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.

Is it (merely) autobiographical?--Part V

Alexsandar Hemon was interviewed recently on The New Yorker's book blog and had this to say about the customary "is it autobiographical" question.

Here’s how it works: Last night, on my way to give a reading, I hurt a ligament in my right hand while putting my shoe on. As I was driving this morning and talking on the phone with my sister in London, I lost my grip and sideswept my neighbor’s car. Being honest, I went to their house to tell them what I had done. When I rang the bell nobody answered. I knocked and went in anyway, thinking they might be in the backyard. The house was empty, and as I walked through I noticed a vase in the shape of a monkey head. The light angle made it somehow seem that the monkey was winking at me, so I picked the head up to examine it, but then, dropped it, what with the weak hand ligament, and it shattered in a thousand pieces. For a moment, I considered cleaning up or waiting for my neighbors to show up, but then decided to sneak out. Now I dread hearing the door bell.

I could go on and turn this into a story. I did hurt my hand last night and I did get into the car this morning, but I did not cause any damage, nor did I trespass. I did not talk to my sister yesterday, but she does live in London. And I’ve never seen a monkey head like that. So, how much of this putative story is autobiographical?

Similarly, I did spend a few weeks in Africa some time in the eighties, just like the narrator in the story “Stairway to Heaven.” But my father was not a diplomat, there was no Spinelli, no Natalie, and most of the things that happened in the story did not happen to me. For some reason or another, I compulsively imagine scenarios alternative to what happens to me. To my mind, my stories are not autobiographical; they are antibiographical, they are the antimatter to the matter of my life. They contain what did not happen to me.

That idea of the antibiography partly explains what's going on with mine. In a sense, I'm telling a preferable version of my story--what I wish had happened. What might have happened with more luck and a stronger character and if different butterflies had flapped their wings at different times to create different kinds of storms.

Another (mixed) metaphor: The story started with the seed of something that really happened but became something strange. It has the trace of a mannerism from my life, like how I can see that my wife and her father cock their heads in the same way sometimes when they're thinking. Of course, they are totally different people with different experiences and characters. Similarly, a familiar mannerism makes itself apparent in my novel here and there, but it's not the story of my life.

Is it (merely) autobiographical?--Part IV

I like Colson Whitehead's answer in a recent interview in Rumpus when he was asked the "is it autobiographical question." If I'm ever so lucky to finish my book and be published and asked about my work, I'll probably say something like this.

Q: Did writing this “autobiographical fourth novel” (as you call it) feel risky in any way?

Colson Whitehead: Let’s get the boilerplate disclaimer out of the way—I overlap with Benji, and use my summer of 1985 as a touchstone for his experience, but you can’t make a one-to-one correlation between my life and his, blah blah, it’s fictional, blah blah and etc.

That said, when I started the book I knew I had to go “all-in,” as they say on those TV poker shows. I was going to dive into all that grisly and gruesome adolescent muck and try not to gag—if I didn’t, the reader wouldn’t see their own horrible squirming existence in Benji’s existence. Once I was up to my chin, it was easy to be truthful about other things—things I had experienced myself and could transform into something that would serve the story, and things I have witnessed in other people’s lives. I had a strict No-Flinch policy from the get-go.

I haven't read Whitehead's new book yet, but I do remember reading and enjoying an excerpt from it sometime in the last year, probably in The New Yorker, knowing my reading habits.

Shame and self censorship

Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer for fiction yesterday for her most recent book, so different interviews and reviews are popping up in the blogs I read. Here's an interview from several months ago on Rumpus.

One especially interesting part of the interview is about the funny reactions people have to writers:

ES: I really didn’t tell people as I grew older that I wanted to be a writer—you know, because they look at you with such looks of pity, and ask what you’ve published—whatever, I just couldn’t stand that. And so I didn’t really tell people.
Q: Do you think there are some small, finite, predictable conversations when one says they’re a writer?
ES: I think so, yes. . . . There’s the first response, “Well, I’ve always wished that I had the time to be a writer,” and that’s sort of like, OK… and then the second response is, “What have you published?” and the third response, which has always sort of appalled me, is that people will say, “Well, you know that very few people are ever successful at that.” And so it carries a lot of negativity.

