Frankennovels

Yesterday I finished reading a Frankennovel.  An award-winning Frankennovel, no less.

A Frankennovel is stitched together out of good and bad parts and brought to lurching life by an artificial external energy source (usually a jolt called Publication). The good parts are shapely and in working order, the flawed parts uneven or mismatched or bolted together.

But flaws are not the problem; readers will overlook or forgive or forget the flaws of living novels.

Frankennovels feel to me like exercises in novels. Like the author wanted to Write a Novel, and so assembled the parts, and pieced them together with skill. But the story started off dead, and remains dead at heart. 

Then I thought about the award, and wondered if it’s the reader’s job to bring the beating heart. Maybe the failing was mine. While contemplating the question, I came across this line in Peter Schjeldahl's review of an exhibition of abstract art at MOMA:

“The proof of any art’s lasting value is a comprehensive emotional necessity: it’s something that a person needed to do and which wakens and satisfies corresponding needs in us.”*

Not every novelist can write in the fever dream that Garcia Marquez says produced One Hundred Years of Solitude.  But that compulsion is necessary for lesser novels as well. What Schjeldahl calls a ”comprehensive emotional necessity” never arises from the desire for publication or from the idea of Writing a Novel (or Being a Writer). It’s a love affair with the story. That is the beating heart. 

* Schjeldahl, Peter. "Shapes of Things." The New Yorker: 7 Jan. 2013: 68

Bugs in the Brain

Instead of writing, I've been wandering around online. A Simpsons website led to a clip of The Pathological Liar, Jon Lovitz's SNL character (“Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket”), which led to the investigation of the following ailments, none of which, alas, has any place in the novel I am (not) writing.

Pseudologia Fantastica: Uncontrollable lying. Also known as mythomania.  

The afflicted tell fantastical tales signifying their uniqueness, worth and courage (friendship with celebrities, kinship with royalty, gratitude of maidens rescued from railway tracks). They are not seeking any obvious material gain from the listener, so this is not a case of sociopathic manipulation, and they are not otherwise deluded or psychotic (although some experts consider the stories a form of “wish psychosis”).

Is it a case of damage to the membrane that normally keeps daydreams and fantasies inside their heads? A coding problem? Poorly executed fiction, and in the wrong medium to boot? At some level the afflicted know their stories are not true, unlike people suffering from

Morgellons Disorder: Syndrome in which sufferers experience symptoms of a mysterious skin disorder.

The afflicted experience burning, crawling or itching sensations (formication) and skin lesions, and claim that red, black and blue fibres erupt from their skin. Sufferers have identified a range of potential causes, from genetically modified foods and environmental pollutants to aliens. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control have determined that Morgellons is a form of

Delusional Parasitosis: Mistaken belief that one is suffering from parasites such as lice, scabies or worms.

The afflicted experience formication and often present proof of infestation in the form of skin scrapings, lint or other particles, usually carried in a small container  (the “matchbox sign”), but lab tests show no parasites. My sister and I have both suffered this affliction on our travels (she gets delusional scabies, I get delusional lice); our delusions arose after we contracted and treated the real thing. The difference? With the real thing, you know you have it, and that is the end of it. The delusional one doesn't feel like a cold, incontrovertible fact; it is a kind of brain fever. You are convinced you have it, and that is just the beginning.

Having spent two hours on fictional bugs, I now pledge to spend an equal amount of time on fiction. Cold, incontrovertible fact: writing fiction is hard work. A little brain fever would help.

Elsewhere

As a child I was always scheming to leave home. I read constantly (the first escape), and fantasized frequently about living elsewhere. The where didn’t matter, only the else (else, from the Old English elles: other, otherwise, different).

I even begged to be sent to boarding school, imagining a long journey by train, an old stone residence, cold rain falling against narrow windows lit against the coming dark.

In our fantasies of away, even the rainfall is otherwise. Therefore meaningful. Therefore story-worthy.

But my grandparents were not keen ( “I’ll ‘boarding school’ you in a minute”), and so I began to lobby for the next best thing, and at last, at age 11, I was finally allowed to leave home. It was only an hour and a half to Camp McDougall in Thessalon, but it was away, it was elsewhere (other, otherwise, different).

Eventually my idea of away began to assume the shape of a big city. Cities had bookstores, literary festivals, publishers. Cities were where stories got told. You moved to a city and you found your community and it was different (other, elsewhere), and this was how (I thought) you became otherwise (a writer).

I left Northern Ontario almost thirty years ago, and have lived away ever since. But I went back to Thessalon last weekend as part of Stories in the North Literary Festival and when we passed the entrance to the summer camp, I felt a surge of excitement, not at the idea of leaving home, but at the idea of returning. The northern landscape, after so many years in a city, now seems like elsewhere: the long lines of hills, old stones emerging out of cold water, narrow farms, white pines against a dark sky.

