Novel Interruptus

Novel Interruptus or Writer's Block

“I’ve written a story about school days in Saskatchewan. It took me about two-hundred hours to write it down, another twenty hours to edit it, and I paid a professional editor two dollars a page to edit my final draft. Then I spent another twenty hours making changes the editor suggested. How much would you pay me for a chance to read it?”

“I’ve painted a 24 X 18 canvas depicting the town we were both born in ca. 1905. I’ve won two awards for it and I’ve made ten reproductions. How much would you pay me for the original? For a reproduction?" 

The Wife, with Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce, is a 2017 movie based on Meg Wolitzer’s 2004 novel with the same name. This is not a review. If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, but intend to, you might not want to read this. The ending is a “surprise,” except that to most viewers—I’m guessing—it’s not that big a surprise at all.

The Wife opens a window on book publishing in the ‘50s, a window that probably hits at today’s authors’ dilemma as well. As the movie illustrates, competence, even brilliance in the art of fiction may never see the light of day given the fact that book publishing, movie making are businesses in the hands of non-artists who weigh name-recognition and book-buyer whims-of-the-day against the likelihood of profitability or loss. It’s an art-in-the-marketplace conundrum, and we all know that the marketplace is subject to psychological manipulation, crass advertising and all the rest of those tricks of Mammon.

Because, as the movie script makes clear, readership is a partner to creative writing and writers want to be read, sculptors need to be displayed, movies need viewers but there are any number of ways in which mediocre art can be flogged to dizzying heights while genius remains locked in the cellar.

In this case, the blocking of genius is gender-based; publishers assume that women writers will be harder to sell than male writers, and so their manuscripts are shuffled to the bottom of the review pile, if they’re to be read at all. So if you happened at that time to be a female with great creative talent, wouldn’t you consider—as Mary Ann Evans already did in the mid 19^th Century—to write under the name of, say, George Eliot? In The Wife, Joseph Castleman becomes the conduit and the name for the genius of wife Joan Castleman with the complication that Joseph wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Sorry, I gave away a significant plot component, if you hadn’t already guessed.)

Art as commodity raises a number of issues not conducive to pure artistry. A chainsaw is a commodity but with a chainsaw, an owner can produce other commodities so that in a capitalist/market world, a chainsaw has multiplier possibilities and therefor capital worth. Even things like chairs, because they consistently provide comfort and ease, can convince consumers on their own merits to pay a fair price. Not so with art, which has no obvious utility beyond the aesthetic, no marketplace multiplier effect and so in the eyes of crass economics, may be seen as having dubious intrinsic value. Furthermore, why buy a book when you can read it for free at your subsidized library? Why pay admission to a movie theatre when you can access a pirated version for free on your wide-screen TV? Why put money into the donation box at a museum when paying to enjoy the work of artists is optional?

How did “starving artists” become a “thing” unless art itself is seen to be of dubious value on its face?

I could go on here to defend the value that’s been added to our various cultures by artists, echoing perhaps Shakespeare's contention in Hamlet that the dramatic arts—in that case— “hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature, etc” (Ham. III,ii,17-24). In an age where the apple-cart is being regularly upset (what with streaming video, self-publishing, audio books, art as speculative investment, smart-phone photography, etc.) the value of art—fiction, in this case—is again in question. 

To build a house and to be paid, possibly praised, accrues to the satisfaction of the builder and motivates him/her to further creation. The Wife illustrates through an almost-believable scenario what might theoretically happen when an artist’s work goes unrecognized, unrewarded or unacknowledged.

How the Castlemans Nobel-Prize-to-him-and-not-her dénouement unravels, I’ll leave to be discovered, a small surprise.

“Sorry. I never asked you for a book about school days in Saskatchewan and who has time to read in any case? So, no thanks.”

“I just bought a huge picture with a deer and a stream at Walmart for over the couch. It cost me eighteen-fifty on sale. I’ll give you the same for your original but I don’t know where I’d put it.”

The Art Job

Bookshelf

Artistic “work.” What is it? Novelists talk about years labouring over a manuscript, normally alone in a room with a computer, typewriter or pen and paper. The scientific definition of work doesn’t apply: “Application of a force to move a mass through a distance” or “transfer of energy from one mass to another.” However, less and less work of this latter kind is required as we harness fossil fuels, the sun, winds, and tides to do our heavy lifting, pushing, pulling, piling. 

But to legitimize what artists do as work, I like a definition less mechanical, something like “the expenditure of talent, skill and time in pursuit of an enlightening, pleasing or inspiring entity or event.” Someone else might protest that he/she too sits at a computer most of the time, but in the interest of business, and isn’t that work? Well, yes. I guess it is. Possibly whatever consumes our time, energy and resources in pursuit of any objective (or payment?) is legitimately work, but then, haven’t we broadened the meaning of the word to the point of . . . well, meaninglessness?

But for now, let’s call what artists do, work.

Probably the bulk of work going into a novel, painting, sculpture or poem happens before the artist picks up a pen, a brush or a chisel. Between the concept and the completed object or event lies technique, mastery of the technicalities on which the medium relies. I think many of us are naive about the amount of work required for mastery—or even competency—in a given field of creativity; I think many of us believe we could paint like Rembrandt or write like Yann Martel if we just put our minds to it; the volume of naive art, of uninspiring writing would attest to the prevalence of aspirations-to-artistry minus the most critical work involved: the painstaking development of technique.