This reminds me of how much I have let myself be nagged by the anticipation of these negative responses. I can imagine people rolling their eyes at meeting an aspiring writer, and so I tend to hide it, and, even worse, I tend not to even BE it. Part of the reason it took me until much later in life than I wanted to really attempt this was a fear of what people would say--expecting they would say the kinds of things Strout summarizes above and not being able to deal with it. I was ashamed of that feeling of exposure and I essentially censored myself. (There were other factors, too.)

What's partly going on is a feeling of illegitimacy. It's not only that other people don't see the work as legitimate but that I myself tend not to see the work as legitimate. I buy into the presumption that writer = published writer. There's a built-in tension stemming from the basic laws of physics--the desire to write precedes publication. The intervening time is a period of illegitimacy if you define legitimacy by publication--or even worse by publishing well enough to be making a living.

The healthy and reasonable thing to do is to recalibrate our sense of where legitimacy as writers comes from--to not tie our sense of self-worth to publication. The journey is its own reward and all that. But for some reason--probably faulty wiring or something--we seem better adapted as a species to living and working through shame than to doing the healthy and reasonable thing.

More Wells Tower and POV and envy

I'm anxious to get back to work--on the book, that is. I'm just as anxious to avoid my paying work. But I need to hold tight and give my readers a chance to give me some feedback. It's going to be a few weeks at least. urg.

I've read a couple more Wells Tower stories. Everywhere all of a sudden, isn't he? One I read last night--again I forget the title, the one about the old man in a wheelchair who goes across the road to visit his neighbor--I liked a lot. I think it's the voice of the characters in dialogue that's most interesting. The way he captures certain colorful ways of speaking. That can often be very precious--like more up-to-date versions of replacing all the g's with apostrophes--and I read an interview with him the other day where he said he guarded against that. He had in fact felt his stories were doing that and he rebuilt them to get that out of there. I think my annoyance with the first story in the book, "Brown Coast", was because I felt that precious habit in dialogue, along with the overly familiar modern-ennui-man narrator, were still in there.

And part of my annoyance is probably coming from envy. Back when I was still in the second or third draft of my book it never would have occurred to me to be jealous of a contemporary writer's success, but now that I'm getting closer to the end and imagining the improbable possibility of publication for myself, I can't help but compare, and I'm not naturally inclined to generosity. When someone near my age, with their first book out, is getting a lot of attention from reviewers, I start to look closely to see what it is in their writing that got them there. (See last month when I wrote a lot about Phillip Meyer. See next month when I'll probably be writing a lot about TBD.)

I never say to myself that I could write better--at least not with these stories by Wells Tower. It's more like I say to myself that I want to have written better. The writer in question doesn't live up to my aspirations for myself or to my yearning to see some vaguely new and fascinating thing in contemporary literature. That was my response to "Brown Coast." However, as I wrote before, I thought the title story in the collection was terrific, and I like a lot the other one mentioned above.

That brings us to the fourth story I've seen so far. (I should probably shut the hell up until I've read the whole book, shouldn't I?) "Leopard" It was in The New Yorker last November and often gets mentioned in the reviews. I've read a couple interviews with him, and the interviewer both times asked about that story and why he choose the POV he did.

The story, which is about an 11-year-old boy, uses second person, and he explains in these interviews that he wanted a POV that was more authoritative and less naive than first person could be. As I wrote way back when I started this journal, that was my main concern when I decided against first person for my novel, which also features an 11-year-old boy protagonist. I went with third-person limited omniscient, but Wells Tower says that was too distant and too critical/ironic/insincere a voice for how he wanted to characterize this kid. He felt that second person was the right middle ground.

He acknowledged this was risky because of how off-putting second person can be for the reader, and I don't blame writers for continuing to experiment with the technique to see if they can make it work. But for me, it just never has yet. It didn't work when I read Bright Lights Big City as a teenager, and it doesn't work here. It is off-putting.

And it doesn't work because it doesn't actually function to get the reader closer to the consciousness of the character. As James Wood talks about in How Fiction Works, with the free indirect style form of third-person a kind of magic happens where the language and metaphor belong at once to the narrator and to the consciousness of the character described. So even though it's logically preposterous that the narrator can know these things about the character's interiority, the reader feels like they are riding along inside the character's mind. That magic never occurs with second person. And I don't agree with the premise that third-person is too distant. You might as well say that Madam Bovary and all the developments in modernist narrative are too insincere to create meaningful characters.

