Tea at Trianon: When Writing a Novel, Ditch the Plan and Embrace Uncertainty

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

When Writing a Novel, Ditch the Plan and Embrace Uncertainty

From LitHub:

A brilliant writer friend of mine said to me that writing a novel isn’t an efficient process and people want the efficient. Efficiency, rationalism, progress, all perfectly decent ideas that also call to mind the American highway-building madness of the 1950s, for instance, or the current financial paradigm of ceaseless and predictable growth, and which, left to overtake the novel-writing process, can obscure or squeeze out altogether what is mysterious and irrational, the invisible presence that makes everything in fiction tick. More than the heart—the thing (or, more precisely, the non-thing) that makes the heart beat. A novel, if the writer really means it, is a process in which the writer emerges at the other side having gone through something, and even deeply changed. If a writer isn’t willing to be changed by the work, I might wonder why do it.

In writing workshops, whether I’ve been there as a participant or the teacher, I see writers who want the formula or the secret (but not the true secret, not the mysterious, irrational one). They often want the ten-step list, the actionable plan with concrete goals, a sense of progress and a pattern of coloured sticky-notes. These are fine things, by the way, and I myself am an inveterate list-maker with a hidden closet of index cards and navy gel pens. But this is just some scaffolding, a bit of staging for the real show, which is the grand encounter with uncertainty that is writing fiction, or writing anything at all. Or simply living.

At the beginning of the COVID lockdowns, there was much talk of the wild animals who came to check out previously occupied human spaces, and maybe something about how unattuned we are with the natural world caused people to regard this as both amusing and unsettling—a symbol of the uncertainty in which we’ve been bathing. I live in a semi-rural town, with scrappy woods all around and lots of animals: roving gangs of wild turkeys, deer, foxes, coyotes and a type of weasel called a fisher that locals blame for screaming during summer nights like someone being murdered (try listening to that when you feel uncertain). (Read more.)