On to the next novel, with different doubts plus help from David Mitchell

So I've started, or re-started, my second novel. The actual start date is hard to pin down, since like the previous novel it's based on a short story I wrote several years ago. Also when I abandoned my first novel last summer, I wrote about thirty rough pages of this one, in a kind of panic--by god, I have to produce some kind of novel after all this effort. But a wise friend told me I really needed to finish the first one, and now I see why.

The prolific, acclaimed, and yet apparently extremely nice writer David Mitchell says in this NYT profile that the experience of writing the first one is crucial--even if the book never sees the light of day. An agent had told him "in no uncertain terms to drop" his first novel.

“I had doubts about its quality,” Mitchell told me. “But it had taught me the doubts. What writing it had taught me was that it’s not that great a novel after all.” And it taught him something more: “I had been trying to prove to myself that I could get over this incredible obstacle, this unscalable cliff face of—am I the sort of person who can get a novel written or not? Until you’ve written one, it’s just . . . wow. A feat that humans not like you achieve.”

Now, I am not nearly ready to give up on my only (nearly) finished novel. I haven't even tried to sell it as yet. But regardless of what happens, it is the thing that turned me into a person who can get a novel written. Now that I've had the many and varied experiences of writing one, I am not nearly as flummoxed by this new one. The fact that I don't know exactly the right direction for the plot to take is OK--I know it will take some wrong turns, and that the path will become clear only gradually. Every setback does not mean I cannot write a novel. Setbacks are part of the process. Knowing the process won't be smooth helps make it smoother. I can forge ahead.

That said, the new novel is very different from the last in ways that unsettle me. It appears that it's going to be centered on a grisly murder, which means I'm going to have a fairly hard time making it funny. Already I'm delving into "true crime" tales, especially the Sam Sheppard case, which I see has been deployed to excellent effect in the new novel Mr. Peanut. It is a fascinating story, which is why in over fifty years it hasn't left us. But do I really want to spend, say, two years of my life absorbed in the details of murder? Up until now I've always avoided stories like this. I don't read crime novels, do not want to watch Dexter, and sort of deplore the whole "whodunnit" mindset that turns grief and horror into entertainment. (Strangest of all, I think, are the Miss Marple-style "cozies," which...I mean...murder is cozy?) This novel is supposed to question that mindset, but will no doubt participate in it also.

While frustrating, writing the first novel was fun, and I can see that this one won't be. It will rattle me, and for no certain reward--for me or anyone else. And yet the thing seems to be chugging right along. Maybe I don't want to think what that says about me.

Borrowed Fire: How to be disturbing (part two)

There are only two types of stories: person goes on a journey, or stranger comes to town. (Someone told me that.) Dracula is both. In the beginning of the novel, Jonathan goes on a journey to Dracula's castle. But soon the trajectory shifts, and Dracula comes to England, Jonathan's home. Of course we could turn the whole scheme inside out and see it from the Count's point of view--Jonathan is the stranger who comes to town, and then Dracula goes on a journey. But Dracula's is one point of view we don't get in the novel. Maybe we should consider that in another post.

The approach of Dracula unsettles the coastal town where Jonathan's fiancee Mina is staying with her sensitive friend Lucy. A colossal storm brews. Lucy begins sleepwalking, as a mental patient, Renfield, steps up his unfortunate eating habits. An old man Mina has befriended buttonholes her on the beach:

"Some day soon the Angel of Death will sound his trumpet for me. But don't ye dooal an' greet, my deary!"--for he saw that I was crying--"if he should come this very night I'd not refuse to answer his call. For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin', and death be all that we can rightly depend on. But I'm content, for it's comin' to me, my deary, and comin' quick. It may be comin' while we be lookin' and wonderin'. Maybe it's in that wind out over the sea that's bringin' with it loss and wreck, and sore distress, and sad hearts. Look! Look!" he cried suddenly. "There's something in that wind and in the hoast beyont that sounds, and looks, and tastes, and smells like death. It's in the air. I feel it comin'. Lord, make me answer cheerful, when my call comes!"

And sure enough:

I was glad when the coastguard came along, with his spyglass under his arm. He stopped to talk with me, as he always does, but all the time kept looking at a strange ship.

"I can't make her out," he said. "She's a Russian, by the look of her. But she's knocking about in the queerest way. She doesn't know her mind a bit. She seems to see the storm coming, but can't decide whether to run up north in the open, or to put in here. Look there again! She is steered mighty strangely, for she doesn't mind the hand on the wheel, changes about with every puff of wind. We'll hear more of her before this time tomorrow."

What makes Dracula's approach so ominous is the number of levels on which it disturbs the world. Certain especially sensitive people can feel him coming, and begin to prepare themselves, each in his or her own way. The sea and sky are perturbed. The old man insists the very scent of death is in the air, which is an especially frightening image. Smell is an animal's way of experiencing the world, and in a short time the animal nature of many characters (human and otherwise) will come to the fore.

I especially like the coastguard's description of the oncoming ship "knocking about in the queerest way." More than the coming storm, it seems to me, this image suggests a loss of balance, discombobulation. I've mentioned this strategy of "weirding" the familiar a few times before--in posts on The Secret Agent and Moby Dick--and there is nothing like it for giving your reader the creeps. The ship is recognizable, though foreign, but its gait is "off" in a way the coastguard can't quite figure out.

I'm suggesting here that if you want to be disturbing in your fiction (and who doesn't?), you can create a complex texture of disturbance. On scales ranging from the very small (an old man's sense of smell) to the very large ("All is vastness, the clouds are piled up like giant rocks), the world is ruffled.

Fiction over 40: Is it possible?

I am not sure what to be more depressed about: the fact that the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list contains so many people who are more accomplished than I will probably ever be, or that Sam Tanenhaus thinks most people over 40 can't write. In Sunday's NYT Book Review, Tanenhaus lists all the great authors who did their best work--or what "history" has deemed their best work--before the age of 40. Well, the list, though impressive, isn't that long, really--when you think of all the great authors past and present. And he does give some exceptions--Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth--to give some of us on the downhill slope of artistic possibility the faintest glimmer of hope. (Or maybe that's just the abyss, which glimmers too.)

I would point out that many of the examples of those who peaked before 40 lived in the olden days. Like, before 1950, or even 1900. Might this early peaking be attributable to historical or sociological factors, rather than something innate? Tanenhaus seems to think not:

Not every major fiction writer is a natural, but each begins with a storehouse of material and memories that often attenuate over time. Writers in their youth generally have more direct access to childhood, with its freshets of sensation and revelation. What comes later — technical refinement, command of the literary tradition, deeper understanding of the human condition — may yield different results but not always richer or more artful ones.

Look, I'm more than happy to sink into despair at the slightest hint that I may not be up to achieving my dream. Give up? Give me a reason. But I don't think Tanenhaus has.

More direct access to childhood? So the best authors are, what, twelve? Sixteen? Four? Let's get those nursery school kids into critique groups, pronto! And do we really only want stories about kids, or people who think like kids? I'm all for freshets of sensation and revelation, but are these experiences really only possible for children? I would suggest that more than a few young people spend their days avoiding freshets and revelations of all kinds, and only later, with the perspective that comes with few forehead wrinkles, are able to open up to the world.

