Chad Taylor

The Manuscript I Never Finish

'You look different,' she said.
'But I still look like me, right?'
'Kind of.' She tilted her head. 'It’s remarkable, actually, how much difference it makes. You look like you, but you’re not you. You know?'
'I don’t like that idea.'
'It’s only temporary,' she said. 'You’ll be back to your old self soon enough.'
Since finishing my last ms I've gone back to the Manuscript I Never Finish. In the old days this would have been a hairy box of notes and papers but now it's a hairy box of notes and papers and many, many computer files, all carefully dated. The more experimental a work becomes, the more you fall back on traditional methods to keep track of the parts.

I think a lot of novelists have a work they keep coming back to. This one is hard to catch because it's quite light, but as I work on it, it becomes darker and I have to pull back to recapture that original "feel." Normally I don't worry about tone because tone seems naturally born of structure and story, like tin cans tied to the car's bumper. But this one goes back and forth, and it doesn't help that there's a major surreal element that I lose track of.

Pray that I never finish it. Possibly I already have and I just like going back to the narrative between novels and shoving bits of it around to see what happens. I like the madness of this. Al Pacino starred in a film called The Local Stigmatic that famously never seemed to be finished - a quick click on imbd.com tells me that it's now out on DVD. Stanley Kubrick was always working on Napoleon. I envy people who have the confidence that the world will wait for them no matter how long they take. I've never had believed that. I'm outcome oriented so something that never comes to an end is a meditation.