Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Fourteen)
I have a monkey on my back. The first time I noticed it I was in Grade 2. I remember my six-year-old self going round and round my house in a snow suit while a little voice inside said–you need to work harder. You shouldn’t just be swaggering about in the snow like this. Don’t play. Be serious. Get to work.
I still hear the chiding voice. When I was a reporter, it was even louder. The desk editor Don Grant used to shout at me–don’t think, Susan! Write! I did what he said: I wrote. In those days, there were five editions of a daily newspaper and when I was covering a fast-breaking story I’d have to update the story four times a day. Veteran reporters used to call in their stories, composing it into the phone while they glanced at their notes, and somebody in the office typed up what they said. The ability of these veterans amazed me; then I learned to do it too.
But writing a novel isn’t like phoning in a newspaper story. And the voice in my head isn’t helpful. Oh, it gets me to sit down at my desk every day. But once I’m in my chair, not only do I need to think, I need to play. In fact, a lot of novel writing is about taking your time instead of rushing; it’s about playing with ideas and letting yourself day dream.
So I have a new plan as I start the last section of my book. I am going to play all the way through to the end. I am not going to spend hours and hours revising as I go along, which is what I’ve been doing until now. I’m going to dictate my final chapters, (yes, I know, that’s a link to phoning in the story); get my chapters typed up, and then I’ll spend the rest of the day swimming and wool gathering and generally goofing off.
Until the monkey on my back ruins everything by shrieking, “You really should get back to work!”
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Thirteen)
Image by Jonathan Moreau
In my last blog, I admitted that I’m moving out of the middle of the novel. What does that mean, really? It means that I’m starting the drive to the finish line and there are a number of plotting details I need to be clear about before I go there. So I’ll be taking time away from the blog to think through different scenarios and see which ones are going to work best for my story. And then I’ll report back here on how it’s going.
Meanwhile, I’ll be reminding myself of Alberto Manguel’s axiom: what the story needs is the first law of fiction. Not which of my favourite passages I want to keep. And not the ending that I had my heart set on but the passages and ending that move my story forward. So I may throw away some of the triggering ideas that started me writing my story–if the story asks for that sacrifice.
But most of all, I’ll be dealing with plot, or the lack of it. The late Hugh Kenner (who borrowed the axiom from another writer) once explained plot to me this way: the king dies, the queen dies–that is not a plot. But the king dies and the queen dies of grief is a plot because there is a causal connection between the first event and the second.
Manguel and Kenner are both critics and neither of them would be foolish enough to utter a rule that’s set in stone. Most axioms about writing are only guidelines because fiction writing is an evolving tradition. Many younger writers are moving away from plot and giving the reader instead the experience of being closer to a self, as the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard put it. And the New Yorker critic James Wood claims plot works like a burdensome and predictable caravan in most contemporary novels. I know what he means. The last thing I want to do is freight my story with a creaking plot line.
So I’m really talking about my story’s trajectory. How will it evolve? There’s something exciting about the last part of the novel writing process. The uneasy, doldrumish feeling of being in the middle of the novel is shifting into a faster, more thrilling sensation. The joy of finishing is like plunging backwards over a fizzing waterfall. Or maybe it’s more like the rush of spring light that starts to brighten our lives. The momentum brings with it the gathering up of confidence as characters and events coalesce.
There will be time enough when I’m revising to start eating anxiety pancakes again.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Twelve)
I said I was going to write about Barry Michels and the Shadow, as Jung calls the part of ourselves we hide from the world. Michels is a neo-Jungian therapist who advises Hollywood screen writers to get in touch with their Shadow because it helps them be more creative. When the Shadow is involved, your writing has creative flow, according to Michels. He’s more practical than theoretical, and he offers a number of psychological methods he calls “the tools” that are designed to help anyone, not just writers, get in touch with their creativity.
I’ve tried our a few of Michels methods, like imagining my Shadow is sitting in the room with me when I’m talking to a publisher about a book. His advice helped me to stay focused and confident. Michels has another technique to calm performance fears. It’s called “Dust,” and you literally imagine everyone in your audience covered in two inches of dust. Still another of his techniques, “Cosmic Rage,” consists of silently shouting “Fuck you, fuck you!” to anyone who intimidates you.