I mean, are all those books on finding your inner child just psychic snake oil? OK, yes. But it is entirely possible, as well as desirable, to find new ways to see the world afresh--at all stages of one's life. THAT IS WHAT ART IS FOR, FOR CHRISSAKE. Who are all these brilliant young writers writing for anyway? Themselves? If so, they would not be brilliant.

So if your life is short of freshets lately, even if you are really freakin old and should just give up, here are a few things to try before you do that:

* Art. Look at it. Read it. Listen to it. Feel it. Taste it. Talk about it. etc.
* Astronomy. Look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope. Now look at, I dunno, anything. Changes your perspective, right?
* Water. Spend some time near it or in it.
* Meditation.
* Remembering your dreams.
* Taking a photo a day and writing a description of it.
* Look through the wrong end of the binoculars.
* Get away from the computer.
* And so forth.

None of these suggestions is particularly new, and some veer into "inner child" territory that I would rather avoid. (My inner child is a brat, turns out.) I'm just saying, we can train ourselves to observe, and to feel wonder. We can work on our memories. So if that's the only reason older people supposedly can't write--because their memories of childhood are too foggy--that is just no reason at all.

Borrowed Fire: Does Dracula have a psychology?

A few months ago, Carrie Kei Heim Binas wrote a great post about monster psychology. Basically, a monster should have one. Monsters are characters, and just like other characters, they grow more interesting as they reveal levels of complexity.

So, what can we learn about monster psychology from Dracula? Is Dracula complex? Does he have motivations, other than mere bloodsucking*? Does he have a history? Is he at war with himself?

In the first several chapters, Dracula:

• Disguises himself as a coachman to pick up Jonathan at the crossroads
• Cooks Jonathan several meals and cleans up after him
• Lunges at Jonathan's throat when he sees that Jonathan has cut himself shaving, and then smashes the shaving mirror (but not before Jonathan observes that Dracula casts no reflection)
• Questions Jonathan extensively on the duties of solicitors in England
• Locks Jonathan in the castle
• Climbs down an outer wall, headfirst, wearing Jonathan's clothes
  
• Kills a baby and feeds it to his wives and sets a pack of wolves on the baby's mother
• Grins malignantly at Jonathan from his coffin, when Jonathan attempts to bash him in the face with a shovel.
  

So Dracula's monstrosity is pretty well established: he is powerful, smart, and slippery. He is also a nobleman, whose line--possibly through some fault of his own--has seen better days. Though it's not quite presented this way, there's something amusing and a little pathetic about Jonathan's discovery that Dracula does all his own housework--though he falls down on dusting, like many of us--because he has no (more) servants. Even his wives (daughters?) don't help him, which is rather gratifying. When Jonathan first arrives, he still attempts little touches of nobility, such as serving his guest dinner on gold plates, and leaving him nice notes with his breakfast:

I slept till late in the day, and awoke of my own accord. When I had dressed myself I went into the room where we had supped, and found a cold breakfast laid out, with coffee kept hot by the pot being placed on the hearth. There was a card on the table, on which was written--"I have to be absent for a while. Do not wait for me. D."

I just love that "D."

Anyway, is this ruined but insistent nobility a veneer, a ruse for drawing in innocent victims? Is it a political comment by Stoker? Answer to both questions: yes. But does it also constitute a psychology--a way for readers to understand and maybe slightly identify with D.?

Having discovered that he is a prisoner in the castle, Jonathan attempts to get Dracula talking, to see what he can find out about his situation. Dracula does like to talk, especially about the past. And he has some grudges:

Midnight.--I have had a long talk with the Count. I asked him a few questions on Transylvania history, and he warmed up to the subject wonderfully. In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards explained by saying that to a Boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said "we", and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking. I wish I could put down all he said exactly as he said it, for to me it was most fascinating. It seemed to have in it a whole history of the country. He grew excited as he spoke, and walked about the room pulling his great white moustache and grasping anything on which he laid his hands as though he would crush it by main strength. One thing he said which I shall put down as nearly as I can, for it tells in its way the story of his race.

"We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?" He held up his arms. "Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race, that we were proud, that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back? Is it strange that when Arpad and his legions swept through the Hungarian fatherland he found us here when he reached the frontier, that the Honfoglalas was completed there? And when the Hungarian flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars, and to us for centuries was trusted the guarding of the frontier of Turkeyland. Aye, and more than that, endless duty of the frontier guard, for as the Turks say, 'water sleeps, and the enemy is sleepless.' Who more gladly than we throughout the Four Nations received the 'bloody sword,' or at its warlike call flocked quicker to the standard of the King? When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent? Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkeyland, who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph! They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! What good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it? Again, when, after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys, and the Dracula as their heart's blood, their brains, and their swords, can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace, and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told."

Dracula's story is the story of a people. Not of a good people or a nice people--indeed, they seem to be a seriously fascist people. But their glories are all in the past, and Dracula, clearly, has not moved on. When Jonathan discovers Dracula in his coffin, he sees in the count's eyes "such a look of hate, though unconscious of me or my presence, that I fled from the place..." In other words, the count is not simply a killing machine, although he is that; he is motivated by revenge for a deep, historical humiliation. One gathers he witnessed these historical humiliations personally, which must make them sting all the more.

Does this history make Dracula sympathetic? Definitely not. Understandable? More intriguing? I think so. The history gives him dimension. It also moves the story beyond a horror that befalls some unlucky people in Transylvania and England. Dracula embodies history, and is embedded in it. Peel back history, or lift its coffin lid, and we find this guy staring up at us. Since we're all part of history, we can't escape, not completely.

To the extent that Stoker wants to make Dracula complex, I think he succeeds. The count is at least as multidimensional as any of the other characters in the story. After all, the main purpose of this story is to scare us, not to set us to contemplating the nuances of human interactions as inflected by class and ethnicity. But the fact that Dracula still has a foot in the human realm, and in human motivations (base though they may be), makes him harder for readers to dismiss once the book is closed.

*By "mere," I do not wish to imply that bloodsucking is a trivial matter. It is a big deal.

Once more with compassion

I am reading Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City. Michiko Kakutani's review of this book prompted a rant from me awhile back, which I will now revisit, having a better idea now what I am talking about.

To recap: characters are not people (I ranted), and reviews that rate books based on the "likability" of the characters are...just...silly. But then I got hung up, as always, on exactly what it means when someone "likes" or "loves" a character, as opposed to, say, an actual person. And I did concede that opening oneself to feeling compassion or "mercy" for a character allows you to see more aspects of that character. I am coming more and more to that conclusion. In other words, as a fiction writer, I have developed a utilitarian view of compassion. It is worth trying to love your characters, but not because they are people or near-people, or because this somehow gives you practice in loving actual people. Rather, compassion demands that you notice details. If you are in a forgiving, open frame of mind, you naturally look for redeeming qualities even in the most villainous of villains. You also allow yourself to see foibles in your "good" characters, because you know these foibles don't make your characters worthless, but merely human. In other words, this openness in you, as the writer, makes your characters complex and interesting--likable because they are compelling, not because they are squeaky-clean good.

