The Raw Intimate Experience of Reading the New (unromantic) Romantics

Karl Ove Knausgård image by Kjetil Ree (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Karl Ove Knausgaard is coming to the IFOA in October. Be sure to check him out. He has turned fiction on its head by using real names in his fictional work. I talked more about this in my essay in the Globe this spring: Here is the old unedited draft I wrote for the Globe, warts and all:

Growing older, it’s not only the wrinkles I notice, but a new sensibility created by a generation of younger writers. If I felt paranoid, their sensibility could rock my boat. But I love new frontiers so for me, their writing is a reason to get excited.

One of the leaders of the new writing, a generation I call “the new (unromantic) romantics,” is Karl Ove Knausgaard, a Norwegian novelist who has created an explicit and powerful autobiographical fiction that has been standing the literary world on its ear. This spring, the third volume of Knausgaard’s six novel series titled My Struggle is out in English. It follows the English translations of his first two novels. Three more volumes in English are coming soon.

I’ve read My Struggle: Book One and volume two titled A Man in Love, so I came prepared to Boyhood Island. But before I talk about Knausgaard’s fearless work let me explain why I see him as part of the new writing. While literary prizes are lost or won, and creative writing schools teach graduates how to shape story arcs, this brash new fiction has been finding a younger, less traditional audience for its very non-traditional approach.

Influenced by the confessional nature of the Internet, with its disregard for literary forms, the younger generation of fiction writers includes Sheila Heti, whose brainy, original novel How Should a Person Be? is quickly becoming a classic; Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station, a virtuoso tale of self-exposure; and Kate Zambreno, who wrote Heroines, a daring personal account about the condescending way modernist fictional heroines were treated.

Countless others under forty are part of this gritty new sensibility, novelists like Tamara Faith Berger, author of the vivid, transgressive Maidenhead, and Marie Calloway who wrote about her sexual exploits in the unclassifiable, what purpose did I serve in your life.

Most fiction offers us a story or plot. But the audacious fictional accounts of the new romantics often have little time for narrative masks or literary frames. They aren’t interested in post-modernism either and its fascination with how stories are told. Disclosure is the spirit of our age, and their work seems designed to bring the reader “close to a self,” as Knausgaard puts it.

For instance, when Sheila Heti started writing How Should A Person Be? she purposefully did everything a writer of realistic fiction is NOT supposed to do. She disregarded the modernist notion that the novelist should be invisible behind his or her work and she ignored the dictum about coming up with the brilliant, telling detail that conveys the world of a story.

The authorial signature of this generation vis-a-vis most modern novelists is like comparing a naked story teller to one in an Edwardian ball gown. Or maybe it’s more like the difference between a very intelligent reality TV contestant and an English professor schooled in Victorian literature.

Why do I call them romantics? This new generation of fiction writers makes the self their subject and describing the self and its emotions was a preoccupation of the early Romantics.

Of course, writers like Henry Miller and Marcel Proust have made themselves the subject of their fiction before, but their work is washed through with romanticism and its view of the writer as an Olympian explorer of the human spirit. No such romantic notion of the writer shows up in the writing of the new generation who report on the deepest, shallowest, creepiest and most unworthy feelings and thoughts that can go on inside an individual.

Ultimately, there’s nothing dignified or heroic in their stance, although the authoritative “I” who writes the story always gets the last word, and there’s a tinge of Olympian power in that.

Knausgaard, at 45, goes further than most of them. His fiction is controversial because it says extremely revealing things about real people in his life without bothering to disguise their identities.

In interviews, Knausgaard says that the naming of real people is an ethical issue but he believes that to create literature of lasting value, a writer must carve a freedom outside the rules of society. That means putting honesty before consideration. These days he tends to beat himself up over the pain his fiction caused his family. But when he was writing My Struggle he put his art first. He had felt bored and overwhelmed by the millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series whose stories were all about made-up people in a made-up world. He preferred genres like diaries and essays that focused on the voice of the writer’s personality.

