Writing-acting-writing

Early in my college career, fresh from a Catholic high school with only so-so liberal arts offerings, and negotiating a prestigious southern university with serious and significant liberal arts offerings, I found myself in the creative writing class of Mary Lee Settle, a cranky and rather opinionated professor of the older type, one given to delivering stark sermons about writing, the content of which I can't even remember now.  I do, however, remember an activity she put us through early in the semester.  Each of us were assigned roles of her choosing and forced, in character, to answer questions about ourselves.  The questions came both from her and from other students (who were supposed to stay in character the whole while).  At the time it struck me as a silly and highly contrived exercise, one which made me uncomforable despite the fact that I spent several summers of my childhood acting in community theatre productions and that in high school I acted in several one-acts peformed by a church teen group.  "We're here to talk about writing," I remember thinking as Settle put us through our paces, "not acting."  What I failed to understand is that Settle was talking about writing.  That was the whole point of her lesson.   What I recognize now, and say repeatedly to my students, is that in some crucial intellectual aspects, the crafts of acting and of writing are identical.  Writing fiction, especially, is about dropping yourself and becoming someone else.   This is most obviously true, I suppose, when writing in a first person voice.  On paper you act out that person's voice for the reader as a performer would for an audience.  And it shouldn't always be the same first person voice, or maybe fiction isn't really what you want to write.  But the similiarity still holds when one uses the second and third person voices.  Any time a writer draws characters in a story, the writer must find a way into the character, even if that character is a monster; otherwise the writer is doing nothing but manipulating stick figures, and his story dies.  This is obviously an intuitive process and involves not only mining the expanse of one's own personality-- and whose personality isn't wide enough to include at least a little of the monster--but being sensitivie to realities of the personalities in the people around you.  In the end, it feels like the mental prep work that practiced actors must do all the time.  And it can be remarkably liberating.

Several years ago, across a range of courses, I taught a certain writing student, the only former student of mine that I can call a certifiable genius.  (This was not just my opinion.  Everyone who taught her said the same thing.)  She was frightfully, painfully reserved in class; she said almost nothing during workshop; but her creative work was both voluminous and astounding.  She had more natural command of, and an ear for, language than any person I've ever met.   Her stories were disturbing and difficult and very darkly funny.  As it turned out, this student, for a time, was also a drama major and had roles in several productions.  As hard as it still is for me to imagine, this brilliant but critically shy girl became someone else entirely when she hit the stage.  I'll never forget my wife rushing home from one show, exclaiming how shocked she was to see Jessica, of all people, completely owning a campy, outragious, flirtacious role.  "I just couldn't believe that was Jessica," she kept repeating.  But really, it should have come as no surprise, to her or to me.  The trigger that allowed Jessica to dump her usual self and become another woman on stage is the same trigger that allowed her to develop the outrageous and compelling characters that took over her stories.  When I was in graduate school I was constantly told by readers how surprised they were to find such distrubed, cranky, even hateful people narrating my stories.  "You seem so normal," they would say.  For my part, I was surprised by their surprise.  It seemed perfectly natural to me to create these characters.  After all, I was just acting.

That writing is a means of self-expression--no, that we write in order to self-express--is a widely accepted axiom.  But at the risk of academic heresy, let me say that I think self-expression may be the worst reason to write anything creative and certainly not why I do so.  I write stories to indulge in new human worlds and to know imaginary people from the inside.  And to see how the lives of those imagined people play out.  There's usually very little, and sometimes none, of me in my stories.  Don't you get it?  That's the pleasure.  But I should say, before wrapping up, that I don't think this is merely an aspect of fiction writing.  If one is writing poetry, for instance, or creative nonfiction, genres famous for their ability to let the writer explore and express himself, I don't think the work finally begins to succeed until the writer regards himself as only another character in the reimagined world of the poem or the memoir.  The person-writer who, back in the real world, experienced the triggering event or relationship must get kicked out and be replaced by the writer-as-character in order for the actual writer (who technically is the same person, but not really) to bring the piece to its best fruition, the fruition demanded by the piece itself not by the person-writer whose experiences inspired it.  This may sound like some kind of complicated mental trickery, but it's not.  It's a natural process for any experienced craftsman.  I'll never forget hearing Jo Ann Beard, during a visit to my university, say that she tells her students their memoirs will never be any good until they stop thinking about those memoirs as their attempts to tell on themselves to the world and start thinking about them as pieces of art that have almost nothing to do with them at all.  I sat there and knew exactly what she was talking about.   She meant that when you are writing--no matter what you are writing--you are playing a role (or perhaps several at once).  And she meant to take that responsibility seriously.  She meant to say, Make damn sure you play that thing to the hilt.  Make sure that afterwards people say, I can't believe that was you.