Now, about Chronic City. I can see why Kakutani found the long-winded Perkus and his acolytes frustrating. They do natter on. Basically the book (so far, I have not finished it yet) is mostly about going over to Perkus's apartment, getting stoned, and talking. There's also some sex, a loose tiger (apparently mechanical) tearing up the city, and an astronaut--the narrator's fiancee--stranded on a space station called Northern Lights.

Lethem is definitely taking some risks here. As reviewers other than Kakutani suggested, he intentionally--I believe--makes these conversations overly long and somewhat pointless; he also makes his narrator intentionally vague and distant, going so far as to name him Chase Insteadman. We are meant to understand, I think, that all this verbiage is a screen against powerful emotion, a way of diluting it, and also a way of life for a great many people. There's a reason the astronaut's letters back to earth contain the most emotion-laden language in the book. Dying of cancer and stranded, she is emotion, in some sense. And perhaps it is not all bad that she is far away. It is not at all clear, at least thus far, that "getting in touch" with their emotions would help any of these people, or the book itself.

The question this book raises for me, because it has direct relevance to my own work, is how realistic can characters be when their milieu is partly unrealistic? Like the characters in DeLillo's White Noise, the people in Chronic City are a little abstract. They are largely composed of their own voices, appearing only as their points of view in conversations. They represent positions. This is not to say that one cannot feel for them. But perhaps they are spread a little thin, as it were, to accommodate the wider boundaries of their world--a world in which a tunneling tiger destroys city blocks routinely, in which there are more frequent hints of magic, both good and bad, than in our own. Could you successfully create less abstract, more human characters and still have them inhabit such a world?

My suspicion (and worry) is, perhaps not. I tend to think we are very much products of our environments. So we can't quite know what a product of an environment that does not, and cannot, actually exist would be like. In this case it might make more sense to have the characters float above that world somewhat, commenting on it from some distance rather than thrashing around inside it. Because in the latter case, your real characters start to make your unreal world look like a contrivance.


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Borrowed Fire: How to be disturbing (part one)

In the early going, Dracula appears to be chock full of lessons for fiction writers. We are riding along with Jonathan Harker as he cheerily makes his way to Castle Dracula, devouring paprika-laden meals--which make him thirsty--and learning a ton about what writers can do with landscape. Perhaps this notion has occurred to me because I acquired my copy of Dracula from a table of books a professor was purging from her office; and said professor has helpfully annotated the first section with repeated iterations of the word "landscape." But what a landscape it is!

If you haven't read this book recently, you might assume Jonathan's journey occurs entirely at night, in a thunderstorm, with black, frothing horses, a mysterious coachman, and weird little fires in the distance. There will be plenty of that sort of thing, but what you need to make it work is contrast. So here's how Stoker sets it up:

They were evidently talking of me, for every now and then they looked at me, and some of the people who were sitting on the bench outside the door--came and listened, and then looked at me, most of them pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd, so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out.

I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were "Ordog"--Satan, "Pokol"--hell, "stregoica"--witch, "vrolok" and "vlkoslak"--both mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either werewolf or vampire. (Mem., I must ask the Count about these superstitions.)

When we started, the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and pointed two fingers towards me.

With some difficulty, I got a fellow passenger to tell me what they meant. He would not answer at first, but on learning that I was English, he explained that it was a charm or guard against the evil eye.

This was not very pleasant for me, just starting for an unknown place to meet an unknown man. But everyone seemed so kind-hearted, and so sorrowful, and so sympathetic that I could not but be touched.

I shall never forget the last glimpse which I had of the inn yard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing themselves, as they stood round the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the centre of the yard.

There's nothing like a Slavic language for conveying spookiness, and these early diary entries are sprinkled with amusing "mems" to "ask the Count" about local customs and superstitions. Jonathan even wants to ask him for a recipe. Now that's dramatic irony. But in the midst of all this foreboding and foreshadowing, notice the "rich foliage of oleander and orange trees in green tubs." To Jonathan, it's this lushness surrounding the terrified figures that makes the scene unforgettable.

Then the lushness really burgeons:

I soon lost sight and recollection of ghostly fears in the beauty of the scene as we drove along, although had I known the language, or rather languages, which my fellow-passengers were speaking, I might not have been able to throw them off so easily. Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom--apple, plum, pear, cherry. And as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the "Mittel Land" ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillsides like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summertime excellent, but that it had not yet been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadars would not repair them, lest the Turk should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point.

Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colours of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water. One of my companions touched my arm as we swept round the base of a hill and opened up the lofty, snow-covered peak of a mountain, which seemed, as we wound on our serpentine way, to be right before us.

"Look! Isten szek!"--"God's seat!"--and he crossed himself reverently.

We ride through what ought to be a soothing, pastoral scene. But there are a few undercurrents--the mysterious mutterings of the other passengers, the possibility of war with "the Turk." Also the land, bursting forth with Nature's beauty, is just a little too. The peaks are a little too high and pointy, the blossoms too massive, the colors too strong. The effect is queasy and erotic in equal parts (the word "feverish" is one place where the currents meet). Stoker, as we will see, is particularly good at this balancing act. Also we've just seen villagers crossing themselves for protection from Ordog et al, and now a passenger crosses himself in reverence for "God's seat"--which makes God himself part of this unsettling landscape, rather than a benevolent figure who watches over it from outside. He is going to be no help.

Is this not extremely creepy? As Stephen King once said, true horror happens in broad daylight. We've seen this technique before--taking objects or scenes that should be soothing, in either their ordinariness or their beauty, and giving them a little twist so that they become uncanny.

And then the sun goes down...

Borrowed Fire: Dracula and the novel form

Today we begin a new book in the Borrowed Fire series, Bram Stoker's Dracula. As we make our way through the novel, discovering writing lessons we can borrow for our own work, let us have modest expectations. Let us not assume that these little writing seminars will qualify us to write the next Twilight series and become billionaires. Let us instead plan to write something like The Passage, because we are all literary novelists who would never be seduced by the lure of unimaginable wealth and movie deals. We would only write about vampires if they served our artistic purposes. We'll see if we can make them do that.

I have already written about the ethnography at the beginning of Dracula, which definitely seems like a cool way to set up a book about "otherness." So for my official first post in this series, I'll talk about the novel's form. It is composed of diary entries, letters, and even a "phonograph diary" by various characters (although not, sadly, the Count himself). What do these particular forms of writing allow an author to do? Well, clearly you can switch point of view easily, without having to create a more complex artistic apparatus for doing so: just label each new section Jonathan Harker's Journal, Lucy Westenra's Diary, etc. These formats also contain dates and locations as a matter of course, so that (again) you don't need to worry about more subtle ways to show the passage of time or movements from place to place.

