Just about every time my father-in-law (above) and I talked on the phone, we began by filling each other in on whatever progress we’d made with the books we were writing. I don’t remember exactly when he decided to start working on a study of Macbeth, but I remember his interest developing and his arguments germinating, and I remember clinking glasses with him in many different living rooms as he told Max and me about new developments in his research.

I guess I always believed that Larry and I would finish our projects at about the same time. But in June he died, just a few chapters short of a completed manuscript. At his side were the copy of Memento Mori I’d sent him and Joseph’s most recent essay, which Larry had marked up with question marks and check marks and one “very good.” A teacher to the end.

Like me, Larry was a beginning-obsessed writer. He perfected the start, moved forward incrementally, and backed up again whenever he identified a problem with structure or a hole in his logic. Unlike me, he was remarkably learned and quite conservative. We often disagreed, about literature, about politics, and especially about religion, but I never doubted that he respected me and wanted to hear my opinions. In this regard, and in many others, he differed markedly from my own parents, and I don’t think I realized until his death how much I’d come to think of him as a kind of replacement father. My actual dad and I don’t speak.

When your spouse’s parent dies, grieving is complicated. There is the grief you feel for yourself, for the loss of a person you (if you’re lucky) loved, and there is the grief you feel at seeing the person closest to you dealing with a nearly unfathomable loss. At times the sorrow is literally almost suffocating. These are clichés, but they are also realities, as is the fact that the passing of someone important to you causes you to think about the way you’re spending your own life.

Almost two months after Larry’s death, it’s still very hard to write about him. (Or to think about his book, which Max, Joseph, and I promised him we would finish. We have a lot of reading to do.) And it’s impossible to imagine ever returning to a life in which I treat my writing like a frivolous hobby or prioritize writing about other people’s novels over working on my own.

I’m genuinely sorry for leaving the site dormant without explanation all this time; I honestly haven’t been able to figure out how to say any of this. Things will continue to be relatively quiet here until I’m feeling better and my novel is done. I hope that will be soon, but it won’t be next week or next month, barring some sort of miracle. The good thing about Internet time is that it only seems interminable when it’s happening.

Organization, as you may recall, is not a virtue I possess in excess. And it depresses me when plans are drawn up and fail. So I hadn’t attempted to outline my novel draft in a couple of years. Now that the project has changed so fundamentally, though, I decided to spend a couple hours this weekend mapping out the story on my iPad.

The easiest thing would’ve been to type it all up in Pages, or to forgo technology altogether and plot everything out in my notebook (for some reason, I take comfort in keeping provisional things handwritten). Instead, I downloaded a new app and spent a little time teaching myself to draw letters with my index finger. (See practice effort, above.) Then I put together an outline. At the time this seemed, if not sensible, like a reasonable way to spend the morning. Later, less so.

But now I have the whole scheme in a handwritten PDF that, after many more hours’ work on the book, I’ve updated twice, once from home and once from my office. Maybe the effort wasn’t a complete boondoggle, after all.
 

See also Kitty Burns Florey’s Script and Scribble, on the death of cursive.

Kelsey Newman, the narrator of Scarlett Thomas’ forthcoming Our Tragic Universe, aspires to literary greatness but actually ghostwrites YA thrillers. Her descriptions of the ever-evolving Serious Novel she’s been writing for years remind me so much of my own experience, laughing at them feels like an admission that I have no idea what I’m doing.

“I realised a while ago that I was always trying to make the novel catch up with my life,” Kelsey says, after describing, in hilarious detail that I probably shouldn’t quote from a galley, its transformation.
 

My own plan has been to write one novel* and then turn my attentions to something else: researching a literary biography, writing an accessible book on tax policy (don’t laugh!), going undercover to investigate extreme manifestations of fundamentalism, becoming a private investigator…

Many writers who take their own experiences and twist them into fiction only have one story in them but publish many more, of ever-diminishing worth, after their first book appears. I’m deeply afraid of becoming that kind of literary natterer-on.

The trouble is, though, if you decide you’re only going to write one novel, you will want that book to be the best it can possibly be — not just for right now, but for all time. Down this particular obsessive-compulsive road lie many interesting developments. A completed manuscript is not one of them.
 

Recently I’ve been hacking away at my novel draft, and last week I finally admitted to myself that what I’ve been writing as one book for the past six years is two different stories.

The prospect of wrangling them separately fills me with nearly as much dread as relief, but part of being a writer is tricking yourself, again and again, into investing in each new epiphany. So I’ve given myself a deadline to finish the first book. We’ll see how it goes.

The photo above is of Scarlett Thomas’ contribution to the Significant Objects project, which I won in the third round of auctions (benefitting Girls Write Now).** The object itself was chosen by Paola Antonelli, and you can read Thomas’ brief story about it here. (A copy of Kate Bingaman-Burt’s 20×200 print depicting the candles and other recent Significant Objects is for sale here; proceeds, again, benefit GWN.)

