Those of you with little tolerance for pointless whin(ge)ing can probably just skip this one.
Nearly finished with Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, which is flat stunning. I should be more moved to thought and reflection by the sheer plenitude and endless play in her use of language. But today, all I can think, about four times a page is, boy, I'll never ever be able to write like this.
I have this response to good fiction pretty frequently. The fact is I can't write like anyone I admire. I haven't the vocabulary or (more to the point) the facility with making new and inspired connections to write in a way which truly re-discovers the world for the reader. Nor do I have the clarity of insight into the world around me that a plainer prose stylist might frame in simple, declaritive sentences.
My recent choices regarding what to work on have reflected what I imagined to be a cold-blooded realism about this limitation. I thought I could be forgiven my surprising (to me) limitations as a stylist, as a composer of imaginative experience in language. I thought that I could, perhaps, be forgiven these things because of a choice to go for "storytelling." Forget dazzling metaphors, illuminating analogies. Forget the notion of writing fiction that has as much thoughtfulness as the academic work you also were unable to write.
I figured: the hell with it. Pursue pleasure, unspool a story, surrender to event and plot and action and strange setting and the pure unalloyed appeal of what next? and why not? and soon it would be all just rolling unstoppably faster and faster, the rollercoaster cranked to the top of the big drop and then nothing but its own mass is necessary to produce the thrill. Grab onto a genre, crank it up, and let your hair hang down and your mind unwind! I would become the disciple of writers I enjoyed without strong "writerly" admiration; writers that I read for relaxation and immersion and diversion, and leave the idea of writing narrative with the oomph of poetry in the same place where I had left previous (and similarly ill-starred) ideas of artistic or intellectual brilliance.
And it wasn't, I reasoned, as if this new commitment to telling the tale, to spinning the yarn as compulsively as Coleridge's old salt, meant that I had to truly give up the dream of one day turning out words better fired with wit, heat, and invention. This would be a learning experience, an oblique attack on writing which would make me more attuned to structure, to the evolution of action through drama, but would also simply exercise the compositional muscle, making me fitter in the end to re-approach the question of writing that wouldn't be so simply plot-driven. And, it stood to reason, if I did enough of this, surely the habits of mind that would form would help me find a style less self-conscious than the one I doubtless would create if I wrote with more literary models echoing in my head.
Finally, my reasoning was that entering the marketplace with something in a more commercial genre would give me confidence. Rather than begging agents, editors, and eventually readers to find a sympathy with my quirky little voice, I would instead seduce with a story, offering up something as close as possible to what the market seemed to want, and in so doing sidle into familiarity, into the world of known quantities. This felt like less of a capitulation than it might have to some, simply because I knew that I was never going to write a "literary novel" that anyone would be interested in reading - - or, at least, not at my present level of skill.
So, where was my mistake? You've probably already guessed, dear reader (I suck at mysteries, too). My fallacious assumption that a facility with "telling the tale" would emerge seems, in hindsight, rather amazing to have held. But I've held onto it for a long time. Slowly, slowly, the accumulating evidence comes that my ideas are half-baked, that my story and characters are derivative, and that (here's the kicker), my imagination is surprisingly, almost radically impoverished.
This isn't to say that I don't have one; it's preposterously, distractingly active. Sometimes so much so that I think I could spend my life trying to explicate what goes on in there. So much so that it seems bizarrely unlikely that it couldn't make the stuff of a basic fantasy novel or seven.
But it doesn't seem translate itself into story very well; rather, I describe what I have in my head about as well as anyone does their dreams. Which is to say, vaguely, and with a frustrating awareness that the dream itself was powerful and unique, even if the phrases used to recall it over breakfast seem stale and warmed-over
Nevertheless: I'm trying, and I continue to try, but in this increasingly difficult task I now understand both the genius of a good storytelling and the true limits of my abilities in a way that sickens and humbles me. Here's the painful lesson: what I really need is the same quality of being possessed by language itself that torments and enables the writer of inspired prose. In the end, I begin to think that it doesn't matter if your model is Stephen Dedalus or Stephen King. It don't mean a thing, if you ain't got that swing.