So in all three English volumes he immerses the reader in his Norwegian time and place without worrying much about narrative structure. Knausgaard excels instead at describing sensory details, whether he’s writing about the shelves of sweets he saw in stores as a boy, or his deep shuddering hatred of his tyrannical father. It’s the depth of his far ranging feelings and philosophical reflections that make his autobiographical work read like fiction. (I used to teach a course in the memoir at York University and most contemporary memoirs describe a less complicated journey through one particular kind of experience.)

Critics sometimes compare Knausgaard to Marcel Proust, and the two are certainly alike in their flowing descriptions about the minutiae of daily life. One critic said it took Proust seven pages to describe a man turning in his bed. You could say the same sort of the thing about Knausgaard. But the similarity stops there.

Proust was writing elegantly about retrieving lost time and he sometimes disguised gay relationships as heterosexual. Knausgaard, on the other hand, is telling shamelessly personal truths with an excoriating honesty that feels masochistic. For instance, he incorporates a description of his bowel movements because he sees “shitting” as worthy of attention too.

In the first two widely praised volumes of My Struggle, he deals with his difficulties as a boy, the son of an English teacher and a nurse, and later, his frustrations with trying to write while he helps his wife raise their children. In volume two, although he accepted child-raising as the duty of a progressive husband, he walked around the streets of Stockholm “with a furious nineteenth-century man inside me.”

In volume one, Knausgaard deals with his father’s death from alcoholism, and describes the experience of cleaning up his father’s childhood home, where furniture has been burnt and excrement has been smeared on the furniture and the walls.

In this third volume, Boyhood Island, he exhibits the same hypnotic descriptive powers displayed in the first two volumes. And his father and his pernicious influence on Knausgaard emerges as the central theme. He takes almost four hundred pages to tell us how the man terrified him, (not by beatings or starving a child), but through a continuous vicious deflating of a child’s natural boisterous spirit.

In one of the childhood scenes, Knausgaard describes himself looking out the window and watching a cat hunting a mouse. What could be more clichéd than a cat chasing a mouse? Yet he brings the mouse’s fear and the cat’s playful cruelty to life on the page. As I read on, it was obvious the cat and the mouse were a metaphor for Knausgaard’s relationship with his father.

Here he is describing his father in volume three: “I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear …His footsteps on the stairs—was he coming to see me? The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth… And then his voice: Sitting here now, hearing it in my inner ear, I almost start crying.”

In adolescence, other children called Knausgaard “a Jessie,” high school slang for an androgynous person. Knausgaard knew it wasn’t true; he was a teenage boy who loved boyish things like sports and pop music but he still suffered over not fitting in.

Knausgaard’s father, who was modern enough to share household chores with his wife, had a Victorian remedy for his child’s problems; he would lash out when the boy expressed his feelings. As a result, Knausgaard’s childhood struggle to be himself may have set up a life pattern that’s repeated in his fiction. First, there’s self-expression, followed by anger and retribution. (Some of Knausgaard’s family tried to sue him when the first volume was published, then dropped their case.)

Luckily, Knausgaard’s mother was a kinder, gentler person. She encouraged Knausgaard in his love of books although, mysteriously, she didn’t protect him from his father’s verbal abuse or cruelty. When the pair separate, the mother seems weirdly detached. Either she couldn’t share her emotional grief over a failed relationship, or like many women of her generation, she was relieved to rid herself of a difficult husband.

So Boyhood Island is another triumph for Knausgaard.

However, Boyhood Island didn’t always hold my attention and I longed for more of his philosophical reflections on adult life. Maybe agency is necessary to sustain a lengthy narrative, and agency is what children lack. Knausgaard himself points out that the landscape in childhood is different. In childhood, he writes “every rock, every tree, has a meaning and because everything is seen for the first time and because it is seen so many times it is anchored in the depths of your consciousness not as something vague or approximate the way a landscape outside a house appears to an adult … but as something with immense precision and detail.”

In other words, childhood is a land of sharply felt sensory impressions, and he’s described it masterfully, shaking out his younger self like a pillow until the stuffing, feathers and all, bursts out and floats away on the wind.
(Susan Swan’s latest novel The Western Light will be available this June in paperback.)

