On Writing
Chris Eaton
People
who are curious about a book typically lead with the same question: What is
your book about?
Typically
I come up with something that is a) overly simplified b) a line of
post-considered marketing c) regretful.
My
books are not about something. My
books are something. They’re not
metaphor or parable. They’re not trying, as Alistair MacLeod once said to me
about his books (over middling Chinese food beside another author who had
recently invited me to friendship on Facebook then didn’t recognize my name
when we were introduced), to accurately portray a time or place. They’re not
trying to teach something, not trying to represent a life, not trying to capture
what it might be like to be a child trapped in a basement; a child who travels
through a wardrobe; a horrible child who thinks and does horrible things; someone
else, good or bad, who is not a child. They’re not trying to accomplish the
things that correspond to the reasons why people often tell me they buy books,
which of course makes it even more difficult to explain.
Sometimes
I think of myself more as a classical composer than a writer. I’m just a
composer who quit piano lessons after a year and a half but never gave up
reading. When I was young and just starting to read, I read everything. I read
so many books. All kinds of books. And the stories and ideas filled me up. I
thought that’s what books were for. To convey stories. Ideas. But gradually I
began to feel that I had read the books before, that they were, in fact, all
the same story, only with different words. Imagine that most of our songs only
had one melody, and that only the lyrics changed. Even with the successes that
have been achieved in bringing marginalized stories to the fore, the execution
still too often traffics in the same colonial structures, the same tropes, the
same way of connecting nodes of thought, the same rhythm and cadence, stuck in
the echo of a familiar capitalist narrative form.
Part
of this is based in causality, linearity, the illusion of time passing. The idea
that one action leads to the next and the next is reassuring to us, like the
idea of God. It gives life some sort of purpose or meaning, and we seek it out
in our fiction. Science argues otherwise, however, that time is not only
relative but that the concepts of past and present and future are illusory. Our
memories are not a line but a collection of instances existing simultaneously,
like the Internet with its hyperlinks that take you from a word in a sentence
on one page to some tangential relation.
But
the most important part of communicating is in the rhythm of it, the music of
it, the energy of it. Ideas are only the most basic level of understanding. Too
often, the message gets confused with the art, the message is considered the
art. But a message is a statement. Art is less clear than that. It is itself.
One might see a message or statement reflected in some aspects of it. But it is
always more than that. If I can fiddle with the popular McLuhan expression for
a moment, the medium isn’t really the message, nor is the message the message;
the execution is the true message.
More
often than not when I’m writing I’ll just leave underlined spaces, because I
don’t know yet what I want to say, which descriptors I want to use, but I know
I need two words in that space. And the first has to be two syllables, say. And
the second has to be three. And the stresses have to be on the first syllables
of those words and nowhere else. Otherwise it doesn’t sound right. I also don’t
typically begin a novel with a story in mind, just a rhythmic pattern I’ve been
playing with in my head.
I
sense the energy or the rhythms before I have the sentence, for example. Or the
paragraph. Or the page or the chapter or the this. I say the this because it’s
so clearly different from the that. The that is wrong. The that is something
that someone else once did, and it can be copied, which is often the case.
Sadly. Too often when I read contemporary fiction I’m reading the that. I have
an interesting story, I hear the book telling me. How should I tell it? That is
the that. It’s the way you tell a story. In the this, the music and energy are
always first. The this is mine. The this is mine all mine. I can, however,
sense it, and be carried away by it, in the works of other writers, like
William Vollman, or Roberto Bolano, or Mary Robison. Leanne Simpson. To name a
few. More often than not, I don’t even remember what happened in a book I’ve
truly loved. But I can still feel it, could hum it back. When someone else
copies that rhythm, either by quoting a passage directly or just aiming for the
feel, I remember it, or recognize it, like a duet that’s been happening since the
first author got it right that has simply taken forty years for the second
voice to enter.
When
I can’t find the rhythm, when I’ve had a particularly awful writing day, I’m
also less apt to understand the world. I find myself completely out of synch
with existence and am miserable, inconsolable, am unable to interact with
others and find the requirement to do so oppressive. At those times, about the
only thing that can solve it for me are a good run, wherein I am forced back
into a rhythm, or a conversation with either of my sons, 5 and 2, because they
are still too young to have been lured by something else, and live within the
rhythm at all times.
But
when I do, everything is good, and I know I’ve done it right, and I know that
other people who are looking for it, listening for it, searching for it… that
they will hear it too.
No comments:
Post a Comment