Refraining from writing and Joseph O'Neill

I've written before about refraining from writing at a micro level, and I came across a related idea today.

One, inspired by something Elvis Costello said about songwriting about giving up the recording every snippet of a song idea he ever had, I gave up the habit of jotting down every clever turn of phrase or observation I had. Costello said this was a kind of wasted energy and if the song was any good he would remember it later anyway. Similarly I've come to feel that all those accumulating scraps of paper, from pads I kept next to every place where I might ever come to rest, didn't do anything to help me produce an actual piece of writing.

Another example is that I no longer leap up late at night when inspiration strikes. My writing time is in the morning, and if I'm in bed at 11 p.m. and get an itch to make progress or have an idea about how to solve a particular problem in the WIP, it used to be I would spring into action out of respect for the impulse. Now I respect the process more. I refrain.

The Elegant Variation is running an interview with Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland, and they have a discussion about refraining from writing on a more macro level--refraining from even having a WIP. From starting a second novel before you have an idea that really warrants it. He seems to have the counter-intuitive goal of writing less, and there's a certain kind of sense to it.

TEV: How much writing constitutes an average day, whether in hours or in pages. And how much planning or outlining do you do?

Joseph O’Neill: It is far too shameful to start talking about that stuff.

TEV: Keep that in the box?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah.

TEV: Next question please?

Joseph O’Neill: Well, it’s a disgrace, really. Having said that, I’m a great believer in the essential disgraceful nature of writing. I mean it really should be as close to idling as possible. Of course, I venerate the 300-400-500 words a day sort of writers. I used to be one of them. But at the moment, I’m just too idle to do that.

TEV: Someone, I think it was Fran Leibowitz, talked about the curse of the writing life, that we always feel so felonious because we aren’t writing more often than we are. And there’s not a writer I know who isn’t sort of secretly ashamed in some way of their work habits, that they don’t write enough, or they aren’t disciplined enough.

Joseph O’Neill: I have the opposite. I am secretly ashamed about the fact that I have written so much even thought I have only written very little.

TEV: Can you elaborate?

Joseph O’Neill: Let me put this another way. I think the sort of middling kind of novel that tides you over between novels is not ideal. There’s a lot of that around: “I haven’t got a fantastic idea for my next novel, but I must write 500 words a day. Because if I don’t write 500 words a day, then I won’t have a novel of 65,000 words in the next 18 months. Therefore, I must start writing 500 words a day based on idea X, even though it’s not that brilliant.’

TEV: The system must be fed.

Joseph O’Neill: The system must be fed. Less cynically, there’s the hope that, by writing, you will come to discover that idea X is, in fact, much better than you suspect. So refraining from writing is never, for me, a source of artistic or professional guilt. Of course, to be fair, there may be pressing financial reasons to be productive.

I just remembered that I read a Toni Morrison interview once where she professes a similar Zen-like lack of anxiety about not writing--that she writes when the story is ready to be written, and otherwise she doesn't force it and spends her time on other things that are important to her. I'll have to look that up. It's somewhere in Conversations With Toni Morrison by the University of Mississippi Press.

Toni Morrison on rewriting

From What Moves at the Margin, a new collection of nonfiction essays by Toni Morrison earlier this year:

When you first start writing--and I think it's true for a lot of beginning writers--you're scared to death that if you don't get that sentence right that minute it's never going to show up again. And it isn't. But it doesn't matter--another one will, and it'll probably be better. And I don't mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it--and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better. I don't have the hysteria that used to accompany some of those dazzling passages that I thought the world was just dying for me to remember. I'm a little more sanguine about it now. Because the best part of it all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over. That's the thrill of a lifetime for me: if I can just get done with that first phase and then have infinite time to fix it and change it. I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did. I try to make it look like I never touched it, and that it takes a lot of time and lot of sweat. (pg. 79)

I try to give credit to others for the various ideas about writing that have influenced me, but there is one formulation of my personal philosophy that I'm going to claim for myself. For years I have confidently told my students in freshman comp classes that "There are no rules for writing; there are only rules for re-writing." What I was getting at is that all of us as writers in whatever form sit down at the desk with a head full of rules (don't end a sentence with a preposition; write what you know; write with a reader in mind; have a strong thesis . . . ) and that, while all of those rules are something you should seriously consider observing, all of them are also baggage that slow you down during the first draft.

The trick that I discovered for myself--and that I've seen other writers articulate as Morrison does here; Anne Lamott's celebration of "Shitty First Drafts" is another--is to give yourself permission (even the assignment) during the drafting stage to write very poorly and very much contrary to all the rules. My wife calls these "zero-drafts," because they're less than a first draft. It's really raw material. In a sense, my own first draft would be better characterized as a zero-draft. It wasn't until the first rewrite was complete that I had something sensible and cohesive to really start trying to fix.

