The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep: No New Tale to Tell

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.

Comments

This looks like a self-refuting argument to me, Bill, because you describe your writing dilemmas so well that you must therefore be a good writer. (So that's all right, then...)

Maybe it would help to try writing something in a completely different direction and genre for a while, to see if you come back to this one refreshed? (Mind you, when I've tried the same thing the "coming back" part has proved difficult.)

Posted by: Rory | April 4, 2006 11:33 AM

Wait, I don't remember writing this, although certainly I have been thinking it (not about you, silly wombat!). And I'm most of the way through Two Girls, not Veronica, so you got that detail wrong too. Without agreeing with you, may I humbly suggest you try non-fiction? You certainly know a lot of good *true* stories and maybe you won't have the pressure of feeling like it's your job to make shit up (unless you're writing a Village Voice cover feature about pussy hounds or something). And the world as you find it is far weirder than anything you might conjure on your own...

Posted by: josh | April 4, 2006 12:46 PM

I agree with Rory, your way with prose (above) contradicts the worries expressed. Why don't you try reading a few hack writers to get that "I could do better" sense of mission on your side?

And if you are reminiscing about your academic career, have a think about this: I've written the same article 5 or 6 times and I'm about to do it again today. As 40 approaches, perhaps we will all face these complex feelings (Am I doing what I dreamed I would be doing? If, as likely, the answer is no, why not and am I a failure? My compelling contribution to science has yet to materialize and now I doubt it will). That said, I still believe that success is 90% motivation and 10% ability. I trust you can get your momentum back. OK, must run and spread the word about the importance of studying volunteerism.

Posted by: art | April 4, 2006 07:38 PM

I think you are being unduly despairing here, on both sides of the style/story axis.

First, style isn't necessarily loud, nor grace visible. Your voice animates your prose here; I'll bet it would your fiction too, if you gave it time. Maybe this won't be reassuring, but I can think of science fiction writers who didn't find their voice for years, then suddenly emerged as distinctive and often strange stylists: Neal Barrett Jr comes to mind.

Second, if you get ideas but can't turn them into stories, you're ahead of the game. Inspiration is hard -- maybe impossible -- to teach. Story is the mechanical outgrowth of those ideas. Story is a set of techniques, and they can be learned. One of the quickest ways -- I apologize if I'm teaching you to suck eggs here -- one of the quickest ways to find the story in your ideas is to ask conflict-inducing questions, of which probably the most important is, Who Does This Hurt?

Anyway. Let's talk more.

Posted by: Scraps | April 5, 2006 01:55 PM

All right, I fucking hate TypeKey, which ate my comment after telling me I was signed in. Grrrrrrr.

I think you are unduly despairing on both ends of the style/story axis.

Style isn't necessarily loud, nor grace visible. And that natural fictional voice (or voices) is often one of the last things the fiction writer acquires with practice.

If you have ideas but struggle with story, you are ahead of the game. Story is the outgrowth of idea; it's the technical refinement of the inspiration. That is, it's a set of skills, of techniques, that can be learned. One of the quickest ways to being carving story out of idea -- please forgive me if I'm teaching you how to suck eggs here -- is to ask conflict-generating questions, of which the most important is probably, Who Does This Hurt?

Posted by: Scraps | April 5, 2006 02:02 PM

Sorry Typekey appeared to have eaten your comment, Scraps. I've noticed that after posting I have to refresh to see my comment live, but I've never had to refresh the page more than once.

I very much appreciate all of the supportive comment above -- I felt very mixed about giving in to The Whine on a Wombat File post; I try not to make the blog a location for too much of this particular sort of navel-gazing. But I have been particularly consumed by writerly anxieties over the last few weeks, and it was starting to feel false not to acknowledge it. And it had the salutary effect of making me feel less blocked.

One of the ironies here (this is in response to Rory's suggestion) was that my current project was conceived as precisely the kind of "swerve" from the stalled writing paths of the past that you seem to be suggesting. I had great hopes for the discovery of a looser tongue, as it were, an ability to just let rip. And maybe it's had something of that effect -- I've written much more of this book than of any previous effort at fiction. But I feel (perhaps perversely) that if I set this aside now, I will simply be confirming myself as an endless set-asider, a tinkerer who has a closet-full of half-finished inventions. I want to complete this thing. THEN, maybe, I can try a different line.

As for Scraps's suggestions -- "Who Does it Hurt" is a nice formulation, and indeed I've been wrestling with one character/forces motivation for action (or, perhaps, simply avoiding *defining* it for too long), and indeed by applying this principal (though not thinking of it precisely in that way), I have in the past 48 hours unknotted (I hope) a significant difficulty in the storyline. It's good to be reminded of how an attendance to the issue of conflict is always warranted. I wasn't a particularly good student of acting or playwriting in college (though I did take a couple of courses), but the centrality of conflict in our modern conception of what makes drama work has stayed with me, and it's great to have another way to think about it.

Now, as to Josh, are you saying that the Voice would be interested in my story about artifically hybridized cat-dogs being bio-engineered by Monsanto?

Posted by: BT | April 5, 2006 11:20 PM

Woof-meow.

Posted by: josh | April 6, 2006 02:44 PM

The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

The Wombat File is a Delaying Tactic that May Save Your Life

No New Tale to Tell

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