Stories in the North was created four or five years ago by serious writers and readers.  A serious writer is someone who writes. These people write. They meet to share what they've written; they reach out to writing groups in other communities; they publish and host open mike nights. Their schedule for National Novel Writing Month is full (go to the cafe, the funeral home, the library, write for three hours, six hours, twelve hours). And of course, they created this literary festival, and found funding (through the Ontario Arts Council), and it runs smoothly and beautifully.

Writers with a connection to the north are invited (and paid) to lead workshops and to read, and the writer who accepts this invitation is rewarded by serious enthusiasm (along with music and home baking). This is a place where stories get told. Disappearing lakewater, pioneer grandparents, a woman on fire, a ghost sheep in the middle of the road. Stories that light up the windows against the coming dark.

Yes, you can leave home and seek out a community of writers elsewhere, or you can make one where you are. Elsewhere, like home, is a state of mind. The physical journey is not necessary. But community? Writers write to be read. Community is essential. Therefore meaningful. Therefore story-worthy.

Writers' Residence, Last Week, Day Three

Revising the first draft.

I feel like I'm making it worse. "It's going to get worse before it gets better," my grandparents used to say. About everything. 

I hope they were right.

Outside the sun is pouring down. It's too hot to walk in the vineyards, but I walk anyway. Under a walnut tree I meet a woman from the neighbourhood, Phyllida, walking her two small dogs. She tells me the shade of the walnut is said to be deadly on very hot days. "They say it affects your lungs," she says. "The cool air can give you an awful cold."

Save-This Sirens are going off in my head. Who in my novel can be killed off by the cool shade of the walnut tree? Must discuss with my friend Google.

Google says that walnut trees emit something called juglone, which suppresses respiratory functions...in certain plants.

Damn! None of my characters are plants.

Still. I am going to use this. I'm in Switzerland! There are Jungians everywhere! It's synchronicity! (Or else I'm making it worse.)

Writers' Residence, Last Week, Day Two

Three of the other writers here at Lavigny are poets. I almost never write poetry, but listening to them read their work I often feel a longing for the economy of their genre, the perfection of their lines.

Novels are full of clutter: closets, curtains, cupboards. Calendars. Clocks. Novelists are always worried about the clock: what day is it? how much time has passed? is it winter yet? Poems don't need clocks.

Novelists are hoarders. They never want to throw anything out in case they need it later. Poets throw most everything out. If the plastic iced tea jug with sunflowers from 1974 requires matching glasses and a backstory, they expect you to bring your own.  

Novelists are liars. They want to tell you things but they don't want to tell you why they are telling you because that would spoil the trick, the scene, the light, so they create elaborate deceptions and then hide behind the curtain. Poets just point. 

Novelists mostly add. Poets mostly subtract.

Novelists can afford to be reckless. Poets can afford to be brief. 

Writers' Residence, Last Week, Day One

This is the start of my last week here at Lavigny. A glimpse of our days:

In the morning we walk alone in the cool air, in the evening, together, through vineyards and orchards, past shorn golden fields, inhaling the damp smell of earth and the light perfume of pesticides. In between, we work in our separate rooms in the deep quiet of the chateau.

At 7:00, we gather on the terrace for a glass of white wine from the very vineyards we have been walking through. (Try not to think of the pesticides.)

After dinner we work or read or talk. The night before our public reading, we spill over several tables, pruning translations, grooming our texts. It is quietly thrilling to be at work with people who will argue the merits of the word "gathering" over the word "collecting," and then change their minds and argue the reverse.  

Later we argue over an epigram by Goethe. Does the fact that it is (apparently, in German) beautifully phrased excuse the fact he says you can "use" a girl as you would a boy? (Our first night here, we discussed whether you could be an asshole and a good writer. There is ample evidence that these are not mutually exclusive occupations.) 

My goal for this last week is to write the last two chapters of my novel. Already I am pulling it apart in my head, preparing for the second draft. This has been a very good place to write and think. When I get stuck, I lift my head and listen: aside from the rhythmic cooing of doves and the wind in the sycamore tree, I can hear the other writers working.  They don't make any noise, but their silence hums. That's how I know they are writing.

Locked Out

My novel is a house and it thinks it can lock me out.
I am the architect!


How does it know I have no key?

I bang on the front door.
Demand admittance.
Search for a window left unlatched.

What else to do now but
sit
on the
front steps
and wait, go
round
to the back and wheedle,

Why have you locked the door?
What did I do to offend you?

Let me in, I was only kidding
about the renovations.

Fine, I say, be that way,
I didn't love you anyway.

You'll be sorry.

I'm going now, good bye.
Maybe I'll drop in on that short story
I started before
I met you.

In the night I get up
to check on the house.

The doors are still closed,
the windows all dark

What are they doing in there without me?