Well, this argument I'm making is based on a weak memory of a hasty reading of something Wells Tower probably said offhandedly anyway, so probably I've misinterpreted him and there's no argument at all. And that envy discussed earlier probably has something to do with it--this particular story, and his rational for the POV, can be taken as a referendum on how well I create the consciousness of my character, and in this case, I really really hope I've done better.

Anyway, if you're keeping score at home, that's two stories I don't like and two that I do like a lot. Check out that title story--it really pops.

Is it (merely) autobiographical?--Part III

A few interesting reads on the issue of autobiographical fiction, which I've written about previously here and here and here.

Maud Newton makes a point similar to something I've come to realize when she says:

Even small changes of timing, circumstance, and location create different narrative logic and evoke distinct moods, and cumulatively these alterations can be so significant that it’s misleading to speak in terms of a story diverging from fact at a single point . . . .

It's like the cliche in movies about time travel--be careful when you go back not to change any little thing because it will change everything.

To understand this, imagine a meaningful episode in your teenage years. Now choose one family member who was not terrifically active in that episode. They clutter the episode, so you remove them from your life entirely. Imagine they never existed. Would you still be you? Would everyone else close to you be the people they were and that they became? Would that episode have unfolded the same way? Would it have had the same emotional meaning then and later? Now make it happen on a snowy day instead of a rainy day. Make it happen when you were one year younger. Picture yourself wearing your new tennis shoes your mom splurged on for once instead of the hand-me-downs you typically would have been wearing. How would that episode be different then?

These are the kinds of small changes that a novelist, inspired by autobiography, might make just for the sake of plot sense and flow and simplicity, and those changes quickly accumulate until it's not autobiography at all. The characters become nothing like the real-life counterparts that may have been on scene in the real-life event. And, vice versa, if the people are different it stops being the same event, so the characters in turn become less like the real-life people and so on. Then how these different people respond leads to different, new episodes that have no correlation to your real life.

Rodes Fishburne (What's with all the literary names lately that are also places or things?) rolls his eyes at the "is it autobiographical" question.

I wonder why this is such an evergreen question. It must be because people who don’t write novels are trying to figure out how to reverse engineer the novel writing process and the first and easiest way to do this is to suppose that in the search for a main character one need look no further than oneself! But the truth is that the least interesting character in my head is me.

That doesn't sound quite right. The MOST interesting character in my head is me, and, fellow writers, j'accuse--you know it's true.

Rabih Alemeddine commands you to "ignore that autobiographical novelist behind the curtain."

Which begs the question, why do novelists get so anxious about the question anyway? I know it keeps me up at night preparing an elegant little answer for when Oprah interviews me. I think it has something to do with feeling like it discounts the novel--like people will think I'm cheating somehow if they think it's "merely" autobiographical.

Amis on revision

Since last spring I've been picking infrequently at a book called Off The Page edited by Carol Burns. It's a collection of excerpts, organized thematically, from interviews she did with numerous writers as part of a series for the Washington Post. It's the kind of thing I used a lot for moral support during my drafting stage (I read a lot of the Paris Review interview collections then) but have needed less lately.

I was drawn to the chapter on revision of course, and underlined a lot in there. Here's a sample from Martin Amis:

The process of writing is really finding out more about the novel. When you finish and then go back to revise, you're amazed by your ignorance of what you were trying to do.
(pg. 125)

So true. Ever since finishing the first rewrite I've had an itch (which I'm about to scratch, I think) to start using what I learned about the process to try again with another project.

Read The Inheritance of Loss by Kirin Desai

I finished The Inheritance of Loss last night, which I enjoyed a lot. It got me to wondering about the author, and here are some interesting things I read in interviews with her.

As you said, you had an unconventional method for writing Hullabaloo; this being your first book, do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

KD: There are all kinds of theories that you get told in writing workshops--"Write what you know," and that sort of thing, which I don't believe at all. I think one of the great joys of writing is to try and explore what you don't know, that's exciting to me. There are all kinds of little things--show, don't tell--I just wouldn't pay attention to any of that really. I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different. I can't imagine how they come up with these rules--they're really ludicrous. You can't learn to write in that fashion. What inspired me really was reading, reading a lot and learning from other writers. Learning how they are going about something--I was very aware of that when I was writing this book. Every book that I read at the same time I'd think, "Hmm--how do they do this?" Looking at it in that way, from a technical point of view, which we don't usually do as a reader. But really I think that's for me what was important; I was training myself to look at my work with a critical eye.