When I do complete the draft, I’m going to open a bottle of champagne and light the candles. Even though I’ve only read forty pages of Our Tragic Universe so far, I have a feeling Kelsey Newman would approve.

* You can read an excerpt from the beginning in Narrative Magazine.

** I contributed my own story to Significant Objects, and I sit on Girls Write Now’s Board of Directors.

And Donald Barthelme urged his students to choose their “literary fathers” carefully, and to be well-versed in philosophy. Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s biography, suggests that reading Beckett and the existentialists gave Barthelme confidence that the kind of stories he wanted to write were possible.

Don dropped by Guy’s Newsstand…. and found a copy of Theatre Arts. In it was Waiting for Godot. He stood there and read the whole thing.

That evening, when he took Helen out to dinner, he brought the magazine with him. She had already read the play. “I found it exciting but did not see the implications for Don,” she says. “He was deeply moved and ecstatic about the language…. Each time we were in a bookstore after this, Don looked for work by Beckett and immediately read whatever he found. It seemed that from the day he discovered Godot, Don believed he could write the fiction he imagined.” It would be heavily ironic, and he could “use his wit and intellect in a way that would satisfy him.”

Of course, Don’s breakthrough wasn’t that easy. “The problem is … to do something that’s credible after Beckett, as Beckett had to do something that was credible after Joyce,” he said years later.

Initially, though, the excitement! Waiting for Godot showed Don that philosophy could become drama, almost directly, without the interference of plot, setting, and so on. By stripping away fiction’s stock devices, Beckett focused on consciousness. He could animate the intentionality at the heart of awareness….

[H]is discovery of Beckett and his philosophical studies were guiding him away from vague attempts at an “unlove” story. He was forming a firmer aesthetic. He grounded his magazine editing in philosophy, too, especially in existentialism as it evolved under John Paul Sartre.

I’m fascinated and inspired by this interconnectedness, but also a little wary of it. Whenever I notice philosophy or politics creeping too overtly into my fiction, I think of Jimmy Chen’s succinct dismissal of novels whose didactic agendas overshadow their artistic ones (though I do love Brave New World — or did, the last time I read it. 1984 too, but it doesn’t hold up as well in my memory). Your comments are welcome.
 

See also Murdoch’s Existentialists and Mystics, in which she imagines Socrates saying “In philosophy, if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace, you aren’t moving at all”; In defense of Big Ideas in fiction; and Wolcott on Barthelme.

A couple weeks ago, I was reading Rupert Thomson’s gorgeously evocative, meticulously pared-down This Party’s Got to Stop.

About a third of the way through, I had to take a break. The essay I’m writing had stalled. My verbs seemed unconscionably obvious next to his, my sentences clumsy, my narrative voice about as natural as a conversation heard through a tin horn. I was, as always, struggling with structure.

“I try to take comfort,” I told Rupert, in email, “in the knowledge that This Party is, what, your eighth or ninth book? Surely I’ll get better.”

He assured me:

[Y]es, you WILL get better. We all get better. I can definitely imagine being on my deathbed & thinking, ‘Oh, not now, please; I was just beginning to GET somewhere…’ Who was it who said that a writer’s biography is not the details of his life, but the story of his style. Nabokov maybe.

Of course this isn’t the first time I’ve been so overwhelmed with admiration for someone else’s work that I could barely stand to look at my own. I’m guessing the neurosis is a lifelong affliction — and, judging from conversations with friends, it’s a fairly common one.
 

Joan Didion suffered from an extreme case of awe-inspired paralysis. She told The Paris Review that, while Henry James was as formative as influence on her writing as Hemingway, she could no longer read him at all.

He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them. I wouldn’t dare to write one. I’m not even sure I’d dare to read James again. I loved those novels so much that I was paralyzed by them for a long time. All those possibilities. All that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down.

Can you imagine? The formidable Joan Didion, reduced to silence by her love of someone else’s words?
 

For occasions like this, for the past couple years, I’ve kept on hand a well-reviewed novel that I don’t like or respect. It’s sitting on my desk right now, in fact. I don’t re-read it in any detail, because I don’t want it to contaminate my thinking, but flicking through the book makes me feel better about my own work, however imperfect it may be.

But see Dani Shapiro’s reaction, in the Los Angeles Times this weekend, to an acquaintance who said, “So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?”
 

If you can relate — or if you can’t — I’m curious about your experiences and I’ve opened up comments.

See also Peter Straub’s Twitter bio: “my profession obliges me to enjoy solitary confinement.”

I’ve been thinking about Saul Bellow’s notion that “art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.”

Coincidentally, Colson Whitehead has declared this ShThFuUpAnWoOnYrNo (Shut the fuck up and work on your novel) Month. And why not? It’s winter, you’re going to be miserable anyway. What better things do you have going on?