Perhaps more interesting, though, is the sense that these forms of writing are more private than other types of fictional narration. They are supposedly intended for a specific and relatively small audience--possibly even no audience, other than oneself. In the case of a novel posing as a bunch of journal entries, that conceit is of course more complicated. And perhaps those of us who keep journals expect them eventually to be published among our "papers." (Those of us who blog aren't waiting for that day.) In other words, the author of Dracula is winking at the notion of private communications at the same time as he's presenting them to us, a mass, faceless audience.

Still, the promise of privacy, the sense of a particular as opposed to a general audience, creates intimacy. One could imagine that Mina, for instance, writes her diary with her beloved Jonathan in mind--even if he isn't going to read it one day, she wants to tell him these things, and so she records her observations with a mental image of him as the listener or reader. Writing teachers often give students the exercise of writing a story in the form of a letter to a specific person, and inevitably the writing becomes more detailed and emotionally charged. The idea is to learn to write that way always. This intimacy would seem especially powerful in a story about a creature who gets a little too intimate. By writing, these characters might be trying to preserve the boundaries of their own selves as the Count seeps through the cracks.

But we have also seen the downside of the diary / letter form for stories involving almost any form of action. In Pamela, the 18th century epistolary novel foisted on so many innocent students of English, the letters occasionally go something like, Here comes my rapacious employer yet again! It is really hard to write with him climbing all over me... (OK, it's been awhile since I read it, but this is the kind of thing I remember.) More recently, watching The Blair Witch Project, some audience members may have laughed as the plucky, dwindling film crew managed to grab up all their recording equipment and turn it on before running like hell from the Evil. (I didn't laugh. Not at the time. That movie scared me.) We will come across the problem of "writing in haste" with this novel as well.

A reflective novel, such as Gilead, is far easier to write in diary or letter form. But let's see how Stoker handles the opportunities and pitfalls.

Borrowed Fire: The end of The Brothers Karamazov vs. the last episode of Lost

Two momentous events occurred this week. The much loved and hated series Lost came to an end, and I finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. As a certified comparative literature specialist, I will now compare these two endings for the benefit of fiction writers everywhere.

First, I will say that Trev and I gave up on Lost early this season. We had finally had enough of the characters' endless tramping through the greenery to visit some portentous person or architectural feature, only to be set upon by yet another gun-toting gang of hippie mystics. However, we did watch the final episode, surmising correctly that whatever we had missed was not going to matter. The fact that we did choose to watch it after having given up on the story itself is interesting. Maybe we still had that supposedly irresistible human need for closure. I think we were also wondering just what species of bullshit the writers were going to pull, since they had sunk themselves so deep into the narrative swamp that nothing but bullshit could rescue them.

Now then. Lost and BK are similar in that both are long and convoluted and interweave religious / metaphysical themes into mystery plots. What is the best way to end stories with so many loose ends? Well, the writers of Lost simply snuffed out all the loose ends in a blast of white light. Once it's revealed that the island is some sort of quasi-Christian--but ecumenical!--Purgatory, we are forced to file all the tramping and digging and shooting and bombing and introducing of hundreds of additional characters every week under the category of "tribulations"--or whatever you want to call the ordeals in Purgatory. The Others, and the Other Others, and the No-Not-Those-But-Those-Others are--I guess--the sort of second-tier demons that carry out the Lord's work of helping humans purge their sins, while never getting any credit for it. It's not like the story didn't prepare us all along for some kind of metaphysical ending; it's just that the metaphysical was used to cancel out the physical story, rather than incorporating it. Your petty concerns, such as what was that hydrogen bomb all about, or what actually happened to Walt (who, like Michael, does not seem to have made it to Heaven), don't matter. In the same way, this world, according to some particularly rotten theologies, does not matter. Maybe the rationale is the same in both cases: this world doesn't make any sense, so, uh, let's just forget all about it! Walk toward the light!

Part of the problem is that Lost's metaphysics were never terribly interesting to begin with. The questions boiled down to basically this:

Jack: Everything can be explained by science.
John: No it can't.

So perhaps that set the writers up (probably to their relief) for an either-or type ending. Mysticism beat out science, as usual for broadcast TV, and mysticism by definition can't be explained. White light, music, menorah, Buddha, stained glass, done! Thank God!

In contrast (notice the comparative transition, an oldie but a goodie), Dostoevsky is steeped in a very specific Christian tradition, which he employs to ask very specific questions about human nature, ethics, and the existence and nature of God. Equally important, the different positions are not embodied by separate characters, but present to greater or lesser degrees in every main character. Yes, Ivan is "the intellectual," but I'd argue he's the most spiritual of the bunch, because he really wrestles with the questions of faith, to the point of giving himself brain fever. So while there is no shortage of metaphysical debate in BK--in fact, that's what this book is, a dramatized debate--the different positions tend to overlap, often even entailing rather than negating each other.

So how does Dostoevsky end BK? I mentioned last time how impressed I was (if a tiny bit impatient) with Dmitri's trial. This strategy lets Dostoevsky tie up the threads of the story, but at the same time--and this is really important for a successful novel, I believe--pull some of them loose again. The debate between the prosecution and the defense--you're misusing psychology! No, you are! You're writing a romance! No, you are!--is an argument about the coherence and plausibility of the novel itself. Like I said, Dostoevsky has a ton of confidence in his novel, otherwise he wouldn't dare do this. But we should all have such confidence, and / or fake it if we don't. Too bad the Lost writers didn't seem to have that confidence in themselves or us. I know trials are a cliche of movies and television by now, so maybe an ending with a trial would not have worked. Still, what about putting Jack on trial with John as the prosecutor? Jack is the one who's always trying to save people, and beating himself up when he fails--so the trial would be about his own tormented psyche, and the limits of his loyalty to science. Just for instance.

Anyway (that is an advanced transition, by the way, not recommended for beginning comparatists), since Dostoevsky really wants us all to believe in a just God, and in an afterlife where we'll see all the people we love again (a la Lost), wouldn't it make sense to have God beam the brothers up at the very end? Wouldn't that answer all our questions once and for all? Actually, Dostoevsky stays close to the ground, and does not provide an unambiguously happy ending. Dmitri is condemned to hard labor in Siberia, despite the fact that we know he's innocent. He and his brothers plan his escape, but we don't see that escape happen. And then young Ilusha dies and is buried. His parents are crazed with grief. His schoolmates, including the cocky Kolya, are devastated. At the very end, Alyosha tells them that they must transform Ilusha's death into an inspiration for their own lives:

"Let us be, first and above all, kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other! I say that again. I give you my word for my part that I'll never forget one of you. Every face looking at me now I shall remember even for thirty years. Just now Kolya said to Kartashov that we did not care to know whether he exists or not. But I cannot forget that Kartashov exists and that he is not blushing now as he did when he discovered the founders of Troy, but is looking at me with his jolly, kind, dear little eyes. Boys, my dear boys, let us all be generous and brave like Ilusha, clever, brave and generous like Kolya (though he will be ever so much cleverer when he is grown up), and let us all be as modest, as clever and sweet as Kartashov. But why am I talking about those two? You are all dear to me, boys, from this day forth, I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me! Well, and who has united us in this kind, good feeling which we shall remember and intend to remember all our lives? Who, if not Ilusha, the good boy, the dear boy, precious to us for ever! Let us never forget him. May his memory live for ever in our hearts from this time forth!”

