It's the fourth week out of five of our Zoom writers' workshop, and I've finally gotten used to the rhythm of my Wednesday nights. There's my teacher, in New York City, the sweet nerdy man from Toronto in Toronto, duh, the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor in Los Angeles, and me in Chicago. It pleases me to think about us in our respective places -- an even distribution across arguably the four most major cities in North America. It's always dark out for the three of us and still light in LA, reminding me of how far we're spread. By this point in the course, I've picked up on my teacher's schtick -- he makes fun of you -- rolls his eyes dramatically when you ask a question. I blush. It works as a bit. We all laugh, even though we've seen it now several times. Four weeks in, I find myself less distracted by the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor's beauty. Not because it's diminished, in any way, but because I know her now, and getting to know someone will change the way you view them. Lessen the importance of their physical appearance in comparison to everything else you now know about them.
To be totally transparent, I've written these dispatches every week for Hobart and held my breath that no one in my class would find them, which they very well may. Certainly, I hope that no one's insulted if they read them. If my teacher finds these, will he feel cheated, that I spilled what's gone on in the privacy of our weekly Zoom room? Or will he be flattered that I took the time to immortalize his thoughts and words in print at all? I think about that a lot -- writing about real people in my life. Or even being inspired by real people in my fiction. In my current novel (the one I'm working on in this class), one character is inspired by a dear friend. She's a deeply loveable character, but I wonder whether my friend will recognize herself in the book if and when she finally reads it. Will she be flattered? Offended? I'm not taking her personality traits one for one and transposing them onto the character, of course, but I'm still not sure how she'll receive my perception and portrayal of a version of her. It's hard to know exactly if and when you're stepping on someone's sensitivities and insecurities.
I ask this question of the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor, in whose novel the best friend character I find quite irritating. The character is written that way intentionally, and is based quite directly on a close friend of the author's. I ask her whether or not that makes her nervous, writing about a friend, particularly in light of the fact that the character this friend has inspired is so annoying. "Well I told her already," the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor says. "And she's a bit of a narcissist so she was into it." She laughs. "Just the other day, she turns to me and goes, 'Am I too sexy?'" That line is lifted wholesale into the book, and it's hilarious. This is the hazard -- or the privilege, for some with a narcissistic streak -- of existing in close proximity to a writer. You may one day find yourself on the page, portrayed however you're portrayed. And you'll get little to no say in said portrayal, most likely. The best you can hope for is to write something of your own in rebuttal.
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In the excerpt of my novel that I've turned in this week, my protagonist Mila has sought out a Lexapro prescription, in order to fight the existential malaise she's dealing with. What she doesn't realize is that she's inherited her mother's bipolar disorder, and by taking an SSRI, she triggers a manic episode. When manic, she downloads a dating app and matches with a schlubby Jewish chef, who she decides to go out with. We follow her as she gets ready for the date -- picking out what to wear, doing her makeup, drinking wine -- and on the date itself. It's a thrill for her, as a writer, to have access to random strangers on the internet via the dating apps. A thrill for me too, as it can feel like tapping into a world of character inspiration to sit down for drinks for a couple hours with a new person I've deemed interesting enough to do that with. In the chapter I've submitted, the chef tells Mila about going to a wilderness school for troubled teens as a kid for his coke addiction. As Mila narrates, it's obvious to the reader that she's manic. She's excited, energized, and no one is moving fast enough for her. Naturally, they go back to his place.
My big question for the week is whether or not I've overwritten. In my writing, I tend to go into immense detail, showing the reader every little bit of passing information. "In front of the bathroom mirror, I slicked on a layer of face lotion, forming a silky base layer", I write. "I took a tube of my CC cream and dotted it around my face and blended it in with my foundation brush. Once I was satisfied that my skin was a nice, consistent shade, I squeezed a drop of liquid blush on my ring finger, dabbed the color on my cheekbones, and blended again with a blush brush." I go on, explaining how Mila does her eyeshadow, her lip gloss, revealing more interiority regarding her own insecurities around her makeup skills. Is this necessary? Self-indulgent? Both the sweet nerdy man from Toronto and the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor write dense, action-packed prose. Theirs are both to the point. When I express my concern though, the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor says she would rather be in my position. "I underwrite," she says. "I wish I had your tendency to overwrite instead, but it's not in my nature to be very verbose." The sweet nerdy man from Toronto agrees, also conceding that his wont is to underwrite. They both agree that it's easier to overwrite and later pare it back than to write too little and later need to add.
