Today’s Writing Music: “1979” by The Smashing Pumpkins
Today’s Reading: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
Ten years after publishing postmodern masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon put out a collection of six short stories, titled Slow Learner.
Pynchon was already well into his reclusion, never appearing in public or being photographed. Unlike the monkish, cranky reclusion of, say, JD Salinger, Pynchon made his desire for anonymity delightful to all. Upon winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1974, he hired a comedian to pretend to be him and go to deliver an acceptance speech on his behalf. And he’d later “appear” on at least two episodes of The Simpsons, voicing himself:
With Slow Learner, Pynchon made another subversive choice. To collect only “early stories”—his first ones published, all more than twenty years old by then, rather than give his readers the polished, recent work they expected.
Pynchon explained in his introduction that he'd returned to his writerly origins not because those early stories were of high quality, but precisely because they weren’t.
He observes, “what a blow to the ego it can be to read anything you wrote 20 years ago, even cancelled checks.” Then, after some “physical symptoms we shouldn’t dwell upon” and squelchinh the urge to completely rewrite his old work, Pynchon says he settled into “one of those episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then.”
Though he admits he probably wouldn’t loan his younger self money, let alone want to have a beer with him, he decides he'll share the guy’s writings, with the caveat that a reader will encounter “some mighty tiresome passages […] juvenile and delinquent […] pretentious, goofy, and ill-considered.”
His hope was that by presenting them with “flaws intact” he could illuminate some “typical problems in entry-level fiction” and caution young writers about practices to avoid.
It’s, I think, a deeply generous impulse—maybe one of the best things a successful older writer could do for those admiring him at the height of his experience. To shows them how every writer grows, and can and should learn from past mistakes.
You’ll have to read the collection yourself to see the full scope of it, but Pynchon correctly diagnoses many of the flaws in his “apprentice” and “journeyman” works in the rest of the introduction. He says he lacked faith in the problems of his main characters to be sufficiently interesting; that he tried to “make it literary” by layering on references to The Waste Land, Beat Poetry, and scientific principles he didn’t fully understand; that he had a Bad Ear for accents; a host of puerile values of his own (for which he then apologizes); that he was derivative and ignorant; and much more. He ends by saying that an education goes on forever, and suggests that part of that education must involve looking back, even cringingly, to see what we’ve learned already.
With this in mind, I went back recently to some older work with a mind to assess its weaknesses. But I found that I’m still quite proud of that work, and reading stories I wrote twenty years ago, as a junior in college, I found myself surprised, and feeling the way Pynchon did about a late story of his, “The Secret Integration”—that for all its many flaws…
[…] there are parts of it I can’t believe I wrote. Sometime in the last couple of decades, some company of elves must have snuck in and had a crack at it.
What happens if we look back and cringe, not because our old work is technically flawed (and mine certainly was!) but because we're afraid we’ll see something there that we don't do as well today?
For me, that's been the real worry. It comes back to that original Nature of the Fun question. Is there something in our earliest work that’s freer? Purer? Unashamed? And harder to relocate once we begin taking writing more and more seriously?
In an earlier post, I wrote about “How I Wrote This Play” a one-act comedy I wrote in my Sophomore year of college, wherein the protagonist writes a play (the play that we're reading). Would I do something that meta now? Or would I just assume it would be dumb and silly?
In a two-page story written a year earlier, (“V”… which I didn’t know then was the title of a Pynchon novel!) I labored for hours to create a coded message which could be uncovered by reading every fifth word. Would I ever think of something that weird now?
In another story, “Tranquility” I pulled two separate stories together, one running forwards in time and the other going backwards. (My workshop professor disapproved, saying there had to be a logical reason for doing this—that I couldn’t just arrange it that way because I thought it was more fun.)
And he was right, but I didn’t care! I didn’t care about so many other things I care (too much) about now… for instance, I was shocked to see how freely I wrote about friends and ex-girlfriends, often without even changing anyone’s names. (Why would they ever see it? And if they did, why would they mind? ) For one assignment I wrote about how I crossdressed one night and entered a campus drag ball under the name “Charisma Juniper” (this really happened and no, you can’t see the pictures, but also I looked amazing.)
But would I write that story today? I might not, truthfully, because what felt like a wild experiment then now feels like some kind of appropriation. Maybe that’s dumb? I really don’t know. But the fact that I’m even worried is itself enough to give me pause. Before it would never have occurred to me to worry.
More than anything else, I look back and admire my recklessness.
It was just a different time in my life: I was in college, excited, and having fun, and I wasn’t concerned about the repercussions of that fun.
