Writing is Easy Work, but Nothing Lasts Forever

From Denis Johnson’s story “Triumph over the Grave” in his book The Largesse of the Sea Maiden:

“Writing. It’s easy work. The equipment isn’t expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape. You don’t have to be high-functioning or even, for the most part, functioning at all. If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time, and production wouldn’t suffer. Bouts of poverty come along, anxiety, shocking debt, but nothing lasts forever. I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie — although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.”

I haven’t been writing much lately, but I think about writing all the time. Not in a way that makes me regret the weeks that have passed without opening the draft of the novel, but as an ever-present background, a gentle but insistent reminder of what’s still to be done. I’ve been turning the ideas over in my mind, the way I’ve always done. Summer is drawing to a close, the days are getting shorter, the mornings cooler, and soon I’ll get back to work.

Life is Not Lived by Metaphors

This interview with Lydia Davis from a few years ago got me thinking about metaphor:

“Do I not use metaphors? I don’t consciously avoid metaphors, or similes for that matter. If they don’t happen in my writing, it may be because I find the thing I am writing about compelling enough without comparing it to something else. Maybe I don’t want to introduce some completely different world or image. … If I avoid metaphor, and if I have to think of a reason why, it may be that I don’t want to distract from the one thing that I’m concentrating on, and a metaphor immediately does that. It introduces some completely, even incongruous, other image and world. And it can work very beautifully, but maybe I don’t want to leave the scene of what I’m describing.”

James Wood on metaphor in How Fiction Works: “Metaphor is analogous to fiction, because it floats a rival reality. It is the entire imaginative process in one move. … I am asking you to imagine another dimension, to picture a likeness. Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story.”

Wood describes his favourite kind of metaphor as one that “estranges and then instantly connects, and in doing the latter so well, hides the former. The result is a tiny shock of surprise, followed by a feeling of inevitability.”

Metaphor shows up in Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li, a novel which is essentially a conversation between a woman and her son Nikolai following his death by suicide.

“You make my head swim, I complained. I have to write your words down to understand their meaning.

“You’re being silly, like English teachers always asking us to look for metaphors in the text, Nikolai said.

“Life is not lived by metaphors, we said together. He had heard that first when he had to sit through my teaching for five hours. He was four, and lay under a long table, slowly but persistently rolling from one end to the other and then back. The next day he said I had been mean when I said, Sometimes nothing is wrong with a story but that it’s boring.”

Later:

“Each box I opened let out memory that no space could contain. Each box that remained sealed retained its power to trip and trap. To throw or not to throw the dice: It makes little difference. In a game of luck, luck is already determined.

“Since when have you become an avid consumer of inane analogies and inept metaphors? Nikolai said.

“The adjectives you indulge yourself with, I complained.

“At least I’m consistent. I’ve never said anything negative about adjectives. But you, you’ve been dismissive of analogies and metaphors.

“I’ve started to understand the point of them, I said. They take up space, they distract, they make the difficult less difficult, they even fluff things up a little. And they can be a shortcut, too, the ladders, you know.

“You’re becoming a bad writer.

“Does it matter? I said.”

Finally, on a much lighter note, from Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn: “I hate adjectives. I also hate similes and metaphors, just can’t do them, never have been able to. Anyone who wants to write about food would do well to stay away from similes and metaphors, because if you’re not careful, expressions like ‘light as a feather’ make their way into your sentences, and then where are you?“

Slumbering Memories

W. G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn, writing about memory as the Vicomte de Chateaubriand:

“But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is! — so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory.”

See also: Why you should read W. G. Sebald at The New Yorker.

Three Kinds of Writing

I’ve been thinking lately about the three kinds of writing Joanne McNeil recently described in her newsletter, All My Stars.

  1. “There’s the writing I want to be doing — that fully engages my imagination, that is risk-taking, and might not command a huge audience, but when it is well-received, there is no better feeling.”
  2. “There’s the writing that I know will always whip up attention when I want that.”
  3. “And there’s writing that helps me feel less precious about publishing, such as this newsletter, which I think of as like an ice rink figure skaters practice on that is open to the public. Nothing written here is ever perfect, but it isn’t meant to be, either.”

She has an idea for a critical piece about William Gibson and starts taking notes, but then realizes the piece doesn’t fit in any of those three categories, so she abandons it. “I don’t have all the time in the world,” she writes, “so I have to make choices about what to write and when and why. But it was a nice idea for a moment; so instead I’m describing this discarded idea as I pirouette on my little ice rink.”

Another Thousand Words

The second year of #1000wordsofsummer ended this weekend. Although I got a lot of value out of it last year, I didn’t participate this year. Well, I sort of participated, for three days. But I’m not currently at the stage in my novel writing saga where churning out a thousand words a day is important. I have plenty of words already. It would be all too easy to strike down some new path and allow myself to get distracted from the revision process. At this stage I don’t need to be creating new content as much as I need to be figuring out what to do with what I already have.

At the beginning of May I started assembling the second draft. I say assembling because the second draft didn’t begin as a copy of the first draft. I started a new document entirely and wrote up a sort of dramatis personae and then started copying over chapters from the first draft. I moved pieces around, added new pieces, then divided the document into three main sections to organize the writing better, although all three sections will be interwoven later. I did a good chunk of new writing, then copied more over from the first draft, rearranging and rewriting a bit as I went, but not letting myself get too far into the weeds at this point. I wanted to assemble something that I could go over with more attention later, when I have more of a structure in place, more scaffolding which I can remove later, as Zadie Smith might say.

Over the first week I got together about 12,000 words, took a break for a work trip, then added 7,500 words. I skipped a few days, then added another 16,000 words. Then I didn’t touch it again for sixteen days (oof) between our 11-day vacation and the week of recovery afterward. I opened the document most mornings during that week, but didn’t have the time or energy to give it the attention it needed.

Finally last Tuesday I sat down with the seeds of a new scene in mind and plowed out a thousand words. It felt so good that I did it again for another two days. Now I’m back to assembling words from the first draft, reorganizing groups of paragraphs, making little edits as I read through the scenes. I’m okay with that.

Although I didn’t join #1000daysofsummer, I loved getting the daily emails. Here’s a great passage from the email on Day 10: “We create a space for one idea to live next to another, so that our ideas will have a big home together. But writing is also about reaching out beyond yourself and offering up your best thoughts and connecting them with the world. Everyone gathers together on the shelf in one way or another.”

And some words from Alexander Chee on Day 3: “The legal pad and pen is like a change in the wind in my heart, the new idea raising its hand. The notebook makes room for it and the pen is the door it opens to walk out. A tiny door the size of where the ink comes out. And it cost me less than ten bucks for the pens and the notebook.”

I wonder where I’ll be this time next year, if the challenge repeats in 2020. New novel? Still editing this one? Done forever with writing? Ha. We’ll see.