My teacher speaks in analogies, as always. "A good narrator is like a good tour guide who adapts how much information the audience needs to know. They know which rooms of the museum are more interesting than others, and pace the tour accordingly." It's a sign of unskilled writing, in other words, to depict every scene with totally equal pacing, as the details are less important in some places than others. "My own theory of great fiction," my teacher goes on, "is that it's preternaturally aware of what we're thinking about. If your protagonist's aperture is more open, you have to report more information. If their aperture is closed, you have less to report." The overwriting then, works, in my case, for this particular scene. Mila is manic, so she's taking in an abundance of stimuli from the world around her. Everything is competing for her attention. She is excitable and picking up on sensations that she might otherwise be numb to. This widened aperture should therefore be reflected in the prose. When later, she comes crashing down and becomes depressed however, my classmates suggest that I pare back her verbosity. That the prose become more spare, reflective of her disconnected state of mind.
As a writer, i'm often perplexed as to when it's necessary and good to go into such detail as I did in the case of Mila prepping for her date night. "You can go one of two ways," my teacher says. He sets the scene, wherein a man wakes up in bed next to a prostitute, who's slipping out of bed next to him. "You could either just say, he woke up, or you could go into granular detail. Do you describe the prostitute? Is she 18? Is she 60? Is it the first time he's been with a prostitute? Or is it minimalistic?" As my teacher tells it, we're living in the era of the internet, and thus the internet novel. Everything feels homogenized and flat. "You can either go with the flow of sociology and civilization -- we live in a visually flat culture and it's my job as a writer to represent that -- or you could break from the way the world is and represent it in a way that helps people see what they're missing, restoring depth to this flattened world."
When we turn to the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor's novel, my teacher points out that the point of her novel seems to be to understand something about herself. That's true for all of us, of course, but he says that it seems most obvious in her case. He asks her to go into more detail around what resolution exactly, she's seeking in her own life through this book. "Do I have to tell you?" She asks. "You don't have to tell me," my teacher says, "but you did pay $300." She's writing a novel about control, after all. She goes on to explain where in her life this impulse to understand control comes from. For once, I don't feel it's my place to reveal her inner workings, but hearing it does help me to understand her. To see why she's writing this work of fiction, when she's writing this work of fiction. It slots nicely into the story of her life. Ex-Mormon from Utah. Controlling mother. Ultra-religious upbringing. I'm so fascinated by Mormons, and tend to pepper the few I've met with questions, but I haven't with her. It feels like there's an obstacle, over Zoom. And besides, it's neither the time nor the place -- I'll learn more about it surely, through her writing.
As for me and my novel, I'm certainly working toward a greater understanding of my own life, psyche, and circumstances through this work. My mother wound. What it means to have lost her -- what it will mean to become a mother myself without her. Bipolar disorder -- a scourge I neither asked for nor expected to appear in my life -- yet one I'm forced to now reckon with. This book deals with both those themes, and allows me to process my own experience of the world through writing about them. Of course, we in this class are aiming at art, not therapy. We would like to create something that serves a greater aesthetic vision. We're not primarily concerned with exorcising our own demons. However, writing a novel is a psychoanalytic process. We're working, at this point, on the ontology of each of our novels, my teacher emphasizes. He underscores the fact that there needs to be a sound internal logic -- a coherence to the universe in which our books are set. "When the story has an inconsistent ontology," he says, "we can't psychoanalyze as much." So first, we come up with rules to live by. An order to which our characters must adhere. "Only then do you want there to be unconscious elements that emerge," my teacher says. He's referring, I believe, to those writerly tics that can reveal so much about not only the author but the world in which their characters operate as well. "Those are the gifts from the gods," he says. Perhaps an aestheticized seeking, to me at least, feels less embarrassing -- less vulnerable -- than a blatantly therapeutic one.
To write a novel is a fundamentally psychoanalytical exercise, I'm realizing. As readers, we seek to understand the novelist, on some level. The novelist, meanwhile, seeks to understand herself. Carl Jung said it best, of course. "I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully and carefully as you can -- in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal -- but you need to do that -- then you are freed from the power of them... Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church -- your cathedral -- the silent places of your spirit where you will find your renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them -- then you will lose your soul -- for in that book is your soul."