I’m sure I’ll be around, just not consistently.

I’ve written plenty of autobiographical essays, and I’m sure I’ll continue to write them, but at the LA Times I try to explain why I’m working on a novel rather than a memoir, even though I’m mining my own life for the book. An excerpt:

When I was 12, I emerged from an intense depression by imagining the book I’d write about the things that had caused me to take to my bed.

I remember crossing the field from the library to our small apartment and starting to compose the story in my head. Everything — from the thunderclouds I could see in the sky to the grass whipping against my legs in the wind — seemed potentially meaningful. Not to mention the people who went to my mother’s church. (She was a preacher.) They would all have to be included.

For more on the relationship between fact and invention, see Welty v. Maxwell on autobiography in fiction; On the importance of what is culled; On the melding of fact and invention in fiction; and On the melding of fact and invention in fiction II.
 

In an old short story that has made its way (in significantly altered form) into my novel, the churchgoer I mentioned in the LA Times essay who showed up at our door naked has morphed into “Luke” — a character who is, overall, less like the man himself than he is like my friend Rocky, A/K/A Robert Moak, A/K/A a churchgoer and crack addict who later perished in Hurricane Andrew when he tried to weather the storm in an abandoned houseboat.

The real naked guy actually made the news for stealing a cop’s car to make his way to us. The St. Pete Times (left) and other papers around the state picked up the story.

Here’s a slightly expurgated version of The Miami Herald article:

GABLES OFFICER FIGHTS REPRIMAND / NAKED MAN WENT RACING OFF IN POLICEMAN’S CAR

ANN MACARI Herald Staff Writer

Coral Gables Officer Ron Greene said he was only trying to do his job and shield residents from a full-fledged display of human anatomy. But police and city officials say that is no excuse for what happened. No doubt about it: The naked man who stole Greene’s patrol car has caused the policeman some grief.

The incident earned him a four-day suspension because the police administration said Greene did not follow proper police procedure when he apprehended the 18-year-old in his birthday suit.

But Greene, backed by the police union, said last week he did nothing wrong and plans to let an arbitration board decide who is right.

He blamed the city for not providing him with the right equipment to do his job by giving him a car without a cage — the plexiglas barrier that forms a protective wall between the front and back seats.

Said Greene, who in his six years with the Gables has repeatedly asked for cars with cages: “It’s like giving me a gun and taking away my bullets. I wasn’t given the proper tools to do my job.”

Greene’s problem started Oct. 28 just after 3 p.m. at Le Jeune Road and Ponce de Leon Boulevard. That’s when Christopher [X], 18, walked across the street, instantly capturing Greene’s attention.

Greene put him into the patrol car’s back seat and asked the obvious question.

“He said he had conversations with God,” Greene said. “He told me God told him to take his clothes off.”

The officer said he intended to take [X] into protective custody under the Baker Act, which allows police to pick up a person who seems likely to injure himself or others or appears to need medical treatment.

[X], who police said was mentally disturbed, pointed to his clothes about a half block away under Metrorail. Greene drove to the spot and got out to pick up the blue pants. In that instant, [X] leaped over the back rest, threw the car into gear and pushed the gas pedal with his hand.

[X] left Greene running in the dust and sped west across the city, finally ending up on Bird Road pursued by Gables police.

But before coming to a stop with a flat tire in [my mom's & stepfather's] yard in the 8300 block of Southwest 41st Terrace, [X] careened into the yard on Southwest 46th Terrace where Franciso Bosquet was working. Bosquet twisted his ankle as he jumped out of the way.

Gables Officer Paul Pitts chased [X] through an alley, tackled him, handcuffed him and sat on him until fellow officers arrived.

Police charged the teen-ager — who called himself a minister and gave his addresses as 2621 Lincoln Ave. and 1790 SW 15th St. — with grand theft, reckless driving, fleeing a police officer and fleeing the scene of an accident with injuries. The court has ordered [X] to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, said his lawyer Paul Korchin.

And Greene found himself charged with negligence and carelessness by Chief Ken Bush: He should have handcuffed [X] as police do all prisoners. He should have removed the ignition keys and locked the doors when he got out to pick up the pants. He should have called for a backup with a cage to transport the prisoner.

But Greene said he was not arresting [X], simply taking him into protective custody to get him off the streets. He was not, Greene stressed, a prisoner.

Police officials disagreed.

Capt. Lou Mertz, who heads internal affairs investigations, said [X] was a prisoner in the sense that he was taken off the street involuntarily, and so should have been handcuffed.

“If I had handcuffed him with his arms behind his back, I would have had a hell of a time putting them (the pants) on,” Greene said.

And besides, [X] was not violent and the Baker Act does not require handcuffing, Greene said.

Not everyone put into a police car is always handcuffed, several officers said, particularly the elderly and children.

