I’ve spent nearly a year now being part of a reading group where we read writing manuals and essay collections by other writers. This month we read Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and because this is my third reading, it reminded of how much a book’s effect on a reader is so much about someone’s specific life circumstance and state of mind when they encounter a book. This time around, I realized that in my previous readings, my mind refused to absorb Chee’s ideas about how fiction is a way into finding things you want to say as a writer that your own consciousness wants to hide from you. And often, what this means is being open to letting your writing take you places you didn’t expect, even when those places scare you.
Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life—a book I read because there’s a chapter in Chee’s book about her—talks about her process of revision this way:
“The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part. It is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin.”
I confess to not only to not having had this experience until recently, but also to taking pride in being the person who sees the vision for a piece of writing whole, who gets to that vision fast, who plans for it and hits my target like an archer hitting the bullseye each time. That’s probably part of why I shifted to essays and journalism after getting an MFA in fiction, because this kind of resoluteness of purpose, this ability to see an argument from its inception to the end, works so much better in an essay.
As I’ve shifted back to fiction, I’m coming to realize that this obsession with mastery has been a way for me to cope with and guard against deeper psychological concerns I’ve been reluctant to face, which are now surfacing in my work. But in order for that to happen, I’ve had to follow the trails of various writers I’ve heard and read over the past year.
The method that has worked well for me over the past few months came from Saunders:
“Once, grading some student papers on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, I came across this line: ‘Upon perusing this story, I felt myself at a distinct lilt.’… I started trying to imitate that voice, feeling around inside myself for a corollary. Pretty soon I had a few pages of my version of that voice…”
He goes on to describe a whole hilarious world and plot involving horny teenagers watching a short film, told in this stilted voice that brims with unspoken desire. Since I’m not teaching right now and have no papers to read, I ended up writing out my own weird sentences, some of which evolved into opening paragraphs, while a few have ended up as story drafts. I’ve found this way of working more exciting and meaningful than my old way, which was to conceive a story more or less from beginning to end then write it.
It wasn’t until I read Chee that I became more aware of why I’ve found the single sentence method so exciting and fruitful. I’ve always thought of structure as this beautiful container to pour my writing into, but what I haven’t accounted for is that structure can also be a fort to guard against difficult parts of my unconscious from entering. But as Chee notes in describing the value of fiction for the writer:
“To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it.”
When I write with only words and sentences in mind rather than any pre-existing sense of plot or form, it’s as if I’m just tracing an intriguing path through the maze of my consciousness, and I’m less liable to notice if that path veers into territory that my psyche is guarding against. This means that I’m able to enter parts of my mind that I haven’t been able to penetrate before.
So if this sounds intriguing to you, try it! Or read a writer talking about how they write and try one of their methods.
M.
P.S. This entry is me trying to be thoughtful like Brandon Taylor