Reaching Ourselves in the Past
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.