[X] is now being treated for emotional problems at Highland Park psychiatric hospital, said Korchin, his attorney. Greene and K-9 officer Mark Scanlan, president of the police union, say the whole thing could have been avoided if there had been a cage in the car.

“All cars don’t have cages,” Mertz said. “But there are ways to secure prisoners without cages. There are handcuffs. There are seatbelts. There are assisting officers.”

Fifteen of the Gables’ 23 police cars have cages. Capt. J.J. Carroll said that five more have been ordered, but that there are times when a cage is more a hindrance than a help.

“We transfer people in a police car who are not always prisoners,” Carroll said. “And we have some officers who are really too big to be in a car with a cage.”

Carroll said Greene should have waited for a backup car with a cage to arrive before doing anything.

Mertz said six other complaints since 1980 have been filed against Greene, 47, who before joining the Gables force spent five years with the Surfside Police Department. Three complaints dealt with breaking departmental regulations, such as failing to assist another officer and drinking cider on duty. The others were dismissed.

Greene asked Chief Bush and City Manager Don Lebrun to rescind the suspension. Both denied his request. But Greene is not ready yet to surrender his fight against the department.

Bush would not comment on the case.

Mertz had no sympathy for Greene.

“When you turn a mental patient loose with a police car,” he said, “that’s pretty serious.”

See also. And I like Stephen Elliott’s comments, in his conversation with Sam Miller, about avoiding tidy (and usually false) closure in memoir.

Over the years I’ve developed a bad habit of going over sentences again and again in my fiction because they don’t quite sound right. By that I mean that the rhythm is off or the vowel sounds clash or an adjective is too bland or, worse, too “creative” in some overcomplicated or cutesy way that distracts from the flow of the story.

Occasionally I nail what I want to say, in the end, but often I walk away at least partly unsatisfied.
 

Because I think so much nowadays about construction of phrases at this obsessive level, I was fascinated by Dave Hickey’s “The Song in Country Music,” the entry for 1953 in Greil Marcus’ and Werner Sollors’ A New Literary History of America. Hickey focuses on the vast influence of Hank Williams’ compressed songwriting following his death that year at twenty-nine.

The only people in Nashville who learned any positive lessons from Williams’s career were the songwriters and the cowboys… The songwriters, many of whom were Texans and nurtured in the culture of the laconic West, took control of country songwriting by learning the compression of Williams’s craft. That craft was the primary topic of conversation among songwriters of the period. When I asked Rogert Miller what it was about Williams’s songwriting that touched him, he said, “Meticulous. They’re meticulous and all hooked up.” When I asked him what this meant, he sang me two lines from one of his songs.

The moon is high and so am I.
The stars are out and so will I be pretty soon.

“That’s maybe a little too hooked-up,” Miller said, and sang half a verse of “Me and Bobby McGee” a song by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster that Miller had discovered and recorded first.

Busted flat in Baton Rouge
Headed for the trains.
Feeling nearly faded as my jeans.

“That’s hooked up,” Miller said. “I love the ‘as’ that picks up ‘flat’ and bat.’”

When I asked Willie Nelson, he observed that Williams was less a ’songwriter’ than a ’song-singer’ who obviously sang songs in progress over and over until they came out right. Waylon Jennings said much the same thing. When I asked him about Williams’ songs, he sang lines from two or three of them and showed me how the sounding of the consonants moved from the front to the back of the mouth so the vowels were always singable — you didn’t have to stutter or swallow the words. Billy Joe Shaver, whose junior high school English teacher sent him off to the navy with books by Robert W. Service and Dylan Thomas, admired the way Williams’s figurative poetry virtually disappeared into the facts of the narrative. “‘Melt your cold, cold heart’… ‘Today I saw you on the street/ And my heart fell at your feel’… ‘The silence of a falling star/ Lights up a purple sky.’ Like that,” Shaver said. “The closest I got was ‘I’m just an ol’ chunk of coal/ But I’m gonna be a diamond some day,’ which could describe one of Hank’s songs.”

Harlan Howard, the most meticulous of country songwriters after Hank Williams, went into more detail. He sang the first verse of “Cold Cold Heart.”

I try so hard my dear to say
That you’re my every dream.
Yet you’re afraid each thing I do
Is just some evil scheme
Some mem’ry from your lonesome past
Keeps us so far apart.
Why can’t I free your doubtful mind
And melt your cold, cold heart

Howard then pointed out what Roger Miller meant by hooked up. He explained that those eight short lines were invisibly held together by fifteen internal r phonemes. There are triples in the first two lines, four pairs, and the terminal “heart” that gives the verse closure. “Nobody notices this,” Howard said. “That’s the idea, but once these words are put together this way, they don’t come apart.”

The whole essay is worth seeking out. (And here’s Laura Miller’s review of the anthology.)
 

