Friday, January 30, 2009

Some Disconnected and Random Thoughts

1. Once again, I've been evaluating the essay I was working on. After many more hours reading it, editing, reorganizing, composing new material, cutting out old stuff, and so on, I'm still dissatisfied and unsure that it will ever be quite what I want it to be. I've concluded that writing creative nonfiction is incredibly difficult, much more so than I had originally appreciated. There's such a freedom with fiction to manipulate the characters and situation to make it all work, but nonfiction is limited by reality. And reality is messy and without clear themes or conclusions. I had envisioned my essay as having a sort of pivotal epiphany moment, but that's simply not how things happen, at least not for me. Life isn't full of epiphanies. Life is a slow process; changes happen slowly if at all. So condensing that process into a ten or fifteen page essay is a daunting prospect. When I steer the facts--including some details and leave out others--I feel like I'm being dishonest and turning the facts into fiction. I don't know. Maybe that's what all nonfiction writers do. I suppose truth is an impossibility.

2. My next novel has been pushing its way more and more into the forefront of my brain. It's an idea I came up with a few years ago and started a couple years ago as a short story, but after writing it I realized I really wanted to continue on and discover what else happens, where the characters go from the point I'd left them at the end of the story, and that this would wind up as a complete novel idea for me. I had planned on writing this one after my MFA thesis novel, but then I became more interested in writing my kids' book, so I did that first. But now I'm still really early on in the kids' book process--I have a complete draft but have barely started on an initial revision. So I'm left with this question: Do I put the kids' book on hold while I move on to a story that is more pressing on my mind or do I leave the new book alone to keep working on the kids' book? Well, unable to quite decide between the two of those choices, I've opted for the middle ground. I'm going to begin drafting the new one while rewriting the old one. I'm not sure yet whether this is a smart move, but I'll give it a try and see how it goes. My fear is that I won't fully sink into either world and I'll end up doing both poorly, but who knows?

3. With my new novel I'm proceeding in a different manner than I have in the past. Typically I have a basic story idea in mind and start writing even if I'm unsure where exactly it's going. I make a lot of notes as I draft and usually before I'm very far along I have some sort of rough outline of the entire project so I can see where I'm heading even though the route changes as I go and find detours or shortcuts. With my MFA thesis I began writing out of order, originally composing one piece as a short story then another as a separate story until I concluded that rather than a series of linked stories I really was writing a novel. It turned out the early pieces wound up (in rather different forms) as the end of the book. But by the time I had drafted the first few chapters I had a very rough form of the entire book outlined.

Right now I'm lacking that clear vision of my new book, but rather than beginning with chapter one and seeing where it goes, I'm starting before the beginning of the book. I'm doing character sketches that are more extensive than I've done in the past. Previously I've jotted down key details of characters so I can keep them straight as I go or whatever, but I haven't worried too much about fleshing out their pasts and motivations and so forth since those things tend to come up as I write and I know I'll discover those details by the time I get through a couple of drafts. But now I feel like I won't be quite sure how to proceed with each new section of the story until I have a solid understanding of each character and why they are motivated to do the things they do. So I've written several pages about the lives of the two main characters and have yet to reach the point where the book actually starts. It's really fun to explore the back story like this, and I'm hoping it proves helpful as I move forward. In part I felt compelled to do this because the first big plot point relies on a somewhat absurd turn of events, and I feel like I have to justify those events in order for the story to work. That was one of the problems with the short story version I attempted a couple years ago. I didn't have enough time to make the unlikely event seem plausible. So I need to really understand the character in order for his bizarre action to seem like something he would genuinely do under the circumstances.

Another significant factor with this new novel (that I've commented on before here I believe) is that the story and characters move much further away from my own experiences and characteristics, which in part means I don't have as thorough an understanding of the characters and their motivations. My first novel, my MA thesis, drew heavily on my own traits for the main character: he thought much like I do, had the same tastes and interests, and so on. I didn't have to worry too much about how he would react to different situations because I could simply imagine how I myself would react. My second novel, my MFA thesis, moved further away from myself but still had a lot of me in the characters. While the first book had a stand-in for me, the second one used different aspects of me in different characters, an exaggerated version of characteristic X here, characteristic Y there. None of the main characters were me, but I still felt like I understood them fairly intuitively, that it wasn't a major shift to step into their shoes and discover how they would react in different circumstances. The third book, the kids' book, was a whole different thing, so it doesn't really enter this discussion. With the new novel, though, I don't think any of the characters I've come up with so far have a whole lot in common with me, so it's going to be more of a challenge to figure out exactly how and why they do what they do and then to also make it seem reasonable to a reader that these characters would indeed do what they do. It's fun and exciting to take this new step away from what I've done before.

4. Comedy. I've been reflecting recently on comedy. It's weird, I used to be pretty good at comedy. The major piece of writing I did that convinced me I definitely wanted to devote my life to writing was a one-act farce. I wrote it in college and it was accepted into a festival of one-act plays on campus. Seeing an audience laugh so hard at my words was thrilling. But since that point I've become less and less comic in my writing. I see my new novel as being highly comic. In my mind it's on the lines of A Confederacy of Dunces or Candide, a sprawling episodic novel, maybe picaresque, where a number of characters pursue different goals and keep falling flat and perhaps there's a bit of Camus's absurd thrown into the mix where things fail to turn out as the characters expect. I have a strong sense of the feeling I'd like the novel to have, but I'm a bit doubtful that I'll be able to achieve the right balance. And I realized that the major obstacle in my way is a weird one: empathy.

What's that? Empathy? Why would that be a problem? Well, here's why. I've heard a definition of the difference between comedy and tragedy attributed to Mel Brooks: "Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die; tragedy is when I get a paper cut." There's definitely something to that. Comedy has a distance between the audience and the characters so we feel fine laughing at them. Yes, we often like the characters, but I think we still don't fully empathize. If we did, would we be so callous as to laugh at their misfortunes? Dramatic stories are all about empathy, feeling that torment of the characters. And I feel like over the past decade or so I've shifted somewhat in my level of empathy with my fellow human beings. I formerly identified myself only half-jokingly as a misanthrope, and with a misanthropic view of humanity it's easy to laugh. But more and more I feel a sense of the basic worth and individual suffering and joys of every person, and with that kind of connection, it becomes harder to laugh. So then when creating characters for a story, I want them to be real, to be empathetic, to have people care about them, but then how can I also make them funny? I don't know. I haven't sorted it all out yet. I've heard comedy is all about the head and drama about the heart, and I think my heart has become a bigger part of me than it used to be.