Documenta 13

I am on my way to Documenta, the international art show in Kassel, Germany. Curated by a different person every five years, Documenta is a 100-day show of 200 works of contemporary art. The first Documenta, in 1955, was an attachment to a horticultural exhibit, and showed works deemed by the Nazis to be "degenerate." Today, hundreds of thousands of people come to see pieces hung in museums, performed in galleries, and installed in the open air in the middle of the city.

Kassel does not offer the cobblestone charm you might expect from the birthplace of the Brothers Grimm, but it is also not "the ugliest city west of Siberia," as one American art critic claimed. Not even close. (Clearly the critic has never been to northern Ontario.)

After two months of steady writing, I am weary of that half-and-half place of composition (half-way between images and words for the images, where no picture or sensation can be left on its own for more than half a moment before the phrases swarm in and overpower it and and alter it forever). In short, I am tired of words: I want to look.

Every article on Documenta 13 mentions the installation by Ryan Gander: a steady cold breeze blowing through an empty room. Title: I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull). The idea, apparently, is that the breeze gently moves us through the gallery.

I am unmoved.

But I love This Variation by Tino Sahgel, a performance piece that begins when you enter a very dark room. Twenty performers move among the viewers, singing, dancing, creating rhythms and instrumentation with their voices alone. It is disorienting, standing in the dark with strangers, feeling performers brush past, not knowing what to expect or what is expected of you. You feel strangely exposed even though no one can see you (because no one can see you?) Then the music catches you, and the discomfort fades. But not the strangeness.

It is thrilling.

I also love an installation by Ida Applebroog: fragments of journals blown up, hung along with images of the human form, poems, a found letter about the end of a friendship. ("To end this letter I would like to inform you in order to save time, please do not try to answer me any more, if by any chance Y receive a letter from you I will destroy it and I will not reed it.") The texts have been reproduced on posters which viewers can take with them.

I take the letter.

I also love the installation by Michael Rakowitz, What Dust Will Rise: books carved out of stone from the Bamiyan valley, surrounded by remains of the Taliban-destroyed Buddha sculptures. On one display case is a quote by Mullah Mohammad Omar, who ordered the destruction, claiming as his justification the fact that Westerners were more concerned about stone statues than living humans. "We are only breaking stones," he said. A lie and a prophecy: now there are only stones, broken into unrecognizability. Another note reminds us that stone books were carried by illiterate people as talismans: the silent power, not of the written word but of the idea of it. In another display case are charred, unreadable books from the Kassel museum after it was bombed in World War II: a reminder of the flimsiness of the written word, the defenselessness of paper. The law of conservation of mass applies neither to stone nor paper art: there is nothing humans can make that they cannot also destroy.

All the way home, I hold the letter and think about those stone books and try to find words for the music in the dark. We put things into words (and other shapes) even though they will eventually be erased. We cannot help ourselves.

The Honeymoon Is Over?

Yesterday, I was in love with my novel. I woke up as I had for the past eight weeks -- happy to have nothing to do all day but write, delighted to be spending six or seven hours in my 1920s speakeasy (with a break for lunch and What Not to Wear), spilling over with ideas and enthusiasm and general well-being.  

Today, I hate my novel. It took ten hours to squeeze out a thousand words. True, I kept stopping to read about the divorce of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, but if Katie hadn't filed those papers on Friday, I would have kept stopping to do something else --something just as unproductive and wholly unconnected to writing a novel.

I want my other job back. The one where I get to leave the house and talk to actual people in the real world instead of sitting around noticing plot holes in a bunch of made-up stuff. (Oh my god!! I wonder if Katie Holmes thought the same thing when she filed the papers??)

On the bright side, I started reading A Sense of Direction, a book about pilgrimages by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. Even though it is non-fiction and has nothing to do with speakeasies, it is so elegantly written (and so funny) that I think it might save my marriage to the novel. Or at least to the written word. At the very least, it is keeping me off TMZ.

Don't Just Stand There Beating Your Gums! Butt Me, Then Let's Get Zozzled!

I've been Googling 1920s slang for my novel about bootleggers, laughing at a lot of it ("You want to ankle over to the gin joint?" "And how!"), but using very little. It’s made me think, though, about how people talk and what really changes when language changes, and about a writer’s responsibility to the past.

In a review of The Chaperone, Laura Moriarty’s new novel set in New York in 1922, the reviewer notes that the author’s sentences are “pert and plucky, shaped by a contemporary sensibility that can leave an anachronistic aftertaste.” She cites two examples: “I only tell you this because I care” and “Get it all out.” 

But how would these sentences have sounded ninety years ago? "I only tell you this because I care awfully"? "You ought to get it all out, doll"?

