Being the Author's writerly admission,
he's grown accustomed to his ways . . .
They were down for each other . . .
Something might have kept them apart at the party where they met--if he had left a little earlier or a little later--but it was just bad timing . . .
--Nicolas Roeg, on Alex and Milena
in his film, Bad Timing
Party doll, what's your game?
Do you move, or entertain
What people say
Well it don't mean a thing
It's a sin
Heads they lose
Tails you win . . .
Amen
--Bryan Ferry, "Party Doll"
Over the weekend I finally made the decision to use "Losing Ground" in the novel--it's the structurally demanded song written for the theater piece at a distance of seven months from the rest of the tunes.
While this might first seem an obvious conclusion, it must be remembered that the CD of the songs, the theater piece and the novel are all doing significantly different things--past divergent plots and right down to the choice and order of the songs that trigger the memories in the book. So no, there was no predestined need to use "Losing Ground" in the novel--in fact, there there was all kinds of good reasons not to use it if it simply served the same function on the stage and the page.
I'm not novelizing a theater piece, or making a musical out of a book--nor am I staging a previously recorded song-cycle. That's not The Point. Rather, I want to tell a cubistic story of the same fateful relationship (or perhaps that relationship as it happens in three parallel dimensions) that purposely leverages the structural conceits and unique advantages of three different mediums. I decided on a triptych because I naturally think in threes--but with more energy and a less-focused mindset, it ideally should have been a four-unit matrix, including a screenplay of the events. Recontextualizing the story a fourth time as a film would have forced me to rethink it in an aggressively visual fashion, forgoing the deeply interior lives of novel's characters and the end-all-be-all dialogue of the theater piece. And, at some point, who knows? Fates willing, I may tackle the screenplay version someday just to prove it can be done. Always say Never Say Never. Or something like that . . .
Back to the discussion at hand: Sitting in Ralph Lauren's restaurant in Georgetown (yes, there is such a thing; and yes, the food is very good; and no, polo ponies are not involved in any way), I finally work out how to use "Losing Ground" in a way consistent with the artistic intent of the book, rather than its function in the theater piece. So out comes one of the half-dozen Moleskines in my messenger bag--the thing that is now never out of my sight. (View it as an artist's version of the nuclear-weapon launch codes perpetually following the president around.) But see? This is why I drag that effing bag everywhere--ideas have their own sense of timing and propriety--the best I can do is be there waiting with my own kind of catcher's mitt.
After capturing the way to use "Losing Ground" in the book, I happen to turn to one of my hand-drawn structural maps of the novel featuring the book's present six symphonically inspired movements. The novel's story is both rigorously structured and wildly nonlinear--each makes the other possible. I wanted to capture the extreme fluidity of memory, along with its on-the-fly malleability--which demanded nonlinearity. But at the same time, I needed to give the readers some sort of map-cum-forward movement in the form of a series of highly structured framings--the traditional shape of a symphony being one of them; "The Composition of Dark Matter"--the primary (and serialized) subplot--being another. The inherent structural tension of the book is its need to explode outward with the free-associative logic of memory at the same time this movement is retarded and contained by other chronological story elements. Taken as a whole, the novel has an essentially atomic model--outwardly bound, atemporal electrons orbiting around a temporal nucleus they never quite escape.
And so I'm sitting there, drinking way too much coffee--and not caring about the health implications, for I have recently become legend: the The Man Who Sold the World (I thought you died alone, a long long time ago / Oh no, not me, I never lost control)--when, wham, there it was: Another way to anchor the novel's nonchronological flashbacks. I clearly saw that the first half of the book, leading up to the mid-story climax in the "Tangled Emotions" sequence, is Pygmalion in reverse--a man falls in love with a seemingly flesh-and-blood woman, who turns out to be the equivalent of an emotional and psychological statute. The second half of the novel, from "Wide-Open Once" onward, is Pygmalion then run forward--the man, aghast at the fact the woman is a symbolic statue, attempts to make her "flesh-and-blood," with tragic results. In this way, a structural spiral it created--which reminds me of the way Jimmy Stewart consistently turns in one direction in the first part of Vertigo, and then turns in the other direction during the second part. And I like this arcing reversal a lot.
I bring this up because it ties-back to the previous post about releasing the story's art, rather than attempting to retrofit meaning, which either upends the plot and thus the characters, or the characters and thus the plot. My recognition of the Anti-Pygmalion/Pymalion pulse is about deepening the story, not sending it off in another direction. And this deepening was made possible because the story, upstream of its structuring, was highly resonant.
Resonance, in my writer's mind, is comprised of emotional and intellectual echoes bouncing-off as yet unrevealed levels of meaning. It's similar to spelunking, where you get a rough idea about the other formations lurking out there in the pitch-blackness from reflected sound. From its inception, my sudden vision of a burnt-out songwriter remixing songs that make him recall a past love affair, the novel's story has been deeply resonant for me in ways not accounted for in terms of characters, setting or any autobiographical inspiration. From the beginning, I understood that the story was about more than an affair. But what I did not know at its outset, was everything the story could be: The number and respective shapes of the meanings waiting to be discovered.
If characters and plot are inextricably entwined, and if the combination of both gives rise to meaning, there is still the not-so-small authorial matter of understanding (and, in some cases, not denying) a story's implications. In the novel, Tony, beyond love, is seeking truth--but beyond truth, he is looking for belief. These latter two areas are not things I intended to write about; they were not idee fixes that made me dick-around with the plot until I could address them within the story's universe. Rather, they were levels of meaning inherent to the story, like veins of ore, waiting to be mined when I was finally capable of finding them.