Beginnings of How

In the very first post I wrote for this blog (just click on "About" to see it), I explained how I received the idea to write a novel about Van Gogh in the first place. But that's just one aspect of the origins of this project, the "What." Equally pressing, and this is of course true anytime you write anything, was: "How?" That is, how did I want to approach my subject after I realized that Van Gogh must be my subject? How should I structure the novel? What motifs would I press? I guess you could broadly call these issues of style rather than subject. One very important stylistic decision I made stemmed from having reading Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy not long before the idea for the novel came to me. If you haven't read Hansen's delicious little book, you must. With exquisite delicacy and much quiet poetry, he details the life of a cloistered nun in upstate New York in the early 20th century. I know, that doesn't sound especially thrilling but, Hansen's book is a wonder and rightly earned considerable acclaim when it appeared in 1991. When I got around to reading it, what I marveled at most was how beautifully contained are each of the chapters. Every chapter, even if it details only single minute in his protagonist's life, is a universe unto itself. Hansen's narrative develops in moment-by moment-by-moment thrusts; there are virtually no bridging sections. This seemed a fascinating and atypical way to structure a novel, but it also felt just "right" for the subject. Since at the time I was exploring the world of monasteries in order to write a novel of my own, I knew how the lives of cloistered nuns and monks are purposefully kept the same--at the surface level--from day to day. They attend services on a fixed schedule, keep to regular work details, and engage in regularly scheduled meals, private prayers, and bible reading. On the surface, it's none too exciting and doesn't seem to ever vary. But that's the point and the purpose. Where the action is--where it's supposed to be--is on the level of the soul: those moments of profound confrontation with yourself or with God, wrapped by external quiet. The structure of Hansen's novel cannily emphasized this philosophy of living.

When I conceived of my Van Gogh novel, I immediately thought of Mariette and wanted to adopt Hansen's structure as my own. For some reason I felt it would be "right" for my subject too. My book would be a small book, composed of a series of wildly divergent but significant moments in the painter's life. Even more so than in a conventional novel, my book would proceed scene by scene, rather than chapter by chapter or year by year. Like Hansen, I would create very few bridges. Well, I've actually stuck to that plan during the four years I've worked on the book. Except the novel, in its present incarnation, is not in the least short. Scenes, after all, require pages to effectively be dramatized, and if you write enough scenes you end up with a heck of a lot of pages. And since, unlike Hansen, I am more or less covering the entire life of my protagonist, brevity is virtually impossible. That said, it's important to recognize that this commitment to scene over summary can sometimes be the most efficient way to cover a broad span of years. I think of some of Jo Ann Beard's essays in her brilliant The Boys of My Youth. She'll present a scene from one year in her life, then jump to another year, and then another, allowing that one scene to represent all the fundamental tensions of the speaker during that period. In this way, she can suggest her whole life in 30 or 40 pages, whereas as a more overtly inclusive narrative would have taken many more pages and perhaps not achieved any greater payoff. As I said: efficient. I guess with my novel so far I've not been courgeous enough to let a single scene represent Vincent in each of his various life "periods." (He had several such periods.) Some of these periods--notably Paris and Arles--I've rendered in several scenes. At this point, I've written so many scenes I have a hefty--too hefty?--novel, even after doing quite a lot of cutting. But the thing is, I can honestly say that each of the scenes contributes something important and unique to my picture of Van Gogh. I'm glad I developed the novel in this manner and can't really imagine doing it any other way. I only hope my book can do justice to the influence of Hansen's beautiful and exotic Mariette.