landingtree

I keep tweaking this in the hopes that it will cohere into an essay, and one that is not based on experiences as un-generalisable as dreams, but I have a large proofreading job to do and also accidentally deleted part of a previous draft because of how Dreamwidth post-saving works, so to hell with it.


"I wonder whether it costs you a lot of thought or trouble, or springs ready-armed like Athene from the brow of Zeus?” wrote Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Woolf made her famous reply:

"Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year."

Did she think differently next year? I don't know. Here's a related quote, this time from one of those Delany essays I was reading last year called Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student.

"The first side [of literary talent] is the absorption of a series of complex models—models for the sentence, models for narrative scenes, and models for various larger literary structures. This is entirely a matter of reading and criticism... Nothing else effects it... Generally speaking... the sign that the writer has internalized a model deeply enough to use it in writing is when he or she has encountered it enough times so that she or he no longer remembers it in terms of a specific example or a particular text, but experiences it, rather, as a force in the body, a pull on the back of the tongue, an urge in the fingers to shape language in one particular way and avoid another. To effect this one must encounter that model or structure again and again in other texts and experience it. . . well, through the body. Clumsy, inadequate, and not quite accurate, that's the only way I can say it."

Though Delany is talking about learning writing always and only from other writing, while Woolf is talking about learning style from whatever you perceive, they agree that writing is a matter of setting working in yourself, or submitting to, a pattern you've already absorbed. In this view, is writing beyond the bounds of what can be learned consciously? That was my initial disheartening impression of Delany's essay, and what a creative writing teacher friend of mine thought of it too; even if that were true, it wouldn't be much use. But I no longer think that's the implication. In any class that's about learning to reproduce a method, I find that I'm searching for the experiences a teacher’s language corresponds to. I only really notice this when it's difficult. At aikido, when I was a child, we used to be told ‘find your centre;’ more than a year after we stopped going to aikido classes, I was doing the stretches in the back garden and went, “Oh, that’s what they meant.” And then for two days I walked different. Although it consists of using words, I don't know that the act of writing is necessarily more describable in words than physical movement is – and I don't think it's less describable, either. The bottom-up and the top-down are interlaced like fingers.

( Cut for length and for wandering around through my psychology of writing in a way that doesn't come to a conclusion )

13/03/2023 cont'd.

I don't have a favourite writer. But writers for whom I could make a case are Ada Palmer, Diana Wynne Jones, Samuel Delany. I have read almost everything written by Ada Palmer and Diana Wynne Jones, and there are reasons for the exceptions, so I expect in this course to be reading quite a lot of Samuel Delany.

From his About Writing: 7 Essays, 4 Letters, 5 Interviews, I have printed out the 7 Essays, because that comes near the limit of how many pages from Victoria University's library copy I'm allowed to print. I suspect he would be, not disapproving of this, no, but interested in the material conditions of the reading. That I have shorn away the context of introduction, preface, contents page.

First essay: 'Teaching/Writing', which I've read before, is about his time teaching the Clarion workshop and about how art can be taught in general; a summary of the essay could be 'Any summary of this nature is of necessarily limited use; that said, find new ways to pay attention.'

I intended to begin my reading for this course with this book; the reasons I didn't were a preference for paper versus radiant screens and a complicated printer problem. The reason I wanted to start here, and am happy to be here now, is that Delany is good at paying attention. I don't want to write like him, particularly – although I am, a little bit, just now, or at least am mimicking certain tics I have noticed, less deliberately than because that is what I just poured into the well from which I'm now raising water. But if I can be as alert to the world and to prose as Delany is, then good writing will be a result of that alertness so automatic that it need not itself be trained. (I don't think this is a universal rule of writers, and there's a lot of training that has to precede it, but what he says about it resonates with my experiences of writing now). Also: he describes the workshop process well and entertainingly, the way he, as a longtime writer but a new teacher, does and doesn't know how to go about it. And I'd like to try each of the three exercises he describes.

Start of second essay, name forgotten just now: one of the things that can stop me writing is trying to write like a critic. I spend more time reading book reviews than I do writing. This starts up a prevailing wind pushing me toward wanting my finished piece to do something, something which may be good and interesting but may also be unreachably distant from the start point of the blank page. There is not no worth to distant goals, but I have not yet managed to do this. I seem to draw my energy, like Delany seems to, from the lower levels of the writing process's scaffolding. I love to surprise myself by suddenly realising that a narrative potential exists, or that I could break my own rules, or that x could really have been y all along. In its negative aspect, this leads to stories which are maps of my own thought processes and thus illegible to others, and stories which wildly skip forward over the top of what might have made one care about them. There's definitely an argument that the job I should have set myself this year is 'learn to write a novel, which is shaped like a novel, from beginning to end,' instead of, 'So, each chapter will correspond to a garden, right, except at all different time periods, and the psychic pigs are important but won't actually appear onstage in part one, no, ditch that, I'm putting in the psychic pigs immediately because they fit onto this page right here...'