“Yes, yes, for ever, for ever!” the boys cried in their ringing voices, with softened faces.

“Let us remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, his coffin and his unhappy, sinful father, and how boldly he stood up for him alone against the whole school.”

“We will remember, we will remember,” cried the boys. “He was brave, he was good!”

“Ah, how I loved him!” exclaimed Kolya.

“Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don't be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!”

“Yes, yes,” the boys repeated enthusiastically.

“Karamazov, we love you!” a voice, probably Kartashov's, cried impulsively.

“We love you, we love you!” they all caught it up. There were tears in the eyes of many of them.

“Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya shouted ecstatically.

“And may the dead boy's memory live for ever!” Alyosha added again with feeling.

“For ever!” the boys chimed in again.

“Karamazov,” cried Kolya, “can it be true what's taught us in religion, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, all, Ilusha too?”

“Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!” Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.

“Ah, how splendid it will be!” broke from Kolya.

“Well, now we will finish talking and go to his funeral dinner. Don't be put out at our eating pancakes—it's a very old custom and there's something nice in that!” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let us go! And now we go hand in hand.”

“And always so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya cried once more rapturously, and once more the boys took up his exclamation: “Hurrah for Karamazov!”

OK, so it's a little maudlin. But despite the fact that Alyosha is a devout Christian, and despite his promise to the boys that they will meet in heaven, this ending is most concerned with this world. Alyosha asks the boys to examine how they feel at this moment and remember it as a source of ethical behavior throughout the rest of their lives. Then, off they go to eat pancakes. The pancakes, Alyosha points out, are important.

So, what's the lesson for writers in these two endings? Well, if you're going to do metaphysics, which I highly recommend you try, remember the "physics" is just as important as the "meta." It's fine to leave some plot lines untied, especially if you address that untied state somehow at the end (a trial where the arguments are persuasive on both sides is just one way to do that sort of thing). But it is not fine to simply dismiss the reader's interest in those plot lines by claiming they should not have cared about them--that was "just" worldly stuff that doesn't matter in the end. Stories, even fabulist ones, are made of worldly concerns. Lost just told us that we were watching all those years for no good reason.

UPDATE: I should point out that my thinking on Lost was influenced by this piece in the NYT by Mike Hale. As Hale mentions, in the last episode, Desmond actually says "None of this matters," which may be a way for the writers to get us used to that possibility.

A concert from the heart of cheeseball-land

Foreigner and Styx with Special Guest Kansas, at the Sleep Train Pavilion in Concord.
The whole thing is a kind of self-canceling conglomerate of oh, my god, really?
Anyway, it's tonight. You can still go.

Borrowed Fire: On going for it, really going for it, in your novel

As I contemplate the distinct possibility that, like Louise, or Thelma, I have now stomped on the accelerator of my novel, and it is now zooming toward the cliff of Not Fixable and into the abyss of I Wasted Six Years on This...I pause again to admire Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. Today I will admire just the sheer goddamn authorial commitment here. I mean, apart from this being a really long, intricate beast with dozens of characters and profound philosophical and religious implications. That would be plenty for anyone to pull off.

But the home stretch of the book is Dmitri's trial. And here, Dostoevsky pretty much retells the whole story, twice, first from the point of view of the prosecutor, then from that of the defense. This is extremely daring. OK, I will say this: the rehash made me a tad impatient; I may have skimmed a bit. And I am not through the defense part yet. But the point is, Dostoevsky lets the prosecutor go on at great length to poke holes in the novel itself. The prosecutor points out really strange, illogical aspects of Dmitri's character, which Dostoevsky himself has previously--I think--asked us to accept. He dwells on the preposterousness of Dmitri's supposedly exculpating claim that he kept a small bag of money around his neck, telling no one about it--a weird impulse in the first place, for which Dmitri can offer no evidence. This is risky because having a character announce that something in the story doesn't make sense invites the reader to agree. In lesser hands, this could be an attempt to cover the author's failure to make the story plausible, by acknowledging the failure and trying to make it a plot point. Such an attempt is obviously destined to fail. So Dostoevsky's going all in here. He has given himself some leeway by portraying Dmitri all along as a man of vast contradictions. But the prosecutor addresses those contradictions--in fact he describes Dmitri exactly as Dostoevsky himself has--and still says the bag of money is absurd.

It's been a long time since I first read this book, but the previous chapters made it pretty clear that Smerdyakov murdered Fyodor. In fact, I was thinking Dostoevsky had been a little heavy handed about Smerdyakov's villainy; the mystery was not as murky as I had remembered. The prosecutor's speech, though, made me doubt that belief, and my own memory. It's really only because Alyosha and Ivan believe that Smerdyakov did it that I mostly retain my original conviction. I am relying on characters I have come to trust to tell me the truth--which is a pretty amazing feat on Dostoevsky's part. He certainly makes it clear why a reasonable person would see Dmitri as a murderer.

After the prosecutor's speech, Dostoevsky ups the ante even further. He gives us an extended discussion among various anonymous members of the audience as to how well the prosecutor's arguments hold up, in their opinions. So not only does Dostoevsky invite us to comment on the construction of the novel via the prosecutor, we now get to rethink that commentary as well. And we still have not gotten to the defense's argument yet.

So what I'm seeing here in the trial, above all, is Dostoevsky's total commitment to the story. He does not try to gloss over problems the reader might have with the plot and the characters. Instead, he retells the story, again and again, putting its apparent contradictions on display for all to see. He has that much confidence in it--or to say it in terms more like his, he's put his faith in it. As a writer he's decided he'll live or die by this story. I suppose that's what we all have to do, every time.

Hopefully temporary sense of doom about my novel

For the first half of the composition of each of my novels I have been consumed by a sense of not knowing what I'm doing, and for the second half I have been consumed by the certainty that I know exactly what I am doing and should not be doing it.--Alice McDermott

Well, I hope I come out on the other side of this looking like Alice McDermott. Because two days ago, as I was quite happily editing my novel, it occurred to me: this is a disaster. The whole concept of the thing is broken; I am forcing perfectly decent characters into a totally implausible situation, which has the effect of making the characters themselves implausible. There is no ground. It's like the Wizard of Oz, when the cyclone comes and picks up the house and Dorothy and Toto and a whole bunch of fragments of their former lives--only in my book, they never land again. The whirlwind just keeps going, picking up more and more stuff, and making everyone, including me, dizzy.

The odd thing is, I am sure that during most of the writing process, this is the effect that I wanted. But why the hell did I want that? Does anyone want that? Maybe I have just been reading too many slow and stately novels lately, and too many realistic ones. Maybe this is simply the horror of commitment, of realizing that the framework of the novel is finally locked in and can't fundamentally be changed. Or...it could just be bad.

This is normal, right? This panic?

Borrowed Fire: Who is your devil?

And now back to The Brothers Karamazov. When last we left poor Ivan, he was down with an attack of "brain fever." I highly recommend this as an ailment with which to afflict your characters, since it gives you license to do pretty much anything with the narrative. In BK, it lets Ivan have a long philosophical conversation with the devil himself.