Book City Gets Its Dues: Why We Love Its Indie Book Stores

My partner, the editor Patrick Crean told the world tonight why many of us love Book City and are sad about it closing its 501 Bloor street store. Here’s what Patrick said to a crowd of over 150 who showed up to tell Book City why they care. Patrick has lived in the Annex since 1972, and he was one of Book City’s first customers:

“As a life-long book editor and a long-time resident of the Bloor/Brunswick neighborhood, I have bought hundreds of books and magazines at Book City since it opened in 1976. I was surprised at how sad I felt when the closing of its 501 Bloor street store was announced. It took me weeks trying to get over it. It was just a bookstore wasn’t it? Well, it was so much more: it fed our intellectual curiosity; it sustained us on some psychic level; it made us feel connected to something bigger; something that mattered.

When the store opened in 1976, it created a definite buzz in the hood. There was an kinetic energy to the place: a kind of urban hip atmosphere on two floors. And for 36 years it provided us all with an exciting place to hang out, discover new books, and gossip about the industry. There was a sense of community in that store and it provided a focal point for the neighborhood.

There is no other experience quite like that of patronizing a good independent book store. This is often where we discover new books by chance. And until they discover an algorithm for replicating on line the discoverability aspect of the curated book store, there is no substitute for it.

I would go to Book City to find a particular title and leave clutching at least 3 or 4 books. If you live in the world of ideas, going to the store was always an exciting experience. You never knew what you would find. For me buying books was retail therapy. It was – dare I say – almost an erotic experience going into 501 Bloor. Books are sexy objects and if you are a book nut like me you want to hold them, touch them and possess them. Hooked on books is my motto.

Let us all thank Frans and Gini Donker for their years of inspired and exciting bookselling in the Annex. They have made a huge contribution to our culture over the years and continue to do so with their other stores in the city. Bless you both.

Let’s salute Ian Donker who continues the Donker family tradition of fine bookselling. Good luck Ian.

Let us also thank John Snyder who managed and curated the Annex store with such intelligence and flair. With John, you always knew you would find books of interest without having your brain freeze – as it does when you are confronted with the massive and seemingly unlimited choice at the big box stores. Book buying is an intimate experience and John understood this. He knew his clientele. He hand-sold many a book to me and his kind of bookselling will be missed. Thank you John. We wish you the very best.

The closing of 501 is a great loss to our neighbourhood, but we carry on, we readers and lovers of the book never stop seeking out good books wherever they may be found. It’s comforting to remember that there is actually a line in the Bible – the last verse of Ecclesiastes – that says ‘ of making many books there is no end.’

Help Us Make Protest Go Viral Today Vs Expanding Airport

You have less than three hours to help NoJetsTO make a protest go viral against expanding the Billy Bishop airport. All you need to do is sign up on this link to make happen: This is the link:

https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/9696-saying-nojetsto-to-to-council?locale=en

Meanwhile, as many of you know, I’ve been working hard to publish information about the dangers of expanding Billy Bishop airport in Toronto. A lot of the crucial information about the proposed expansion hasn’t been making it into the newspapers. So I was glad to see the Toronto Star ran an op-ed column today by Air Canada CEO Calvin Rovinescu.

Rovinescu is against the current expansion plan and he made some points that don’t get aired a lot. Rovinescu pointed out that the Billy Bishop Airport is a public facility that has been handed over to a private company, Porter Airlines. He also said that expanding the airport will cost taxpayers over one hundred million to three million to upgrade airport facilities. He wondered why one private company would be given such preferential treatment. Why, indeed?

Rovinescu didn’t say this in his article but another word for Porter’s dealing with Toronto politicians and the Toronto Port Authority is crony capitalism. That is, a select group of business people make strategic alliances with politicians in order to get public funding for their private companies.

If you want to see more of Rovinescu’s case check out page 16 of today’s Star or the link: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/03/24/public_interest_must_prevail_in_island_airport_debate.html

We thought the city agreement protected us

My name is Bob Ramussen and I live near the island airport. Why am I against its proposed expansion? When the large jets start flying, whether louder or quieter, the increased traffic congestion will make the waterfront a dead zone.

