The Zebra Hunter Problem

As a writer I am often asked if I have anything "lying around." Coming from producers this is code for "something to be had for free" and the answer is "no." If the request has come from another writer or artist things get more interesting.

I use a MacBook Air 11" with a solid state drive. It's still amazing to me that so much thinking can fit on a chip the size of a cameo brooch. With the wifi off I can tap away on TextWrangler or Final Draft for up to eight hours so inevitably things accrue. There's the Manuscript I Never Finish which is unlikely to ever see the light of day because I never get around to finishing it. Then there's the novel I finished last year -- the first in a series -- and the novel that comes after that (all going quite well). In between -- lying around -- are some short stories, a stack of anonymous sections of dialogue, a pulp noir and another novel that split like a roux.

The split novel was frustrating. Every now and then I would go back to it and stare and scratch my head. I knew it had gone wrong but couldn't see where, or why, or how to fix it. At the same time I knew that the answer was right in front of me. Wood / trees. Nose / face.

It's what I call the Zebra Hunter Problem. You write 200 pages about a zebra and 200 pages about a zebra hunter and then wonder how to fit the elements together. Any fool looking over your shoulder can say, hey, you know what would work – make the zebra hunter hunt the zebra. And you reply: wouldn't that be far too obvious?

And you go back to staring.

Then one day, much, much later you open the file / legal ringbinder / shoebox / paper sack of Post It notes and locks of her hair and think, hey -- you know what would work?

It's not a eureka moment. It's a zebra moment. So that novel is fixed, now. It's lying around.

(Pic: Nicholas Ray / Burnett Guffy)