This is not to set artists aside as special. Technique, or lack of it, separates the successful from the mediocre in business, agriculture, education, medicine, etc. in much the same way, except that there aren’t many who would think being a surgeon requires only commitment, for instance.

My focus is writing. My career has revolved around technique: basic grammar, style, structure, etc., always with a view to two objectives, maximum clarity and aesthetic appeal. Broad categories these, and consisting of many parts: active voice vs passive, present tense or past, viewpoint of the narrator, tone, audience . . . and on-and-on. But whether I think back to creative writing classes or to drawing and watercolour courses I’ve been in, I can’t remember a time that the discovery and practice of technique wasn’t exciting and pleasurable. To finally write the perfect sentence, draw a still life with perfect perspective is work, but only because one has to be there, must expend time and have a view of an objective that’s new and, dare I say, lofty.

The completion of a work—a crafted quilt, a bin of clean grain, a dozen jars of canned peas, a vintage car restored—is its own reward, not dependent on pecuniary possibilities. Artistic work is no exception. Artists are some of the poorest, neediest persons among us in the category we call, “making a living.” Not unlike priests, nuns, monks of old, the artist commits to the art, not to what it will buy. Here the scientific definition often comes to apply; the application of a force to move a mass through a distance might well manifest in the moving of a pile of dirty dishes from table to sink in a restaurant while a half-written novel is busily not-writing-itself on a computer at home.

Take the novel, When we all get to Heaven, which I’ve worked on for about five years and may discard. In it are bits that give me satisfaction as finished, pretty-good artistic achievements. Here’s one . . . you be the judge. I might have to work on it some more:

Blanche says nothing. She has a notepad on her knee but she’s clearly doodling, not taking notes. Her left leg is crossed over her right knee, she drops and recovers the back of a red, high-heeled shoe rhythmically as she doodles. I can tell she’s in a mood. The bell at the front door tinkles and she leaves the room, comes back almost immediately: “The furniture’s arrived. Do you want me to tell them to bring it in?”

    “No,” he says. “I want to show them where to set it up.” He stands.

    “I could have done that,” she says.

EAT, PRAY, LOVE, CREATE

Before the Beginning

I guess we all have some inkling as to where our strengths lie. But for assessing strengths and weaknesses, we always need to make reference to scale: where do I lie on the patient/impatient continuum, for instance; am I more logical or more intuitive; maybe even, do my strengths lie toward leadership or “followship?” Am I creative, or its opposite?

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love did a TED talk recently on the foundations of creativity. That her novel would vault her into what are dizzying heights in literary achievement was as much a surprise to her as to everyone else, she said. She went on to talk about the act of writing fiction (in her case), the frustrations (many) and the triumphs (not so many), but what interested me was her delving into possible sources of that strength or inclination we call “creativity:” where it comes from, how it does or doesn’t ignite the fervour, fuel the energy that leads to great paintings, great sculptures, great poetry, great fiction.

She talked about the loneliness of the creative endeavour, how we place all the credits and debits of a work of art on the artist-person. There was a time in Greece and Rome when creativity was seen as an endowment from an outside source, like a muse or genii inspiring a selected person for a given purpose in, for instance, the sculpting of David or the writing of Virgil’s Aeneid. 

I immediately thought about the prevailing theology surrounding the origins of our Bible, i.e. God as the inspiration energizing certain people for the writing of specific volumes. Given this paradigm, the human with the pen or the chisel or the wheel is a partner in a creative process, a conduit for inspiration originating elsewhere.

Inspiration. Literally “a breathing in.” The choice of that word to connect art with its practitioners seems fitting. If you’re a Christian doing Christian work with fervour and conviction, it’s probable that your conviction and fervour came from “breathing in” the New Testament and the spiritual “air” that permeates your church. The idea fits: wander off to breathe in alien air and that “inspiration” is bound to lead you down a different pathway. I would contend that most artists “breathed in” art well before they picked up their tools of choice. The genii or muse, in that case, being very human; creative inspiration handed down generation to generation, built upon and adapted by each.

The work that creativity requires was probably touched upon less than I’d hoped in Gilbert’s talk. An exercise I’d do with students who were asked to write but hadn’t a clue how to get started was to have them jot down one word selected at random, “grass,” for instance. Next we’d add an adjective, like “green,” or “spikey.” Next, we’d add a verb, “waving,” possibly, and as we built on our start, an image would begin to take on a life of its own. “In Grandpa’s pasture on a summer day, the green, spikey grass would wave to me in the heat of the afternoon, and I would go out to greet it.” It begins with work, even if it’s just the writing of a single word, and then a bit more work, and a bit more and suddenly, even a little work begins to “inspire,” we breathe in the joy of having begun, and with each new inspiration, the air becomes richer, the breathing easier, the energy rises. 

Maybe that’s what makes even the most skeptical of us capable of creative greatness. Maybe that’s all that creativity really is. What do you think? Maybe un-creativity is simply a hesitancy or refusal to write down that first word, pick up that lump of clay, dip that brush into the red ochre and make a tentative but bold mark on the canvas.

Or maybe we’re hooped unless a genii creeps out from under the wallpaper and . . . does what?

P.S. We can hardly talk about work without mention of technique. No good starting a sculpture until you’ve practiced chisel behaviour; better to know a bit about sentence structure and tenses before committing a great story to print. Next post on Readwit will be about that.