Instinct with Handrails

Last week I was on vacation, and I made a sincere attempt to go "screen-free". I didn't watch any television, or use the iPad to watch movies, or look at Facebook, or type anything on a laptop, or send any emails. I did look at my emails - the single one I hoped for didn't arrive, but I got six from Facebook in four days (six!), reminding me of all the cool stuff I was missing by not logging in. With one exception, all the others (25+) were not-really-needed notifications or junk.

But I'm not here to write about the meaning of that little experiment. I'm here because the main things I did on vacation, in place of my usual screen-focused activities, were 1) read Proust and 2) write. Volume II of Remembrance of Things Past is just as all-encompassing and gorgeous and tedious and witty and self-indulgent and YESTHISFOREVERPLEASE as Volume I.* School starts in just about two weeks, so I don't know if I'll finish it before then, but I'll make room thereafter if need be. I tried to find the best blog post from last summer that talked about the experience of reading the first volume, and found that everything old is new again; last summer I started it on vacation and hadn't finished before school started. Ol' Repetitive, that's what they call me.**

Anyway, I took intermittent breaks from Proust to read David Shields's How Literature Saved My Life. Though I've owned and wanted to read Reality Hunger for some time now, I'm glad I started where I did. It was just the right book to slingshot me back and forth (yelping in joy) between the early years of the twenty-first and twentieth centuries. The writing I'm doing is in some ways positioned closer to Proust than Shields, but the collagist sensibility of Shields is exactly where I want to live, creatively. So the work proceeded apace.

I've now told two people what the secret project is, and both were very interested, so I'm a little reassured about the idea. I'm on the ninth pie piece, of twelve, but I know already that there will be lots of rewriting, lots of wholesale throwing into the fire and starting over. What I'm doing now isn't quite down to placeholding, but it has the distinct sensation of impermanence about it - Play-Doh instead of real fireable clay. I needed to write all these thousands of words to get to where I am now, which is: everything starting to hang together, a better understanding of the characters and their conflicts, an utter exhilaration at how ideas are sprouting out of the earth of the draft. I had no idea that I was writing about at least two of the themes that are at the very core of my life and work, but poof, up they came, like onion sprouts in the pantry. So I'm writing in that direction, vaguely, tottering, half-blindfolded, hoping that the work will lead me as ably as it has so far.

I'm sure this method, drafting first before theme enters into it, contradicts questioning and assertion that I've done right here on this very blog, because I resisted the idea really strongly when it came through Pam Houston to me in 2013 - that putting theme first makes for crappy writing, and you should let the sentences lead you to theme instead. Maybe other projects won't work this way. But this project is evidently going prose first, whittling second, themes third, rewriting fourth, and after that I have no idea.

I mean, what am I doing? Is this a quantum leap in my work or just a muddle that no one will like except me? I'm pretty sure it's teaching me a great deal (and what else is there?), but it's so different that I'm nigh consumed with what even is this?!? It's like writing was when I was in high school and knew thimbles about it: instinctual. Yes, that, but now with handrails. I think of Mary Gaitskill and the fucking power in her sentences, of Joanna Newsom and the bizarro brilliant songs she makes, of Lidia Yuknavitch and the library full of rules she breaks when she uncaps her pen, of Kate Bush and how she allows others' ideas to swim peaceably into her own. These are artists I couldn't call on when I was a teenager. Plus, to no small effect, there's the writer's toolbox I've equipped over the past decade via enormous expense and personal irresponsibility. Somehow all that makes a line to grasp when I write into that weird dark room where I spent so much time last week.

As ever, iunno.

The picture at the top of this post, in case you were curious, is of a Last Straw. On Friday night I closed the lid of my time-worn spillproof travel mug, which contained a little leftover tea from the prior Sunday, and dropped it in my carry-on bag to schlep upstairs with the rest of our luggage, and IT SPILLED FIVE-DAY-OLD TEA ALL OVER MY PROUST AND MY DRAFTING NOTEBOOK, and so I am throwing it away. It is a rather elderly travel mug, in travel-mug years, and I'm kind of sick of looking at it and didn't ever love its appearance much anyway, so after this appalling insult, in the trash it goes. Shallow as I am, I hate reading water-damaged books (I still remember which Beezus & Ramona book I dipped in the bath as a girl and had to read with an accompanying crinkling noise ever after, grrrrrrrrr), so I ordered a new Volume II from Amazon, a total waste of $16 but HONESTLY, TRAVEL MUG, YOU HAD ONE JOB. The stains are kind of distinguished on the drafting notebook, but I'm still very disgruntled. At best, it made for an interesting picture, and a nice visual overview of the post, thematically.

