Fear of Breaking it
Sep
10
2008
I pulled something out of the deep freeze that’s the beginning 3 pages of a short story (at least), and I like it so much I don’t want to touch it.
I haven’t seen that level of lyricism out of my head recently.
Aiyiyi.
It often appears that 3 years ago and in snippets I was at the top of my game, and that I’m unlikely to hit those chords so well again.
This is unchanging: the point of peak is always 3 years back.
When I was a kid, my dad wanted so much to buy a farm. At heart, he was a farm boy and hated the big city. Kitchener had 60,000 people and was the big city. Anyway, his dream of buying a farm was always, “in 5 years”. I grew up hearing about those 5 years my whole life. That’s what your “three years ago” reminded me of.
And we were always going to move to Vancouver in two years. But look! We finally did! So maybe your lyricism will catch up with you too. Or maybe it already has.
Lyricism, like wine, has to age a bit before its quality is recognizable.
The problem I have with beautiful passages is that they seem to have a terrible gravity – and I mean gravity in the astronomical sense. They’re black holes, warping the writing around them. Whole plots can be twisted beyond all comprehensibility, in service to their beauty.
I prefer to tuck those passages carefully away in a drawer, preserved pristinely for my eyes alone, and then cannibalize them for parts later on. Once a work is structurally sound, see, go back and fetch that brilliant 2-ton metaphor, because you can set it on the well-built chassis without it doing any damage.
(Of course, rereading the title – “Fear of Breaking It” – makes me suspect you might be reluctant to mine your old work for scrap. I’m a bit of a heartless pragmatist that way. A tinkerer. An INTJ – no, REALLY. Not sentimental about the building blocks. They go where they will do the most useful work.)
Actually, this one’s got a pretty good chassis, too. The structure is part of what I’m loving.
It’s just incomplete.
However, it just occurred to me that it could be working as a SHORT story, instead of the 6000 words I normally do. That’d be fun. Try to get it into, uh, say 3000 words. I just have to cap it, rather than yank it farther than it needs to go. Maybe sometimes less IS more. SHOCKING.
Yeah, Beth, it’s like that. Only it’s always this despair instead of hope: I’ve already reached my pinnacle, it’s all downhill from here, oh my god I have Alzheimer’s.
I think it was Sheila who recently said elsewhere that the New York times suggested that despair is a critical part of the creative process – and mine often looks like “3 years ago!”
When I was 19, I was able to write, and write, and write. And a lot of it was good – really good – but I think that’s because I didn’t censor myself, and I didn’t hold back. I did edit a lot, but that came after, and it was satisfying to have something substantial to edit. Now I find that when I’m writing, I’m constantly second guessing myself. It’s like I lost my literary innocence.
However…
Rather than a lost hope, you could view it as a peak and valley, with an impending peak on the horizon.
I think it’s an element of that “bad” gene we were talking about. The stuff you did 3 years ago is always going to look better. It was pure and free of the muddy muck muck of the acceptance and production of “art” as a lifestyle. You’re much more serious about your work . Now that can be looked at as either a welcomed maturity or as a curse. For me it changes from day to day. I look at stuff I did 20 years ago and I am amazed at how good some of it was, but it was all lucky accident. Nowadays, it’s much harder to bring to fruition what I previsualize in this sick mind of mine, but at least I have a clearer picture(no pun intended) of what I want.
It’s sort of ironic, isn’t it.