What Are Chapters For?
January 26, 2012
In the long time that I have been away from this blog, I have not been entirely unproductive. Among other things, I’ve been revising The Jane Austen Project and am now through Chapter 6. In honor of that, I have decided to post Chapter 2 here.
I’ve also been thinking about a lot of things, like Downton Abbey, which deserves a post of its own, only I don’t know where to start, and also, not completely unrelated, about chapters. For one thing that intrigues me about Downtown Abbey is the issues it raises about the different ways there are of telling a story, and chapters have something to do with that. How do we decide where they begin and end, and what do they have to do with the architecture of a novel? Read the rest of this entry »
Further Reading, Part II
December 8, 2011
Whose Jane Austen?
It’s a question I’ve often asked myself while researching and writing The Jane Austen Project, but never more insistently than when considering the works that make up the short story anthology “Jane Austen Made Me Do It, Original Stories Inspired by Literature’s Most Astute Observer of the Human Heart.” I use the subtitle advisedly, for this is one way of viewing Jane Austen, and perhaps a message from its editor, Laurel Ann Nattress of Austenprose, of how she, at least, does.
JAMMDI is on one hand a brilliant marketing idea, combining the brand recognition of Jane Austen with some of the biggest names in Austen and Austenesque fan fiction. But ideally it is more than that, being also an effort to wrestle with the question of what Jane Austen means to people living today, nearly 200 years after her death. Read the rest of this entry »
Further Reading: Jane Austen Made Me Do It, Part I
October 27, 2011
I have mixed feelings about much of the contemporary fiction inspired by Jane Austen, despite or perhaps because of my own efforts to write some myself. The work, and I include my own in this comment, often disappoints. Perhaps, like Marianne Dashwood, “I require so much!” Or perhaps the problem is inherent in inviting comparison with one of the wittiest writers to ever pick up a pen; one’s efforts can hardly avoid seeming pallid by contrast. It fails to be Jane Austen, as most everything does.
Despite the perils, people keep doing it, drawn like moths to a flame: writing sequels and prequels, imagining Jane Austen as a vampire, a sleuth or a con artist who fakes her death at age 41 and runs away, disguised as a man, to start a theater troupe, for which she writes all the plays, that tours the young nation of America. Actually, I made that last bit up. Nobody has written that book, which is not to say nobody ever will.
What makes them (us) do it? I suppose there are as many reasons as there are retellings of “Pride and Prejudice” through Mr. Darcy’s eyes: simple homage, awareness that there is an already created fan base, the same spirit of fun that impelled the teenage Jane Austen to mock the fictional conventions of the late 18th century. Then, too, there is the desire to fill in the unknown bits, and a large element of wish fulfillment. If reading a story is a way to indulge one’s fantasy of being or having what one is not or lacks in real life, then writing one is even more so.
And perhaps the strongest wish of all is to somehow be closer to Jane Austen, to connect with her spirit, her genius. The same spirit animating the women who sew their own Regency outfits and then model them on YouTube videos inspires others, more adept with a keyboard than with a needle, to write fan fiction. Jane Austen Made Me Do It! one can imagine them explaining with a shrug. Read the rest of this entry »
Flaubert and the Bears
August 19, 2011
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. –Gustave Flaubert
So my novel was workshopped. I was horribly nervous the whole day waiting to go the workshop at 8 p.m., like I was waiting for my own execution. But I needn’t have worried. My colleagues and instructor were enthusiastic in their praise; specific and constructive in their criticism. It gave me a much clearer idea of what wasn’t working and why not. More important, fixing it seemed, at that moment, both possible and completely worth the effort. It was an exciting few hours.
And now I have to actually do it. When I sat to revise Chapter 1 — that was when Flaubert and his troupe of dancing bears entered my mind; not only entered but sat down and made themselves at home. What a horribly blunt instrument language is, how inadequate to our supposedly profound ideas! That Flaubert came up with such an unforgettable metaphor for this inadequacy does nothing to diminish the truth of his observation.
Everything is there; I see it now, what needs to be there: sharper, deeper, truthier. But how to get it out?
Two, No, Three, Secrets of Novel-Writing
August 12, 2011
There are a few things I figured out in the past couple of months that I find myself thinking about and thought might be worth writing down, as I come to the end of one stage of this process and start another.