Her basic point here--that the most important part of learning to write is learning to read--I absolutely agree with. It's something I talk about with my freshman comp students all the time. In that field, it's called "reading rhetorically." The other thing I tell them is that all the rules for writing that they get told are really rules for re-writing--that when you are writing you should act as if there are no rules, and then in the revision stages you channel the ghost of English Teacher Past.

Contrary to the impression Desai gives here, I do think it's important for the end product to show rather than tell. But if what she means is that you should ignore that rule while writing and then come back with a critical eye to see what works (presumably discovering that failing to show doesn't work), then I'm with her.

What did you think you wanted to say when you first set out to write The Inheritance of Loss? Do you think you managed to convey all you wanted to?

. . . . As for whether I'm content with the book -- I always have the feeling that something got away. Where is that thing -– the sublime novel? What would it feel like to hold that in my hands? Whenever I come across it as a reader, I read trembling. Like any art form, when it's great, the person experiencing it exists in a form of grace. I hunger for that feeling as a writer as well as a reader.

Are you satisfied with the way your work has developed, as a writer? Do you see yourself continuing to write more in future?

I think this book is better than the last, but certainly I don't think it's perfect. It's the hardest thing to write a perfect book. Yet, of course, as a reader, I hunger for it. It's a constant desire and I know I'll write another book for that reason.

Writing, for me, means humility. It's a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you're writing honestly. I imagine businessmen feel smug at least twice a day. Writers? The moments are rare.

All of these comments jumped out at me, because they so accurately describe my experience.

Knowing the ending when you start

Interviewer: I think academics tend to assume writers write novels the way freshmen write term papers. You have a thesis . . .

Larry McMurtry: That’s right. And you explain your thesis. But that isn’t what happens. What happens is a process of discovery in which a writer is compelled as much by curiosity as to how things will turn out and who people are as anything else. I get curious about a group of characters and I start investigating them.

I wish it was that way for me. That’s the way I would like to write, but after many years of trying to just finish something, I mostly only had mere sketches of characters I was curious about. The breakthrough for this book came when I pictured the ending and I realized I could just keep writing toward that ending and that if I kept moving toward that ending I would logically have to create a plot along the way. For me, plot has always been the weakness I had to work on most consciously.

Now, this didn’t necessarily make a good ending a good plot, but since experience told me the biggest risks were not starting and not finishing, I decided not to worry about “good” and to focus on “finished.” That insight was what it took for me, with my particular mix of talents and deficiencies, to get a complete draft written.

Also, it didn’t necessarily mean that the ending and plot, however good they might be, would still go together very well. In fact, in the last two days as I was writing down the final scenes, half of my brain was celebrating—“I’m almost done!”—and the other half was admitting how unsatisfactory the ending was.

So the ending really served as a kind of placeholder that I’m now going to have to get rid of in favor of some other ending, still to be thought of. I love what the ending did for me. It served me well. But now I have to retire it.

More on Larry McMurtry tomorrow.

The domestic novel and the sensitive 20th century male author (like me!)

Interviewer: A couple of male writers have found it particularly valuable to write in a woman’s voice.

Sue Miller: In the nineteenth-century men wrote a lot from the perspective of women, if not in the voice of. Think of the really great novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy. Maybe in the nineteenth century, the writer’s life, Tolstoy’s and Flaubert’s in particular, was very domestic, very like a female life in some ways. They would have been comfortable writing women’s lives because writers used to lead what the world would have thought of as women’s lives.

I think American fiction in particular has fallen into the male-female division traditionally. It may be exciting now for American men to cross that line. They had gotten trapped for so long in what Leslie Fiedler proposes as a peculiarly American turning away form the domestic in fiction—the novel of the road or the sailing voyage or the trip down the river: leaving home was important in American fiction. The work of someone like Hemingway embodied this. It’s important for male writers in the past not to write domestic novels. Now they more and more are writing them.