Giving yourself permission to write poorly at the beginning, gives you material to work with, and it's in the re-writing phase that you start to try and write well, by whatever rules you deem worthy of observing. I learned that habit in journalism and it served me well writing this book so far. Not incidentally, I've never felt like writer's block was a serious problem for me. I'm a little bit stuck-up about the subject. To me, it's a symptom of unrealistic expecatations about what a first draft should do. Personally, like Morrison, "I don't mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it."

Now that I'm done bragging about my maturity, I have to confess that I'm not quite as sanguine as Morrison. In this project there has been a range of work so far between drafting and careful line revision. The drafting was a joy because it's all id--just creating a mess regardless of the consequences. The little bit of time I have put in with careful line revision has been pleasurable. I've heard writers, like Morrison here, describe that as the most pleasurable part, and I expect to enjoy it when I actually get to that stage. But in between has been this long process of figuring out what the book actually is and needs, and that has involved a lot more doubt and fear and hard slogging through. I have not enjoyed it except for the rare day when I find the solution to a problem and lay it out.

I'm hoping that my inexperience with writing a novel was the main cause of that and that in the future I'll both minimize the need for that process (with better planning) and live through it with less doubt and fear, because I will know what it is. In fact, I've been feeling a burst of confidence lately and fantasizing about when I can choose a second novel project and launch into that equipped with all the experience and perspective I've acquired this time.

A single powerful metaphor

I don't remember the exact quote, but Toni Morrison talks in one of her interviews about how in the drafting process she's looking out for the one metaphor that will carry her through the book. She says once she has that, she knows what the book is about and the rest just flows.

I thought of that today as I was trying to work on the book--really struggling--and had this image of what it would be like not to struggle. It was a fleeting sensation of having some kind of guidestar that just made it obvious what I was supposed to be doing all the way through the book. I'd be glad to work hard on all the rewriting and revising necessary, if I just knew what to do. My real problem for the last few months is I just plain don't know what I'm doing. This sensation for a second this morning, as I thought I was glimpsing that kind of clear path ahead of me, felt like a major relief, and for a second I felt I just had to have something like that. That it would take away all the burden of this rewrite process.

I don't think I have it though. Maybe I can split the difference and say that I have one for Part 1 and one for Part 2, and even that I'm not sure of.

Toni Morrison on Point of View II

Picking up on my last post about looking at things from the bad guy’s P.O.V., the example of the that clearest to me is the Cholly chapter in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and that whole book, along with Beloved, are what I turned to for technical models for my narrative P.O.V.

I started out knowing that I wanted my narration to be in the third person. Partly I didn’t want to limit myself to the P.O.V. of my main character all the way through. Especially since it’s a coming of age story, so my youthful character would not be very sophisticated or a mature judge of his circumstances. I wanted to be able to say more than the character could.

Also, I didn’t want to invite comparison with other coming-of-age stories with strong first-person narrators like Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird and Huck Finn. Any story about youth told in the first person always gets summarized by some readers as either a modern Holden Caulfield or Scout or Huck Finn and I didn’t want to have that hanging over my head as I drafted.

As for second person narration, I’ve always thought that felt gimmicky and unnatural. It puts up a stylistic barrier between the story and the listener. In theory, it's a more immersive experience for the reader, but in reality I think it has the opposite effect, forcing the reader to translate through the technique.

So when I first started, I went looking for examples of coming-of-age novels in the third-person, and they are actually pretty hard to find. (If you can suggest any, let me know.) My wife suggested The Bluest Eye, but if you start reading it from the first chapter, you’ll see that her memory was technically mistaken. It starts in first person, but from the P.O.V. of someone other than the main character of Pecola. It’s sort of how Nick Carraway reports on Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby—the on-the-scene observer who is not himself central to the action. (Except that he actually is when it comes to the thematic conflict vs. the exterior conflict—I’ll parse that another day.)

But I nevertheless re-read The Bluest Eye all the way through and saw that the P.O.V. jumps around. It’s in first person a lot of the time, though with different narrators, and it's in third person omniscient a couple times and third person limited sometimes, especially in the Cholly chapter. That turned out to be a chapter that inspired me quite a lot. If you look over the Cholly chapter, you’ll see that it gets in so close to looking through his eyes and limiting the information to what he knows and how he feels about it, that it almost feels like first person, but it’s third-person limited.

That was also instructive because I knew I was going to have a technical problem similar to the one that chapter was dealing with—a character who does monstrous things but who if I presented as monstrous would come off as flat and unrealistic and incredible. With Cholly, Morrison "causes readers some dismay" (to use her own analysis--see yesterday's post) by making him understandable and comprehensible. She treats him as human, which is necessary to the art if he isn’t going to be just a tool to move the plot along. It certainly is dismaying and raises the stakes for the reader of all the conflict that follow. (That's key probably to any great narrative art and part of what I admire in Morrison's novels--when not only can the reader see something at stake for the characters but can feel something at stake for themselves.)

