I've been reading Saturday by Ian McEwan. I'm sort of tempted to steal his way of solving the whole present-story/backstory problem. He writes the main storyline in the present tense, tracking the protagonist closely as he goes through his day. It's the perfect approach for what he's doing: in the present tense, you're in that very moment being described, with no foreknowledge of the future, not even the next second. The reader experiences the day just as the character does. Flashbacks, whether it's earlier in the day or the protagonist's childhood, are handled in the past tense, often without any noticeable break other than the change in verb form. No clumsy signals like "He thinks back to when...." No preponderance of the pluperfect.

I'm wary of imitation though (not because of being unoriginal - I'm taking it as given that what I'm doing is not terribly original). When I'm taken with someone's style I have a tendency to go too far in echoing their voice. In high school, I wrote stories and essays where my teachers would know instantly, "You've been reading Vonnegut," or "You're trying to do a Calvino." My writing voice is already too changeable. A bad habit, like picking up accents when talking to people.

I do need to flesh out the present-day story, which *cough* I never seem to get around to doing. Getting out of the habit of wallowing in backstory would also help with the "remember" problem. I have a sort-of beginning and a sort-of end, and a very fuzzy middle, as in how do they get from here to there? I should just start writing it and see what happens.

On the other hand, I think I've been doing a bit better with the things I mentioned last time. Well, I don't know that I'm any better at physical description, but at least I've got a clearer image of them - it just doesn't seem to come out very much during those initial spurts of writing. I have to let more of that leak through in revision.

I feel less self-conscious about the choreography, though sometimes it's because I'm skipping it altogether. At least people don't look at each other gratuitously so much anymore.

I've dumped a lot of speech tags. I could probably stand to cut a few more. The draft is heavy on dialogue, it's just too easy to fall into. At times it feels like disembodied voices talking to each other. (Maybe I should start writing screenplays for Lost or something, flashbacks every episode and a framing story no one understands or really expects to.) I need more good choreography and setting.

Also, I ought to write more of the 3rd-person narrative from her POV to balance out the 1st-person journal entries from him (that also goes along with the focusing on the framing story). And his parts should probably sound more journal-like. He's sort of more fun to write, but that's not fair to her, or the story in general.

Anyway, I need to get the discipline to start wrangling these scattered elements into some sort of coherent shape, at least so I have a clearer idea of what it looks like, and where it needs to go. All right, consider that the goal of the next few months.