The most important might also seem the most obvious. Writing a novel takes a lot of time. If you have other commitments, like children and/or an outside job, writing a novel is something you can do in your spare time only if you are willing to ruthlessly refrain from (or at least drastically reduce the frequency of) doing many other things in your spare time, things people often consider normal and desirable, even indispensable: seeing your friends, watching your television shows, exercising, going to the movies or to a museum, keeping your home reasonably clean, volunteering, attending worship services, studying a foreign language, managing your finances, spending a weekend at the beach, surfing the Internet, having people over for dinner, even reading other people’s novels. Such activities become the enemy, for however different they seem, they have one thing in common: they are not writing. When you are doing them you are not writing. Read the rest of this entry »
When Ideas Acquire Solidity
August 3, 2011
It’s a strange feeling when something that existed only in your mind, or in electronic form, suddenly emerges into the physical realm. Over the weekend I got a request from one of my writing workshop colleagues: she would be away the week I was supposed to deliver my manuscript to the group. Could I deliver it early? As in, Aug 2? I said I could. This meant I had to stop nervously tweaking and take it to the printer’s. I was not sure my venerable laser printer’s cartridge was up to producing 360 pages without warning; besides, I wanted to make my copies double-sided, having realized from attending the group how very bulky paper — each sheet of which seems so thin individually — can get after about 150 or 250 pages. I could not figure out how to do this at home.
I consulted the Internet for recommended copy shops in my neighborhood and set out to Remsen Graphics with my thumb drive. “I have a 360-page document,” I told the man there, who seemed more cheerful than was appropriate to a hot summer Monday morning in the copy shop. “I need five copies. Double-sided. Is that possible?”
“Of course! No problem! Come back in an hour or so.” He took my thumb drive and information about the file. He did not take my name or my money, nor did he write down any of the information I had just imparted. Feeling a bit uneasy about this and hoping the shop would get it right, I went away.
My fears were groundless. When I returned, the copy job was waiting for me, was just as requested, and the price was reasonable. The copies were given to me all in one big box, the thin kind of non-corrugated cardboard like bakeries put cakes in. I had wondered how big the product would turn out to be, had debated which of my reusable shopping bags would be the best size and shape to bring, but as it turned out I chose right. I paid and loaded the box into the bag and lifted the bag onto my shoulder and walked back out into the hot summer morning. The package was sharp-edged, and much heavier than a cake, and it was as I were carrying the weight of the product of my own mind, my own thoughts, home with me.
The Complete Wordle
July 31, 2011
It’s here.
The End
July 29, 2011
I reached it today. I wish I could describe how I feel right now. Like someone who puts the last piece in a 1,000-piece puzzle, except this was a 150,000-word puzzle.
Like — is this it? Really? As Rickie Lee Jones would say, Is This the Real End? A strange mix of exhilaration and anticlimax.
And it’s not like it’s really the end. Revision will be needed. Maybe a lot.
I can’t wait to see what my colleagues at the writers’ workshop, who I already feel closer to, in a strange way, than some people I have known for years, will say.
But then, I kind of can wait, for what if this novel really bites?
I had given myself permission for years not to ask that question. Now it’s done, and I have to. The question virtually asks itself, though fortunately or unfortunately does not answer itself.
I look forward to rejoining the world of normal people, people who go to movies without guilt, though I don’t think I belong there anymore.
Page 350
July 21, 2011
Rilke said it best: “I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Thought While Approaching Page 200
June 17, 2011
Writing a novel is not unlike reading one, except for being much more work. At a certain point in either undertaking, ideally, the momentum and the mystery of the plot take over, and you become so curious to find out how it ends that there is no option but to keep going. Which, when you are the one writing it, means there is no other way to find out what the end is than by writing it. Constructing a plan is helpful; so are notes to oneself, but they are unsatisfactory in the same way that reading a summary of a novel is an unsatisfactory facsimile of the thing itself.
I have reached this point. The sense of needing to be done pulls me, gently but firmly, the way North pulls the needle of a compass, back to my Dropbox folder and my laptop, to the only place I belong right now, the world inside my head.