A lot of what Michels is saying is really about training your unconscious to be on your side. For instance, before I go to bed, I sometimes ask my unconscious to solve a problem I’m having in my narrative. I know it sounds wonky but the answer often arrives with the daylight.
Anyway, this morning, I thought of Michels when I woke up. I had been dreaming of my character, Dale Paul, who runs a dead pool on aging or frail celebrities. In the dream, I felt submerged in his life and his problems and there was a doleful sense of the world ending. Just before I wrote this blog I realized the dream was telling me Dale Paul’s story is almost finished. That’s right. I’m no longer in the middle of a novel. I am getting closer to the end.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Eleven)
Yesterday I mentioned the temptations of a novelist. The phrase was coined by the late Arthur Koestler, the European novelist who wrote Darkness at Noon. In his essay, The Novelist’s Temptations, Koestler said that writing a novel was like sitting in front of an open window with your feet in a hot water bucket. Koestler borrowed the image from the Russian master Turgenev, who actually wrote his novels by an open window with his feet in a bucket because Turgenev felt the hot water stirred his unconscious.
In his essay, Koestler said the novelist’s temptation were threefold: either to stick their head out the window, shut the window, or peer at the world through a small hole in the closed curtain. He said none of these actions helped the novelist write. Instead what he recommended is that the novelist keep their window wide open to the world so they know what is going on around them. But they stay at their task with their feet in the hot water bucket.
The important thing, Koestler claimed, was that the novelist keep up with what is happening outside his study. He believed that these things didn’t necessarily need to be in the pages of the novel, but they needed to be in the novelist’s mind when he or she wrote their story. According to Koestler, knowledge of the world indirectly informs the novelist’s story, taking it to greater depths of understanding.
Well, I agree. But Koestler didn’t say that sticking your head out the open window is always wrong. He said that in some periods, to care about politics is a temptation for the artist. And in other periods, to not care about politics is a temptation. I believe we are in the latter period where not caring is a temptation so my head is going to go out the window when I see a good reason for it. Tomorrow, I promise, my thoughts on Barry Michels, the shrink who talked about why writers need to be in touch with their Shadow, the Jungian aspect of the personality that is the sum of all the unpleasant qualities we like to hide.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (day ten)
I know I said I was going to write about a Hollywood shrink called Barry Michels today who has good advice for writers. But I’m moving Barry to tomorrow’s blog because yesterday I ran into one of the temptations of the novelist. What’s that? Simple. It’s called politics.
Last night I went to the meeting at City Hall to discuss the proposal by Porter Airlines to bring bigger jets and more passengers to the island airport. A crowd of about 500 showed up. About forty in the audience were backing Porter. They wore round yellow Porter buttons on their lapels. A sweet, fresh-faced young woman politely offered me a Porter button as I went in. I politely refused it and told her I felt an expanded airport would make Toronto’s air and water even more polluted than it already is. She recoiled in shock.
As the evening ground on, I found myself staring at the Porter contingent, trying to figure them out. It struck me that they really do believe they are doing Toronto a favour by bringing more business to the city through their airlines. So why can’t we make it bigger and better, they reason. A number of my friends fly Porter. They’ve told me it is a friendly and well-run airline without the hassles of Pearson. I believe them. Porter seems to have done a good job building up its clientele.
There’s only one problem: the airport is making a mess of our waterfront. Residents in the buildings by the harbour report a new sticky black residue on their balconies since Porter expanded in 2006. They suffer from window-rattling noise from the planes. In some cases, the planes take off only 200 metres away from their homes–a distance that would never be allowed at Pearson, where the homes around the airport have been built at a required distance. Unfortunately, many of the downtown condos were put up before Porter increased its passenger numbers to well over two million a year.
People are starting to move out from some of the downtown co-ops because they can’t stand the new traffic jams on their streets, along with the noise and the bad air, and likely more will go if the airport expands. Sailors are upset; so are arts organizers like Tamara Bernstein who runs concerts by the harbour. She says the noise of the planes taking off interferes with their public events.