Sue Miller is speculating here, so it’s far from gospel, and she goes on after this part to speculate some more on if most readers of literary fiction are female and if all authors—male or female—are catering to a market that has evolved from 40 years ago. Check out the rest of her interview in Master Class: Lessons from Leading Writers by Nancy Bunge. (University of Iowa Press)

This caught my attention when I read it because I was aware while I was drafting that my story is essentially domestic. And it’s a coming-of-age story. The setting has more in common with The Bluest Eye and To Kill a Mockingbird than it does with Huck Finn or Catcher In the Rye. i.e. With classic coming-of-age stories by female authors that are superficially at least more domestic in their setting.

(Another way of thinking about this that occurs to me since I first made these notes is inspired by Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction where she says that all modern novels can be categorized as novels of manners, adventure stories or psychological novels. By no means do I accept the scheme, but using it for the sake of discussion, you might say that the male coming-of-age story in America has typically been an adventure story—e.g. Huck Finn. Arguably, To Kill a Mockingbird, while Scout has an adventurous tomboy spirit, is a novel of manners. My story more closely resembles that.)

That wasn’t a choice about markets at all. It simply arose from the story occurring to me and feeling that the story was powerful and interesting. And I wasn’t inspired by Tolstoy or Flaubert—they’re on my stack of reading to catch up on now. And I’m not deliberately avoiding the road story. I’d love for my second book to have more adventurous settings in it.

It is the case that I’ve always had a deeply ambivalent relationship to many 20^th century American male authors. I’m thinking for example of On the Road and The Sun Also Rises. I must have written a half dozen papers on these books when I was in college and graduate school. On the one hand, I loved their style and form—I thought they were perfect examples of executing on a stylistic innovation. On the other hand, the masculine ideology of them drove me nuts. It wasn’t the macho persona of the stories, the characters and the authors so much as the dishonesty of those personae—how they were expert disguises for the same adolescent sentimentalism and outdated romanticism they pretended to be too cool for. In some ways, the amoral gloss of Jason Bourne stories is more honest.

This all makes me want to go back and read my Leslie Fiedler. I remember being influenced by Love and Death In the American Novel, Waiting for the End and The Return of the Vanishing American when I was in grad school, but I don’t remember what any of them said.

In any case, I’m intrigued by the speculation that more male writers are turning to the domestic. I can’t think of any example off the top of my head. No wait, I just thought of one. I think I mentioned that I recently read Richard Powers’ The Echo Makers. That’s one. Let me know if you think of some others.

Motivating character with the dragon

Interviewer: When you teach, you talk to your students about “the dragon” . . . . Could you please explain it?

Sue Miller: It’s an analogy for the writing of fiction lifted from Flannery O’Connor—the notion that every character in a story must struggle with something: his dragon. . . . My argument has been that if you really look at any given character, there is . . . a dragon for that character: something born of him that is the thing he ought to be confronting fictionally that you could make him confront. . . . If you look at each character, there is something that’s the pickle he needs to be in in order to make a story happen. . . . The character richly drawn struggles with something which emerges from himself that he ought to struggle with; or at least he learns that he’s going to have to struggle. In a way, what fiction does is watch people struggle.

Presumably Sue Miller isn’t talking about watching me struggle, which is what it feels like right now.

I’m looking at this explanation of hers carefully lately because it’s a really helpful metaphor for the aspect of the writing I have to work on next. In the first draft, I thought in terms of “longing.” What does this character long for? Trying to answer that was great for helping me build up tension from one scene to the next to keep the plot going.

Now that I’m working on the rewrite, I’m seeing lots of places where there still isn’t much going on with the characters--not much longing and not much struggle, places where the struggle doesn’t seem very significant or meaningful, places where their longing doesn’t connect to other places, places where they simply aren’t “richly drawn.”

So I’ve been using this dragon metaphor to guide my imagination in the rewrite. What’s the thing that is each character’s core that they need to struggle with?

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.

Reading novels while I’m writing

John Updike said, “I want to read only what will help me unpack my own bag.”

