Writing Process Blog Tour
I was invited by Kate Robinson to participate in a “writing process blog tour.” Thanks, Kate!
Each person on the tour tags three others to answer questions about creative work, process, and so on.
My process comments are below.
I’ve invited the following writers to participate next:
Ned Hayes, Meghan McNealy, Anna Wolfe-Pauly.
My WRITING PROCESS now.
1. What am I working on?
I’m working on moving between projects. My novel is in the publishing process, which means, really, I can quit while I’m ahead, maybe learn an instrument. I’ve been working on it so long I’m not sure I really have anything else to do with words.
Nonetheless.
For some time, I have had a little fantasy of following Samuel Beckett’s trail, the one taken during the Nazi occupation of France, during which time he worked on the novel Watt and soon after which he embarked on his “siege” of writing, completing, most significant to me, his trilogy of novels and three “Stories” and thirteen “Texts for Nothing”, all in French.
Maybe I’ll do it, but in the meantime, Beckett’s flight from his home (with his partner) during the invasion of Paris, his return and work with the resistance (in the ‘Gloria’ network), their betrayal (by a truly bizarre character), fleeing again, and his, why not, purgatorial time waiting out the war, time with the Irish Red Cross in St. L0 (see Perloff), and so on…: all this seems to me engaging material for some kind of book. What kind? I feel myself drawn toward two approaches to the prospect of an historical book: one established by Barthes in Michelet par lui-meme (and to a lesser extent his Barthes par Barthes), and the other by the work of WG Sebald (esp. Rings of Saturn). Both present different kinds of wandering, different blends of the analytic, the apparently non-fictional, mixed with artifice and the imagistic. Both have somewhat playful structures, ways of moving in and out of times and places and ideas. That’s how I imagine working my way into history… and probably changing all the names.
Also, I have a letterpress project underway. For a short time, Stéphane Mallarmé wrote, single-handedly, a women’s fashion magazine, La derniere mode. The prose is by turns immaculate, charming, tender, winking, etc. Throughout, Mallarmé’s obsessive twists of grammar & his love for things sparkly emerge with the same eloquence as they do in his poetry and prose.
My project is to use snippets and fragments of the fashion writing to create a new poem that works in the form of Mallarmé’s masterwork, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le chance. First, the composition requires a close examination of the poem, attending to different itineraries across the page spreads, balance of certain imagery, and so on, and then working to fit appropriate phrases from the fashion writing (I’m working in english, so this also involves comparisons of the original with several translations). An interesting challenge has been to balance links between the two pieces with a desire to also let the fashion writing create its own themes—though, for me, part of the fascination of the project is how coherent the themes are, inhabiting not the idea but the visual form and Mallarmé’s inimitable vocabulary.
Another inspiration for this process is Quentin Meillassoux’s “decipherment” of the poem in his book The Number and the Siren, which offers some strict structural and numerical constraints, including a total word count for the poem and the inclusion of various “keys” and “clues” that I’d like to retain in the Fashion version, but in its own unique way.
2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Here, I want to think about my completed novel, Little is Left to Tell. Some relatively shallow genre categories could be applied that would magnify its difference: that it has to do with family, that it has to do with memory, that it has to do with the pleasure of stories, meditations on death and loss, talking animals, tall, humanoid, imaginary rabbit companions, and so on. These are more themes/tropes than genres, and so capture little of the formal or structural components that allow us to perceive deeper similarities & more interesting generic patterns—or the novel’s substance in relation to reading practices.
Structurally, I’d say that, at the broadest scale, my novel resembles other narratives of submergence. Simple submergence looks like The Wizard of Oz and Through the Looking Glass (waking up is relatively uncomplicated and is revelatory). Less simple, perhaps, The Fisher King or Brazil or Twelve Monkeys (what’s up T. G.?) (waking up is a problem, confusing, perhaps even undesirable or impossible). In literature, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Murakami) and The Unconsoled (Ishiguro) both come to mind.
What submergence seems always to point to is a confusion or transition between levels of the mind, usually toward some kind of un- or sub- conscious or from the real toward the imaginary. We can picture Bachelard’s house of mental poetics becoming maze-like or sinking in on itself. My work, like some of those above, begins by pitting the real against the imaginary (or the outer real against the inner / dream-like) but develops toward a kind of indifference to the primacy of the Real—a lack of faith, a non-commitment to resolving the relation between the two (usually through a psychological / psychotherapeutic process). This seems to me a non-trivial distinction, since on the whole, we might—at least aesthetically—regard literature as the collective dream work of a society; when the dreams stop playing the game, then the relation between reading and living is also complicated.
In my novel, Mr Fin, already what I think of as thin soup of a character, becomes submerged, along with the reader, in somewhat nested narrative worlds, the status of which are ambiguous—they are his and not his at the same time; the reader will likely be undecided as to whether they are really “with” Mr Fin as he submerges or whether they have submerged in some different way and he has been left behind: in essence, he is less capable of participating in the novel than the reader. His being a thin soup & his broadly realistic level of the narrative, allows that tension of losing the real or solving the relationship between the real and the not-real without, I think, overemphasizing the distinction. At least for a time, the problem of the real is as unimportant to the reader as it becomes to Mr Fin, and the lack of a dependence on the psychological resolution or moral climax of a return to the real, the pleasure of the text is the pleasure of numerous stories playing with and against each other.
3. Why do I write what I do?
When I was 13 I read the comic book Moonshadow. Each issue started with a literary quotation splashed lovingly across the page and coyly illustrated by the amazing Jon J Muth. That’s how I discovered Samuel Beckett—probably a year or so before he died. Christ! A snippet from Waiting for Godot got me curious, so I read the thing. Otherwise, how would I understand the comic book? A later issue quoted The Brothers Karamazov; so I found that and started in. I didn’t get too far before reference to Ophelia brought me up short. Who’s this? So I found my way to Hamlet. This was all good reading, but more important was the enmeshment of the texts that, for some reason, fascinated and drove me on. I began to see how literature is a bunch of books speaking to one another, interdependent, bound by language but also by a network of images, characters, patterns, and so on. Experiences like these moved me closer to being an artful reader. My novel is in part about the joys of reading, of being read to, about loving books, loving to see stories (even unfinished or unfinish-able or very bad ones) that merge with and respond to one another.
I don’t want to write about life. While there’s much in my novel drawn from life, none of it is meant to represent features of my life or of anyone else’s. To me, the pleasure of writing is about just this kind of distortion… that one can take the patterns observed, transmutes them into language, images, narrative patterns—into “literature”—then transform them again by playing with the poetics and structures of writing to produce something new, unthinkable: that’s what amazes me, keeps me writing. It’s as though you can shout and hear a new, a better, a living response in the echo.
4. How does my writing process work?
Slowly. I used to only agonize. Now I alternate between agonizing and carefree productivity. Like most people, I’m a terrible writer. But I’d claim to be an excellent reader and a good reviser. I love to think of the writing process really as a reading process, one where I get to read my drafts and my readerly notes and ideas are then rolled into the text to produce something new.
Numerous times, I have printed my entire novel out and arranged the pages on the floor or on a wall (I developed a system for making very small pages with which to do this) and then moved the pages or sections around to see how new positions affected the whole. Each project could become so many different things. My process of writing does not include so much finishing the work or accomplishing a work-as-conceived but instead watching it transform before my eyes.