Ivan's devil is quite an interesting figure. He's not scary, at least not at first glance, so much as persistently annoying. That's because he's a kind of "leftover" of history, which the nation, and Ivan, would very much like to bury:

This was a person or, more accurately speaking, a Russian gentleman of a particular kind, no longer young, qui faisait la cinquantaine, as the French say, with rather long, still thick, dark hair, slightly streaked with gray and a small pointed beard. He was wearing a brownish reefer jacket, rather shabby, evidently made by a good tailor though, and of a fashion at least three years old, that had been discarded by smart and well-to-do people for the last two years. His linen and his long scarf-like neck-tie were all such as are worn by people who aim at being stylish, but on closer inspection his linen was not over-clean and his wide scarf was very threadbare. The visitor's check trousers were of excellent cut, but were too light in color and too tight for the present fashion. His soft fluffy white hat was out of keeping with the season.

In brief there was every appearance of gentility on straitened means. It looked as though the gentleman belonged to that class of idle landowners who used to flourish in the times of serfdom. He had unmistakably been, at some time, in good and fashionable society, had once had good connections, had possibly preserved them indeed, but, after a gay youth, becoming gradually impoverished on the abolition of serfdom, he had sunk into the position of a poor relation of the best class, wandering from one good old friend to another and received by them for his companionable and accommodating disposition and as being, after all, a gentleman who could be asked to sit down with any one, though, of course, not in a place of honor. Such gentlemen of accommodating temper and dependent position, who can tell a story, take a hand at cards, and who have a distinct aversion for any duties that may be forced upon them, are usually solitary creatures, either bachelors or widowers. Sometimes they have children, but if so, the children are always being brought up at a distance, at some aunt's, to whom these gentlemen never allude in good society, seeming ashamed of the relationship. They gradually lose sight of their children altogether, though at intervals they receive a birthday or Christmas letter from them and sometimes even answer it.

The countenance of the unexpected visitor was not so much good-natured, as accommodating and ready to assume any amiable expression as occasion might arise. He had no watch, but he had a tortoise-shell lorgnette on a black ribbon. On the middle finger of his right hand was a massive gold ring with a cheap opal stone in it.

In the course of his conversation with Ivan, we find out that the devil's musings on the existence of God, the problem of evil, and so forth are all Ivan's own ideas, which he explored earlier and discarded. He even brings up "The Grand Inquisitor." So he's very much a writer's devil--imagine having all your old short stories read back to you by a smarmy guy in too-tight pants, sitting on your sofa.

In other words, this devil is memory itself: a blend of national memory and Ivan's own rejected past. Now we can start to see why this guy really is scary, his lorgnette much worse than leathery wings. Like a certain kind of relative, you simply can't get rid of him. The harder you try, the more insistently present he becomes. And he pushes every button you have: the guilt, the responsibility, the sense that he and you are really the same deep down. What on earth can you do with a guy like this? What can you do with the past?

So the writing exercise I propose for this week is to come up with an original devil. Let's not go for the obvious ones, like Sarah Palin or Dick Cheney or James Dobson et al. Who can get so deeply into your system that he or she is literally impossible to dismiss?

The relief of the uncrafted sentence

I just finished up a freelance job writing a grant proposal to the Department of Education. I am now in the process of turning my mind, which is about as nimble as an aircraft carrier at this point, back to my novel. Not that grant proposals aren't a form of fiction themselves.

Writing bureaucracy-inflected prose for weeks on end is probably not good for one's fiction. On the other hand, while attempting to explain complex ideas under considerable time pressure, I did make a discovery: you do not need to craft the shit out of every single sentence. Sometimes you just need to say the thing and get on with it. We request five million dollars. It is snowing. There was a sign in the front yard. No need for flakes of white down settling in the branches like a distracted flock of birds; no need to banish "to be" or "there was" constructions altogether. Of course if all of your sentences are like this, you will sound either like a children's author, or a bad imitator of Hemingway. But every so often--and probably far more often than I think--just throwing down a sentence is fine. It's even good. It feels like such a relief to just say what I mean, I suspect it's a relief for readers too. They get the information they need, everyone's on the same page, and now we can move on together.

Bronte action!

The best action figures ever.



Thanks, TCW!

Smart people write for n+1

I am way too swamped with grant-writing to say anything intelligent about The Brothers Karamazov for probably another week...which means we have to wait to have our conversation with the devil himself!

In the meantime, via 3QuarksDaily, I offer you this wonderful article in n+1 by Mark McGurl. It weaves together all my interests: monsters, genre vs. literary fiction, and characterization. If I were this smart, I would not have had to teach my course, "Imitation of Life"--I would have already known all the answers.

Reading my novel

Having waited the requisite 6+ weeks,* I spent the last day and a half reading a printout of the first draft of my novel, and taking notes. First, I will say it is gratifying to hold that heavy pile of paper in my hands. The thing has heft--physically, if not yet in other ways. Second, this was an exhausting task. I did not expect to be so exhausted. I was hoping more for exhilaration, but that seems to be in short supply.

I now limp into the light to pass along a few discoveries, which may be applicable for fellow writers.

• I have heard other novelists say this, and now I know it's true. The first fifty pages are the worst. I can literally feel the novel picking up at almost that very boundary. Sadly, those are the pages I've sent out to a few people who could have had some influence over my literary career. Advice to those who follow me: don't send out your first fifty pages until your novel is really, truly done. These may be the pages you love the most, but this is especially why you shouldn't send them out (see third bullet point, below).
  
  
• There is way too much staring in my novel. Anytime a character is surprised or upset, she or he "stares" at whoever or whatever. I recently noticed this same phenomenon in a published and very popular novel, which just won a big award (no, not that one)--a whole ton of staring, or looking at. I think this is a way of creating "beats" in dialog, though it's almost as egregious as saying, "He paused a beat." I also think it's drawn from real life--we really do stare when we're surprised. But I think it's better just to describe what the person sees when she is staring. Or have them do something else.
  
  
• The parts I thought were the best when I was writing them are now the ones I like least. The reverse is also true. The stuff I was "just jotting down to fix later" actually jogs along quite nicely. This has to be the result of a lack of pressure and self-consciousness. The stuff I loved, I over-crafted.
  
  
• I over-explain in first drafts. As Richard Russo (also a former academic) once said, I write the novel, and then I write the Cliff Notes. I suppose that's part of trying to understand, myself, what's going on. But the Cliff Notes must now go.
  

My overall impression: the novel is both better and worse than I remembered. On the plus side, some stuff I had no idea how to fix now seems relatively simple. Some changes I thought were too big to make are not that big. But...will it be enough to make people care?

*Per Stephen King's instructions, in On Writing.

Borrowed Fire: In praise of "brain fever"

Ivan is my favorite character in The Brothers Karamazov. He's the author-insert, the tormented intellectual who makes up stories, and as such is Dostoevsky's portal into alternate realities. Margaret Atwood uses a tormented author-character in The Blind Assassin to tell a science-fiction story within a larger, realistic novel. In a similar way, Dostoevsky uses Ivan to give us metaphysical fables, which are juxtaposed with the "real story." Ivan has already brought us "The Grand Inquisitor," which is more than we could ask of any character. Now, after an extended and rather wearying visit with Dmitri, Ivan's back.