Also I read another chapter of Everything For Everyone, and whoof, this book is prepared to be dark. Feelings were felt. Where I write, above, 'my pessimism warns that nothing will ever go this well', what I'm talking about is how the fall of Capitalism shakes out in the end; this book and I are in full agreement on how much crisis would (will?) plausibly happen first.

I just read – what a day it is for reading! - the start of a Delany collection called Silent Interviews, and laughed at how directly he addresses the reader about reading, by discussing the question of whether good readers skim, skip words, or are inattentive, in a scene peppered with details in excess of the point at hand – where the speakers are sitting, and what they're eating.

14/03/2023.

Well, I played Disco Elysium, a game full of good writing, but since the things I would immediately want to talk about are art, music, voice acting, and game design, these being inextricable from the effect of the writing, I won't set them down here. Oh, although, I also played Hades, and that is a game to which Delany's idea of excess he talks about in that introduction applies; the most elevated readerly emotions happen beyond the task of the aesthetic object, in the spare space, in the things the reader can forget between readings or the viewer of paintings might not initially notice in the background, or, here, all the actions which are not necessary to complete the game. Hades is a sequence of rooms in which you fight monsters with your buff little Zagreus-man, repetitive enough to require little thought but variable enough to stay interesting, and the story of Hades is contained in the relationships you build with NPCs in the course of repeated failures to break out of the underworld, almost entirely through text conversations you read along the way. But then, after a battle, I can also go off and stand for a minute at a window watching the souls of the dead drift along a walkway far below, a detail I did not notice during my first fifty attempts to break out of the underworld because I was too busy breaking out of the underworld. I'm not sure I agree with 'most elevated' or if that's even a good paraphrase of Delany, but I certainly do like what happens in this space, the space only a re-player or a re-reader notices (although for each player or reader it's a different shape).

Also I read another couple chapters of Everything For Everyone. One is an interview with someone who doesn't really like telling their own story, certainly not in order; the voices of the interviews aren't strongly different voices in the 'writers did one style here, different style here' way, it's all very transparent, but thought has been put into differentiating them in terms of how the interview process feels to them and what it means to them, which I like. Some interviewees are really glad to have their stories told, others feel themselves being retraumatized and stop the interview, others are willing to be there but really stuffed-up about the past so that it comes out in no clear order.

And then the chapter on gestation work, which is also about housing and co-habitation in all its permutations. Since I've written 'co-habitation' on my list of themes for the novel I'm writing (despite what I say above about not finding high-level scaffolding helpful I do have a list), this is more relevant than expected. Also I've written something in this territory before: a novella in which supernatural events militate against the formation of any stable households, and have given rise to a society which tries to prevent the formation of what we know as close human bonds while still letting people live as well and happily as possible. (One thing this chapter makes me think is 'I should get that published', though its ending is in a deeply confused state and where, anyway, can one publish novellas?) I guess family structure and the requirements the world's economics put on it are an interest of mine? Without having done much reading around that stuff, and without, even, living in a situation that's done any formal talking about it. We have the silent precarity of short-term renters with our lives in several different kinds of flux.

[One qualm I have with this chapter is that I don't think we're within a century of implantable wombs, I seem to recall reading somewhere that that is a technical challenge on the order of a Mars colony - but this is just one of those unchecked convictions one picks up around the place, so who knows? Also in this book they're getting ready for a Mars colony, so. Pauses to skim scientific paper names: huh, I'm not going down this rabbit hole now but it is being worked on, and in fact it's already been done with partial success. I retract my qualm pending actual research.]

Also this book is very full of therapists and people in therapy. I don't know why I have a knee-jerk reaction against this, because, after all, I am in therapy, and it's been extremely valuable to me, and that's without me even having gone through the traumatic collapse of global Capitalism yet. I guess it's that I have no current sense that therapy as a whole is as good as it is in this book, no particular conviction that the discipline will move in good ways, as opposed to being a weird mess with some good therapists and practices in it, some of whom I was lucky enough to find. I guess this is a microcosm of my sense of the book's optimism as a whole. (Though also it reflects a knee-jerk and poorly informed prejudice against psychoanalysis specifically, which I can get halfway out of my mouth into reasoned argument before running into the fact that I have never spoken to a psychoanalyst or a client of a psychoanalyst about psychoanalysis or looked at a study about the effectiveness of psychoanalysis).

I have now been writing my reading diary for an hour I could have been spending writing my novel or, alternatively, reading; this is why they get you to hand your reading diary in in August, with three months to spare at the course's end.