I’m not sure that Moriarty’s sentences -- or the impulses behind them -- are the exclusive property of our era. “Get it all out so that we can have closure going forward”?  Yes, anachronistic in a novel set in the twenties. (And vomitorious, in any decade). But “get it all out” sounds like it could have been thought and said in 1922.  

Artificiality is a bigger problem for me than anachronism, which is why I’m wary of those lists of slang. They’re the Kool-Aid (that’s Kool-Ade, from 1927 until 1934, thank you Google) of dialogue. Add some spit and you have instant parody: Scram! The coppers are here! Bugsy’s on the lam, see, and I got all the dough.

Needing to hear the language as it was actually spoken, in full sentences, by people to other people, and being unable to travel back in time (still waiting for my flux-capacitor, Amazon), I've started reading 1920s fiction, beginning with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” published in 1920 in the Saturday Evening Post, looking for language in action (i.e. fluency), and finding this instead:

Marjorie, giving her cousin some advice: Well, you've got to learn to be nice to men who are sad birds. You look as if you'd been insulted whenever you're thrown with any except the most popular boys. Why, Bernice, I'm cut in on every few feet--and who does most of it? Why, those very sad birds. 

Bernice: You're a peach to help me.

Is that really how people talked? Maybe. It’s hard to tell with Fitzgerald because his characters are always trying so hard to be arch and clever and wonderful (so that Fitzgerald can show you how brittle they are).

But none of my characters is going to say “sad birds” or “you’re a peach,” no matter how real it makes them sound to a 1920s reader. They have to sound real to me.

Should a writer avoid distracting anachronisms while replicating speech patterns as authentically as possible? Should she notice that people used to start sentences with "say" and "why" and favoured the word "ought"?

Why yes, she should. But she ought also to remember who she is writing for.  Her responsibility is to her readers in the present. And therefore, the dialogue should be shaped by a contemporary sensibility. 

F.Scott Fitzgerald's story: 

http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/bernice/bernice.html

Review of The Chaperone:  

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/books/review/the-chaperone-by-laura-moriarty.html

So. Much. Work

I wrote Every Time We Say Goodbye over a long period of time. I started the novel, looked for a day job, went to teacher's college, abandoned the novel, found my dream job, worked on the novel, went to Bhutan, came home, taught class, marked exams, developed some courses, worked on the novel. It took so long that the work did not feel like...work.

Let me just add: it didn't feel like sitting on the couch watching Mad Men and eating maple bacon toffee, either.

It felt like small periods of writing work spaced out endlessly between profoundly satisfying teaching work and profound, paralyzing self-doubt.

And by endlessly, I mean eight years. Maybe ten. Day One is hard to remember.

It's only now, writing every day, that I realize how much work it actually is. The thinking work, the waiting work, the laying down story lines and tearing them up work. The line by line writing work. The burst of words work, the slow creaking accumulation of words work. The dealing with doubt work. (Just because you wrote A novel doesn't mean you can write THIS novel.)

Even when I'm not writing, I'm writing. I almost fell off my bike at the gym because I thought of something I needed to write down RIGHT AWAY. (This is why I don't ride outside.)

When I'm not really writing, I'm watching Mad Men (and Nurse Jackie and Girls) and eating maple bacon toffee. There has to be some kind of a balance, right?

K Period and Other Rules

This morning my students informed me that a period in a text message indicates anger. "Like your friend texts you about something and you just write back one word with a period," they said. "You sound pissed."

How about one word without the period? Not angry, just in a hurry.

Also, "OK" sounds like you're angry but "okay" does not. Worst of all is "K." "K." is the equivalent of "Yeah, yeah, I'm busy. Stop bothering me."

I want a list of these rules. Not because I want to use them when texting (all my texting is done with people like me -- so old we text in complete sentences, properly punctuated, with caps) but because it's like watching a new language being born.

Marking Midterms vs. Writing a Novel

I'm in the middle of Study Week. This means I can stay home and mark, and stay home and work on my novel about the bootlegger. Here's my comparison of these two activities, based on the last four days:

Marking                                                    Writing a Novel


- Comes with some multiple choice                - Long written answers only

- Mostly know what I am looking for               - Don't know what I'm looking for until I find it.
                                                                        (Even then....)

- Rubrics                                                       - Coffee

- Second-guessing? Quite a lot                        - Second-guessing? Don't make me laugh

- Inspires desire to procrastinate                    - Inspires desire to procrastinate

- Can be used as a procrastination                 - Never used as a procrastination tool
   tool to ward off writing                                  to ward off anything. Except maybe death.
                                                                       (And even that...)

- Grueling                                                     - Grueling

- Exhausted when finished                             - Energized when finished

- Feels like it takes forever                            - Takes forever

- I have to do it                                             - I don't know why I have to do it

Cosmogony, for Writers and Word Nerds

Just read this in Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence:

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

-- Kenneth Koch, "Permanently"