See? Writing into the theme. Pam Houston knows what the hell she's talking about, folks.


*I have the silver Vintage paperback editions, which are bound in three volumes: Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove in the first volume, The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain in the second volume, and The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained in the third volume. These seven "individual novels" (which they aren't) were split into eight volumes, rather weirdly, when À la recherche de temps perdu was originally published, and have been published in many different ways under various English titles in the intervening century. To say that I'm working on "the second volume" is extremely confusing in conversation, but I know I sound pretentious when I talk about reading Proust anyway, so whatever.

**No one calls me that.

Debriefing

SO.

Just in case you didn't read the last post or forgot or something, I was at the Esalen Institute last week at a writer's workshop with Cheryl Strayed and Pam Houston. Big Sur is foggier and chillier than you'd think.

All week I composed pieces of this blog post in my head, trying to figure out what I was going to say and what I was going to keep to myself about this experience. It would have been a lot easier to write this if I'd still been at my old anonymous blog; I went through an interesting emotional arc from Sunday to Friday, and I'd love to have the chance to decompress about that in thousands of rambling words. I also have a lot to say about experiencing Esalen, not all of which I'm eager to set down under my real name.

So rather than trying to write the most exhaustive or illustrative post about the experience, I'm going to use a technique I learned from Cheryl, and make a list.

1. I am so much more enthusiastic about rewriting now than I was at the end of last week. About the prospect of writing a scene four different ways, even if it takes precious time. I think the way they made us do a pile of exercises and then only mentioned some of them again, leaving the others to be washed out to sea (or expanded upon in one's own time), helped enormously with the feeling that effort expended on writing is disposable, should be disposable, in order for good work to appear at the end of the road.

2. Pam showed us how literary dialogue is supposed to go: at cross-purposes, two separate conversations going on at once rather than direct communication. This was a total revelation. Everyone I talked to about it said the same.

3. The whole time, I was on a knife-edge between pleasure that a place like this exists and astringent cynicism. Very hard to take seriously at the same time as it was a relief to open my mind to hippie woo-woo stuff and enjoy.

4. My writing exercises improved noticeably (to my eye) over the week.

5. I kept coming up with questions that I knew it would be stupid to ask, because they'd send us down a tangential rabbit-hole that would have been great for a lazy afternoon seminar but not good at all in this limited environment. Things like "can MacGuffins exist in lit-fic, or are they just for genre writers?" and "how do you keep from writing the boring story?" and "why is it good to show instead of tell and bad to tell instead of show? Who set up that standard?" Some of these I brought up with other writers over lunch or dinner and we had interesting talks.

6. I made amazing, wonderful new friends, and am terrified that they didn't like me as much as I liked them.

7. I didn't miss Facebook and whatnot at all while I was there, but once back, I fell into the same pattern as before I left. I hope to remember that feeling, though, and treat the commitment of FB a little more lightly.

8. "Yeah, but Alice Munro is a wizard."

9. Form will set you free! Alton Brown says this about keeping organized while cooking, and he's exactly right. Writing a sonnet sounds like it'll be a lot more complicated and difficult than writing free verse, but at times, the limitations can help you to imagine your way into far more interesting places. I saw this come true under my pen this week (not literally with a sonnet but with something similarly formal). Previously I knew this wisdom in a very different context: classical Hollywood cinema labored under a LOT of restrictions and still turned out remarkable art. Sirk wouldn't be Sirk, in all his hilarious symbolic glory, without the Hays code.

10. I smoked too many cloves and even a few regular cigarettes. Aside from looping conversations that drifted well past bedtime, this was the best thing about the evenings there. I miss smoking so goddamn much.

11. One of our exercises was to write down the question at the core of our work. I had a very hard time with this at first, although eventually I came up with an answer. But more on that in the next post.

It was a remarkable week and I'm very, very glad I went. I wish I could do a big workshop like this every season, four times a year, because it's just the sort of thing that quantum-leaps my writing into a new place and presses me back into the confidence I sorely need to get to work.

PS: Everybody to whom I described the wikibook thought it was a neat idea. Nothing is going to keep me from getting this thing done, even if it takes two years.