Some Thoughts on Trying to Write Well

After a hiatus of close to a week, today I was rereading what I have recently written (12 pages I am currently happy with) and I found that many of my conclusions from a week ago were now much different. In the past this is something that I would have been instantly offended by ("how will I ever be happy if my goals keep changing?"), but I persevered in thought and realized quite simply that the idea that my new conclusions were more important than the old ones was actually quite inconclusive. I simply quieted my mind of these concerns and revised to the best of my humble intuition and was happy with the result.

I am not an authority on the subject of writing (although I read about half of Norman Mailer's "The Spooky Art" in early mornings manning a cash register at Barnes & Noble some years ago), but I have been thinking a lot about the limitations of the medium. It seems to me that one of the most obvious limitations is not actually specific to writing at all but is a limitation of the world. We cannot perfectly reconstruct subjectivity no matter how hard we try. You cannot turn a reader into the character in the book. So in writing, you have to make lots of compromises to get as close as possible.

It seems to me that another problem is that as you attempt to plumb deeper into a character, the standard litany of storytelling tools becomes less and less useful. It is easy to show - even through action alone - that a character is angry or happy. It is far more difficult to thread words and actions into a tapestry that enumerates the person's life. But good writing tells us far more than what is on the page (i.e. Hemingway's "iceberg" theory). And though I do not claim it is the same problem (merely related), at the micro level, how indeed do you put the reader into the character in some specific moment in time when the character's own consciousness must differ so far from the reader's? You have to bend the story or bend the character or bend the actions. For example:

I am writing a scene where a character is drunk. I want to express the delusion that feels so incontrovertible when in that state but that is an absurdity later. How can this be done in writing? I don't want to describe it as such - I want the reader to feel all the same emotions, not read literal description of the event. It is a full dimension of difference. Well, I can't make the reader drunk (that would be some trick), but I can distort action (or in this case, the rigor of logic carried in a conversation) to frame an idea as evasive to the average reader as the idea is to the character in his state. So the "drunk" character is thinking far above his level because what "feels" difficult to the character takes something very different to "feel" the same to the reader. This is a work in progress but I believe that of the possible distortions, it is the best choice.

I also can't be certain but I believe as I was rereading part of my work today, I picked up a note of Shakespeare in my writing (not trying to congratulate myself - I'm talking about the spirit of the writing, not the quality). I think what I have been writing can't help but explore the boundaries of its characters. My work has no narrative momentum or consistency in dialog (yet) but it has a tone and I think it has ideas.