In the case of my own book, it would certainly be more comfortable for me to treat my monstrous character as simply a monster but the credibility of the tale would break down there, and the Cholly chapter showed me a way to create what I needed to.

But where Morrison used the third person limited in that select spot, I felt her way of getting in so close that it felt like the first person would be good for my entire story. Instead of shifting the P.O.V. and the technique, I would stick with that technique and switch from one character to another as needed in different sections or chapters.

Just about decided on that, I turned to Beloved to study how she handled P.O.V. there. I looked at the scene where the full detail of how Beloved dies is revealed to the reader—the family working the yard, the horses coming up the lane, the mad dash to the shed. If you look at that scene, you’ll see that same technique of third person narration getting in real close on the shoulder of the characters so that it feels like first person.

Except in this case, instead of it changing from chapter to chapter, the P.O.V. changes from paragraph to paragraph. We spend a few frames on Stamp Paid’s shoulder, then on Baby Suggs’, then on the slave masters, then on the nephew’s, then the white man coming up from town in his carriage and so on. In each paragraph we only see it from the perspective and limited understanding of each character and in that way get the whole story. It’s masterful. It’s the most impactful and complex—and dismaying—presentation of horror that I know of in a novel.

I've imitated that style a lot at the most emotionally intense points in my draft and overall the P.O.V. would be described as third-person limited, mostly from the perspective of the main character and occasionally, for the duration of a chapter, switching to other key characters.

Toni Morrison on Point of View I

This is from one of my favorite books about literature, Conversations With Toni Morrison (Edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie; University Press of Mississippi)

Q: Do you love all your characters?
A: Always!
Q: Do you identify with any of them?
A: No, that would not be a good position to take . . . . I love them and I cherish them, and I love their company as long as I am with them. The point is to try to see the world from their eyes, and I think that is probably what causes readers some dismay. I like to do what I thinks actors do on stage. My work is to become those characters in a limited way, to see that they see, not what I see. I need to see how they see the world. Each one speaks his or her own language, has an individual set of metaphors, and notices certain things differently from other people.

My biggest direct influence when it came to P.O.V. was Toni Morrison, and I'll write about that at more length later. This quote, which I found after I had already get well started, isn't obviously about P.O.V. in that it doesn't say anything about first-person, third-person, omniscience, etc. But it is about P.O.V. in the sense that it reminds me that all the technical parts of a book are integrated. Whatever technical approach I take to the issue of P.O.V.--third person limited, for example--it won't matter if I don't really perceive my characters as fully human.

This can be so difficult to do with the bad guys in a story. (Though I suppose the danger is just as great with the good guys.) The temptation is to treat them like monsters--to have them serve the purpose of antagonizing your protagonist. But if they aren't fully human in their own right and don't have real, credible reasons for their behavior, then you have melodrama instead of literature.

One way I forced myself to do that is to have some chapters that are specifically from the antagonists P.O.V. In my case it's like when Gruendel speaks for himself in John Gardner's novel. It's not always necessary to narrate from the bad guy's P.O.V., but Toni Morrison's point here is that it's always necessary to be able to.

A working title finally

Up until last week my book didn’t have a working title. All through the writing of the first draft, a couple months of stewing and a couple months of working on the rewrite, I didn’t refer to it by any name at all, aloud or in my head. I was in no rush to find the perfect title, but it made me a little anxious that nothing had leapt out to suggest itself as a possibility. I was worried that there was nothing grounding it—no strong metaphor or image that held it together, no theme connecting it all the way through. I could think of lots of metaphors and images and episodes that I had confidence in, but none of them seemed overarching enough to warrant being the title.

Now that something has come to me, it kind of confirms that my anxiety was well founded—I can see an overarching theme and metaphor much better now that I have a title and that I was working much more blindly before. Having the title is even helping to solidify and focus the plot and character. The lack of a title was coincidental to the book just not being very well developed yet.

I also know now that I was right to ignore that anxiety and keep moving forward anyway. The larger underlying fear—that all the work was shit and going nowhere—wasn’t well founded. I needed to ignore that and keep going on the assumption that while what I had so far wasn’t as well developed as I wished it was, it was still something and was still adding up to more and more something every day.

This line of thinking reminds of something Toni Morrison says in an interview about trying to find the right metaphor for a book. I forget it exactly, but I remember that when I saw it, it seemed to clarify things for me for a couple of days. I’ll have to look for that again.

The title . . . I should say a title, since working titles are more likely to change than not, for both artistic/literary reasons and, if I should ever be blessed with publication, for marketing reasons . . . A title came to me uncomfortably late, but it has always worked out pretty good. I’m quite proud of my title, actually. I hope it doesn’t change. However, this is one of several pieces of valuable experience I have gained in my first book that I will try to do better on in my next book—to settle earlier on some of the thematic and metaphor issues that a good working title is a symptom of. I expect my early work in future novels will be much more “on task” than it has been in this book.