In the clip below, you can watch Roger Miller, on Johnny Cash’s show, creating his own hilarious and bawdy hooked-up verse about a piece of twine.

Image of Hank Williams taken from The Austin Chronicle.

Byatt herself has recently raised similar concerns, voicing opposition — see, e.g., her discussion with Kera Bolonik in Bookforum — to the use of “a real person as the single original for a character.”
 

I wouldn’t adopt Byatt’s prohibition as a hard-and-fast rule, personally. But I have found that when my own fiction is inspired by actual people and events, as it almost always has been to one degree or another, it needs the space to become its own thing, and this is largely a matter of letting the characters and events morph, in incremental but ultimately fundamental ways, into ones that wind up being very different from those I had in mind when I started writing.

The most exasperating thing about this process is that it is absolutely essential but can’t be forced or hurried; the story will take as long as it will take, even when I put in time daily. No doubt every approach to writing has its drawbacks, but it seems like it’d be so much more expeditious to concoct stories purely from imagination, not at all tethered to the raw material of my experience. Maybe one day my brain will decide to cooperate.
 

See also Welty v. Maxwell on autobiography in fiction; On the importance of what is culled; and On the melding of fact and invention in fiction.

When Bookforum relaunched its website recently, the editors introduced my favorite feature: an idiosyncratic collection of writers’ syllabi on various topics. Mine is devoted to doubt.

The narrator of my novel in progress has a storefront preacher mother and a family legacy of extremism that seem, the more she struggles against them, destined to determine her future. While her life goes in a very different direction from mine, I’ve taken quite a bit of material from my own experiences and neuroses in imagining her story. I’m a doubter by nature — committedly, almost compulsively so — and gravitate toward works by other agnostics. Skepticism is as old as faith, and its manifestations are complex and varied.

Go there for the actual reading list. (And please consider it a plea for someone to republish the collected works of Anne Royall.)

Many writers say that they write what they do because the novels they want to read don’t exist.

I don’t think about my own book quite that way, but to me one of the most frightening things about writing fiction is the corollary to this idea: namely, if you have an individual voice and any skill whatsover, it will occur to you one day, as you obsess over the problems with your latest draft, that you are the only one who can fix it.

Obviously trusted readers are necessary and invaluable; their advice will help when your own vision falters. And once the book is in its nearly final stage, a good editor can pare away the fat and tell you, in a way that shows understanding of your project, what’s missing or not working. But no one else is going to be able to produce the actual words that will make the story work the way you want it to.

Because I’ve been preoccupied with this idea while writing lately, here’s the “You’re On Your Own” or “Revise, Revise, Revise” installment of writers’ quotes.
 

“Simply stated, maybe too simply, it is the writer’s business to have something of his own to say; second, to say it in his own language and style.” — Katherine Anne Porter

“I think and think for a sentence, and every sentence I think for is wrong, I know it. Then, all at once, the illuminating sentence comes to me. Everything clicks into place.” — Jean Rhys (pictured)

“In the case of a story, the beginning and the end always reveal themselves to me, but not what happens between the starting point and the finish line. There are writers who say that they don’t work this way, that for them the beginning is sufficient, later they look for the best ending, the best solution. I know the beginning and the end, and I have to figure out what happens between them for the story itself, and I can be wrong. So I have to start again when I realize this.” — Jorge Luis Borges

“There is much that I like in the book — it seems to me more simply and clearly written than its predecessors and ingeniously constructed to avoid the tedium of the time sequence (I had learned something from my continual rereading of that remarkable novel The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford), but until I reached the final part I did not realize the formidable problem I had set myself.” — Graham Greene, on The End of the Affair

“You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives. You [can] thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.” — Mark Twain
 

Prior literary quips, observations, instructions, and warnings: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Fiction writers who borrow from life often dodge inquiries about what’s true in their work, causing readers to see them as cagey or coy. But unless you’re writing strict autobiography and just changing names, these kinds of questions are difficult to answer honestly.

In some sections of my own book, fact and fiction have become so tightly fused that I’d have to pull them apart line by line; in other sections, there’s no truth at all, except insofar as the things the narrator does and endures draw in some way on my own hazily understood anxieties.
 

Even small changes of timing, circumstance, and location create different narrative logic and evoke distinct moods, and cumulatively these alterations can be so significant that it’s misleading to speak in terms of a story diverging from fact at a single point — i.e., “it’s all true, except she didn’t really kill him” or “his mother was exactly like that, although she was suffering from Alzheimer’s rather than Parkinson’s.”

After publishing The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem wrote The Disappointment Artist, an entire book of essays focused on the actual events that inspired the novel. He did this not only to satisfy his readers’ curiosity, but to remind himself of the way things really happened.
 

Novelist Alexander Chee and I have been looking forward to The Blue Hour, Lilian Pizzichini’s forthcoming biography of the enigmatic Jean Rhys (pictured above). Our excited chatter about it at Facebook sent me off to some of Rhys’ seemingly contradictory remarks about Quartet, the novel inspired by her affair with Ford Madox Ford.

