I Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself

As a Columbia MFA refugee, I wholeheartedly agree.

"ALBERT & NANCY" AND A FEW WORDS ON PROCESS

Last night after Group, I sat in bed reading a roundtable of all the Best Pic directors in Newsweek. The guy who directed CAPOTE said something about Phillip Seymour Hoffman's having a "brutal process" as an actor that involves his becoming, about halfway through the process, convinced that he'll never succeed, that he can't get into the character, that the whole world is finally going to see that he's a fraud.

And I thought: yeah, well. Isn't that how this whole art thing works?

That's how it works for me, at least. Last night, I brought the second draft of "Albert & Nancy" to Group. I'm so deep in it I have no idea how it's playing, but Group seemed to love it. (They had amazing insights for deepening it, as usual, but general comment seemed to be it's damn close to done). So that was wonderful.

But rewind a week, and things really sucked. See here, direct from the pages of my notebook:

27 January 06 7:10 am Starbux

Tough writing day yesterday. I powered through the structure draft in the morning, only to return to it in the afternoon convinved it was unreadable and unworkable. That so freaked me out I spent the rest of the afternoon on other projects, like reading for Friend. Whas TOTALLY depressed by the time I left work after 4. Husband asked to look at it, so I let him, and then I went to wallow in a bath.

Which is where I decided the problem with the story was that it had the wrong protagonist--that it really ought to be a story following her. Husband disagreed. He liked it as Albert's story, liked the writing, thought for the most part it was working, just needed more of the WHY these people like each other, a little less stock-character stuff, and more evolution of the relationship, more WHY.

I got in the car to meet Friend at the Ahmanson, still disagreeing with Husband, head all abuzz with the possibilities for Nancy's story, called "The Good Nurse." Got to restaurant before Friend, and wrote out a series of note cards for the new version, then could barely watch the play because I kept hearing lines from the new version in my head. Went to sleep with the sinking feeling that I had to start completely anew and cobble together the new version in less than a week so I could submit it for Group.

But then this morning I wroke up and had a few insights into how to fix the current, Albert story. If I still hate it, I can always write Nancy's story, later. But I must commit to finishing this, to not sabotaging myself at the very last moments. So I have cards of notes I scribbled while brushing my teeth this morning, and today I hit these points ...

That's pretty much the way it always works. Which really sucks, especially when you know you've been depressed enough in your life that any time you're low for a day you're freaking out that means you're about to sink into the months-long morass. But the good news is, this time at least, I managed to identify the freak-out as self-sabotage WITHIN LESS THAN A DAY, which is huge huge huge for me, and work through it. The trick is this year's mantra of finishing things.

I can't say it too often. 2006 IS THE YEAR OF PUTTING THINGS TOGETHER.

Takes One to Know One

The best description I have ever, ever seen of writer-paralysis (and the very reason I have vowed to NEVER LOOK BACK, NEVER START OVER until a draft is done from start to end) is found in the story "Sunlight," by Matthew Kneale, which is collected in a volume called Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance (a collection I can best describe as Roald Dahl grows up, ditches his mysogyny and dependance on magic to drive plot, and travels the Global Village behaving badly -- wonderful stories that made me so uncomfortable I had to stop reading them before bed because thinking about them afterward made it impossible for me to sleep). Anyway, see here:

All his dignity would be restored once he finished his novel.

Unfortunately, he never did. Years went by, and the book continued to slip and slide from his grasp. The maddening thing was he could never quite see what was wrong. Everything felt fine when he was deeply absorbed, but as soon as he stood back, distracted by a few day's break, or even an absorbing program on television, it all seemed to fall to nothing: characters he had thought intriguing and complex became somehow indistinguishable from one another (changing their names, which he did repeatedly, never seemed to help). Likewise, plot lines that had felt ingenious suddenly appeared lacking in any sense of surprise, as if the whole story might be the background to something else more eventful. A number of times he tried to abandon the whole project, only to be pulled back, like a cart dragged into the same muddy ruts it has got stuck in ten dozen times before. How could he give it up whne he had already invested so much time? [...] So he worked on, accumulating first chapters--he never quite got started on a second--of wide variety, one opening with Lucinda dancing passionately in a 1932 Berlin nightclub, another beginning with poor Hermann breathing his penniless last breath in the chill wind of 1979 New York, a third starting with Leonora (previously Lucinda) weeping tight-lipped in her Stepney home at the news the Gerhardy (Hermann) has been reported missing in action from the Afrika Korps. The novel did not grow so much as spread, as pages of handwritten notes and printed openings piled up in his study, on shelves, in drawers, on the floor at his feet.