That makes sense to me. I feel very touchy about what I read, and I’ve had an uncharacteristic tendency in the last several months of picking up lots of books and not finishing them. All the surfaces in my house are stacked with books I’ve pulled off of shelves, started in hopes of finding coaching or companionship and then abandoned. I’m looking for books that address the same technical problems that I’m having or that give me a sense of how to keep going without fear. One example was Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker, which I got caught up in and finished while I was drafting. It’s in the third person, which I was lad to have a chance to study in action, and I enjoyed looking at how it handled the characterization of a small-city environment, which I also am doing.

Books like that are hard to find—thus all the Paris Review interviews I’ve been reading. Still I need to keep my mind busy between my morning writing sessions. Early in the process I had some luck distracting myself with some totally unrelated history books and biographies, but I’ve been feeling impatient with them lately.

I had a period when I started reading poetry some, which in a way felt more dangerous. You hear some authors talk about how they don’t want to be “influenced” while they’re writing, and poetry it seems to me is more likely to do that anything, to put a certain tempo or stylistic consciousness into my sentences. I’m intrigued by that but cautious. I don’t want to risk any kind of disruption. Perhaps it will come in handy during the revision/editing process.

Are the characters in control?

If you read a lot of interviews with writers like I do, you often see writers claiming that their characters just take over sometimes as if the writer is just a medium. That’s never my experience and the mysticism of it puzzles me. So I got a chuckle when I saw this exchange with Vladimir Nabokov on the subject.

From the Paris Review interviews . . .

Interviewer: E.M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?

Nabokov: My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.

The whole interview is worth reading for Nabakov's combination of wit and precise language. He's relentless.

Interviewing my character

This morning I did another exercise from, or inspired by, The Novelist's Notebook. The original exercise was a questionnaire--pet's name, car the character drives, etc. It was pretty basic and suitable for an exercise at the very beginning of dreaming up a story.

At the later stage where I am now, it might be a little helpful as a "gut check" to hunt around for some superficial things about a character that it might be worth thinking about.

But I re-imagined the exercise as an interview with my character--almost like a psych evaluation. The character is a child and I imagined him sitting in the chair in front of my writing chair while I asked him some of those questions (many were only appropriate to adults). It was like talking with my imaginary friend, and as he responded I made notes the way my shrink does when I have a session. The point was less about the factual information but more about HOW he would answer.

So, starting at the top of the questionnaire, asking his name, which I already know, I imagined how he would respond to me asking his name.

This did wonders to start to bring him to life for me in different ways. I started to notice his vulnerability and other personality traits in different ways.

No change from my goals yesterday--still hoping that steadily doing these exercises will give me the confidence and inspiration to launch into the rewrite stage.

Process: How long can this go on?

Interviewer: How long does it take you to write six drafts?

Bobbie Ann Mason: Well, I’m on draft eight right now. I don’t know. Two years.

Interviewer: So you’re working for two years without really knowing how it holds together. What keeps you going all that time?

Bobbie Ann Mason: Well, fairly quickly, the plot emerged . . . Superficially, I can see where I’m going, but it’s not written very well yet. So I just keep rewriting it, trying to get deeper. The novel Feather Crowns . . . probably took four and a half years. . . . If I went through a chapter a day . . . I could get through it in about three months. It seemed like I would never see the end of it because it was many drafts, maybe twelve—I wasn’t keeping count.

Heaven protect me; I’m not sure I want to be a novelist that bad. It’s a calling, not a crucible.

Earlier in this interview Mason talks about the drafting process, and I think she must have very different goals for what is achieved in the first draft, so she’s accomplishing some of the work in later drafts that some other writers attack earlier.

I’ve only read her first novel In Country, a couple times, and I think it’s quite good. I read it probably ten years ago, and then a few weeks ago after I finished my draft. It made me a little nervous because there are so many similarities between that and my book in setting and period. She already uses many of the cultural references I’m using. Honestly, I’m not trying to rip her off—it’s coincidence.

I read it to look at technique. It’s yet another coming-of-age story in first person, so there was nothing for me to study there. I was especially looking at the pacing of her chapters, how many scenes they have, what “beats” they break off on, their length, how the framing of a chapter accommodates back story and flashback. My chapters are a lot longer—they really have the pace and length of a contemporary short story.

By the way, this interview is from a book I just discovered called Master Class: Lessons from Leading Writers by Nancy Bunge. (University of Iowa Press) More on the book later . . . I have some issues with it.