In “Chronotope and Intertext: The Case of Jean Rhys’ Quartet,” Betsy Draine writes:

Just about everyone but Jean Rhys has understood her first novel, Quartet, to be an autobiographical act of vengeance against her erstwhile lover and literary patron, Ford Madox Ford. Rhys herself found that view appalling. In a letter written a good thirty years after the publication of Quartet, Rhys claimed: “I was astonished when so many people thought it an autobiography from page 1 onwards and told me it should never have been written. Well, I had to write it. Even in American it was supposed to be a roman à clef… I think it is angry and uneven as you say, but it has some life and it wasn’t an autobiography, as everyone here seemed to imagine though some of it was lived of course” (Letters 171).

The blurring in the critical imagination between Rhys’ life and her work is attributable both to the author’s strong identification with her characters’ emotions, and sometimes their circumstances, and to interviewers’ and readers’ desire to conflate the woman with her protagonists. Of the conversation she had with Rhys over five days in 1970, Mary Cantwell writes:

I had suspected, in fact assumed, that Jean Rhys had based her novels on her life. But to meet her, I discovered, was to be simultaneously introduced to Sasha, Julia, Marya, Anna, even Mrs. Rochester. Whenever I asked about one of them — Jean Rhys’ women they’ve been called — she replied with “I.”

While it’s natural for readers to be curious about the connection between a writer’s life and work, sometimes the puzzle is not solvable. Rhys herself ultimately emphasized not “the individual Writer” but Writing itself. (Caps in original.)

“I can only do the one thing,” she told Cantwell — resignedly recounting her failed efforts as chorus girl, shopkeeper, cosmetics, mixer, and cook — and in Rhys’ view, that one thing was fraught. “However much you cut, or how careful you are, your own feeling will come through. But on the whole I’m rather sorry for everybody… I’ve reached that stage.”

An excerpt from my novel(-in-progress) is up at Narrative Backstage today, alongside audio readings from James Salter, Donald Hall, and Ann Beattie, new fiction from Richard Bausch, Stuart Dybek, Josh Weil, and Charlie Smith, new nonfiction from Rick Bass, and much more.

Originally this post included a disquisition on the use of autobiographical elements in made-up stories, but I thought the better of that long-windedness. Suffice it to say that the excerpt is called fiction for a reason. Here’s how it starts:

When the Flock Changed

My mother was a preacher until the cops shut her down. Well, okay, she kept at it halfheartedly in our living room for a while, but the fire had wiped out not just her warehouse church and the halfway house she ran out of it, but her passion, her commitment, and maybe even, deep down, her belief. All those years of serving the Lord, of taking to the streets to let the homeless and addicted and just plain lonely know what a friend they had in Jesus, and now she had no proper house of worship, no sea of folding chairs or repository of sermons on tape. She was practically a layperson. Worse, her flock knew it and was slipping away.

The church ladies saw the blaze as a sign of God’s disfavor. Mom had created a makeshift dorm in the sanctuary, a commercial space, and one of the guys had fallen asleep with a joint still burning. Maybe she shouldn’t have spent so much time ministering to the riffraff when there were perfectly normal people’s problems to attend to. Our Heavenly Father wouldn’t have let the church burn down if she’d been in tune with Him and His Word. So the flock was saying.

I think my little sister, Faith, and I knew, even as we stood that sunny August morning beside the scorched remains of folding chairs and tambourines, worried for our friends who’d been living there, that the church would end up shuttered. As Faith paced and kicked up anthills, I surveyed the wreckage. A shard of my friend Luke’s rainbow bong glinted along the periphery. He’d only been out of the mental hospital for a few months and didn’t need any more trouble. Glancing over to make sure the cops weren’t watching, I stooped and slid the iridescent glass into my pocket. A second later one of the officers turned. “Behind the yellow tape,” he yelled, motioning toward me as if directing traffic. “This is a crime scene.”

Three policemen took measurements, one shouted into a CB, another scrawled notes. Mom batted her eyelashes, tried to talk to them, but they weren’t especially interested in what she had to say. The detectives had already interviewed her. “Step aside, ma’am,” one of them said.

Our mother wasn’t used to being treated like that. She was plump, sure, but she had a pretty face, a large chest, and thick blond hair. She had yellow cat eyes that she insisted were also blond. Mom was like a high school cheerleader for God—and, like a cheerleader, she was accustomed to deference. And a large following.

In the weeks that followed, Mom stood in the backyard, hands in her pockets, staring at the pool, until standing still became too much effort. Then she dropped into a lounge chair. As the position of the sun changed, she followed the shade, staying close enough to the water to dip her feet in and glide them back and forth. But even these desultory activities failed to give full expression to her ennui, and at last she took to her bed. She’d sleep till around noon. Then she’d venture to the kitchen for coffee to fortify her for the grueling afternoon lineup of Hawaii Five-O and Carol Burnett Show reruns.

