Halted Production
You might recall the work I posted recently, An Unfamiliar Girl (extract from my current work). That seems to have halted production at around the twelve-thousand-word mark, and I still feel I’ve barely begun it. I’m quite sure there’s enough material in it for a novel, but it’s just writing the novel that’s the tricky part. And this one seems to have become tricky because it is based so much on feelings, rather than plot.
I shall elaborate: I wrote a short novel before (still in it’s first draft, still, one day, to be put up on this site) and the way I did that was by making myself write two pages a day, six out of seven days, until the first draft was finished. This is one way to get writing done and becomes easier with practice but, particularly with early attempts, the writing can seem forced, and consequently, there’s a lot in the ‘novel’ I’m not very happy with. I’ll go back to it sometime, but in the meantime I’ve been working on this other piece, extracts from which I plan to submit for my course, though I’m still waiting for feedback on my first submission.
The problem I think I’m having now is firstly that I don’t want to force myself to write it, I want to feel it and then write what I feel. Therefore, rather than set myself a daily quota to meet, or a total word-count to aim for, as I did with my previous piece, which I set, rather modestly, at fifty-thousand words, I have been writing when I felt like it, with the idea that it will be finished when it’s finished whether it takes fifteen-thousand words or a hundred-and-fifty-thousand.
But why is feeling it so necessary, so much more necessary than with my previous work? Well that ties up with the second problem I think I’m having: this work is pretty ambitious, I’m tempted to go as far as ‘experimental’, but that would be only in terms of my own work, and not within the western literary canon. As one might expect, it’s a very modernist-influenced work, even somewhat impressionistic (the above picture, by Leonid Afremov, I’m quite sure, is a type of impressionism, and has been something of an influence among other things). It has been particularly influenced by Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which is a dangerously great work to emulate.
Proust has a distinct writing style, centred around extremely long, digressive sentences. His syntax is what I wanted to emulate, but in doing that, it is easy to appropriate the kind of late-nineteenth / early twentieth-century phrases he uses, which then makes the work something of a pastiche. This became such a problem in early passages that I had to stop reading Proust altogether. Now I feel rather stylistically lost: I’m not sure how to write the work, except that it’s a kind of stream-of-consciousness. I think this is my biggest problem at the moment, along with the perennial problem of the amateur novelist: maintaining a consistent style across the whole work.
Another problem I’m having, which is related to style, is discourse, the layout of the piece, how it is introduced, how the narrator moves between events. As I said before, it is impressionistic: it aims to give impressions rather than definitive explanations. I suppose I should say here, as I have not yet done, what the piece is about.
Its working title is Lila, Remi and, as the name suggested, it is about two girls, specifically two girls with whom the narrator has a relationship. It’s not a love-story, or a romance novel, but rather a story about relationships, as my works tend to be. There is never any question of “will they / won’t they” get together, because this is made explicit from early on, and there is no happily-ever-after because the story deals with the relationships in their entirety, from the first moment the narrator meets each of them until after he breaks up with them. From a suspense point-of-view you might suggest I’ve already shot myself in the foot by revealing the entire story from the word go, but the piece is about how and why things happen, not what happens. But yes, that sort of story is more uncommon and more difficult to write, which is what I meant by both experimental and ambitious.
This relates back to an idea of mine that I like stories that are not spoiled by knowing the ending, of which Ulysses is my favourite example. Now, if you know the ending of most thrillers, or, in fact, most genre fiction, the story is ruined, there is no point in reading it, because you know what’s coming. If you know that Ulysses ends with a reconciliation between husband and wife, mutual forgiveness and acceptance, the story is not ruined. If you know every detail of Leopold Bloom’s journey over the day described in Ulysses, the story is not ruined, rather, I believe, enjoyment of the novel is increased, it makes more sense and can be more easily appreciated. For me, Ulysses is like a jigsaw puzzle. There are a lot of ideas and events in it which do not make sense on first reading and only in the context of later ideas and events. In a way the entire book makes very little sense until the last page is finished, and then it is as if all the pieces of the puzzle come together at once to form an intricate tapestry.
I am not aiming for exactly this, but perhaps something along those lines. My story is not told chronologically, but rather, like Remembrance of Things Past, in the order that the narrator remembers things and how they link together. This poses the problem of how to put all the events together so that a coherent narrative is produced, and I’m still working on that, but, for example, though this is subject to change, currently, there is a part where the narrator first finds out Lila’s name. He recalls that the name made him think of lilacs, which then leads to a digression about how he once decided, after they were going out, to buy her some lilacs, or rather, some other flowers, because he could not find lilacs anywhere, and how she was overly-happy to receive them. In the story this is a sudden narrative jump from the first time he meets her to a time when he has already been going out with her for several weeks. The plot then moves back again, but has created an impression of the semi-random leaps human consciousness makes.
Again, this is why it is so important that I feel this story in order to write it. I have to get the relationships straight in my head so that, as I write, I can freely jump between different times in them to give an impression of what it was like living them. In a way, I have to imagine as if I had had these relationships, as if I had known these girls.
In order to ease this process, and somewhat in homage to Remembrance of Things Past, I have made the story semi-autobiographical. In many ways, the nameless narrator is me, or a version of me with a few exaggerations and tweaks. It’s as if I’m writing an alternate universe account of my meeting these two fictional girls and going out with them. Perhaps this could be interpreted as some Freudian wish-fulfilment, perhaps it is only a logical path to writing this sort of novel. All characters come from the author’s psyche however, and so are always, in greater or lesser parts, a rendering of the author or aspects of the author. It has been said to me before that the male characters in my stories are always essentially me, but I felt this was only half the truth; the female characters are just as much myself as well. There’s a further discussion of the importance of androgyny in my work in my About section, but the female characters generally just express different aspects of my personality to the male ones, as much as being composites of people I know.
My third and final problem at the moment, if it can be called that, in terms of this story, is that I seem to be in a pretty good relationship right now. At the least it seems hypocritical to write about how depressing and bad relationships are, or can be, when I’m enjoying one so much. And at the most, it’s possible my overall view of them is even changing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pretty pessimistic and fatalistic about these things, but right now I remain content, and my work is built on discontent.
Of course, this might not be the problem at all. I don’t seem to have had much time or inclination to write fiction lately, and so I could just be going through a non-writing spell (I refuse to use the term ‘writer’s block’ because it’s dicky and self-important, which I most certainly am not), but I can’t help returning to the idea that happiness is antithetical to my writing. We shall see.
Tags: A la recherche du temps perdu, Impressionism, James Joyce, Lila Remi, Marcel Proust, Modernism, puzzle, Relationships, Remembrance of Things Past, Truman Capote, Ulysses, writing