For an example, most of “How I Wrote This Play” involved me and my friends hacking our cordless phone and eavesdropping on a couple somewhere else in the building that was breaking up. I didn’t know their names or who they were. But I used their real dialogue in the script. When the play was put up on campus a few months later, I remember only vaguely fearing that someone in the audience might realize they were hearing their own break-up replayed. But even then I was far more concerned about how best to deny it, than I was about the actual ethics of the situation at large.
Reckless. But, effective—people loved the play and I got a lot of praise for it after. Nobody got hurt, that I know of…so—was it a win?
Back then, without any sense yet of what kind of writer I wanted to be, I impulsively ran in all stylistic directions. And why not? That’s what I was doing in my life too. College was a time of near-perpetual discovery for me. New people, new information, new books, new experiences. Sometimes I stayed up all night writing (usually because I’d put it off until the last minute). Other times I’d stay up all night just to be around my pre-med friends while they crammed for a big exam. I’d sit and draw or write and make them soup and procure snacks. I’d also drink way too much, steal furniture from campus buildings, get up to other mischievous and dumb things—including once getting inside of a garbage chute and riding it down to the basement of my building (that’s a smell that still haunts me). Somehow I survived all of that, and avoided ending up in too much trouble—though I very nearly did fail out of school after the first year.
Quickly, I turned things around academically. I figured out how to get my work done, and settled into more “serious” writing. I started writing about overcoming trauma, about a suicidal friend, and about mental illness--three big themes I still write about often today.
I'd begun finding a voice, and the topics that really intrigued me. I stopped messing around with weird styles, and picked my lane. Maybe it picked me.
I cut back on drinking, set up one-on-one meetings with my professors to go over my stories, and went to the library to dig up old stories they advised me to use as models. I learned how to revise. I studied structure and set out to write a novel. I started getting ambitious.
I begged my way into two graduate classes as an undergrad. I wrote a few full-length screenplays and did a summer study abroad at Oxford where I binged on Joyce and Woolf. I started entering my stories into contests and submitting them for publication at the Atlantic Monthly (where C. Michael Curtis rejected them regularly with thought and grace.)
And with all of those steps, my writing got better and better, but also less and less reckless. I wasn’t just messing around on my own anymore, but starting to really put my work into the world.
Eventually, people read some of it. People who then wanted answers: why I had done this or that, or to know where characters had come from—asking how much was based on my real family, my real friends. I was asked this in interviews that went out live over the radio, and in articles which will remain forever in print and online. And when someone didn’t like what I’d written, their complaints weren’t just coming from the unpleasant kid at the end of the workshop table, but were posted up there for all to see in perpetuity at Salon.com or printed in The Guardian.
And that's not a complaint—it’s a privilege to be read widely. It’s a point that I worked hard to reach. I’ve never wished for my work to be less visible than it is or was. (No goofy or monkish reclusive phases in my future plans). I’m just observing how and why the stakes change, and how that drives recklessness towards decrease. I simply care a lot more now about what I’m writing, and the impact it has on others… and that’s nothing but good in my mind. Still, I want to get some of that old recklessness back in my work. I think that, too, would be good.
Why? Well, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is a serious novel, right? About death and war and history and metaphysics and, well, it's on the list of Time's Top 100 Novels. But also… part of it is narrated by an immortal talking lightbulb named Byron, who “finds himself in the crosshairs of Phoebus, a nefarious lightbulb cartel intent on controlling the life span of every bulb in the world.”
Reckless imagination isn't incompatible with serious literature. I think it might even be a crucial component of it. The books I love today are almost always blessed with some Puckishness, some roguery. The best books are a little bit blasphemous. They leave us wondering just where the Hell it all came from.
Whatever wild impulse of Pynchon's first birthed Byron the Bulb, he chose to pursue and nurture that idea. Even if it meant dedicating a decent chunk of his masterpiece to an immortal talking lightbulb.
That's a big risk, but when something like that pays off, we say it's genius.
My garbage chute days are squarely behind me. Today I’m a parent. A professor, with students of my own, and colleagues whose respect I appreciate. I don’t drink to excess anymore, or even stay up late. Hell, I can’t have a third cup of coffee now without regretting it for the whole next day.
I’m turning forty this summer (sob) and at this point I’m about as responsible as I can bear to be at all times.
Can I even remember how to be reckless again? What am I so afraid of?
A friend and fellow writer, Idra Novey, helped me figure it out with this great short essay on the importance of “Learning to Be Embarrassed On the Page.”
In it, she talks about translating a book by Argentine writer Emilio Lascano Tegui called On Elegance While Sleeping. Certain scenes in the novel made her blush as she worked on them, like one in which “a man falls in love with a goat and daydreams about her udders.”