And he is better than ever, for he has come down with a case of that wonderful nineteenth-century disease, "brain fever." The symptoms of this illness always, conveniently, are exactly what the author needs them to be. I say that's a good thing. Not to pick on Ian McEwan or Richard Powers again--but what the hell--I think there's a potential loss when a writer builds a character around a specific diagnosis of mental illness. In McEwan's Saturday and Enduring Love, and in Powers's Echo Maker, I sense that diagnosis takes the place of character. It's as if diagnosis itself drives the story; I picture the authors scouring a detailed list of symptoms, seeing what else has to be covered. Now, I hugely admire both of these authors, and I am certain my suspicion of their meticulous research can be partly explained by my own laziness. But this clinical style of novel, while interesting and valuable in itself, does not so easily leap into the metaphysical, which is where I, personally, like to end up.*

Whereas Dostoevsky, or more precisely his narrator, gives himself carte blanche to do with Ivan's brain fever what he will:

I am not a doctor, but yet I feel that the moment has come when I must inevitably give the reader some account of the nature of Ivan's illness. Anticipating events I can say at least one thing: he was at that moment on the very eve of an attack of brain fever. Though his health had long been affected, it had offered a stubborn resistance to the fever which in the end gained complete mastery over it. Though I know nothing of medicine, I venture to hazard the suggestion that he really had perhaps, by a terrible effort of will, succeeded in delaying the attack for a time, hoping, of course, to check it completely. He knew that he was unwell, but he loathed the thought of being ill at that fatal time, at the approaching crisis in his life, when he needed to have all his wits about him, to say what he had to say boldly and resolutely and “to justify himself to himself.”

He had, however, consulted the new doctor, who had been brought from Moscow by a fantastic notion of Katerina Ivanovna's to which I have referred already. After listening to him and examining him the doctor came to the conclusion that he was actually suffering from some disorder of the brain, and was not at all surprised by an admission which Ivan had reluctantly made him. “Hallucinations are quite likely in your condition,” the doctor opined, “though it would be better to verify them ... you must take steps at once, without a moment's delay, or things will go badly with you.” But Ivan did not follow this judicious advice and did not take to his bed to be nursed. “I am walking about, so I am strong enough, if I drop, it'll be different then, any one may nurse me who likes,” he decided, dismissing the subject.

Perhaps fortunately for Dostoevsky, the MRI and psychopharmacology had not been invented, so illnesses of the brain did seem more existential--or as special connections to God or the devil. (Dostoevsky's own epilepsy allowed him to think of himself as a kind of seer, although he well knew it was an illness too.) Still, I see no reason why our technologies should bind us. A few disclaimers, admitted conjectures, a "new" but unseen doctor who predicts "hallucinations," and you're good to go. Is Ivan schizophrenic? Does he have a tumor? It doesn't matter. Better not to know, because the real suggestion is that Ivan has driven himself mad, by trying to understand God intellectually. It's this intellectual madness, rather than any plausible illness, that has given us "The Grand Inquisitor," and now, Ivan's fascinating conversation with Satan himself--who both is, and is not, a figment of Ivan's imagination.

The whole conversation with the devil as a "poor relation"--dapper but shabby on closer inspection--probably requires a post of its own. For now, I'll leave you with this suggestion: in fiction, there's nothing wrong with making up your own mental illnesses. Your story might even suggest to you the type of illness it requires.

*I do not think this is the case with Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen's wonderful novel, which, like The Echo Maker, deals with Capgras Syndrome: the belief that other people are imposters. While Galchen, a medical doctor, understands the syndrome thoroughly, her touch with it is lighter, more lyrical. Her interest in the illness is primarily aesthetic and existential, and not so much in the plot entanglements such a condition might lead to.


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Life lessons from Shaun of the Dead

I could have gone my whole life without seeing Shaun of the Dead. Alas, I will now never know what that life would have been like.

In this life, though, I have had a chance to reflect on certain lessons presented in the film, which are particularly applicable to those of us writing novels. Q: How do you write a novel? A: Be a zombie.

Now, your traditional zombie, as I have discussed elsewhere, is slow. But slowness, and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough, is his weapon. His quarry--i.e. the humans--underestimate him, believing they can spend long minutes staring at him in astonishment and still sprint away in plenty of time. Or the extra time may entice them (as in Shaun's case) into hatching over-elaborate plans that don't work. The zombie's slowness represents his relentlessness. You can shoot him; you can tear his arm off. He keeps coming. He takes his time because he knows, in the end, he will get there. You see? Slow is just fine. Slow is better, even.

It is also true that zombies tend to move in packs, and to multiply, which are keys to their success. As novelists, we can view these packs as the invaluable support we receive from our fellow writers, and our desire to gather in classes and conferences and writing groups. Yet it is also important to note that the individual zombie is not overly concerned with the doings of his peers. For example, some of them may zoom ahead. Perhaps they are those newfangled fast zombies, or maybe they are simply better zombies. It does not matter. Similarly, other zombies fall behind, have their brains destroyed, and so forth. The zombie feels bad when this sort of thing happens. He is not heartless. Still, he keeps moving forward.

So, you see what I'm getting at? Moving forward. Keep. Moving. Forward.

A question remains as to how zombies become this relentless in the first place. It appears that zombie-hood confers a sort of automatic lobotomy. For our purposes, this may be where the drugs come in.

(TC: we are both thinking of zombies today...strange...)

Alice McDermott on whatever you can get away with

In my never-ending quest for reassurance from famous writers, I came across this 2000 article by Alice McDermott in the AWP Writer's Chronicle. Here's one reassuring bit:

For the first half of the composition of each of my novels I have been consumed by a sense of not knowing what I'm doing, and for the second half I have been consumed by the certainty that I know exactly what I am doing and should not be doing it.

Check, and check.

McDermott turns out to be one of those writing teachers who says writing can't be taught. What she's really saying, though, is that writing can't be taught *directly.* She's right, I think, on this count:

[O]ne of the most subtly disconcerting things a writer can say to a student goes something like this, "John Cheever [or Updike or Chekhov or Flannery O'Connor, or Munro or James or whoever] did exactly what you're attempting here in a story called." That slow burn you can detect behind the student's enthusiastic nod as she diligently copies down a title is, I believe, the one true indication of a real writer, a real writer who even as she obediently copies down the suggested reading is thinking, No one has ever done exactly what I'm attempting to do here, you stupid ass.

Not that I am ready to claim the mantle of "real writer" by any means--but more and more, I feel this resistance to models as such. Yet I'm reading widely and voraciously, looking for...well, inspiration is too hackneyed a term; more like some glancing blow that shakes up a locked-up portion of my mind--or heart, I should probably say. When I'm reading, I'm not so much thinking, I could create a scene or character like that--as, Oh, this is possible; therefore this other thing (that I want to do) could also be possible.