Story of my first novel, with the slight exception that I managed several awful complete drafts in addition to the dozens and dozens and dozens of first chapters that are archived in stacks of plastic file boxes in our garage.

Faith?

Hmm. I'm the girl who went around my synagogue hanging "Is there a god?" signs on all the sliding walls. But that said, this is still a vaguely encouraging story.

For What It's Worth, I'm Not the Only One

See the first paragraph.

Something To Read Again When Losing All Hope

The Guardian interviews first time novelists.

Slowly but Surely

337 decent okay sorts of words and a font-experiment:

Last night, as I began reading Plot Against America, I was struck, as I always am, by Roth's sure touch. His sentences have a sense of authorial certainty that I envy to no end. Every word is perfectly chosen, every clause indelible, every detail indispensible. How many writers can really list all the ways women work, all the things they cook and clean and organize daily, filling a long paragraph with this list, and not seem like they're just jerking off on the page? (I didn't mean to conjure up Portnoy with that statement, but there you go.) I was ruminating about this, and then I began to wonder if maybe how his sentences LOOK, art-wise on the page, has anything to do with this --

-- so today I came into the office and surfed around to find a font that approximates that in the new novel and the copy of American Pastoral that's in the office. I ended up at fonts.com, where fonts aren't free but at least you don't have to wade through "surveys" to get to the good stuff. I searched by sight, and came up with a font called Hollander, which I bought and installed on my machine. Then I killed a bunch of time making my Chapter 1 look a lot like Chapter 1 of American Pastoral ... and I gotta admit, Maud Newton was right on the money:

My work looks better and I'm willing to convince myself it reads better, and with that Dumbo-esque metaphorical-flying-feather in mind, I managed to get Anna out of Hillsdale and onto Route 44. Yippee!

And now from Philip Roth...

Like I said, I liked the suggestion reported by Maud of formatting your own pages to resemble those of books you love. So I spent a little time with the novels I love, or rather, the very very edited selection of them that I have in the office (I am trying to cut down on distraction around here):

David Leavitt, The Lost Language of Cranes
Somerset Maugham,Of Human Bondage
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Walllace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
Oswald Wynd, The Ginger Tree

I was immediately stymied, mostly because I don't actually OWN any of the fonts in these books, and I really do draw the line at spending hours finding them for free. But something worthwhile did come out of all of this ...

I found notes in my paperback copy of American Pastoral from the one time I met Philip Roth.

The occasion: a seminar at Columbia run by David Plante, who met Roth during the London years and was close friends with him. This seminar took place around the time of the Leaving a Doll's House / I Married A Communist flap, and David thought his friend was really depressed with all the savage press and so pressured him to come into the city and be adored by all of us. And we adored him. Meeting Philip Roth is like meeting Bill Clinton, and I know, because my family home is in Chappaqua and you really can't go out for Starbux without tripping over Secret Service everywhere these days -- in the Chinese restaurant, for instance, there's a huge shrine to Bill, every missive from/to the proprietors to/from the (eternal) President framed on the walls and annotated with photographic evidence of the mutual love-fest. To follow this digression further: I first experience Bill -- my friend and yours -- in the Chappaqua bookstore, called "The Second Story," which made more sense before it lost its lease upstairs from its current space. Anyway, I was browsing for the newest collection of Munroe stories to give my mother for Xmas, and I literally ran into a Secret Service agent as I browsed, which made me pull my head out of my ass and notice that I was sharing the tiny space with two booksellers, two Secret Servicemen, three completely overwhelmed locals, and Hillary, Chelsea, and Bill. I was pleased to see Hillary also had the Munroe stories in the enormous basket of books they were buying. Bill was mobbed by everyone in there, who couldn't stop touching him, and H. and C. looked on, slightly bored. I pretty much fainted against the bookshelve and gazed. The pherenome level was EXTREME and palpable ... we were clearly in the presence of a happy penis with an enormous brain.

