When it comes to writing, I tend to be part planner, part seat-of-my-pantser. And while these two parts usually balance each other nicely, right now they seem to be dueling. E.g., I'm supposed to be working on my last chapter. It feels good to say that but it turns out, or it turned out in the past couple of days, that this isn't the case. The last chapter, which is supposed to focus on a fictional piece of Burke's about an operation he--I mean the main character--had in '56, has set me on to broader questions about illness and medicine, questions that I really can't ignore if this is going to be a book I'm happy with. And so I'm at work on a new section or chapter or something, and I'm not sure where it will go (and I mean that in a couple of ways, arrangement wise and direction-wise). In other words, I'm letting myself be a seat-of-my-pantser for just a little while so I can poke around in some really cool scholarship on medicine and physiology in the 1920s, hatching a new claim about illness in Burke's very early fiction, and wondering where in the hell it will fit in to my otherwise tidy manuscript.
Maybe that's the lesson, though: if something is too tidy--or as Burke might say, too healthy--then it could use a little shaking up.
