'fiction is a temporal art form'
so stop procrastinating
A few months ago, I was doing a fiction workshop with Transition Year students. I was trying to explain to them how, in the words of Robert Olen Butler, fiction is a temporal art form without getting too morbid. Noticing some of them had bags with sport gear, I asked them to imagine they’re playing a game of hurling. Their team is two points down, a goal will have them in the lead. The sliotar is coming their way; they strike but it arcs and then falls just outside the posts. No matter how much they want to turn back and do it again, they can’t. They can only go on.
One girl nodded grimly at this example, you could tell she knew its truth. But it seems to me a lot of emerging fiction writers haven’t fully grasped this. Or maybe they have as readers and humans, but when it comes to writing they are holding back from opening that heavy door, from leading their characters to true life-or-death trouble, and so their manuscript lacks urgency. Because without the life-or-death trouble, what can this temporal art form really say about being human?
Maybe they haven’t as readers and humans. God knows, it took me (is taking me?) long enough. But really getting to grips with this isn’t just important in getting to the heart of things in your work of fiction. It’s also a bit relevant surely if you’re to get any words on the page at all - to start and finish the first draft, so that you have something to work with. That’s because if we don’t understand the tiny finite beings we are, we also don’t understand that our little patch time is passing by, right now under our noses.
In his book Three Thousand Weeks - Time management for mortals, Oliver Burkeman notes (drawing from a philosopher called Bergson?), how when we fantasise about anything, it feels good because we’re not commiting to anything. We don’t have to make trade-offs, we can have it all. But when we actually start to make steps towards something in Real Life, we’re immediately choosing one thing over another. And therefore inevitably losing options as we go. He uses the examples of careers, relationships. But isn’t this so true of writing fiction too? And in doing so (maybe because we’re doing so), we’re facing the truth of our own finitude. Burkeman quotes Bergson: ‘This is why we find more charm in hope than in possession’.
This quote reminded me of a funny article or interview, I can’t remember which, with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. In it she talks about that lovely stage of writing your novel - when you’re imagining it but haven’t yet started to write it. It is a beautiful, glittering butterfly brooch, its colours and hues beyond anything anyone has ever seen before. But once we start actually writing, and then plough on and on, the smaller, the littler, the thing starts to feel. It’s downright painful, for me anyway, to go from fantasising the novel I’m about to write - the lovely idea of it - to getting those first ugly sentences down. And when you finally finish, you find that instead of jewels, it’s actually made of beer mats and gum and stuff like that. You pick it up and a bit falls off. But it’s unique! It’s your butterfly, you made it, all by yourself! Go you!
This feeling of reluctance when it comes to writing - despite this being The Thing We Want To Do - is maybe normal, so. Maybe we should expect to feel bad when we try to write, instead of wonderful. And expect to find ourselves, when we finally have the house to ourselves and work out of the way for now, to suddenly be overwhelmed with a need to clean out the fridge. And the disheartened feeling when you read over what you’ve done - maybe that’s inevitable too. To write fiction is maybe to look our mortality square in the eye, something we humans tend (wisely probably, most of the time) to try not to do. It’s to understand how small and insignificant a human life is at the same time as you seek to show its value. Another fiction paradox. Anyway, what I got from everyone quoted here is that writing fiction is inherently difficult. For me, that’s weirdly reassuring.
