles. I talk in circles and I write in circles. If my writing were to be diagrammed, it would surely be displayed as a labyrinth: the story line follows a rounded path for a bit then turns back on itself.  It retraces steps from a new view and turns right instead of left, then circles around - back towards the center, always towards the heart of the matter. All my characters' meetings, all my clues, all my sub-plots...it's all circular. Like a labyrinth, all the possibilities, all the various directions my story and my characters take, are funneled by a grand design to exit in the same place at the same time. The purpose of the labyrinth is the journey itself, following a rounded path of discoveries to their natural linear conclusion.

My Grandma Lucy grew up in the mountains of West Virginia; like most mountain people, she had an uncanny knack for saying non-sensical things that were somehow perfectly logical.  A woman who was pretty feisty for her time, she would have enjoyed walking a labyrinth just for the new adventure of it.  I can hear how she would have described it as she left the circle: "You've done gone around your ass to get to your elbow." Grandma defined my writing style to a 'T.'

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Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
- E. L. Doctorow
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Sis...who took the picture of us leaning into wind? Love you.