Author: Flynn

Re: Vision

~ Flynn ~ Leave a comment

Flaubert and his bears seem distant, or at least they no longer oppress me. Revision. It is what it is. For those keeping score at home, or as a memory aid to some future reading self, today I am through the end of Chapter 13, which now ends at Page 254 out of 461. It’s gotten longer, because I keep adding things, while I have excised only a few extra words here and there, and one scene of any length — the eight pages at the end of Chapter 12 where Rachel visits Henry Austen in the sickroom, which I decided made no sense and wasn’t leading the story anywhere I wanted to go. I did a lot of stuff in Chapter 1, but many of the other changes were relatively minor, until I got to Chapter 12, the part right after Liam and Rachel meet Cassandra Austen for the first time and are trying to decide what to make of her.

This chapter was a bear (sorry, Flaubert) to write, and it reflected the strains of its origins as I read it again. Additionally, it did not seem to lead naturally into Chapter 13. This midpoint seemed exactly where things needed to get thicker and crazier, and instead Rachel seemed to become more vague as a narrator; I had a sense of the narrator getting bored with her own tale, summarizing things she should have shown, indulging in cheap acts of foreshadowing. Like the really exciting stuff was still a little way off, and we had to get through this slightly tedious other business first. A lot of talking, not enough reflection and not enough actual event. There is still a lot of talking — maybe too much.

But it’s better. I think. I hope. I moved up and adjusted an important plot element, Rachel’s moment of self-revelation where she realizes she is attracted to Liam, and I explored another aspect of the altering-the-universe element. Is it enough? Only time will tell. I can say as of March 29, 2012, I definitely do not know where I am going with the love story part of this, and I am rather sorry I ever thought of it.

Lately I am so far inside the world of this story that coming out is hard. Maybe impossible. It’s like a movie playing in my head. Yesterday, finding myself at liberty on a fine day and in the mood for a walk, I walked from East 57th Street (where I had had an appointment) to Union Square. And the whole way I was staring at people’s faces in fascination, looking for people who looked like what I imagined my characters looking like. It was like my imagination did not want to stay inside my head; it needed to find validation in the world.

I passed “Mordecai” on about 20th Street, and I was so excited that I briefly thought of chasing after him and asking if I could photograph him. I tried to think of how I would explain this. Then I realized I had no way to shoot him: I had left my cellphone at home.

I have moments when I am so delighted with my story I can hardly contain myself, and others when I think it is still extremely mediocre and pedestrian. But I do not trust either of these feelings more than the other one.

Further Reading: Second Impressions

~ Flynn ~ 3 Comments

Knowing little of the person but what I read in The New York Times, Sandy Lerner, as an idea, has long fascinated me, to the extent that she inspired a minor character in The Jane Austen Project, an ancient Ph.D. mathematician and tech billionaire with an obsession with literature, thought to be bankrolling the Jane Austen Project. When it turned out that Ms. Lerner (who for the record is neither ancient nor a Ph.D.) was giving a talk at my own local Jane Austen Society chapter, on a night that I already had off, no less, that I would be going to hear her was obvious.

I don’t know what I expected, except that it was certain to be interesting. It was that, and much more. Ms. Lerner, it turns out, has written a novel, having spent 26 years researching a historically accurate sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Continue reading →

What Are Chapters For?

~ Flynn ~ 1 Comment

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 Downton 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? Continue reading →

Further Reading, Part II

~ Flynn ~ 4 Comments

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. Continue reading →

Further Reading: Jane Austen Made Me Do It, Part I

~ Flynn ~ 1 Comment

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. Continue reading →

Flaubert and the Bears

~ Flynn ~ 1 Comment

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?