These observations parallel those in the previous post: Just as characters should be allowed to behave as they need to (and not necessarily as they were intended to), the story must unfold as it is meant to (regardless of expectations).
Thus, today's takeaway is to trust your writing instincts. A story that doesn't resonate from the outset, most likely never will--at least in the hands of of its current author. Step Two or Step Three can't be "Make story more meaningful than it is." It simply doesn't work that way. The trick is to find a story sufficiently rich from the outset--even if you aren't certain of all its implications: There has to be emotional and intellectual echoes--even if you don't presently know what they've bounced off of. No echoes? Then keep looking for a story that is resonant . . .
Now that I've identified the Reverse/Forward Pygmalion level of the story, I may chose to to amp it up--which will simply be a case of giving that meaning a little space and free rein; after all it's part of the story's DNA. But this also makes for an interesting artistic dilemma--what's to be gained by suppressing this level? Even if Backward Pygmalion contradicted other aspects of the story(which it doesn't), it is inherent to the story. As an artist, am I not honor-bound to explore my tale as fully as I can, rather than parsing it in ways that threads only selected meanings?
Deepening a story (compared to plot changes dominoing through characters or vice versa), and additional levels of meaning that surface well into writing (or rewriting) are expedited by my preferred workflow for long-form fiction. Though I wish I could pretend that it was an experiment in form-is-function with regard to this novel, I basically write lengthy pieces as if I were in the recording studio; the various applications on my laptop forming a kind of meta-mixing desk. I tend to lay down individual prose "tracks," mixing them together later. This very modular way of writing is why identifying and underscoring Reverse/Foward Pygmalion level of the story presents no greater challenge than, say, recording additional drum fills in a studio. It also allows me to better control the "intellectual volume" of a theme across the book--mixing it up front in some sections and burying it in others.
And yeah, the irony that I"m writing a story about Tony in much the same way he's reshaping his own memories is not lost on me. As I say, I wish I could pretend this was a genius stroke--the writing equivalent of method acting--but it's really just a coincidental alignment of material and the long-form manner in which I normally work.
And since I'm singling-out my longer writing, it should probably be noted that it's the polar opposite of these genuinely improvisational and one-take blog posts. The lengthy projects are planned to tolerances that would be admired in the machine shops of the aerospace industry. In fact, though I've never really thought about it, these blog posts are probably the welcome antidote to a meticulous planning process that, prose or not, has even incorporated storyboards on occasion.
The bulk of the time it took me to write the first draft of the book--possible as much as 75- to 80-percent of the total hours--was spent in researching and planning. (Here, I'm aided by a variety of software which allow me to compile and readily access multimedia data--text, sound, images, video and websites--especially my old standbys, NoteTaker and NoteShare.) I only begin to write when I have a full outline completed, with various climaxes, points of character growth, story arcs, and resolutions indicated.
I realize that many writers balk at this degree of preparation--and those who know my other, more loose-limbed work often have trouble reconciling my two very different writing modes. The most clarifying thing I can point out is that Deep Preparation in no way stymies creativity or improvisation--it merely moves those things to much earlier in the process, before the outlining. I find I am every bit as imaginative and free-associative in the long-form work--just not making it up while actually crafting the pages (unlike these blog entries, where just-in-time, spontaneous delivery is the whole challenge).
Thus over the next few days, I know exactly what I'll be doing--slotting the new "Losing Ground" sequence into the novel's structure and working-out its introductory quotations (among other things a new Beatrice horoscope will be required). I'll then hunker down and outline the needed scenes, which will include the third-most-important mid-novel climax; one involving Beatrice--very doable, but I don't look forward to all those terrible, colliding emotions. (Suffice it to say, by this point in the writing, when Tony has a Bad Day, so do I--it's the cost of living in someone else's head for eight hours at a time.) And artistically, I know those scenes must be set at Pemaquid Point. After that, but before drafting the new sequence, I'll review the book's flow to determine the best points to let the Reverse/Forward Pygmalion level poke through surface of the story. After which, a flurry of Deeply Serious Writing will occur.
While it may not look like it, writing--balls-to-the-wall writing--is one hell of a way to make a living. This has simultaneously been one of the best and worst experiences of my life. Because if I get it right it, if I really nail the sucker, I've preserved an ill-begotten relationship and mounted it on a pin for public display. And while it has all sorts of, well, resonant implications beyond itself, it is still the emotional equivalent of an unfortunate mutation--something that might be found bobbing in a jar in the Medical Museum of Amour, if the Institute of Love had funded such wing. Put another way and in Big Dumb Corporate Speak, the answer to "How does Success look?" is the paradoxical "It looks exactly like the Failure of characters we've come to know and care about."
This is the third leg of the writing stool that's not often talked about: There's talent/vision and craft/technical prowess--but, critically, an unnatural threshold to psychic pain is also required. Because it's not enough to have a splendid insight into human nature and an unquestioned command of the written word. You're still going nowhere if the Oww Factor is too great. World-class writing is not for faint-hearted readers, but also out of reach for faint-hearted writers. You have to be willing to bleed--perhaps even hemorrhage--and to do so in public. This Bleeding Bit is the part they won't tell you about in writing workshops--it tends to kill future registrations. (One of the ongoing ironies in the novel is the fact Beatrice has talent and craft, but no tolerance for any sort of discomfort--hers is a fluttery, Jane Austen-y world. Thus, she writes and writes, but nothing true or courageous or courageously true gets produced--just cautiously safe, bland observations.)
There, but for the grace, etc, etc, go I. However, I thankfully don't shy away from the pain, and think nothing of spilling my blood. And so, with indisputable, massive fortitude, I'm going back to
The Work . . .
Later (fingers crossed).
