Material: A Diary of Not Writing  

Brendan Kerr

This installment of Material is about not writing.  Not surprisingly, it’s taken me a long time to write.  It’s hard to talk about not writing.  Maybe that’s why people don’t do it much.  It feels private, shameful, to not write.  To be unable to.  These are legitimate feelings, but this Material isn’t much interested in them.  I don’t care to meditate on the place of privacy and shame in the age of Facebook and Viagra.  I would like to talk a bit about the process of not writing.  Some things that happen during that time. 

I’m sure it’s different for different sorts of writers, but for the fiction writers I’ve talked to – especially those ‘trained’ in MFA programs – the process of not writing involves a serious engagement with rules.  Though they may hide it under a very sophisticated barrel, MFA programs in fiction reinforce a lot of rules about what a story should be…and these persist.  Even a resistant alum carries these rules with him like a moral code.  They haunt the writer like a good former boy scout must be haunted by the sinister chants of “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly…”   And when one is not writing, these rules can echo in the corners of the room.  Scary.

The process of not writing is basically the process of trying to figure out what a story should be.  If you thought you had a line on that question, you’d be writing.  So it makes sense that these cocksure, professor-enforced rules are so quick to appear.  If the flailing non-writer has any sort of spine at all he’ll protest: they told me that I need to learn the rules so that I can break them.  But when do you know them well enough?  And how do you go about breaking them?  This line of thought often ends in a barroom.

The first thing you have to do is recognize these rules for what they are, for they serve only one purpose and once you see this clearly, they become infinitely less intimidating.  The rules we are taught about fiction writing are a structured framework developed by bored teachers tired of reading a bunch of kids’ guesses about what the world is like in order to restrict the space available for bullshit.  That’s it.  When have you learned the rules well enough to break them?  When you’ve learned – through the rules or despite them – to avoid guessing and faking and bullshitting.

Okay, so this is just great.  By taking the teeth out of the rules we’ve exposed the horrific, gaping maw they were designed to camouflage.  Are we capable, grown, moral, cool, good enough to write a story that doesn’t bullshit?  This is a tough line of thought, but a more productive one than the one that leads to the barroom, because this one often leads to books.  We want to read and diagnose.  What does a no-bullshit story look like?  In what ways do ‘successful’ writers fall prey to bullshit?

In my recent months of active non-writing I’ve read several books.  Without going back, picking each one up and going through an exhaustive, detailed study, I’ll offer a teensy nugget about what my radar picked up and how this helped me narrow in on the story I wanted to write.
I first picked up a giant novel on horseback – Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart tells the story of Misha Vainberg, an obese Russian Jewish oligarch senselessly rich with skuzzy mob inheritance who has taken the fall of socialism as an opportunity to wholly and self-awarely consume himself right out of nation and history.  Dressed in a constant track suit, Misha gluts himself with vodka, prostitutes, rap music, psychotherapy, sedatives, anti-depressants.  He sulks and longs for America – specifically the South Bronx – where his voluptuous Rouenna has begun a journey of self-discovery that Misha is anxious to preempt.  It’s a circus of a story, weighted with weightless slabs of cultural reference.  Such a story cannot be told with the spare Hemingway sentences of workshops; semicolons are called for.  A man needs commas and modifiers on top of modifiers.  The wisdom – and the humor – is in the sadness of the excess.  For a not-writer the effect is liberating.  I knew I wasn’t up to writing a broad scope global satire, but I felt somehow freer.

Next, I read Stewart O’Nan’s Wish You Were Here.  The book follows three generations of the Maxwell family during a final week-long vacation at a beloved lake house.  Framed with hints of an external threat, the majority of the story is deeply interior.  It traces the slowly passing days through shifting points of view and the characters are systematically unpeeled like the proverbial onion, laying bare the secret hurts of childhood, the grudges long held from slights real or imaginary, the betrayals of love.  Nothing all that much happens.  The perceived external threat never comes knocking.  The internal volcanoes simmer and spit, but never fully loose their molten destruction or wipe the family landscape to smolders.  The week ends and the different branches of the Maxwell clan go back to where they are expected – and it is the power of those expectations that resonates.  It’s an engaging, shifting, deeply internal character study and it made me reconsider the cool Aristotelian notions of plot.  I took the time to open some folders and look at some blank screens, but nope, still wasn’t writing.

I read US!,in which Chris Bachelder resurrects infamous muckraker Upton Sinclair to see what he can make of our contemporary world.  It’s a wild mishmash of journal entries, book reviews, open letters (to the likes of Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger), sick jokes, transcripts of phone calls, fake interviews, folk songs and, finally, a novella.  Any classic satire must exaggerate the characteristics of its subject and Bachelder is forced to go to (often disjointed) extremes in order to exaggerate the already hyperbolic and heavily exclamation-pointed works of Sinclair.  I suppose it would be interesting to the meta-textually inclined or to those wary of narrative.  I’m neither.  As an entertainment, however, it is jolly good.  And it is an inventive bit of muckraking in its own right, for no matter how it may poke fun at Sinclair’s mad political earnestness, the book ultimately celebrates such madness – if only because it is not what it condemns.  The whole reminds the secretly mad non-writer that there are subjects, simple subjects, small, manageable subjects, about which he cares, about which he could rant and rave if he wanted. 