This made her consider an earlier time in her writing life when she’d felt freer to write similarly outlandish things. While living abroad in another country, and writing just for her own amusement, she found herself taking lots of risks:
I wrote about the whales supposedly fornicating for days near the port city where I taught in Chile. I wrote about a group of women who danced on their kitchen tables at night. I also experimented with form, mixing up voices and writing short fable-like pieces that moved like prose but read like poetry. I let myself switch languages in the middle of a page or scene. If I imagined something in Spanish, I used Spanish.
Tegui’s outrageousness, she notes, soon became “contagious.” Even though she had to be responsible in her life as a parent and a professor, she began giving into making messes in her writing—in one case, she pushed herself to let a bathtub in a story overflow and flood an apartment, and then the whole building. (That gives me an anxiety attack just reading it, but damn it sounds fun to write!)
In the “unregulated place” on the page, Novey concludes, we must be brave and risk embarrassment. “To risk something real as a writer is to risk making a fool of one’s self.”
Fiction is a place where anything can happen. Where anything is allowed to happen. And at least when tubs overflow in stories, we don't need to mop up the mess afterwards. And it is a joy to readers when a writer risks such leaps on the page. It lifts us all out of our regulated lives.
So, how do we do it again?
Thinking of recklessness as joy, and as being enough of a reason for writing in and of itself, may be one part of the puzzle here. (Remember, as Zadie Smith has taught us, joy isn’t the same as fun—it may not always even be very pleasurable.)
Reading more of that reckless stuff we love, like Tegui, or even our own older work can also surely help reorient us towards that former freedom.
But, I wonder… does writing more like I used to mean returning to the recklessness I once embraced? Do we teach ourselves to stop caring about what everyone else thinks, and just do whatever we enjoy? Should I always write whatever’s on my mind? Seize whatever the hell I want just because I want it?
Maybe. Certainly more often. But I don’t think that’s the whole answer.
Or, rather, I no longer think that reckless writing has to be selfish writing, or careless writing. I’m not sure that kind of Freshman year artistic solipsism can get me where I want to go anymore. At the same time, I know that thinking too much about what “everyone” else will think is awfully stifling. We know that can be a major source of writer’s block. If, with everything I write, I’m weighing what my mother will think, what my kids will think, my students will think, my colleagues will think, what some critic will think… then I’m going nowhere fast.
So if I can’t write just to please myself, and I can’t write to please everyone else… what’s left?
Help us Obi Wan Vonnegut, you're our only hope.
In the preface to his own collection of early stories, Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut makes this simple recommendation:
“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
I’ve had that quote at the top of every Introduction to Creative Writing syllabus I’ve taught for fifteen years, and somehow I still manage to forget it regularly.
Who is that one person? I can’t say for you—I only know for myself.
For Vonnegut, it was his older sister, Alice, as he explains in the same preface. (She died of cancer just two days after her husband was killed in an accident, and Kurt and his wife then adopted three of their kids.)
Reading through something he’d written, he’d ask himself a simple question—would it make Alice laugh?
If yes, he kept it in. If no, he’d cut it out. Simple as that.
I think about Novey’s advice too—because aren’t I willing to risk looking like a fool in the world, if it makes someone that I love smile even a little more? You bet.
We talk sometimes about giving ourselves permission to write something we want to write but might be afraid to write—afraid of who it might hurt, or offend, or shock. I think the “one person” idea helps us work through that—or at least it limits the number of people we have to concern ourselves with. But it isn’t merely self-serving this way either.
To put it another way, I’m not riding down a garbage chute again—I know that my one person wouldn’t laugh at that. And I’m not sure my next character will be fantasizing about a cow’s udders, either—same reasoning. I know my person hates when dogs die in books, so I shall kill no dogs. I know my person hates it when female characters “shriek” or “sob” their dialogue. So mine do not (anymore).
But there is plenty of recklessness I can conjure up, even in this wise old age, that will make them smile.
And that's the place to start.
Writing Towards the Fun #16:
This one is coming from Idra Novey’s essay—take a scene you’ve written recently and try to push it recklessly even further. Let the bathtub overflow and flood the apartment, then the building. Wherever you stopped the scene, go further and let it get messier and messier.
Is your character cooking something? What happens if the meal gets burned? If it sets off the smoke alarms? If it scorches the kitchen?
Driving? What if they go off the road? Pop a tire? Crash into the person in front of them?
Shopping? What if they take something without paying? What if the store’s alarm goes off? What if they then make a break for it?
Have fun!