Which is pretty much exactly how I'd describe my impression of Philip Roth, with one slight modification: more-depressive/guilty/less-functioning-but equally-adventurous penis, enormous brain. He was talking about Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral, and every woman in the seminar room was draped across her patch of table, gazing longingly, twirling her hair. And not just the Jewish ones, either. Even the macho-est men in there were leaning towards him. Even the girl who two weeks early had railed and ranted about his being a horrible mysogynist was practically melting in her chair from his heat.

So here's what I managed to write down while I tried not to DIE just sitting there:

American Pastoral, first published in 1997, was first attempted by Roth in 1972. He was making notes about a girl who blows up the Princeton library, 7-8 years into the Vietnam War. He got 60-70 pages in, couldn't make it work, and gave up. (Tell me that isn't completely comforting in EVERY way.)

Ultimately, he reapproached the project when he started thinking about the Swede as a corrective to Mickey Sabbath ... once the focus had shifted from daughter to father, he found it easier to write the book. The reason he wrote the story from Zuckerman's POV was that he decided the Swede couldn't ever be conscious in the same way Zuckerman could, so he'd have to borrow Zuckerman's consciousness, a trick accomplished in what I consider the most amazing piece of writing EVER, on page 89 of the Vintage paperback ed:

Dispelling the aurar of the dinner at Vincent's, when I'd rushed to conclude the most thoughtless conclusion--that simple was that simple--I lifted onto my stage the boy we were all going to follow into American, our point man into the next immersion, at home here the way the Wasps were at home here, an American not by sheer striving, not by being a Jew who invents a famous vaccine or a Jew on the Supreme Court, not by being the most brilliant or the most eminent or the best. Instead--by virtue of his insomorphism to the Wasp world--he does it the ordinary way, the natural way, the regualr American-guy way. To the honeysweet strains of "Dream," I pulled away from myself, pulled away from the reunion, and I dreamed ... I dreamed a realistic chronicle. I began gazing into his life--not his life as a god or a demigod in whose triumphs one could exult as a boy but his life as another assialable man--and inexplicably, which is to say lo and behold, I found him in Deal, New Jerset, at the seaside cottage, the summer his daughter was eleven, back when she couldn't stay out of his lap or stop calling him by cute pet names, couldn't "resist," as she put it, examining with the tip of her finger the close way his ears were fitted to his skull.

It's amazing, right? 89 pages into the book, in which all has been Zuckerman: Zuckerman at dinners, Zuckerman at reunions, with just an em dash and a "lo and behold," we drop into the Swede, and we're all Swede for more than 300 pages to follow, without another look at Mr. Z again!

AMAZING.

The last note Roth pressed upon us was his feeling that a book has to argue an assertion, and so must employ specific DATA ... for instance, if he was going to talk about the loss of old for new, he needed something concrete to cipher that through. So he chose glove-making, and having chosen glove-making, he spent weeks visiting one particular factory, making notes.

LOVE HIM LOVE HIM LOVE HIM.

Okay, that said, nothing more inspiring than typing out a favorite passage to set you off into your own work ...

I Feel Her Pain, and I'm Curious About Her Prescription

Something Maud said has me thinking:

See here for her interesting essay on aesthetic approaches to the contemporary novel (ie. writing them), and her current avoidance of such (ie. reading them) for greater, deader-writer pastures. I went through that a few years back and read all of Somerset Maugham and wished I was a dead Englishman so I could write like that; then I read most of Wallace Stegner and thought, wow, I wish I wrote like that.

Or, if you're short on time, see here as Maud offers us a short-cut to the "wish I wrote likes", which should fill many wonderful procrastinating hours:

Anyway, I was blathering on about my novel and my Grand Theories About Psychological Fiction with Terry Teachout (whose biography of Balanchine, which appears next month, just received a starred review from Kirkus) several weeks ago. Based on the story I’m writing he suggested revisiting several other novels, including the aptly-titled Brideshead Revisited. He also offered a practical tip on the move from short fiction to the novel form, and I’ll share it with you.

Terry advised me to look through my favorite books to find a typeface I liked. He said I should select a similar font for my novel and format the text so that it looked like an actual novel page.

