Notes on process
Woolf, December 7, 1918: “But this sort of writing is always done against time; however much time I have”.
1. I approached the novel (the long piece of fiction) with certain assumptions. For instance that its primary considerations are (‘should be’) character and plot. I have no knack for either and I knew this going in. Moreover I have very little interest in them. Is this a character flaw of my own? A sociopathic disregard for characters in my writing, in favor of—what? Data agglomeration? It’s fair to say I came to writing long-form prose both by accident and with a chip on my shoulder.
2. Accident because I began writing a short story about a murder in Paris which very quickly lost any kind of concern for plot as I had previously defined it (a causal relation between events leading in some kind of line, plane, or network through the text) and became ‘about’ how information itself is and what it can do, especially when compared to the (fragile, perishable) human body.
3. I had to fight hard with one of my dearest readers to convince him that a story where the main actor is non-human (non-sentient, even) could still be a story, and not a piece of non-fiction. It was all fiction. It just happened that the archive (concept and institution) was doing the work. It turned out I could sustain an interest in the behavior of institutions and information where human beings did not hold my interest.
4. It’s possible (it’s my feeling) that this is because I feel uncomfortable getting to know characters well. Especially at first (now there are a few human agents in the novel and I do know things about them). I feel like I’m prying. I feel like I don’t have a right to know more about these people than I can glean by observation. A tricky thing when I have to write them to observe them. But they do begin to tell me things about them. Not everything. I don’t have one of those checklists I’ve found on how-to-write-a-novel websites (yes, I’ve looked at many): hair color, mother’s birthplace, favorite food, age at which they lost their virginity. I don’t have a photograph of the characters in my mind, although I was at a flea market on the weekend and I’m pretty sure I saw a passport photograph of one of them. Then it was gone.
5. Plot remains a difficulty, but here is what I’ve found: plot is Time’s fool. The novel is not (in my understanding now—or this novel is not) mainly concerned with cause and effect. It is concerned with time: representing time, moving through time, moving time itself, watching as two streams of time pass by/through/on top of one another. I feel unskilled at saying X follows Y, but I feel very able to show X and Y’s concurrences and intersections. Overlaying times. One time outpouching from the other.
6. Understanding that this piece of work wants to deal with time has helped me think about how to structure it. Not that everything I plan always gets made, but I tend to conceptualize book-length movements in drawings first (or in descriptions of feelings, colors). I have a drawing that looks like St-Exupery’s drawing of the snake who has eaten an elephant, and that is a representation of time in this novel.
7. Maybe by now when I tell you that the book’s working title is 1873 you will not be surprised, but it wasn’t until I wrote this paragraph that I realized that this book about time has a timestamp for a title.
8. Apart from mechanical and existential struggles, I have no reason not to be writing. I’m in the (unbelievably privileged) position of not working besides writing for the past 10 months—the first 8 months because I didn’t have the legal right where we are living, and now because my partner understands that the book is my work. The magic period will come to an end in September, but I am trying to take advantage of it as much as possible until then. Nevertheless, I have found writing (working on 1873 in particular) unbearable for the past five or six weeks.
9. Sometimes, highly aware of this unfettered time, aware of my privilege in having it, and aware of its limited duration (the end comes ever closer!), I find myself even less able to write. I sit at the desk, open the document, open the notebook to my graphs and diagrams, read my notes, read books I have sitting around, read the New Yorkers piled on the floor, look out the window, look back at my computer (which has gone dark by now), and can hardly bear the thought of writing. I have nothing to say. Even worse than otherwise, since writing is what I’m ‘supposed’ to do.
10. I forget that ‘writing’ ≠ ‘only sitting at a desk, day in and day out, typing’. For me. Writing, and writing this novel specifically, has since the beginning come about by an active, daily engagement with the world. This comes in the form of research: reading novels, articles, histories; going to museums and archives; viewing photographs and maps and video footage. But my research also takes the form of walking, seeing films, allowing myself to relax. In the absence of immediate pressure to put words on the page, my mind has formed many of the ideas in 1873. Just as helpful to me is the way that in these moments—away from the desk—I am able to conceive of larger structural and thematic movements, which then allow me to write into spaces I had had difficulty with.
11. Woolf, November 15, 1919: “I think I can foresee in my reluctance to trace a sentence, not merely lack of time & a mind tired of writing, but also one of those slight distastes which betokens a change of style. So an animal must feel at the approach of spring when his [sic] coat changes. Will it always be the same? Shall I always feel this quicksilver surface in my language; & always be shaking it from shape to shape?”
12. It’s true: sensing this resistance, I feel either that the thing is done (which it is not) or that I have to change how I work on it. The perspective from which I look at it, or from which I approach it. The same old thing won’t work anymore. I have to listen as carefully to this resistance as I do to my body when I begin to feel sick: otherwise I crash on through, find myself boxed in by my own stubbornness, full of distaste for how I’ve proceeded.
13. When I began in earnest, my dear reader—who by this point believed that the story that became the beginning of 1873 was indeed a story, and who believed in my ability to write the long thing I was embarking on—told me that all I really had to do to write the novel was to keep going. As the tides have gone in and out, writing, I hold onto this. Sometimes I am standing on his pronouncement, confident, looking out over the water, charting stars. Sometimes I just cling with one hand and hope I can keep on. Keeping going is something that cannot happen all at once: an utter process, it, too involves passing time, marking that passage.