Swimming Toward My Novel

Here is the premise I am abiding by these days: The novel I am writing already exists.

What I am doing when I work on it is to push aside everything in my way of seeing it clearly.

It is like swimming underwater toward the wall at the other end of the pool.

Or walking toward a mountain.

Or seeing a friend a block away at a peace march and weaving through the crowd to reach her.

This is counterintuitive, yet it also makes sense. When you think of an idea, a line, a character’s gesture, a beginning incident, that protrusion is part of a body that is already whole. It is not detached. You are not building the body from scratch as you compose. It is rising into consciousness, emerging, like a performer rising on a lift to stage level.

When we reach the end of a book and have the great satisfaction of a sense of inevitability, the writer has managed to uncover a story that existed as an organic entity when she began her work.

This is like the famous story about Michelangelo.

How did you create the glorious statue of David?

I carved away everything that wasn’t David.

When we are working on a story or a book, we know there is a David somewhere. Sometimes we creep toward him by following headlights in the dark. Sometimes we write lists and plans and synopses and charts that guide us as to what might become his arm or his leg or his hair. Sometimes it is a matter of laying down sentences one after the next that we recognize as being both David’s and our own, and fiddling with them until they snap into place like puzzle pieces.

George Saunders says he works on sentences until they sound like him.

Yes. That rings true.

What gets in its way? This is something every writer has to figure out for themselves, but I was once told that your writing problems are your life problems, a claim that struck me as helpful and worth exploring.

What was my writing problem?

There were a few. But one big one. I was trying to squeeze my writing into the shape of other people’s books. I wanted to write something like…I wanted to be as unassailable as…I wanted to be as good as…

Meanwhile my own writing was always there, waiting for me to swim to it.

It was there in the hundreds of fantasies with which I entertained myself during boring classes at school, there in all l’esprit de ’escalier conversations I went over in the middle of the night, there on my bookshelves in categories about subjects that obsessed me.

My writing was always there. What depressed, discouraged, harmed, confused, or saddened me was thinking I should be doing other people’s writing.

It is easy to think that. Our writing is corrected from such an early age. Who likes being corrected? Correction is different than a wise and insightful friend or editor suggesting we spend a bit more time on David’s fingers, or showing us that his left calf is longer than his right. An honest and loving suggestion is about the most exciting present you can get.

Corrections are telling us we should be writing other people’s writing.

When I teach now, say an undergrad lit class, I will correct one two-page paper for conventional grammar and offer my opinion (I emphasize the margin of error involved in anyone’s opinion) about next steps toward more clearer expression. After that I respond without correction. I have found that this method untethers students from their assignments. A two-page assignment can arrive as five pages because they have more they want to say to a listening teacher.

I will let them know which sentences really made me sit up straight.

I ask which sentences did the same for them.

Often they are the same sentences. And they understand something more about writing.

I have written before here that I stop writing when I start thinking. That is glib but also accurate. The thinking that is leading me to the story that already exists doesn’t argue with the steady flow of story onto the page. It is the second guessing, the doubt, the other kind of thinking, that is trouble.

My friend is the crowd disappears. A cloud obscures the mountain. My eyes fill with water and I can’t see the other end of the pool.

The story already exists in the germ of the idea, whatever came to you, the sentence, the glimpse of a character, the notion of a twist. That germ is like a fertilized egg that contains all the information to manifest the entire creature.

That germ is unique to ourselves. It is different than an idea inspired by another person’s writing. That inspiration may be unique but it may be overthinking.

A good way to remember that you do indeed have your own writing is to copy passages from someone else’s book. Soon enough you will feel tension, an urge to rebel, to finish a sentence your way.

So what is your way/my way?

I have a piece of writing I did about a seal in a harbor in Maine I wrote in seven grade. It sounds like me; my sensibility, the way I like to use words.

I have boxes of pages of also starts or cut pages…examples of when I was inspired by the writing of others. It is such a great feeling at the start, but it founders as it develops, because the initial conception was not wholly my own.

I am swimming underwater toward the other end of the pool with this book, and with this world, for that matter. I see clearly a beautiful earth where harmony and peace and abundance and kindness already exist. No children are scolded and left to cry alone, no animals are eaten or exploited, no one is in want, there are no fights, the world is one well-knit community. Like my story, this beautiful world is just ahead too.

A few joys:

I loved cards by Hazelmade, and the wonderful newsletters Susan Hazel Rich sends out. Hazelmade

Marlon Williams talks about his new album and upcoming documentary about his working with a the red Maori album. Marlon Williams interview