Reaching Ourselves in the Past

April 21, 2020

I may have sounded a little critical yesterday of Writers & Lovers, so I’m writing this post to clarify that I loved it. Although we disagreed on the matter of page vs. word count, the novel gets all the other parts of the writing process right.

Writers & Lovers is the story of a woman in her thirties who is writing a novel and grieving for her mother and barely scraping by. No spoilers, but it is ultimately a feel-good story with a satisfying ending. It gets a little sad, a little deep, but the touch is light and not sentimental.

A big reason why I love novels about writers is that there are always excellent passages about the writing process. Our narrator Casey thinks as often about writing as she does about her lovers and friends and debts and losses. This bit in particular rang very true to me:

“The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane. The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable.”

This passage was definitely in the back of my mind when I wrote yesterday about only surfacing from writing long enough to check my word count.

I find this idea of a first draft as the first layer of a painting very comforting:

“I’d had a few bad days of writing, and I was tempted to go back a chapter to fix it, but I could not. I just needed to move forward, get to the end. Painters, I told myself, though I know nothing about painting, don’t start at one side of the canvas and work meticulously across to the other side. They create an underpainting, a base of shape, of light and dark. They find the composition slowly, layer after layer. This was only my first layer, I told myself. … It’s not supposed to be good or complete. It’s okay that it feels like a liquid not a solid, a vast and spreading goo I can’t manage, I told myself. It’s okay that I’m not sure what’s next, that it might be something unexpected.”

At one point, Casey is interviewed for a position as an English teacher. The interviewer asks if she was always such an enthusiastic reader. Her answer:

“Not really. I liked reading, but I was picky about books. I think the enthusiasm came when I started writing. Then I understood how hard it is to re-create in words what you see and feel in your head. That’s what I love about Bernhard in the book [Woodcutters]. He manages to simulate consciousness, and it’s contagious because while you’re reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. Not themes or symbols or the rest of that crap they teach in high school.”

The reference to consciousness reminded me of something Emily Gould wrote in a recent Lit Hub Craft of Writing newsletter:

“Novels pile up; they can seem like a nuisance, frivolous at best and at worst a self-indulgent way of avoiding a reality we’d rather not countenance. But it’s worth remembering that they are also the best technology we have for transmitting one person’s consciousness directly into another’s.”

Which in turn reminded me that Lily King also wrote a Craft of Writing newsletter. In it, she describes the novel as the story she needed to read at the narrator’s age. As Toni Morrison said, “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”

I like how Saeed Jones puts the same idea another way: “I don’t think it’s enough to save our lives in the present; I think we need to reach ourselves in the past, even if it’s only to make amends or pass on an idea we’ve come to understand years later. Who would we be now if we could connect with ourselves back then, just in the nick of time?”

I’m definitely writing a novel I wish already existed, but at this point it’s in no shape to save anyone. In a convoluted way, insofar as my novel reflects anything about my own life, the story is about what could happen in the future. Maybe I should look more to the past instead.

April 21, 2020

Am I There Yet?

April 20, 2020

In the novel Writers & Lovers by Lily King, when a character talks about how their writing is going, they speak in terms of how many pages they’ve written. In one scene, a novelist describes her ex-boyfriend, also a writer, begging for a second chance. The ex hasn’t even started writing his book, but the dumped novelist has written two hundred and sixty pages since he left. Their respective page count is how we know she will never take him back.

In another scene, our main character, Casey, asks another writer, George, about the story he’s working on.

“’How long have you been working on it?’

‘Three years.’

‘Three years?’ I don’t mean for it to come out like that. ‘It must be more of a novella by now.’

‘It’s eleven and a half pages.’”

When George tries to ask her out, she thinks: “I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and a half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.”

Pages are one thing, though, and words are another. I prefer word count. A page could be sloppily handwritten in a pocket notebook or in a 10 pt font single-spaced with the tiniest possible margins. A page could mean anything! Word count is the only measure by which I can meaningfully chart my progress.

At the beginning of the month, I joined a group of writers led by Nina Semczuk for an April NaNoWriMo in order to get back to work on the fourth or fifth draft of the novel I’ve been working on. I did NaNoWriMo back in November but hadn’t worked much on the novel since. As I found then, the external accountability of sharing my word count is obviously the special sauce I need. This latest draft is going much better than I expected.

I usually track my word count in my own spreadsheet, but for this round I’m only using the spreadsheet shared with the group. I keep a sticky note on my desktop with the total word count I have to reach and how much I’ve done so far today. Whenever I feel the urge to quit a writing session early, I update the day’s count. Seeing the number helps me push onward. I’m like one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at every word count update, hungry for that feeling of accomplishment in reaching that daily goal.

