A quiet day in the shop; I stood at the till and wrote the remaining 20-odd pages of Michelina in one gigantic push. Memories of university, page after page of longhand, my already creaky handwriting seriously slanted at the end.

The oldest fiction writer's workshop cliche in the world is the idea that "your characters will surprise you." Stephen King, in his excellent memoir On Writing, likens writing to digging up a fossil; you're never sure if you're going to excavate a wishbone or a tyrannosaur's hipbone. These last few days I feel like I've excavated a small house, a place which, apparently, I've been carrying around in my subconscious for months. So, yes, there are places where the characters surprised me, especially Michelina, and her resourcefulness in the face of a narrative which began as an illustrated picture book, of all things, then grew progressively more violent, expressionistic, and strange.

The last piece of fiction I actually completed was a not terribly well structured story called East Pacific Rise, which was promptly rejected by On Spec magazine, who had previously published a much less well written, but better structured story called Making History. I was still living in Kitsilano in my alley apartment, and working on my old kitchen table 386, so this would have been...1994? 1995? Long enough, at any rate, to consider the story-making mechanism in my head permanently broken, and to move on to art criticism, curating, and entrepreneurship. Part of the problem was peristent deep depression; that and the dumb belief that plot was subordinate to style, and that prose lines had to be worked like lines of lyric poetry, till they sang and sounded like Cormac McCarthy. Or Thomas Pynchon. Or Faulkner.

Those writers still retain a hold on me -- I can quote whole paragraphs of Gravity's Rainbow from memory, and not the funny stuff you'd expect, the limericks and off-color jokes, but the quieter passages, the descriptions of wartime London, or the men and women singing all across snowy England on Christmas Eve -- but somewhere along the line I started paying attention to a subtler kind of literary modernism -- first John Updike's Rabbit books, then Henry Green -- that achieves the same kind of stylistic innovation I admire in Pynchon and Faulkner, but without the thick veneer of symbolism and allusion. And read, again, writers I'd admired in childhood, Tove Jansson, Roald Dahl, and Robert Arthur (creator of the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, which I devoured religiously as an elementary school kid) among them.

So: off to transcribe, and to edit. Dry spell snapped. Back soon.
- posted by cjb @ 9:08 PM