That sense of possibility is the point of McDermott's article. The bulk of the piece is taken up with a sort-of reading of Nabokov's Bend Sinister, not as a model to follow, but an example of what can be done in fiction. (First of all, thank you, Alice McDermott, simply for not presenting us with yet another Raymond Carver story, whose brilliance we are assumed to already recognize and desire to emulate.) Nabokov, McDermott points out, breaks pretty much every rule beginning writers think they know. Which means, of course, there are no rules. Except for one. Pivoting off a quote from Nabokov describing what the novel was "about," McDermott says:

The plot moves, turns, develops, not in order to accommodate the author's cleverness (and there is much cleverness in contemporary fiction), but to reveal, to record, the beating of Krug's loving heart. [....]

Advice to writers then: without that heart at the center of your fiction, advice can't help you. If it is there, then no one, no one, can-or needs to-tell you how to write your stories.

It seems the advice we most need is how to write with heart--with our hearts, to put it ever so sappily, because no one else's can do the job for us. No writing class can teach us how to do that. I suspect we can only learn this indirectly, by immersing ourselves in other stories that have heart. We can recognize how we feel when we're reading them, and see if our own work makes us feel the same way. In fact, writing with heart is painful and scary. As Nabokov puts it, we're delving into the "torture an immense tenderness is subject to," and that tenderness is really our own. No wonder we need reassurance, and still need our teachers.

Borrowed Fire: Making children interesting

Dostoevsky's portrait of Kolya Krassotkin in The Brothers Karamazov offers a clinic in creating a smart and complex young person. Child characters, especially if they're minor characters, are often little more than allegories of adult hopes and fears, rather than individuals in their own right. Dostoevsky himself is given to sentimentalizing children, for instance by having them die slowly while bathed in an angelic light (a la Evangeline in Uncle Tom's Cabin). In fact, our acquaintance with Kolya comes about through this very circumstance, the dying being handled by Ilusha, whom we've met earlier.

Dostoevsky spends a great deal of time revealing the extremes of Kolya's character, because, at thirteen (nearly fourteen, as Kolya insists on pointing out), his soul is in the balance. Kolya is intelligent, and that means he's at great risk. Dostoevsky doesn't worry much about the fate of unintelligent people; they are bound to be either holy innocents or brutes. However, the smart can get themselves into serious trouble, and do serious damage, if their intellect outstrips or stifles their spiritual development.

Kolya is a convincing adolescent because he has embraced adult concerns (religion, politics) with all the enthusiasm of the new convert. But he is (pardon the anachronism; I just can't let it go) like a novice driver behind the wheel of a Ferrari. His mind is a powerful engine, which he doesn't have the faintest idea how to control, and so he's constantly crashing. He tricks a peasant into killing his own goose to prove a theory; he lies on railroad tracks and lets a train pass over him (fainting in the process, but developing a reputation as a "desperate character"); he finds and hides a stray dog--Ilusha's lost dog--for a month, in order to train the dog and surprise Ilusha. Kolya's training methods border on cruel, as does his notion that it's better to wait and surprise Ilusha, rather than just give him the dog back as soon as he finds him.* In all cases, Kolya's theories on the superiority of the intellect (especially his own) distort his good, or at least benign, intentions. But Kolya's goodness still comes through: he really does want to make Ilusha feel better, and he does, though at some cost to all concerned.

For this reason--the goodness showing through the cracks--Kolya attracts the attention of Alyosha, who functions as a true angel for the boy. Alyosha's at his most appealing in his interactions with Kolya, which shows us another benefit of creating complex children as characters: they allow your adults to show more interesting sides of themselves as well.

As Kolya recognizes, Alyosha treats him as an adult, which is what an intelligent child desires, and deserves, above all. And by this means, Alyosha gently makes Kolya aware of his errors:

“What do you think the doctor will say to him?” Kolya asked quickly. “What a repulsive mug, though, hasn't he? I can't endure medicine!”

“Ilusha is dying. I think that's certain,” answered Alyosha, mournfully.

“They are rogues! Medicine's a fraud! I am glad to have made your acquaintance, though, Karamazov. I wanted to know you for a long time. I am only sorry we meet in such sad circumstances.”

Kolya had a great inclination to say something even warmer and more demonstrative, but he felt ill at ease. Alyosha noticed this, smiled, and pressed his hand.

“I've long learned to respect you as a rare person,” Kolya muttered again, faltering and uncertain. “I have heard you are a mystic and have been in the monastery. I know you are a mystic, but ... that hasn't put me off. Contact with real life will cure you.... It's always so with characters like yours.”

“What do you mean by mystic? Cure me of what?” Alyosha was rather astonished.

“Oh, God and all the rest of it.”

“What, don't you believe in God?”

“Oh, I've nothing against God. Of course, God is only a hypothesis, but ... I admit that He is needed ... for the order of the universe and all that ... and that if there were no God He would have to be invented,” added Kolya, beginning to blush. He suddenly fancied that Alyosha might think he was trying to show off his knowledge and to prove that he was “grown up.” “I haven't the slightest desire to show off my knowledge to him,” Kolya thought indignantly. And all of a sudden he felt horribly annoyed.

“I must confess I can't endure entering on such discussions,” he said with a final air. “It's possible for one who doesn't believe in God to love mankind, don't you think so? Voltaire didn't believe in God and loved mankind?” (“I am at it again,” he thought to himself.)

“Voltaire believed in God, though not very much, I think, and I don't think he loved mankind very much either,” said Alyosha quietly, gently, and quite naturally, as though he were talking to some one of his own age, or even older. Kolya was particularly struck by Alyosha's apparent diffidence about his opinion of Voltaire. He seemed to be leaving the question for him, little Kolya, to settle.

“Have you read Voltaire?” Alyosha finished.

“No, not to say read.... But I've read Candide in the Russian translation ... in an absurd, grotesque, old translation ... (At it again! again!)”

Kolya's pomposity is obnoxious and funny at the same time; and his flustered self-awareness makes us care about him. With Alyosha's help, we forgive his blunders and feel genuine hope for his future.

So, in creating child characters, it might help to think of the child as a person at a crossroads. At stake is the kind of adult he or she will become. The child is trying on adult ideas and ways, playing dress-up, only the game is serious. The child lacks whatever adults possess that enables us to wear our grown-up costumes more successfully...which raises the question, what is that quality, exactly? Is that quality always desirable? In Kolya's case, through the conversation with Alyosha, we learn that empathy--which requires, according to Dostoevsky, belief in God--is the key to a meaningful life. Many adults don't have empathy, and Alyosha is determined to cultivate it in Kolya. Alyosha is like an author developing Kolya's character, acknowledging his cruel and awkward tendencies while drawing out his humanity. We, as authors, could try doing the same.

*I am still not a hundred percent certain that this dog is in fact Ilusha's lost dog. Because Ilusha's ill and also wracked with guilt--he thinks he killed his dog by tricking him into swallowing a pin (a stunt Smerdyakov, the villain, taught him)--Kolya may only be fooling him with a different dog. Either way, Kolya is doing a nice thing for Ilusha, but in an unintentionally mean way.