It is simply not possible to squeeze the same number of passengers who now fly through Ottawa’s airport through Billy Bishop. The island airport is located smack dab in the middle of an area that the city of Toronto has zoned as a residential, park and cultural community.

Let me say it again: Why am I against the proposed expansion of the island airport? Because it will only make the quality of downtown life worse. Recently, the island airport has expanded to over two million passengers a year, and that makes our quality of life bad enough. But the proposed expansion to well over four million will degrade our once beautiful waterfront even more.

Here’s some background on me: When my wife and I purchased our harbourfront condominium in 1996, we lived in Hong Kong. But we had decided to retire to Canada, and we wanted to live in a waterfront environment close to city amenities. We chose downtown Toronto over Victoria and Vancouver so we could enjoy the cultural excitement of this city and, in particular, Toronto Island, Harbourfront Centre and the Music Garden.

We knew there was a small airport serving mainly small planes. We also knew the city’s Tripartite Agreement protected our investment because the agreement forbid the use of jet planes. But we really never worried about airport expansion because no city would ever consider destroying its greatest asset. Or so we thought.

Our building has a beautiful garden plaza. It was a spot where, for many years, we could lounge, eat, visit with friends and enjoy the greenery and lake view. It has now become a noisy, unpleasant place to be. During the busy late afternoon flight period, eating and talking with friends is no longer the joy we used to experience. In the past, we also kept our windows open to let the lake breezes blow through our home in the summer. Rarely did we use air conditioning. Now the island airport makes it necessary to always keep windows closed when watching television, listening to music or talking.

Many years ago we lived in Mississauga underneath a flight path to Pearson. We looked up, way up, to see the planes fly overhead. Now we look down to see the planes pass by our windows. Hong Kong had an airport like the one being proposed for our waterfront. Hong Kong closed it. Toronto wants to build one.

Toronto’s Department of Health voted against expansion last November. So here’s my last question: Why are city councillors still debating this irresponsible expansion?

What’s With the Sticky Black Stuff on the Window Sills?

Photo by Llima Orosa

I’ve made it my job (since the papers aren’t doing it) to find out about the sticky black stuff on the windows of downtown residences along with the impact of jets on our air and water quality. So check out my blog next week for missing information about Toronto’s air and water quality. On Dec 9, 2013, Toronto’s board of health voted against the expansion of the island airport because it is a threat to Torontonians’ health.

In a city map based on the board’s report, NOW magazine demonstrated that serious pollution from the airport goes as high as Queen street and reaches as far as Queen’s Park. More pollution brings more lung and heart disease, the Toronto Board of Health says. So don’t assume you’re safe from the impact of the airport just because you don’t live on the harbour.

In the meantime, here’s my interview with Rick Persich who will move out of his home on Bathurst Quay if the airport expansion is approved. By the way, Rick Persich is still waiting to hear what the city’s health officials have to say about the black sticky substance on his window sills:

I live in Windward Co-op at 34 Little Norway Crescent. Looking out my window, I can almost count the distance on my fingers from my town house to the airport hangars. It feels about three hundred meters. (The quotes are different depending where you’re counting from.) So if the airport expansion is approved I will move after living here twenty-five years. Ideally, I’d like to stay close to the city but I’m an actor and a recently certified teacher and I will go where the work is.

The particulate matter on my window sill used to be a brownish colour but it’s turned blacker. In February, some city inspectors took a sample of the sticky black residue and put it in a petri dish. They haven’t got back to me yet. Inspector Barbara La Chapelle was here in her fur coat. She said while standing on my balcony, “You sure do live close.” Or something like that. She said the city’s health study would not be biased. That was one of my concerns because the Toronto Port Authority paid for the city’s study.

Last Monday, perhaps because of stormy weather, the airport activity was almost nil. I couldn’t put my finger on what was different until I realized how quiet it was. My whole being felt calm and peaceful. It was a profound feeling, and I realized how the ubiquitous din from the airport helps create a kind of inner tension in my personal being. One seems to get used to it and not realize what an assault constant noise is.