So why doesn’t the Porter crowd understand that their airport has a noxious impact on the environment? Because they claim it doesn’t. Not a “significant” impact anyway. The Toronto Board of Health has recently said no to the expansion because it says the airport is bad for our health. But the Toronto Port Authority who runs the airport says the environmental impact is not “significant.” It’s hard not to think of the backers of the airport expansion as frogs in a slowly boiling pot, frogs that ribbett reassurances that yes, the water is a bit warmer than it was, but not overly warm, and certainly not tropical temperatures, at least not yet.
Last night a man from Transport Canada spoke about its responsibility to certify the new jets that Porter wants to bring in. He never mentioned that it is his job to look at jet emissions or jet noise although it is his job to see if the noise and emissions are bad for the environment. He talked a lot about making sure the construction of the proposed extended runways didn’t interfere with the flights that are on going at the airport. His words weren’t exactly reassuring.
Why can’t our public officials be more honest about what we’re doing to the environment? Is it too scary to face up to what’s happening so it’s easier to close your eyes and rush forward with business plans that make a deteriorating situation worse? Another big problem is the media. These days they don’t do investigative reporting unless it falls into their laps like the Rob Ford crack video. Newspapers can’t spare the money for this kind of reporting because the Internet has taken away much of their advertising revenue. TV news still gets most of their information from the dailies so they aren’t big on investigative reporting either. The result? The public is unable to make informed decisions about issues like the airport expansion.
And that brings me back to the temptations of the novelist. Yes, I am getting politically involved again because our journalists aren’t writing courageously about what’s happening.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (day nine)
There’s a term for what I’m feeling, the winter blahs. The blahs have come upon me slowly because I usually love winter. I love the cold air and how it helps my thinking, and I love winter sports like cross country skiing. But yesterday I couldn’t ski for more than half an hour because the ground at High Park was mostly covered with ice. Our high winds last week had blown the snow away. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been plenty cold this January but we haven’t had a great deal of snow. Until today.
The view from my office window is bleak. I’m looking at my garden through falling snow so fine it could be white dust motes. I have no energy. I am not interested in writing a new section of my novel. I am not even sure if I will be able to finish today’s blog, which I want to be short and comforting. So just to see what happens, I’m going to interview my main character, Dale Paul, and find out what he has to say about my listless mood:
Me: So what’s wrong with me, Dale Paul? Why aren’t I more interested in writing about you?
Dale Paul: I have no idea. You’re lazy is my guess. After all, there are few people as fascinating as me.
Me: That’s true. But even you seem pretty boring today.
Dale Paul: Look, I know what you’re trying to do. You insult me so I’ll beat you up. Well, I’m not going to put you through my word mill just because you’re looking for a little nastiness. Find someone else to punish you. I’m taking off.
Me: Where are you going?
Dale Paul: Wherever you aren’t, you idiotic, craven pusillanimous charade of a writer. Good-bye.
Me: Don’t go.
Dale Paul: I’ve gone. Try and find me. See if I care.
Me: Hey, I didn’t mean what I said. The sun is coming out as we speak.
Dale Paul: Blankety blank blank and then blank you….
(Gurgle, gurgle, hiss–the sound of a character disappearing down the bathtub drain.)
Tomorrow–some good advice to writers from Hollywood shrink Barry Michels.
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Four)
Yesterday I complained so much I feel almost cheerful today. Like many Canadians, I tend to revel in “a woe is me” attitude. Blame it on our weather. In the days when I did performance art, I once performed a show about self-pity called “Down and In” at the Detroit Institute of Modern Art.” Dressed in scarfs, shorts and toques, my fellow performer, Louise Garfield, and myself lowered ourselves into the gallery’s fountain chanting sad sack phrases. It was funny until we realized we couldn’t touch our microphones on stage. Then we really felt sorry for ourselves. So what did we do? We made our situation part of the show.
This is a good thing for me to remember because the labour of writing a novel, with its long, hard, dry spots and sometimes baffling dead ends, can make you feel sorry for yourself. According to the late teacher and novelist John Gardener, the profession of novel writing gives joy to a certain kind of person. But he warned that no other profession is so fraught with professional and spiritual difficulties. He should know. He died drunk driving his motorcyle.
Gardener wrote two excellent books about writing, The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist. That’s why he has my respect. He didn’t just write powerful novels; he taught fiction for over 20 years before he gave into his demons. (His brother died in a horrible farm accident while he was driving the machine that caused it.)