My goal for the month is 55,000 words. As of today I have 38,511 words. In Google Docs, using the font Spectral Normal at 12 pt with 1.5 line spacing, 6 pt before and after every paragraph, indenting the first line of each paragraph, without page breaks between chapters, with 1 inch margins, that’s 82 pages.

(I used to just type into Google Docs without changing a thing, but I recently decided to switch up the formatting from draft to draft as a visual reminder to create something new and better instead of just rehashing what came before. Each draft looks a little different from the last one, even aside from all the different words in it.)

I feel validated when I read about writers like Fran Lebowitz who also fixate on how much one writes in a day, not discriminating between page and word count:

“I’m not interested in the thoughts or ideas of these people, I only want to know how many pages a day they wrote. I don’t know many writers. … But as soon as I meet any, as soon as I can figure out that it’s not too intimate a question to ask them, which is about six seconds after I meet them, I say, How many words do you write a day?”

Even better is recognizing the importance of word count in someone else’s writing process, demonstrated in this story Lebowitz tells about a man at Sotheby’s showing her an original Mark Twain manuscript:

“He showed it to me. A short story. He was telling me about the manuscript and where they found it and everything.

He said, I’m pretty knowledgeable about Twain but there’s one thing we don’t understand. We’ve called in a Twain scholar.

I said, What is that?

He said, See these little numbers? There are these little numbers every so often. We just don’t know what those are.

I said, I do. I happen not to be a Twain scholar but I happen to be a scholar of little numbers written all over the place. He was counting the words.

The Sotheby’s man said, What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous!

I said, I bet you anything. Count. I don’t want to touch it, smudge up this manuscript. You know, like the sign says, you break it, it’s yours.

He counted the words and saw I was right. He said, Twain must’ve been paid by the word.

I said, It may have nothing to do with being paid by the word. Twain might have told himself he had to write this many words each day and he would wonder, Am I there yet? Like a little kid in the back of a car — are we there yet?”

Like a little kid in the back of a car, like one of Pavlov’s dogs — perhaps there is something instinctive and primitive about making word count the thing that gets you through the writing day. The work itself can be rewarding too, but only when you’re deep in it, not when you surface and wonder if it’s time for dinner, if it’s time to get up and pour yourself a drink. That’s the moment when you check your word count and figure out how much more you have to do. You catch that refreshing little breath, and then you dive back in.

April 20, 2020

A Slice of Life Like Any Other

April 16, 2020

Philip Christman, author of Midwest Futures, wrote in his newsletter (which Levi Stahl gets the credit for bringing to my attention) about teaching Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, which I first read many years ago.

As Christman notes, this book is all too relevant at the moment, as it “mostly concerns suffering, mass death, and the question of the significance of a single life” and carries a strange blend of nihilism and compassion in the face of it.

So I picked up For the Time Being again. This part got its hooks in me:

“Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? — our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Though perhaps we are the last generation — now there’s a comfort. Take the bomb threat away and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.”

Replace “bomb threat” with “coronavirus” or “the election” or “climate change” or “massive economic inequality” or whatever you like. But the part that gets to me is that “slice of life like any other.” This moment doesn’t feel that way, not in the slightest, and yet. Annie Dillard is not wrong.

Here’s what my slice of life is like these days: Working from home, mostly at the table in our office but sometimes on the sofa or in a chair. Even when it gets uncomfortable, feeling too urgent about the work to stop and get comfortable. Working on that. Loving lunch at home every day, even if it’s just a peanut butter and jam sandwich. Having no more and no less time than before. Not taking up new hobbies or discovering myself. Always meaning to go for a walk but rarely doing it. Often meaning to take a bath before bed but rarely doing it. Going to the grocery store exactly once per week. Wearing a mask the last two times, and both times fogging up my glasses.

“Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy — probably a necessary lie — that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?”

I’m trying not to read the news. I avoid thinking too far into the future — just into next week, maybe two weeks from now. Not thinking about when this is supposed to end, how it will end, what it will even mean to end. Living through this does not make us special; this is a challenge humanity has faced many times before. We don’t know what the world will be on the other side, and it’s impossible to know what now will look like from there.

April 16, 2020

The Infection and the Antidote

March 31, 2020

When COVID-19 was beginning to spread in North America a few weeks back, when lists of books and films about viruses and plagues were going around as a way of coping with the news, I kept thinking about Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It’s the only pandemic-adjacent literature I’ve been interested in revisiting (no shade to Station Eleven or Severance or any of those blockbuster medical disaster movies I’ve never seen), so I started rereading it this week, our third week of physical distancing and staying at home.

