The Secret Project Revealed!

I know you've been scouring TMZ, stalking CNN, trying to catch hints of what this mysterious secret project could be that I've been writing on and off for a year. Wait no more.

From a post on April 11, 2013:

Lately, with no concrete story ideas, I've been thirsting to write about ghosts... Also, like going around and around the same jogging track, I keep mentally returning to Florence + the Machine's Ceremonials, an album that is just packed with ghosts and ghost stories, whispered and half-understood. Since first listening to it, I've wished I could write a novel that somehow accompanies the album, the way House of Leaves and Poe's Haunted go together. I'm not Flo's sister, though, and I really haven't the foggiest idea what she had in mind when writing the songs on that album, so it's a pretty impossible notion. The songs are just so evocative, of dark hallways and fluttering dresses and the wind through chimes and things half-seen in mirrors. I want to evoke in words and story what's evoked in music there.

That is the secret project. It's a story cycle pegged to the twelve songs on Ceremonials. It's not just wild song-tales, though; it has an overarching story about two girls at a boarding school who fall in love with each other but are not meant to be together. Not in life, anyway. Beyond the stories and characters, and even a little bit beyond honoring and echoing the music, the point for me was to experiment in manners both technical and mystical. To learn how to evoke, the same way Florence did, rather than speaking directly.

Unfortunately, I had to halt my work on it when school started. (Schoolwork has become completely overwhelming, and it's actually freaking me out a bit, but that's not what this post is about.) I've drafted ten stories out of twelve, but I know, I know, I'm going to go back and rewrite some of them partially and others totally from scratch. So my work on it isn't just beginning, exactly, but it's hard to know how far along I actually am. Nevertheless, I'm doing it, and I can't hold down my excitement about it.

I used to think this idea was stupid or weird, or that even if I did finish it no one would want to read it. I believe I was wrong on both counts. I've told a small handful of people about it and they have all been enthusiastic, even those who don't know Florence. Ekphrastic art is not an uncommon thing, so it's really not that weird. Although I've never heard of a book tied to an album like this, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Or that I can't write it. And I finally decided that if no one wanted to read it except me, that was fine, because then I could write a book that I wanted to read, something I made that I could love, instead of making allowances and sacrifices for readability.

Writing this book/story cycle (it's not shaped up to be book-length yet, but I'm pretty sure it will be eventually) has allowed for a series of breakthroughs. Lots of things have been changing in terms of how I think about writing over the past year, but without the secret project, those changes wouldn't have been grounded in anything. The project has helped me believe, genuinely, that there is no writing for others without writing for me. It's helped me trust that I understand syntax well enough to mess around with it intensively and see what happens. It's helped me just not care about writing in ways that are too murky to explain well; of course I still care about writing, very very very deeply, but I'm not wrapped up in what's going to happen to it later to the exclusion of what occurs when it goes on the page.

Toni Morrison says that if you look around for a book you want to read, and it doesn't exist yet, you must write it. I said this to a sculptress friend and she hit me back with the words of one of her teachers: "Just make whatever you want to make." These may seem like laughably idealistic proverbs in terms of paying bills and publishing gatekeepers and how long it takes to do creative work and whatnot, but...my sculptress friend makes these fantastic outdoor installations that you can visit in public city spaces and parks. I'm writing the book I needed and badly wanted to write, and everyone who's heard about it has said I want to read that. Everything this idea has done for me has been good. It helped me seize Fictator power. It forced me to let the hell go. It saved me, this summer, from never writing again. Whatever happens to this project in the world, putting it into the world has been invaluable.

So make whatever you want to make. That's how inspiration ripples from Flo to me, from me to you. Sing out. Write on. Go.

never knew I was a dancer till Delilah showed me how 

How to Write Soporific Prose

Just incidentally one day during our To the Lighthouse unit, the professor mentioned that Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, was aawwwful, a thudding interminable Victorian thing. It's not that I didn't believe her when she said this (I gather that she's something of a Woolfian, so she'd know), but I wondered if "aawwwful" was a relative term when it came to Woolf and/or if the book's Victorian attributes made it much more awful to someone who prefers Modernism. I was dancing through Middlemarch at the time, so I thought Night and Day would make an interesting middle ground between Eliot and what I was reading for class.

Turns out she was right. Night and Day is awful. Aawwwful. It's one of the dullest, most joyless books I've ever read. But man, is it ever an interesting awful. I'm learning so much from reading it.

The scenes are very bad, with all the rhythm of an oompah band at its first rehearsal. The narrated paragraphs are better, but largely descriptive - a lot of telling, much of which never pays off. We are deep inside the characters' heads, reading every last thought and emotional reaction to each gesture of every little finger, but the characters themselves are still remarkably inconsistent and difficult to grasp. Through all of this, I can feel the author trying and trying and trying to get something on the page that matters to her. In a chapter I just finished, I could feel her fever at the theoretical high emotional point of the scene, but I felt no fever in myself. The scene was an endless, stilted conversation between two characters in whom I have amazingly little investment after 300 pages, and I had no idea why it was such a big deal that they were talking to each other about who was in love with whom. Between the lines, it felt as though she was trying to write the scene when Darcy first proposes to Elizabeth. It fell flatter than a cheap stage set.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).
Apropos of nothing in this post, here's five minutes of stunts from The Great Stone Face.

