I find it very difficult to write essay in the place I am currently in my fiction. Which is to say, I wake up every morning determined to try very hard to know nothing at all. The bones of the book are in place, characters, tensions, the beginning, middle, end. But now I’m in there each day in search of everything I don’t know, everything all that focus on the structure and the action and the movement, might lay bare for me if I only spend more and more time inside of each sentence and each scene.
What this means literally is that I’m retyping for the third or fourth time from the beginning. Plenty of the writers I know do this, print the whole thing out, open a fresh document, and start typing from scratch. I have the manuscript next to me and sometimes I hew very close to it and sometimes a whole new chapter suddenly becomes necessary. The biggest rule I have is that I have to not trust that any of what is already there is right. I have to understand that it is much more likely that it’s nowhere close to what I want.
The result is every sentence I make here makes me physically disgusted. I know three to seven sentences underneath each one I write here will hold a solidity and truth that these early messy sloppy sentences simply fail to have. But then, after weeks of this writing every morning without stopping, after weeks of this thinking that’s not right, that’s not right, that’s wrong, I am nosing my way closer to an understanding of what I’m trying to do with THIS book that I haven’t done before.
It is always in some ways reactive. It is always in some ways almost completely obscured from me the first couple of years of work. A thing I think about fiction is that, at its best, it holds truth inside of it, truth that can’t be argued or explained but that accrues inside of you as you move through the pages of the book.
A few years ago, when I sat down to write my second book, I was reacting sort of viscerally and angrily to all the ways I felt like books didn’t hold enough truth inside of them. There was too much story, too much artifice. That the ones that claimed to be new and different, were just the artifice turned inside out or flipped, but still artifice. (It feels worth noting here that I know I can be sort of an asshole; every book I’ve ever written has come from an intense and also deeply shameful sense of if I don’t do this right now, I will die). I wanted a book with sharp hard edges. I wanted a book that, a little sweaty, a little anxious, equal parts intimate and scary, grabbed you by the arm and made you look.
Immediately after that book was published and then for the year or so that followed, I felt intense, extraordinary shame. I wasn’t supposed to tell truth! I was supposed to make art! What was I even thinking? Fiction is about story! Fiction is built by artifice. I had worked, I thought, in that book, to make it shapely. I had thought a long time about its order, about accrual, about the way movement and collisions work inside of books.
But then I felt sure I was an idiot, I felt embarrassed and ashamed. A story! I decided. I want to tell a story! I kept saying to my friend. So, then I wrote a story. I thought a lot about it. I was still aware of all the ways I wanted it to hold truth inside of it, the ways I didn’t want the people to ever feel like people in a story but like people in life. But I wanted to be more overt in the construction, to work hard at all the formal tools at my disposal. I wanted to play with the ways I might be able to control movement, the ways I might be able to navigate a whole bunch of points of view.
But then (and I imagine you might see the pattern now), the book came out, I felt horribly ashamed. Was it too much story? I started to wonder. Was it not enough truth? It was still only a single book and therefore still so far from everything I wanted to accomplish as a writer. It was only a single book and still so far from all the questions I still yearned to ask.
I realized today, running, because something happened to me this morning and I opened the document I’ve been typing into every day for almost a month now, and I thought that I would vomit if I spent any time inside of it. I realized I’m suddenly desperate to get out of it, that suddenly I’m casting about for what might feel sure enough to get me to the end.
This book started with a feeling I had a couple of years ago when we were in Florida—the book is my first completely set in Florida—and it was two opposing impulses that were maybe also the same: that I had never written a story or a truth that was as fucked and as insane as that place. The result so far is a strange pendulum swing in both directions: I built out all this story. I built it out to try to get to some harder and more icky murky sweaty anxious truth.
I don’t know if any of this makes sense. A year from now, I would perhaps be able to re-type all of this and send it to you and it might hold something more solid inside of it. But I also think that writing should feel like cliff-jumping. Maybe as I garner the courage to jump off the cliffs that will come up in these last fifty or so pages, I’m wanting to get a bit more of my footing again.
One of the ways I get my footing is by reading, also talking to other people, also more running likely than my poor middle-aged knees can stand. I wonder if any of you still get this and feel like responding: what is it you think story can offer that feels most exciting to you? What is the shape or texture of the truths that you feel most grateful for?