She announced that she’d no longer be driving Faith and me to school. “We live close enough for y’all to just march your own little butts down there,” she said. “And unfortunately, I’m sure you can also find your way home.” Then she lay back down and pulled the sheets over her head. A whiff of sour air escaped from the covers. They smelled like old people and old people’s problems, and I vowed that I would shower twice a day for the rest of my life so my bed would smell only of shampoo and deodorant soap and maybe some exotic perfume.

If you’d like to read the whole thing now, it’ll set you back $3. (Or you can submit to the current contest and gain access to all of Narrative Backstage.) When the spring issue of the magazine goes live online, you can read the piece for free, and eventually the print version will be available at your local bookstore.

In case you’re wondering, “When the Flock Changed” isn’t the title of my book. I’m keeping that part to myself for now.

For years I’ve hoarded some of my stranger and darker experiences, with the intent of twisting parts of them into my novel. My narrator is not — and never was supposed to be — me, but I’ve inflicted many events from my own life on her. Even when they didn’t fit.

Recently I’ve been writing nonfiction about some of these experiences. Initially the essays felt like a distraction from the larger, far more urgent (pretend the last four words are encased in giant quotation marks) work of my book, not to mention uncomfortably revealing. But now I believe getting them out of my system is helping me focus on the story I’m really trying to tell.

The vast accumulation of crazy things I need to fictionalize and fit into my novel somehow had become the major impediment to finishing the book — the reason the story was so unwieldy and bloated. I’m guessing this is a common problem for first novelists.

Now I’m trying to stay mindful of Twain’s advice: “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”
 

Photo mosaic of a thunderstorm over Miami swiped from Eugenia y Julian.

American creative writing instruction, in my experience, tends to discourage would-be novelists from working with philosophical concepts. Large, abstract ideas are seen as the province of scientists and Nobel laureates. Everyone else, the thinking goes, should stay squarely in the realm of concrete troubles like adultery or thievery or murder.

But don’t the best novels — Crime and Punishment, for instance, or The Sea, The Sea or Disgrace — blend the two? Aren’t we interested in the reasons for and implications of characters’ predicaments and actions?
 

In my favorite Walker Percy interview, an annotated 1974 conversation with scholar Bradley R. Dewey, the author reveals that The Moviegoer was a story in search of a philosophical framework until he read Kierkegaard.

Recently I was commiserating with a writer friend about the trouble I have switching between different parts of my book. She had a surprisingly practical suggestion: Give each part its own soundtrack. Listen to different music as you work on each section, and make sure it’s the same music every time. And then, she said, the words just flow out.

In essence, you’re training yourself the way Pavlov trained his poor dogs. But with fewer harnesses and wires, and considerably less detachment.

I’ve yet to try it but hope to create some playlists soon. Until then — since I need some new music anyway — I’m trawling Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes archives and listening to Katherine Lanpher’s Must Have Festival interviews for ideas.

Bishop was a famously, almost proudly unproductive poet. She was such a perfectionist that The New Yorker actually pleaded with her to part with some of her manuscripts and send them in.

Sometimes, when paralyzed by self-loathing after too many days without writing, or after weeks squandered on incremental changes, I reread her correspondence. It was from her letters that I first learned some writers don’t put pen to paper every day. Her dry spells, sudden spurts of inspiration, and periods of tinkering remind me that there’s no one way to write, that all is not lost just because I fall off the wagon for a week or two.
 

Next year the Library of America will publish Elizabeth Bishop: Collected Poems and Other Writings.

The book includes correspondence, stories, translations, reviews, drafts of unfinished poems (if you missed the debate about these, go here), and, best of all, some personal essays I’ve never seen. In “The U.S.A. School of Writing,” Bishop recalls taking a job at a shady, correspondence-based writing school during the Great Depression. She responded to students’ submissions under the name Fred G. Margolies.

When I met a friend to see a show last fall, I turned up disheveled and withdrawn, with only seven of my fingernails painted, and I tripped on the stairs as we were descending to our seats. He caught my arm before I could plummet. “What’s going on with you, Maud?” he said.

“I’ve become feral,” I told him. “I’m writing like a madwoman.”

Apart from putting in my time at work, it was my first outing in more than a month. Just maneuvering through the crowds and lights in Times Square without scratching out anyone’s eyes was a feat.
 

Lately I’ve slipped into a similar phase, so I was amused on the train yesterday morning to read these comments from William Maxwell’s 1955 speech, “The Writer as Illusionist,” collected in the Library of America’s forthcoming William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories.