When I moved to the Bathurst Quay neighborhood I expected to live a fairly peaceful life, slightly separated from the inner city core and near the fresh air of Lake Ontario. At the time, BBTCA was a small and acceptable regional airport. But that changed when Porter expanded its flights in 2006 and the proposed expansion would pretty much finish off our wonderful neighborhood by the water.

By the way, an increase in cancer has been recorded in my area, especially in Arcadia Co-op which has a high concentration of people with cancers on the 6th and 7th floors of their building. I mention this because a dear friend of ours, who lives in Arcadia, has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. One cannot conclusively say that this cancer was caused by air pollution emanating from jet fuel but a connection could be drawn. The turboprops now in use at the airpot have jet engines with propellers and they run on the same highly toxic fuel as jets.

Read more on this topic at Now Magazine’s: The Island airport: hazardous to Toronto’s health

Our Young People Are at Ground Zero in This Mess

Photography by Abdallahh, and elPadawan (adapted work).

I said I’d talk more about how an expansion of the island airport would change our lives. Not only would it bring in more passengers (a jump from well over two million to a possible 4.8 million). Our waterfront has been marked as parkland for mixed use by Toronto citizens. The proposed expansion would tip the balance even more to planes. Here’s how a sailor, Ron Jenkins sees the impact of the proposed Porter expansion.

1. How would an island airport expansion affect you?

I’m a member of the National Yacht Club, which is adjacent to the airport. The NYC and Alexandra Yacht Club both contend with significant aircraft noise and exhaust fumes. Our balconies are sometimes unusable and we often move our outdoor activities indoors or to the north of the building to get away from the noise. The NYC has been on the waterfront since 1894, and I think this inappropriate and unnecessary airport expansion would destroy a Toronto waterfront legacy for my children and others.

2. What were your expectations when you started living near the airport?

I’ve never lived near the airport but have sailed from the National Yacht Club all my life.

2. How has the landscape changed?

I started sailing at the National Yacht Club on my grandfather’s 25 foot wooden sailboat boat when I was three months old — in the late 1950s. The area has vastly changed. The area between Stadium Road and Bathurst was an empty dirt field. Now it’s populated with many residences. It’s also the staging point for over two million passengers a year at the airport. Commercial use of the airport has increased one thousand fold.

3. Can you tell me a personal story that demonstrates the impact of the airport?

Back in the 1960s, my grandfather had no motor on his boat, and when there was no wind and we were hurrying to get to races that started off Hanlan’s beach, we’d paddle across the Western Gap. Then, in the style of Volga boatmen, we were able to pull the boat along the seawall and across the end of the airport runway.

In the last ten years the expanse of lake at the end of the runway has changed dramatically. Marks now encircle the so-called “Marine Exclusion Zone” (MEZ) — the area all boats must stay out of to keep a safe separation between boats and aircraft. This makes sense, and yet we boaters have seen the area marked out by the MEZ grow season over season. It’s pretty intimidating to have a Q400 pass overhead when you’re in a sailboat.

My involvement with the summer sailing school also makes me concerned about the health of the young sailors coming from around Toronto to use our water and breathe our air. The recent Board of Health report shows there are health hazards because of the scale of airport operations. Our young people are at ground zero in this mess.

No Brain IS an Island Airport Expansion

Image by James Cridland with text design by Mariel Marshall

Today the Toronto Star published an opinion piece by the man who holds the reins of power over the island airport. His name is Geoffrey A. Wilson and he is the president and CEO of the Toronto Port Authority which is asking Toronto’s city council to expand Billy Bishop airport. He claims that his aim is to “do no harm” and he certainly tries hard to strike a reasoned tone in an article that is mostly unreasonable guff.

He says we need to focus on the facts regarding the airport–a point I agree with him on. But he denies that the proposed Porter expansion will grow Billy Bishop to the size of the Ottawa airport. Of course, Billy Bishop won’t be the physical size of Ottawa. There isn’t room to physically grow a regional airport on a tiny island in our harbour–a fact that our citizen groups have been pointing out for at least twelve years.