James Dickey was primarily a poet, but he liked to write some fiction, too, and I decided to read some of it.  Deliverance is famous for the movie scene, the piggy line, but the book is so good that I began to find myself becoming angry with people who couldn’t let their fascination with anal sex down long enough to listen to me recommend it.  I was a fanatic about the book.  I read the last 100 pages between 2:30 and 5:00 AM one Friday night and then walked to a diner and ate eggs as the sun came up, sure that I was getting closer to making the move from not-writer to writer.  The book is deceptive like that.  What Dickey does is eliminate all variables.  The story is carefully structured so that by the climax of the book there are no choices left.  A character isn’t left with any options to choose between, only whether to do the one thing before him or die.  The plot literally becomes inevitable and what the book is left with are the stunning images and the sweat-inducing descriptions of the action.  It’s a handy trick.  Stephen King loves it.  So would Aristotle.  We’re at the opposite of Shteyngart’s hilarious, obese indulgence.  This is life or death prose – perhaps the only way to write earnestly.

After the cardiovascular workout of Dickey I had to choose my next step carefully.  I’d had a couple nibbles at my bait and I felt that I was getting close to writing something.  I tried some Edward Abbey, but put it down in disgust.  Wary of another disappointment, I went back to an old familiar, a muscular re-read.  I turned to James Crumley’s drunken private eye C.W. Sughrue and his spree The Last Good Kiss.  Sughrue is a violent moralist, distinctive enough to hold down a story that tugs him this way and that, smart enough to figure out who’s holding the strings and strong enough to—as the story folds back over itself—wrest whatever control he can manage.  Sughrue has a code and when you’re reading him his code becomes yours.  There is one way to see the world and that is through his rough and hard-earned system of merciless ethics.  His book puts you in a bold wrestler lock.  And lo and behold, something was happening!  I began work on a short story.  A brief taste of that old feeling.  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  Curb the enthusiasm.  One foot in front of the other.  Keep reading.

So, next, I picked up The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III.  The book is reminiscent of his blockbuster, The House of Sand and Fog.  In short chapters unobtrusive prose wends sympathetically through the minds of a cast of confused characters including a stripper, a wife-beating contractor and – notably – one of the 9-11 hijackers.  There is a lot of guesswork here.  You notice it especially when the narration inhabits the mind of the hijacker in the days leading up to the attack.  Dubus knows the vocabulary of Islam, but his western perspective does not vanish into the character and it reads like an American writer working from another point-of-view and – worse – guessing about the inner workings of a man responsible for our greatest recent national tragedy.  If anyone needs a code it’s this character, Bassam, but compared to Sughrue, Bassam is an understudy reading a script.  Dubus’ guesswork bleeds into the other characters as well.  There’s something pat and hard-timey about the long backstory he grants April, the stripper, and AJ, the wife-beater.  I won’t say that it is necessarily wrong to fictionalize or re-imagine a real-life tragedy, but more rigor could have limited the guesswork and smoothed out the false notes.

Which led me to Carson McCullers.  I had never read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and this seemed a damn good time to do it.  And here we found it.  This book has it all.  It has Shteyngart’s sweet embrace of human folly: like Misha’s hilariously beloved “multiculturalism,” McCullers’ Christ-like deaf protagonist is misinterpreted in ways useful to each character he encounters.  It has O’Nan’s character-centric patience, slowly unpeeling and observing its characters throughout the book’s span of time.  Its spirited, though restrained, treatment of race hints at a soul with Bachelder’s political fire.  Each individual chapter is realized with the image-driven immediacy of Dickey.  Characters’ flawed codes are as fully realized as Sughrue’s and – impressively – evolve through the course of the book, leaving no room for the kind of guesswork that taints Dubus’ sympathetic narrative.  If you find the will to write in the best available reading, I would surely find it here.  And I still hope to.

When a person stops writing for a little while you start to read differently.  You take a different perspective on what a story is.  You acquaint yourself differently with the authors.  You encounter all brands of rule-breakers, some rigorous adventurers, a few bullshitters, even occasionally something really great.  You learn once again, like you could when you were very young, to recognize the difference.  For this reason I think not writing is an important part of the writing process, especially after sustained periods of activity and development, such as might occur at an MFA program.  Not writing can be difficult, anxious, frightening, hard to weather, but there’s fun to be had out there, too.  And a lot of books to read.

Brendan Kerr lives and writes in Polish Hill, Pittsburgh.