Writing

I guess nobody has ideas for me, and I probably shouldn’t have asked. It reminds me of an artist I read of once, a New York artist of the eighties, whose schtick was this: he put two ads in the Village Voice, one calling for artists who could generate ideas for artworks, and another for artists to execute others’ ideas. He hired a bunch of starving artists at minimum wage and set up a factory, then signed the results, and that was his art. He was quite succesful, though loathed by many. Anyway, if there are any bloggers out there capable of working up others’ ideas into ripping blog entries, please get in touch...

In the last entry I wanted to write a little about what fiction I’m working on, but the topic kept dropping out as I wrote, so I’ll put it in a blog entry of its own.

In November I worked dilligently if unsuccesfully on my novel. I don’t like to describe the plots of things I’m working on – I find it kills the idea – so I’ll just say it’s an apocalyptic novel. While others were trying hard to turn out 50,000 words of stream-of-conciousness blather for the ridiculous NANOWRIMO, I was trying, simply, to come up with a voice for my book. I wrote certain paragraphs, then re-wrote them, a number of times. Eventually these paragraphs would become so dressed up with subclauses and clever verbiage that I would abandon them and find some other passage to play with. I even wrote a couple of pages of actual novel, although they weren’t any good. I told myself that I was trying to decide whether the book should be in first or third person, which is not something that should really take a month – and anyway, everything I wrote was first person. I wanted to write it in first person, because first person is so much easier – for me, and I think for most people. I can create some slightly altered alter-ego and let him talk, more or less as I would myself. I can insert my own caustic observations and humour whenever things get a little slow.

I think I secretly knew all along that the novel should be in third person. In December I stopped writing it. I felt bad about stopping, but I think now it was probably necessary. I’ll go back to it eventually.

After that I just wrote blog entries, which as I mentioned in the last entry turned out to be the best thing for me. Then, in the last few weeks, with my interest in fiction revived, I went back and looked at some things saved on my computer. The first thing I looked at was my novel attempts, which seemed, with a month’s distance, to be pretty abysmal. Then I found a couple of short stories – ideas I’ve had for a long time, four years in one instance, five in the other – that I have worked on, over the years, very occasionally and with limited success, but which are still in some way alive for me.

I’m not good with short stories. In truth I haven’t finished one in about eight years. I have written two full-length manuscripts in that time, so it’s not laziness (although as I write that, it doesn't seem such an amazing achievement; certainly I should have written more); I don’t think I’m well-suited to the form. My short stories tend to either remain unfinished, or turn into novels. But I’d like to write a short story now, if only because it would be nice to complete a new piece of fiction, whatever the length, and shorter is easier than longer.

One of the short stories is very important to me, still hopelessly vague in conception, something I only work on when intoxicated, and quite likely to turn into a novel, if I ever get a grip on it. I’m leaving that one alone for the moment.

The other is what I think of as my Professional Short Story, and that’s what I’ve been working on. It is not particularly important to me, nor particularly brilliant in concept – it’s one of those epiphany sorts of short stories, like something from the New Yorker in the fifties. And that’s how I want to write it: with that sort of sinewy prose that some of the American writers of that time had, tough in its nouns and verbs and elegant in its punctuation and grammar and sentence construction. Tight. It is not in danger of turning into a novel, and probably in little danger of turning into a story that will change the world, but it is a serviceable idea that I would like very much to turn into a well-crafted short story.

It hasn’t been going too great so far; it hasn’t been as well-written as some of the things on my blog, and I’m not too inspired to write it, although that’s kind of the point. Instead of nouns and verbs I’m getting convoluted sentences, a general dullness, and innapropriate oratorical flourishes.

Last night after another not-too-succesful session with this story, I got out my copy of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. This is something I do a lot when I’m writing, re-read stuff that seems close to what I’m trying to do, to see how others have done it. I should say, not out of brag, but because it’s slightly important to the anecdote, and because I am a trained bookseller, that I have a reasonably nice copy of this book – the second British edition, in a good dustjacket (parenthetically, I’d like to say that I think first editions are a bit stupid, particularly if so valuable and pristine that they can’t be read, but there is something nice about having a contemporary hardcover edition of a book you like, and when I find these, I tend to keep them.) Anyway I got this book off my bookshelf in order to be instructed by old JD. Like a lot of people, I was hugely enamoured of him between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, and he’s probably still the biggest influence on my style. These days I’d admit that some of his ideas are a little sophomoric, but I still love the way he writes. So I opened this nice copy of a great book, and the first thing I read was the front flap, which had a brief introduction by JD Salinger. He was talking about the Glass stories, and he said something in it that perfectly stated how I’m feeling about my own writing, which I’d like to put down here. I could have stopped there, I suppose, but I did re-read "Franny", and it was helpful – I realized how economical his sentences are, how they tend to be simultaneously elegant, and well-observed, and revealing with regards to character. So that’s something for me to attempt, if not achieve, when I next try to write my Professional Short Story. Thanks, JD, for both things.

It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful.

posted by Nicholas @ 12:04 AM