In Doomsday Book, an Oxford historian named Kivrin time-travels from 2054 to what is supposed to be 1320 in order to learn firsthand about life in the Middle Ages. Almost as soon as she arrives at her destination, fully inoculated against every known disease, she exhibits symptoms of a nasty flu, before she’s even exposed to anyone or anything that might infect her. She’s taken to a village and gradually recovers there. Soon after the villagers become ill, but with a totally different disease.

Meanwhile, back in 2054, one of the technicians involved in Kivrin’s trip also becomes ill, and Oxford is put under quarantine. The authorities attempt contact tracing, but it quickly becomes impossible to track down everyone exposed. There is a long and — more so now than ever — painful time between the reader understanding the situation and the characters realizing they’ve been exposed to a mysterious and dangerous infectious disease. Interwoven with this are scenes with Kivrin, a woman alone sometime in the 14th century, suffering the same symptoms as the technician back in the 21st century, trying to figure out where and when exactly she is and wondering why she feels so bad. The tension is extreme and makes for a very propulsive read.

I’m still in the process of rereading the book, and I don’t remember all the details, so I won’t spoil it for either of us, but I’m very much enjoying diving back into Connie Willis’s world, regardless of how much it does or doesn’t keep my mind off our current pandemic.

Jill Lepore in the New Yorker considers what it means to read fiction about pandemics: “[T]he existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading. Reading may be an infection, the mind of the writer seeping, unstoppable, into the mind of the reader. And yet it is also — in its bidden intimacy, an intimacy in all other ways banned in times of plague — an antidote, proven, unfailing, and exquisite.”

I suppose I’m reading Doomsday Book, of all possible novels, at this particular moment, for the same reason I read anything. It provides a distraction, to some degree, but it also provides a lens through which to see the real world. During a pandemic and during the regular drudgery of everyday life, fiction provides the same solace, the same caution, the same escape as it always has.

March 31, 2020

Something Taking Root

March 22, 2020

Before it became impossible, for the foreseeable future, to visit a physical bookstore, I went to a local shop in the next city and bought a book I’d had on my to-read list for a very long time: The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin, an amusing mid-twentieth century Oxford murder mystery. The bookseller was delighted I was buying it and commanded me to come back when I’d read it. Now that I have, I do indeed plan to go back and buy another in the series (especially since the series suits my intention to read more books older than I am this year), although in our current state of emergency it’ll have to wait.

The plot concerns a bored poet, Richard Cadogan, who goes to Oxford in search of adventure and finds it, stumbling upon a dead body in the middle of the night. Near the end of the story, after a parade of suspects have given testimony of the events surrounding the murder, while the amateur detective Gervase Fen is assembling the solution, there is a striking moment during which the poet reflects seriously to himself after spending several dozen pages frantically running around after Fen and longing for a meal.

“Euthanasia, Cadogan thought: they all regard it as that, and not as wilful slaughter, not as the violent cutting-off of an irreplaceable compact of passion and desire and affection and will; not as a thrust into unimagined and illimitable darkness. He tried to see Havering’s face, but it was only a lean silhouette in the fading light. Something took root in him that in a week, a month, a year perhaps, would become poetry. He was suddenly excited and oddly content. The words of his predecessors in the great Art came to his mind. ‘They are all gone into the world of light.’ ‘I that in heill was and in gladnesse.’ ‘Dust hath closed Helen’s eye …‘ The vast and terrifying significance of death closed round him for a moment like the petals of a dark flower.”

Later, he declares to another character that this murder has given him more than enough of the adventure he so blithely sought at the story’s beginning.

“For excitement, give me a country walk any day; and I’m inclined to think there’s a good deal more adventure to be had by just opening the curtains in the morning. I dare say that sounds gutless and middle-aged, but after all, I am middle-aged, and there’s no escaping the fact; as a matter of fact, after today I welcome it. Being middle-aged means that you know what matters to you. All this business has been strictly meaningless to me, and from now on I shall conserve my energies, such as they are, for significant things. If ever I’m tempted by posters advertising cruises, I shall whisper ‘Sharman’; whenever I see headlines about international crooks, I shall whisper ‘Rosseter’. I eschew Poictesme and Logres now and for ever. In fact, in a couple of days I shall go back to London and start work again — though I’ve a nightmare feeling that this business isn’t over yet.”

Although we are only so far into what will be a who-knows-how-long period of distance and isolation, I’m already feeling an uncharacteristic itch to go out, to explore, to mingle, to connect. An insipid longing for adventure, something like Cadogan’s, but perhaps a misinterpretation of the desire for things to go back to the way they were. But it is wiser to be content, in my usual way, with the adventure of staying indoors. With the necessities, with the piles of books acquired against just this sort of emergency, with the privilege of merely opening the curtains and looking out the window onto the rest of the world.

March 22, 2020