I haven’t given you an update on my thesis since January 11th, almost two months ago exactly. In that time, I’ve completed chapters five and six and brought my total word count to 65,907 words, which equals about 229 printed pages and 206 paperback ones (averaging 300 words per page, and leaving space for chapter transitions, etc.).

In theory, the entire novel should take ten, maybe eleven, chapters, so I’m little over half done. I’ve been getting interesting feedback from my advisor this semester. In response to my first packet, she wrote:

As soon as I started reading your work, I thought, Hey, this is exciting!!! Kyle, you have a really strong voice, an energy, a mind, an imagination. All terrific. While I don’t want to rein you in too much, I do want to rein you in some. I want you to slow down, to look at some of the patterns of things you are doing in your style and make more considered choices about what to do and how often in your work…I want you to regard revision as a hugely important part of writing, being able to go back to cut and clarify and make your work more directly what it wants to be.

Which is very good advice. But this is what I wrote in my process letter for packet #2:

I started my novel thinking it would be one thing, but I soon made the decision to NOT force my novel to be anything. I would ride the river of inspiration from its source to the sea, going wherever it would take me. I’m now six chapters into that process, and am both frightened and excited at the unknowable twists and turns that lay ahead.

But make no mistake: once I type the words “The End,” I’m going to jump inside my metaphorical helicopter and give myself a bird’s eye view of the river I’ve just traveled. Then I’m going to take out my back-ho and craft what I think is the most satisfying ride from the novel’s first page to its last. I’m going to cut that river mercilessly, make it run deeper and faster, and give whatever readers come after me one hell of a ride.

Which is to say that, yes, I understand “revision is a hugely important part of writing,” but I am still at the stage where the best thing I can do is surrender to the flow. I want to assure you that this is not a kind of Kerouacian impulse to take a bunch of speed and stay up all night scribbling scrolls of pseudo-beatnik drivel. It is, instead, to look at the blank space to the right of my cursor and say, “I am not afraid of you.”

Where her response to the first packet concentrated on my stylistic repetitions, her second-packet response addressed concerns with the structure of my novel. I don’t think I’ve explained this to you before, but the structure is a bit on the confusing side. Episodes are introduced not when they occur in “real time,” but when they make the most sense thematically, which makes my advisor wonder “if supplying some kind of timeline would be a good idea.”

I’m wondering the same thing myself, but I’m not sure how I feel about it. I mean, it would be simple enough. I’m already using a resource document to keep my timeline straight. What troubles me is that I want the experience of reading the book to be an experience of timed revelations, and I wonder how having a timeline would affect that.

Of course, there’s more than one way to orient a reader. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace doesn’t give a timeline, but he does put a date at the heading of almost every chapter, and while the dates are a bit confusing, they do provide enough context for readers to situate themselves in the book’s non-linear flow. But…I don’t know…something about that just strikes the wrong note for me. I’d almost rather include a graphical timeline, but one that wasn’t obviously a timeline, you know? It’d be more like a graphical separator between the novel’s sections, like how some books have a ying-yang symbol, or an asterisk, or whatever. It’d be like that, but it would carry a modicum of meaning.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not against including a timeline, but I don’t want everyone to know it’s a timeline. I’d almost rather it feel like a secret gift, like a reward for paying attention. I don’t know.

Maybe that’s just being elitist.

What do you think?