But the proposed expansion (if it is approved by Toronto’s city council next month) means that Billy Bishop will have the capacity to have MORE passengers than the Ottawa airport per year. The proposed expansion means that 4.6 to 4.8 million passengers can pass through Billy Bishop each year. The Ottawa International airport currently has 4.6 passengers each year.

Oops! Mr. Wilson conveniently forgot to mention this very basic fact. Nor does he mention that growing Billy Bishop will bring more traffic and jet fuel emissions to an already challenged environment. I am sick and tired of our newspapers running mostly pro-expansion stories about the island airport so I am committing this blog to reporting the facts about what an expanded island airport means for the rest of us.

By the way, I live in the Annex but that doesn’t mean it’s in my interests to ignore a debate that is going to shape our city’s future and the lives of our children and grandchildren.

There are more F-A-C-T-S on this link. www.nojetsto.ca

Mr. Wilson’s opinion piece is at www.thestar.com

More tomorrow.

TAKE ACTION: SIGN THE PETITION

We all cherish the Toronto waterfront as a place to live, work and play. But our waterfront as we know it could soon be scarred by an expanded Toronto Island airport with jet aircraft. An expansion that  will bring noise, pollution and more gridlock – paid by our tax dollars.

Toronto’s Board of Health, Waterfront Toronto and high-profile Torontonians and organizations have spoken out against the jet plans, but Porter is pushing City Council to give the green light even before all studies have been done.

It all comes down to how City Council votes in April 2014. By speaking out today you can do your part to save Toronto’s waterfront. Fill out the form and your city councillor will receive an email urging him/her to stop the Pearson-by-the-Lake. Sign the petition here: http://www.nojetsto.ca/take-action/

No Brain is an Island Airport (expansion)

Image by BriYYZ

In a short story, I once wrote that a human being grows slower than any creature in the universe … slower than dogs or roses… And our slow evolution is obvious when I see what’s going on with the new plan to expand the island airport. Do we really need to wait until the waterfront is no longer liveable, when people and businesses move out of downtown Toronto because the air is poisoned, and the noise unbearable? In the interest of hurrying our slow, sloth-like tendency to respond too late to choices that are bad for us, I’m starting a new series of interviews with people who live under the planes. They can tell us what it really feels, hears and smells like right now in downtown Toronto. Our daily newspapers aren’t giving us this information; Porter Airlines spends too much money on ads for the newspapers to rock the boat so I’m going to provide some of the missing information on my blog. The following is an interview with Barbara, who lives on Bathurst Quay.

When I moved to Bathurst Quay 28 years ago, the island airport was a sleepy little airport. We thought it would remain little and sleepy because we were told we were protected by the Tripartite Agreement.

Since 2006, everything has changed here. Huge fuel trucks pass daily in front of schoolchildren and other pedestrians. Taxis speed through the intersection to the airport, almost knocking us over. Airport limousines and private cars idle in the no parking area in front of our wheelchair ramp. They also line up idling in the bicycle lane on Queens Quay next to the park. The drivers get mad and refuse to move when we point out that it is a bicycle lane and that idling is illegal. I wake up between 6:30 and 6:45 every morning when the engine run-ups and turboprop takeoffs and landings start. We can no longer eat dinner on our balcony because the noise is unpleasant and fairly constant now, and we often can’t hear others speaking.

I recently had a landmark birthday. I wanted to plan a big party and invite friends from far and wide to celebrate with me. Then I realized–I can’t have a big party. The airport has filled all the parking lots in our area, and there is nowhere for my friends to park.

(Out-of-town Visitors to Harbourfront, who complain of scarce parking, will find it even scarcer this summer, now that Porter Airlines has made a deal for airport parking with the parking garage across the street from Harbourfront Centre.)

I developed a chronic lung condition (a form of COPD) in 2009. I can’t afford to move to a part of Toronto with better air. I understand that even the current level of air pollution, and surely airport expansion will shorten my life.

Anxiety Pancakes: Life in the Middle of a Novel (Day Fourteen)

Photo by Tambako

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.