species of writers

I thought I would check in with a quick post, to let you know that all is well. Kimmie has this week off from work, and so the routine is different. Snow fell in the night sometime, so now there is a powdery cold blanket of white outside. Traffic, much less than usual, is muted. In fact, right now I can hear none. Love it!

Christmas passed very pleasantly here, and Santa was most generous. Among other things, I received a pair of waterproof Helly Hansen walking-boots made in Vietnam. Maybe I'll break them in today. I have a stack of DVDs that I must return to the library. Shall I take a walk up to Lynn Valley?

As for writing, my god, what can I tell you. Among the stocking-stuffers I received was the Holiday Issue of The New York Review of Books. I rarely read book reviews (except readers' reviews on Amazon.com when I'm considering buying a book). This is partly because my reading program is governed by my research and interests, and therefore not by what people are touting as a good book. It is partly too because I like to find my own reading experiences, and not simply consume products that have been vetted and assessed by others; I like to form my own opinions.

Then there are the specific qualities of "reviewer culture" that I don' t like. There's something depressing and undignified in the attack/counterattack of book reviews. Criticisms are rebutted by authors, then reviewers might get a chance to counter-rebut. These exchanges are often tinged with bitterness, which, while understandable, is not edifying.

I'm not very attuned to literary culture in general, although I read quite a lot and love books. Too often I find reviewers and critics gushing over works that seem very uninteresting to me. I get the feeling that the whole system is governed much more by fashion than anyone realizes or acknowledges.

On top of all that are feelings of intimidation. This issue has an essay on Joyce Carol Oates (including a lovely black-and-white photo of her from 1975: a delicate-looking creature with enormous dark eyes). Oates is a serious, high-quality writer. I've read one or two of her short stories, and thought they were very good. But what she really is, is prolific. She's published dozens of novels, short-story collections, essays, and plays. She seems to spend much of each day writing--many daytime hours and a few nighttime ones.

Egad. If a writer is someone who writes (and I think you can make a good case for that definition), then Joyce Carol Oates is a writer. The real deal. I note that she's a Gemini (born 16 June 1938), the sign of writing and thinking and talking.

It makes me wonder: why aren't I churning out books and stories and scripts by the dozen? What's wrong with me? Why does my "work" in progress consist mostly of hundreds, nay, thousands of pages of notes? I write to myself, for god's sake! What am I doing?

Clearly, I'm some different kind of animal. A slow-spawning one.

Writers' methods must differ not only because our temperaments are different, but because our aims are different. What kind of experience are you looking for from a book? I remember reading a rueful comment by John Fowles, who was always embarrassed that his most popular book was The Magus, his second novel, published in 1965. He said (as I recall) that in it he had tried to create an experience "beyond the literary"--and meant this as a criticism.

I thought I knew what he meant--sort of. I remember my excitement and enjoyment when I first read The Magus, probably about 1977 or so. It was a fast-moving, thrilleresque story, but written with a mystical aim. It seemed to be an example of the "spiritual adventure-story" that I myself became interested in writing. (Last time I tried reading The Magus, about 10 years ago, I couldn't get into it.) But was it a bad thing to want to create an experience "beyond the literary"? And what is a "literary" experience, anyway?

Maybe I'm not sure what kind of experience I'm aiming to create. But whatever it is, it's not something I can come up with quickly. I'm seeing a book like a tree, or a tooth: something with roots. The roots are its hidden connection with reality. A work of fiction is a fantasy, but its power, its effect, comes from its connection with reality. I say this knowing how slippery and unsure a word reality is. But let it stand. Reality is that which we care about. A work of art affects us to the extent that it arises from or has implications for that which we care about.

My reality-detector is a fussy, finnicky gadget. As I work through my great epic, I think, "not real enough..." and am sent off on another errand, in search of more reality, like finding potting soil with which to surround the deep, vast root-system of the oak I'm planting.

I guess it's like the sloth watching the cheetah (assuming they could find a continent to share). The cheetah is dynamic, fast-moving. The sloth, for whatever reason, conserves its energy. (The sloth was named after the sin, by the way--not the other way round.) Its habits are so sedentary that lichen grows in its fur, tinging it green as though it were a rock or a stump. But sloths have their place.

At least, I hope we do.

the gestating virgin

Yesterday I finally had time to take up cudgels again for writing my book. It was one of my least-favorite kinds of writing sessions: one in which I struggle to recollect the threads of what I'm working on. Eventually I realized that, after my break of several days, I just could not remember what my thoughts and intentions were with respect to my current chapter (30). Nothing for it but to go back and read the (highlighted portions of) my Word notes.

The notes document for chapter 30 now runs to 35 pages. When chapter notes get long like this, I become anxious. Admittedly, the first 13 pages of notes are mostly extracts from research texts. That still means over 20 pages of actual cogitation-and-creation notes.

Mind you, the overall quality of these notes is high (take my word for it). In my effort to understand what drives my characters, I must dig. And dig, and dig.

"Oh, pshaw!" you might say. "A character's motivation is just whatever you make it. Decide on one, and go! Don't talk in that quaint way about 'discovering' the motives of a character, as though he were a real person. You've said yourself that characters aren't real people."

Yes, true. I've been skeptical of this kind of talk from writers, which is finally a form of pathetic fallacy, I think. I remember reading a nonfiction work by the novelist John Fowles, in which he described working on The French Lieutenant's Woman. He said that when he was writing a scene for his character Charles, he had the strong feeling that Charles wanted to diverge from his path and go down to knock on the cottage door of the heroine. Fowles declared that it was a real, definite feeling of intent coming from the character--that was how he experienced it.

Yeah, right, I thought.

I was already a writer myself by then, and not had any such experience--at least, nothing so definite. Of course, I never had a very clear idea of what the hell I was doing in any case. But my suspicions about this Frankensteinian moment of the composite character suddenly rising from the laboratory bench are backed up by Robert McKee in his Story:

Research from memory, imagination, and fact is often followed by a phenomenon that authors love to describe in mystical terms: Characters suddenly spring to life and of their own free will make choices and take actions that create Turning Points that twist, build, and turn again until the writer can hardly type fast enough to keep up with the outpourings.

This "virgin birth" is a charming self-deception writers love to indulge in, but the sudden impression that the story is writing itself simply marks the moment when a writer's knowledge of the subject has reached the saturation point. The writer becomes the god of his little universe and is amazed by what seems to be spontaneous creation, but is in fact the reward for hard work.

To discover what drives a character, you need to know his world, for that is what he is responding to. It's an ecological task: to understand how the animal functions within its environment, for the two go together. The cheetah is an animal of the African savanna; it can't function in the Arctic or in the Arabian desert. It is what it is, and behaves as it behaves, because of the environment in which it exists.

Finding this level of authority for a remote historical period is, of course, difficult. But I find, as I keep at it, that insights do come. Gradually, gradually, my main characters start emerging from the fog of potentiality into the clear outline of specificness. As I learn--or decide--something definite about my world, my characters acquire something toward which they can have an attitude, and thus define themselves.

In fairness to myself, I've made a lot of progress in the last month in understanding more about my world. While the historian and the archaeologist have to refrain from making positive statements beyond what the evidence permits, and so leave their picture of the world frustratingly vague, the storyteller must commit. Nothing can be a maybe; the finished picture will be the result of countless definite choices.

My finished world will be in high-definition, and so will my characters. And look how long it took us to get high-definition TV.