I Have Exactly One Thing on a Dead Author
Reading the fiction of dead people is a wonderful way to feel good about one's own books. They make you feel so full of potential.
Anita Brookner passed away in 2016, the year my first novel was published. I don't have to compare myself to her, or, for that matter, James or Proust or Eliot or Spark or Highsmith. I don't have to see their book deals on Instagram, still less lie awake at night wondering whether I'll ever have to ask them for a blurb. I read them to feed the beast and the beast makes a book and the system works for everyone.
Whereas, when I read Mrs. March recently, and Vladimir a while back, and Eileen several years ago, and whenever I read Mona Awad's work, or Tessa Hadley's--or any odd book with impeccable prose--I think, good god, why do THEY get to write like that? Where did they come from, and where are they going? I thought only dead people were allowed to write like that. I imagine these living authors who write like dead ones as supremely confident in elegant, rigorous clothing, toasting the Manhattan skyline with their editors, perhaps with champagne sent especially for this purpose by proud, wealthy parents. But probably they're just like me, more or less. They just write whatever the hell they want to.
That has been my manifesto from the beginning, but following it has been surprisingly difficult. When the pandemic began I stripped everything away and went back to the beginning and rededicated myself to it. I'm pivoting genres right now, as they say in the biz; my work-in-progress (and oh how slow the progress has been!) is a horror novel. But the genre to which I am pivoting is not horror. It's whatever-the-hell-I-want. That's my new genre.
It may look exactly like the old one from the outside. Not sure! Still figuring it out!
It turns out that writing whatever the hell you want is hard. There's a perfect silence at the center of every word. Will anyone want to read this? What if the closer I get to writing whatever the hell I want, the fewer people want to read whatever the hell I've written? I imagine myself at 45, signing up for a temp agency because I have no marketable skills and we need to pay for summer camp for the soon-to-be kindergartner, so that I can continue to sit around trying to write things that come from the deepest part of me, a part that craves Jamesian prose and slasher movies.
I'm currently up to Friday the 13th Part III in 3d, Halloween IV, Hellraiser VI (yes, that one is a labor of love), and the fifth Scream movie. That's a lot of daycare for a lot of not-writing, even though therapists and coaches have assured me that it actually IS writing, because my brain is still writing in the background, or something. All I can say is I hope that whatever my brain is writing, it likes a steady diet of teenagers walking into dark rooms and getting impaled on things. It does seem to help, a little. Maybe if I can enjoy art this stupid--relish it--love it, even!--someone will feel that way about mine, someday. Even if I'm never any of those authors, who probably weren't any more confident in their work than I am in mine. But Iris Murdoch famously did not allow her punctuation to be changed by copy editors! What guts!
So, it is possible to be jealous of dead authors, after all.
Podcasts tell me jealousy is a useful tool, a sign that we want to make an adjustment in our own lives. And I have no choice but to believe podcasts. There are too many of them; in a fight they would quickly overwhelm me. So I am converting my jealousy into a question: what the hell do I want to write? Not yesterday or tomorrow, but today?
Death is in the air. Three wonderful old-Austin types died recently; of course there are lots more, always more. Sometimes I think I'm writing horror (and watching slashers, and reading Anita Brookner) because of the pandemic; other times I think I'm just spoiling to kill, not my darlings, but the darlingest version of writer-me. Who will be the final girl here? Not even I know for sure.
Anita Brookner passed away in 2016, the year my first novel was published. I don't have to compare myself to her, or, for that matter, James or Proust or Eliot or Spark or Highsmith. I don't have to see their book deals on Instagram, still less lie awake at night wondering whether I'll ever have to ask them for a blurb. I read them to feed the beast and the beast makes a book and the system works for everyone.
Whereas, when I read Mrs. March recently, and Vladimir a while back, and Eileen several years ago, and whenever I read Mona Awad's work, or Tessa Hadley's--or any odd book with impeccable prose--I think, good god, why do THEY get to write like that? Where did they come from, and where are they going? I thought only dead people were allowed to write like that. I imagine these living authors who write like dead ones as supremely confident in elegant, rigorous clothing, toasting the Manhattan skyline with their editors, perhaps with champagne sent especially for this purpose by proud, wealthy parents. But probably they're just like me, more or less. They just write whatever the hell they want to.
That has been my manifesto from the beginning, but following it has been surprisingly difficult. When the pandemic began I stripped everything away and went back to the beginning and rededicated myself to it. I'm pivoting genres right now, as they say in the biz; my work-in-progress (and oh how slow the progress has been!) is a horror novel. But the genre to which I am pivoting is not horror. It's whatever-the-hell-I-want. That's my new genre.
It may look exactly like the old one from the outside. Not sure! Still figuring it out!
It turns out that writing whatever the hell you want is hard. There's a perfect silence at the center of every word. Will anyone want to read this? What if the closer I get to writing whatever the hell I want, the fewer people want to read whatever the hell I've written? I imagine myself at 45, signing up for a temp agency because I have no marketable skills and we need to pay for summer camp for the soon-to-be kindergartner, so that I can continue to sit around trying to write things that come from the deepest part of me, a part that craves Jamesian prose and slasher movies.
I'm currently up to Friday the 13th Part III in 3d, Halloween IV, Hellraiser VI (yes, that one is a labor of love), and the fifth Scream movie. That's a lot of daycare for a lot of not-writing, even though therapists and coaches have assured me that it actually IS writing, because my brain is still writing in the background, or something. All I can say is I hope that whatever my brain is writing, it likes a steady diet of teenagers walking into dark rooms and getting impaled on things. It does seem to help, a little. Maybe if I can enjoy art this stupid--relish it--love it, even!--someone will feel that way about mine, someday. Even if I'm never any of those authors, who probably weren't any more confident in their work than I am in mine. But Iris Murdoch famously did not allow her punctuation to be changed by copy editors! What guts!
So, it is possible to be jealous of dead authors, after all.
Podcasts tell me jealousy is a useful tool, a sign that we want to make an adjustment in our own lives. And I have no choice but to believe podcasts. There are too many of them; in a fight they would quickly overwhelm me. So I am converting my jealousy into a question: what the hell do I want to write? Not yesterday or tomorrow, but today?
Death is in the air. Three wonderful old-Austin types died recently; of course there are lots more, always more. Sometimes I think I'm writing horror (and watching slashers, and reading Anita Brookner) because of the pandemic; other times I think I'm just spoiling to kill, not my darlings, but the darlingest version of writer-me. Who will be the final girl here? Not even I know for sure.
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