With school canceled for the week due to the fires, I was a very lazy girl. Well, at least in that productive write-your-research-paper way. I did start writing my next short story, however, since my last story was workshopped a few weeks ago. I found myself stalking my characters, trying to get to know them. I wandered around the apartment thinking of what they would say to each other, and then, questioning their decisions. I fretted over structure, told myself something has to happen (action’s not my strong suit) and more or less banged my head against the wall for a few days. Godammit, why won’t they just tell me what they want?
At the same time, I started reading for myself, finally putting a dent into Granta’s Best Young Novelists 2, beginning Kaui Hemmings Hart’s House of Thieves, and slowly plodding away at One Hundred Years of Solitude (again) for class. It was there, in those pages, rather than the blank ones on my computer screen, that prompted me to keep going. While my stories begin with germ of an idea—a dream, an image—these texts inspired me by breaking up a the traditional narrative, by offering that one telling detail, by showing me worlds beyond my own, a lens in which to see my characters. And of course, they’re just so damn good.
And so I finished the first full draft a few days ago. Of course, now I’ve got the emotional lull because it’s not really mine anymore. Not exclusively. But mostly, I hope this is a lesson: When stuck, go back to the books. Keep reading.
It reminded me of something I read from Julia Glass, after I read her novel, Three Junes. Here’s what she had to say (the truncated version) about reading while writing.
But inspiration, that’s a kinder, gentler matter — and if I turn a less covetous eye on my list, I could say it’s a list of writers who inspire me: amplify my senses of the physical world, my joy in language, my faith in the power of make-believe. The only impediment to reading their books is the urge — the almost literal itch — they sometimes give me to heave them aside like burning coals and get to work on mine.
I have heard writers claim that while they’re working on a new book, they won’t read anything contemporary, won’t read anything they haven’t read before, or simply won’t read at all. They’re too impressionable, they claim. I find such restrictions as absurd as protesting that you can’t eat out if you’re the household cook or can’t give birth if you’re an obstetrician. And when, after all, is a writer not working? In my head at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters’ lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams…all arrive unbidden when I’m getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.
The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape — affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark. This kind of inspiration struck, perfectly timed, when I was about two-thirds of the way through writing Three Junes. … I went right out and bought a collection of Cameron’s stories and his previous novel, The Weekend, a book that would prove fortuitous to the completion of mine.
I was also facing down the true challenge of writing a novel: ending it. I knew who the characters were in the final third of the book, I knew the present action would take place over a weekend at that house on Long Island, I knew the alliances as they would stand at the end and that the end would be hopeful, but I did not know quite how the characters would get there. In The Weekend, I was surprised (and a little unnerved) to encounter a cast of characters from the very same world, even (as in Three Junes) a man still mourning the loss of another man to AIDS and a mother preoccupied with the fate of a small child. More remarkably, the novel ended, as I knew mine would, with the main character’s return to New York City. I might have been depressed at the similarities, but I was energized.
I felt as if I had traveled abroad and run into next-door neighbors I’d never met at home or as if my characters, drifting about in my head, had discovered a gang of soul mates — souls who seemed not frivolous but tragically weighted. I was heartened by this kinship, even though Cameron’s writing has a conciseness I could only envy. And now I confess to an act of theft.