I followed his advice, putting the same approximate number of words on a page, setting the margins so that the block of text on my page was roughly identical in height and width to text on a standard page of the book. Terry promised it would help me conceptualize my story as a novel, enable me to see it as something distinct from my short fiction. And I think it’s working.

Now if only I could figure out how to make it, you know, good.

Yeah, I hear that.

Ok, so maybe the NYTBR isn't all that bad ...

Friday was a horrible horrible writing day. The sort of day that starts bright and shiny and has you racing through your shower to get to your computer, where you open to the chapter in progress, put your fingers to the keys ...

... and become overcome by some form of writer-narcolepsy. You are suddenly so tired you have to put your laptop on the floor and snake into a armchair-and-ottamon-appropriate napping position which is made ever more frustrating by the knowledge that you ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT NAP WHILE WRITING!!!

Two hours into this I called my husband and went for a drive, hoping he would Fix My Book. This is a conversation I have ALL THE TIME, mostly with myself: How do I fix my book? I bothered asking my husband this time b/c he's been nagging me to let him help me, b/c he did actually pull it all together for me one night over ceviche a few months before the wedding, at which point I realized I really should marry him, b/c not only did he love me but he Got My Work. His nagging me lately to let him help me (again) is a little like my father telling my mother the two of them ought to get cracking on their mother's eulogies--this despite the fact that both mothers in questions are in great form for 80-pluses. I think my father's impulse has a lot to do with the fact that he delivered THE BEST EVER Daddy-of-the-bride speech this summer-- no seriously, it wasn't just me that thought so--and he liked the spotlight. He wants to pull it out again, and no venue is too depressing, it appears.

ANYWAY. Friday drive was not a success. My fears were I had lost "the point": what was I trying to say? Dave kept saying, "I thought you had a theme," and I kept saying, "Theme doesn't matter, what the fuck is going on with my CHARACTER, WHY does this story have to be told, and why now?"

He wasn't helpful. I was depressed Friday night and Saturday that once again after a few weeks of digging in and really working, all had come to what felt like a project-ending grinding stop.

And then today I actually read the NYTBR from cover to cover, and here is what they said:

Some people take forever to write books.

And, in a review for "Joy Comes in the Morning," which I now intend to rush out and get, they quoted Talmudic scholar Ben Bag Bag (tell me there isn't at least a short story in his name alone): "Turn it and turn it for everything is in it."

And I thought, back in the day when I wrote the play that was in some ways an expression of this book, Anna's problem was LETTING GO, because this was a woman who felt she had been so often LEFT.

So, the WHY AND WHEN OF THIS STORY ARE: Anna has recently had another assignation with her old lover Marcus, now a husband-and-father-of-twins. This despite the fact that she thinks she's in love with Danny, and wants very much to have a real life with him. But for over a decade she's held on to Marcus, despite the fact that so much of their relationship has been under cover of darkness/moral mud. So, that night alone in Falcon Ridge, she can't sleep b/c she feels badly about fucking M., and she ends up at Hart, where she relives the start of their affair for much of the book. Then, we learn she and he kept it going for many years, on and off, despite their life changes, and despite her knowing it wouldn't or shouldn't work, b/c to her the CRIME OF HEART is LEAVING, that you STAY NO MATTER WHAT (b/c she has abandonment issues due to mom & dad). Even seeing Lasky and Rita in New Haven that time, and later, seeing they'd married, and knowing that would never be the right choice for her, she has always held on. At the end of the book, she confesses to Olivia that Danny even has a ring for her (he's peripheral for much of the book). HER BIG LESSON: You have to let go of that "grand romance," see it for what it is, in order to grow up and have a real life of your own.

Anyway, THIS at least makes sense to me, and gives me the juice of: what happens when they actually act on this promise they made when she was 17, that no matter what, despite everything, wives and lovers, every once in awhile, they would still meet? It lets me throw her under a truck, so to speak, and lets me complicate her, show how her moral view is not so goody-two-shoes black-and-white.

Today I am going to a bookstore and buying things I read about in the NYTBR (gotta give SOMETHING back, right) and picking up some Booker books ... And tonight I have the first meeting of Writing Group #2. So tomorrow, back to the office with a bang bang bang (and it even means I can get great if slightly dark sex into the PROLOGUE of the book!)