I am working on a novel. I have no idea what I’m doing, and I think that this is fairly common. I tried on a couple of different accoutrements to aid me in my task - outlines, formal constraints, that sort of thing - but what always spurs me on to the next chapter is reading. Both in terms of ideas that are sparked within the things I read, and in the fact that I am exceedingly difficult to please, and at a certain point, the pickiest eaters have to accept responsibility for themselves and take their place in the kitchen.
There are two essential halves of my fiction writing, or rather, manifestations that I keep separate. They derive from two similar but stylistically distinct influences. In the main I write from a certain strain of literary realism, after Alice Munro, and a strain of magic, after Philip K. Dick and M. John Harrison.
I used to accompany my mother to her psychiatric appointments in advance of my own, being driven down from Loveland to Denver. I would have been 8 or 9 or 10. While my mom spoke to her shrink I would sit in the lobby and read, and the only magazines kept current (or that went unpilfered) were Good Housekeeping and The New Yorker. So it was The New Yorker, with its obtusely humorous cartoons, that I read.
I have two memories of this biweekly reading session. The first was a full-page recreation of the violent pornographic painting (forewarning: don’t google this, or you will probably end up on a list) “The Guitar Lesson” by Balthus, which deeply unsettled me. The second was a fiction entry which came to represent realist fiction broadly in my young mind. I can’t remember the name of the story or who wrote it, but it involved a strained marriage, a pregnant wife (her swollen belly and breasts described in detail as grotesquery) and a climactic carjacking in Manhattan. The emotional coldness and physical threat scared me.
So from a young age I developed an antipathy to high art and literary realism, associating them with bitter physical and emotional violence.* Then in college I fell in love with a very malignant person, and it was something like a conversion experience — I had built my life, over two years, around a compulsive liar. Truth hollowed out all that spent time and left it strange to me. The person I thought I knew persisted physically in the world but the person in my memory didn’t really exist, as though she were a ghost. I had only seen her weeks prior, but I couldn’t remember her face.
So it was an experience of the uncanny, this entire stretch of my life that did not seem right no matter how much I dwelt upon it, like someone had gone through it all and moved key objects just out of place.
When I first started trying to write around this experience — trying to write about bad love, denaturing and depersonalizing love, as subtle and silent as I knew it to be — a teacher pointed me toward “Royal Beatings” by Alice Munro. Not knowing, or caring, that she was the ur-New Yorker writer, with over 60 published stories in the magazine, it was a revelation. The story was tight and perfect and mysterious and it justified itself. Munro typifies all the good and bad elements of literary realist fiction and she never, ever misses. I couldn’t be a reactionary about the form anymore. It made me want to write toward it. And like everyone else, I continually fail to be her.
More recently I’ve eschewed trying to be Munro and have written toward the same concerns via the fantastic. My origins in that vein are a little bit less malevolent — when the football games I went to with my dad failed to be interesting, I would shuffle out of the stands toward a grassy spot near the end zone and sit cross-legged in the snow to read an omnibus of Philip K. Dick short fiction. Dick’s paranoia and porous consciousnesses, his nuclear apocalypses are suffused in my mind with the sharp concussive blasts; across the field from where I sat, a group of army reserve stood at attention with an old artillery cannon filled with blanks, fired off whenever CSU scored a touchdown or field goal.
The best of my nascent genre writing approaches the sort of bewilderment and dread of those stories (I hope) but it’s a weird thing to aim for. Most of the time my stories are not as neat as I want them to be; Dick was generally as adept at storytelling as he was in mood-setting, not shying from Twilight Zone twists and vivid, often devastating exclamation point endings.
My dirty secret is that I never know what I’m doing. I understand this is very much the standard experience for writing novels, but short fiction? Any novelist will tell you that short stories are far harder to tame. I have this notion that novels are all possibility, growing things that require guiding and trimming, whereas short stories are the statue in the marble — they don’t care what you want, they are what they are, and it’s your job as the writer to discover that permanent essence. A story can only be one thing. You can be up to it or not up to it. When you are, it’s a supersonic bullet, a rare bird, an austere palace. When you’re not… You know when you play yourself into a corner in solitaire? It’s like that.
I had accumulated a fair number of story drafts that guided me toward what I felt certain were dead ends; I wrote what the story wanted me to write and they weren’t tight or perfect or austere. They were open, imagistic, slightly opaque. Either I wasn’t up to what they required, or they were just failures, grist for the mill of some better story.
That’s what I thought, at least until I was gently urged toward M. John Harrison by my mentor. He was, at a young age, a contemporary of Dick’s, and is still actively writing (his latest novel, The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, is excellent, and it won the Goldsmith prize for experimental fiction last year). He’s also somewhat infamous for his heretical disdain for tenets of genre — he is anti-Tolkien, anti-worldbuilding, even on occasion anti-storytelling. He’s an eccentric, which is really just a term for “admirable crank”; when I poked him for details on his process in writing The Sunken Land… he politely scolded me. He’s probably fielded such curiosity for half a century.
Harrison has written particularly odd spins on fantasy (the Viriconium cycle in the 70’s) and sci-fi (the Light trilogy in the ‘00s), which can only tenuously be pinned down to either epithet. But my interest is drawn to his contemporary, occult-adjacent stories, of which The Sunken Land… is the latest (The Course of the Heart is my favorite of his novel-length works, but some of his short fiction, eg “Cicisbeo”, is also in this vein). These are the novels that I want to write: ostensibly realist but with strange things, like numinous influence, like alien minds, like romantic love, leaking from their corners. His books are full of mystery that you have to submerse into. You either conclude that it sabotages the work, or fulfills it.
Most importantly, Harrison’s work can often resemble those frustrating stories of mine that predate my encounters with it. I’ve thought a lot lately about what it means to be punk, in the sense of ethos. I mean punk in the nature of its reaction to 1970s prog rock: the outright rejection of technical proficiency, critical embrace, or intellectual abstraction as necessary to art, or being an artist. Thus punk music contains the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, but more importantly the Shags, Daniel Johnston, Beat Happening. In writing I think less of the Beats or gonzo journalism than I think of Henry Darger or Robert Walser, or indeed M. John Harrison. An embrace of the punk ethos requires that we see beyond common dictates of form, execution and good taste. It must contend that value persists and flourishes even when the thing you get isn’t what you’d expect it to be.
So I’m reevaluating the misshapen, weird stories that I’ve written, that don’t seem to have a diamond-tipped flourish for an ending or seem preoccupied with image or mood. It’s hard to say whether I’m getting at something real with this dissatisfaction with rules, or whether I’m looking to excuse the impatience and imperfection in my own work, a tendency to embrace mess because it’s easy. But it’s hard to read and appreciate Harrison’s work and conclude that it needs more than what he gives it; there’s a difference between being true to the strangeness of a story and being half-assed.
This perspective has also made writing the novel a little bit easier, made the scattershot weirdness of my inspiration easier to take. I have constraints and sometimes I break them; there are things it wants to be and I fight those notions or I don’t. But it’s most important to me that I get at what the story wants to be about, in whatever byzantine way it’s about anything. I had been thinking that it’s harder to judge the success of a formally experimental work, over that of a formally conventional work, but the more I read the more I start to believe that writing anything at all requires the same quality of hubris. Whether you’re punk or not comes down to whether it requires permission to flourish.
* Another notable offender: My Brother Sam Is Dead by Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier, my first taste of white American miserabilist fiction. I feel like I must have mentioned that before.
Luv this piece and would LOVE to hear anything and everything about your novel!