In other words, writing novels can be a painful way to spend your time. Yet it’s satisfying to live in the world of your imagination. Satisfying and seductive. Who has more freedom than the novelist? (On Monday, the long, dry hard spots of novel writing.)
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day three)
It’s been three days without much sun, and I’m three days into recording life in the middle of a novel. Lack of sunlight discourages me so I slept in this morning and woke up feeling especially grouchy and slow. It’s taken hours to put my seat in my chair. But I said I was going to write about questioning the art of fiction. So here goes.
I’ve been reading fiction by the younger writers like Sheila Heti, Tao Lin, Karl Ove Knaussgaard, Marie Calloway, Ben Lerner, Tamara Faith Berger, and many others for an essay I’m writing for the Globe. And what they’re doing has stopped my breath. It’s something new and it’s very autobiographical. They’re dispensing with some of fiction’s most important tropes. I don’t just mean a trope like plot although they mostly dispense with that too. I mean tropes like using a narrative mask. Instead they’re inserting themselves as the subject into their fictional stories. Sure, writers like Henry Miller and Proust have done this before but they’ve done it with a tinge of romanticism. These new young wonderful writers are not romantics. I’m calling them the New Unromantic Romantics because they report on the deepest, shallowest, creepiest and most unworthy feelings and thoughts that can go on in the mind of an individual. And the result? Their work is fascinating and original.
The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knaussgaard said he wants his writing to bring the reader “closer to a self.” That’s what happens in the books by these younger writers; they create a powerful and unique intimacy with the reader. I admit I am in awe. So how does the work by these writers affect day three in anxiety pancakes? When you’re prone to self doubt in the middle of the novel, one of the first questions to ask is–now, why aren’t I doing something other than I’m doing? So yeah, today I’m asking why I’m not writing a novel without a narrative mask and story arc. I mean, why aren’t I?
Now that’s something to brood on for a while, isn’t it?
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Two)
In my novel, The Dead Celebrities Club, I’m trying to work out if people are capable of change. I’ve always believed that people evolve rather than change. But some people do change drastically going right back to St. Paul who was zapped with god’s power when he was on his way to Damascus to arrest followers of Jesus.
Are these conversions authentic, or delusional? We live in a cynical age. I suspect most of us think someone who has been selfish and unethical is not going to undergo a conversion. And yet why not? Or if not a conversion, how about an evolution–which is more in keeping with my belief system. That is, I think a spiritual conversion may be as simple as extending your sympathy to the world beyond yourself.
In some ways, this philosophical issue is the least of my problems. It will unfold with the narrative, and my story telling brain will give me the answer.
My more practical issue is to keep writing, as I said yesterday. To put one foot in front of the other and keep moving. How do I do this? I daydream, I make notes, I look at research; then I talk some scenes from my story into a digital recorder and myself or my part-time assistant Mariel transcribes it. While I’m composing I think–you idiot, what on earth are you doing? This is absolute crap! You’ll need to go back and completely rewrite every page. ONLY NOT NOW. You have to go on. (Tomorrow: my number one bugaboo: why I question the act of writing fiction itself.)
Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel
I’ve decided I’d keep a diary about the ups and downs I go through writing my novel. Years ago, I did an investigation with art curator Peggy Gale into the relationship of anxiety to creativity. We discovered that some anxiety is necessary; it inspires us to write or make art but if there’s too much anxiety, the anxiety will shut down your creative powers.
I’m thinking about our insight into anxiety this morning. I’m half-way through a novel about a white collar criminal who runs a dead pool in prison where the prisoners bet on which of the list of aging or frail celebrities is going to die first. My character also goes through a spiritual change in prison. Or mimes going through a spiritual change. I keep changing my mind about this. It seems to me that people become their environments to a large extent so it’s possible he’s in a place that leads him to spiritual reflection and emotional change. But once he gets out, he goes back to his old ways.
But to begin. My main job right now is to keep writing. And that means keeping anxiety and self-doubt dialed down. I have a tendency to question what I’m doing, and ask–is this working? Those questions are like a meal of anxiety pancakes because I end up feeling stuffed with heavy, leaden feelings that lead me nowhere. Anyway, anxiety pancakes are my subject in this blog. I’ll try to post a few paragraphs every day. That’s a promise.