As a result of too long and too intense concentration, the novelist sooner or later begins to act peculiarly. During the genesis of his book, particularly, he talks to himself in the street; he smiles knowingly at animals and birds; he offers Adam the apple, for Eve, and with a half involuntary movement of his right arm imitates the writhing of the snake that nobody knows about yet. He spends the greater part of the days of his creation in his bathrobe and slippers, unshaven, his hair uncombed, drinking water to clear his brain, and hardly distinguishable from an inmate in an asylum.

At the core of Maxwell’s speech is the idea that “Writers — narrative writers — are people who perform tricks.” The writer, says Maxwell, “has everything in common with the vaudeville magician except this:”

The writer must be taken in by his own tricks. Otherwise, the audience will begin to yawn and snicker. Having practiced more or less incessantly for five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years, knowing that the trunk has a false bottom and the opera hat a false top, with the white doves in a cage ready to be handed to him from the wings and his clothing full of unusual deep pockets containing odd playing cards and colored scarves knotted together and not knotted together and the American flag, he must begin by pleasing himself. His mouth must be the first mouth that drops open in surprise, in wonder, as (presto chango!) this character’s heartache is dragged squirming from his inside coat pocket, and that character’s future has become his past while he’s not looking.

I think Maxwell’s right — or at least I find that my own writing only comes alive when I’m completely open to my characters’ needs and possibilities. As I read the speech, I thought of Rupert Thomson, who has cited Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow as a book he continually re-reads for inspiration, and who told me “The pleasure — and the pain — [of writing a novel] is precisely in not knowing [where it will lead].”

See also Kate Christensen’s remarks (i.e., “I don’t want to know what happens in advance, have zero interest in making my characters do my preconceived bidding”).

A couple weekends ago I was still struggling with that essay about my ex-boyfriend. I’ve tried to write about our relationship many times over the years, in at least five or six completely different ways, and I was starting to worry that this was just the latest abortive attempt when my friend Phil sat me down and told me to strip away the distance. He told me to make those years exactly as fucked-up on paper as they actually were in life.

I was annoyed. Easy for him to say, I thought. This is my fucking life, and my fucking essay, and I’ll write it the way I want.

But once the three-year-old in me quieted down, I tried following his advice. Now I’m putting the finishing touches on something that I’m not sure anyone related to me by blood or marriage should ever read.
 

Apart from Phil’s advice, it helped to hear Joshua Ferris read from his New Stories from the South contribution at McNally Robinson last week. “Ghost Town Choir” is funny, but, like his novel, it’s also sad, and true. I admired the piece when I read it in the anthology, but hearing it out loud, I was struck by Ferris’ deft interweaving of first-person narration with the most natural dialogue.

The action transpires in a trailer park following a break-up. I’ll include an excerpt here, from the perspective of a young boy whose mom has split with her boyfriend. As you’re reading, be sure to pause in your head every time someone speaks.

When I got home she was pulling up the kitchen floor. She had on her tool belt, and about a hundred tools were everywhere except for in her tool belt, and her bangs were sticking to her forehead like how they do when she cleans. About half the floor had been peeled away. “Mom, what are you doing?” “What does it look like?” she asked, without looking up. “Okay, but why?” “Because it’s brown,” she said. I didn’t understand. She looked up finally and swept her hand across the trailer. “Just look around you, Bob,” she said. “Everything’s so fucking brown. Aren’t you sick of it?” I didn’t know what she meant other than the TV and the lamps. And the fridge was brown. And the carpet. I guess I never noticed before how much brown we had with us in that trailer. “How come you don’t like brown?” I asked. Then she pulled up the floor really hard with some kind of gripper tool. Her face was scrunched up from it. That strip tore like saltwater taffy all the way across the floor to the carpet. Then she breathed.

“Brown,” she said, leaning back on her knees, “is the color of men.” She started to count off on her fingers again. “Brown smiles, because their teeth are brown. Brown mustaches from their tobacco. Brown penises swinging all over the place, standing up to say hi under the brown sheets. I’m sick of those fucking sheets, too,” she said. “They’re going. We’re starting all over again at the Wal-Mart.”

I went out to play in my fort, and when I came home, she had painted some of the house. I went in for some bologna, and my hand came back all cold and wet and white. She was at the kitchen sink, cleaning off the paintbrushes. “Oh, Bob, she said, “I just finished with that. Now look what you’ve done.” “Mom,” I said. “You painted the fridge?” She took one of the paintbrushes and smoothed out the handle of the fridge where my handprint was. “Why’d you paint the fridge?” I asked. “Weren’t you sick of putting your food in a cold turd?” she asked. “Don’t you want a fridge that’s white, like in the commericials?” I looked at it up close. It looked dirty still because the brown showed through the new paint. “Don’t you ever just get sick of your old life?” she asked me. “Don’t you ever want change? Even if it’s just a color? Just some stupid change?”

I can’t write like that, but it’s good to have something to aspire to.

Image of Gainesville’s Hidden Village Apartments found here.