The book feels like a sort of expungement. As if all the worst habits of a writer are being wrung out in print before she gets on with the business of writing well. Every paragraph is bogged down with prose that takes the longest possible route to get anywhere, and describes everything in exhaustive and unnecessary detail. Abstractions abound. We hop heads constantly, but to little benefit, which makes the book seem amateurish.

There was a brotherly kindness in his voice which seemed to her magnanimous, when she reflected that she had cut short his explanations and shown little interest in his change of plan. She gave him her reasons for thinking that she might profit by such a journey, omitting the one reason which had set all the rest in motion. He listened attentively, and made no attempt to dissuade her. In truth, he found himself curiously eager to make certain of her good sense, and accepted each fresh proof of it with satisfaction, as though it helped him to make up his mind about something. She forgot the pain he had caused her, and in place of it she became conscious of a steady tide of well-being which harmonized very aptly with the tramp of their feet upon the dry road and the support of his arm. The comfort was the more glowing in that it seemed to be the reward of her determination to behave to him simply and without attempting to be other than she was.

Are you asleep yet? Page after page of this! Every little emotional dip and soar of young love, recorded at enormous length, and then contradicted by the next minuscule emotional change, and then around again...oh my God, seriously, it's aawwwful.

Go Back to the Shadow!

Most days I pluck half an hour out of the afternoon to sit on my balcony and take notes about what I'm working on, writing-wise. Sometimes nothing happens, and I just sit there. Sometimes I bring a book out and read instead. Sometimes I come up with all-new ideas.

Yesterday a big idea came to me. An idea for an ambitious writing project - a book-length series of short stories that would be linked by their main character, by their purpose, and by their structure. The long story I mentioned last week would be the first one in this potential series.

The structure of this story, where four different tales are interleaved, helped me to make the Bigger Point I was trying to make - the reader at some point has to think about what they all have in common (I hope), and why what they have in common matters. It's the Crash narrative, right? You tell a bunch of different eye-level stories in order to get at something about the way humans act and feel. It was also a really interesting way to write, to keep switching voices every couple of pages.

I don't remember where I first heard of the "novel in stories", but once I understood what it meant, I decided I wanted to write one. My attempt eventually became a novella, Those Ghosts of Time, which is still Matt's favorite thing I've written and which I know will never, ever, ever sell. It didn't turn out to be a novel in stories, though - in finished form it was a novella about one character and a few assorted stories that ended up not fitting anywhere in the main narrative.

Published novels-in-stories I've heard of are Justin Cronin's Mary and O'Neil and Molly Ringwald's recent (apparently quite respectable) foray into fiction, When It Happens to You. I'm sure there are many others. I've read books of short stories that seemed all of a piece, as if the characters all lived in the same emotional town - Circling the Drain by the unjustly late Amanda Davis, most of what Raymond Carver's written. It's not the same art form as just revisiting character or locations, like King's Castle Rock or Fitzgerald's various characters. Oddly, even though it's a form I deeply want to emulate, I can't think of a single example of a novel in stories I've actually read. (I'm in the middle of Lost in the Funhouse, but I'm not sure that quite counts.)

The thing I liked most about this idea was telling a single narrative through a bunch of distinct tales. Drawing a throughline beneath things that seemed unconnected. I didn't really have a good outlet for it, though, until I wrote this story.

What I wanted to do in the end was write a series of stories that explored stuff we live with every day - the nature of being in our bodies, the experience of growing older in America, the way we view people with mental illness - but that we don't admit or talk to each other about much. And I wanted to write more about this interesting character I invented, a teenage androgyne, who would help me explore the problem of pronouns in the English language (a bit nerdy, but hey, me and grammar have been best buds for a long time) among other, more significant issues. In brief, it would be a collection of humanist spelunkings that were linked and were all structurally identical. Not actually a novel in stories, but a book of stories that had a great deal in common with each other. I even came up with a fancy name for it.

This morning in the shower I tried to talk myself out of this project. Writing literary is exhausting, and deep down, I don't really believe I do it well. I've got two other books to work on. I collected years of disconnected notes to come up with all the concepts and storylines I slotted into last week's story; how will I think of so many more? No one publishes books of short stories. No one likes books of short stories. Maybe the one story I've written is actually crap and the whole project should be torpedoed now.

Etc., etc. After several long minutes of this, I'd had enough. I stood there in the shower and mentally put down a staff-slamming Gandalf inside my head, between me and the taunting Balrog of negativity that was listing off all this stuff for me. NO. YOU SHALL NOT PASS, MEAN BRAIN.

If no one took on any demanding and weird literary projects, there are so many incredible pieces of work we'd never have. And there's no reason to believe in this project any less than the other ones I've started (and finished). There's especially no reason to cut it off before it begins. I just need to put down one word at a time, take as many notes as I can, and go forth.

There's a lot more to be said here, about my uncomfortable reactions to my own crazy ambitions, about writing a form I haven't studied, about the strange fact that deep down I don't think I write literary fiction well. That realization came out of nowhere. But I think that'll do for today.