Andrew Statum

It's not fair. No one should be able to write the way Keats wrote before the age of fifty. The guy died at what, 26?, having secured for himself a place in the upper echelon of the Western literary canon while I, at 28, have nothing to show for my creative life but a handful of ephemera and some half-baked ideas about literature. How is it possible for anyone to write like this while he was still so young?

I hope I didn't start too strong without leaving myself anywhere to go. Frances and Joe have both come along beautifully while Marcus languishes at the table with his Dad. I know where I need to go with him but I'm not quite sure how to get there. Oh, and I think he might now be a closet homosexual. Joe, I think, has the most fully developed arc and his is the crisis that seems most prevalent in the three characters' respective consciousnesses. But its Frances who is the "hero" of the piece. She is the only one of these three who confronts her past, accepts it for what it is (don't know exactly what that means yet but hopefully that'll work itself out over my remaining writing sessions) and moves on with her life. Marcus "confronts" his past - in the form of his father - most directly, but he refuses to deal with what he finds and ends up literally running away from it. Joe is at the other end of the spectrum. He is haunted by the specter of his ex-wife and by the residual pain of a life spent feeling sorry for himself and he "deals" with it by overdosing on diet pills.

In all I think its working and I think the close third person voice helps me to abstain from judging these people too harshly which, I hope, increases the pathetic response in readers by helping them to see these characters in a more sympathetic light. For example, Joe may be dealing with his problems in a less-than-productive way, but I'm hoping readers will follow the voice as it reveals the anxieties and personal circumstances that have lead him to this point in his consciousness. Same with the other two who are, I think, far-from-exemplary, but also far-from-despicable.

As far as the fugal arrangement is concerned, I'm thinking of creating three columns, one for each voice. Only one voice would be speaking at a time with a little overlap when one voice "takes over" the narrative from another, except at the end when all three voices will be going simultaneously which, I hope, gives the piece a kind of symphonic resonance at the climax. We'll see if it works.

Hopefully this reads better than the draft. Thank you all for your helpful feedback.