Friday November 3rd, 2023
Fragile, so fragile the imagination. Thank goodness for the confidence and solidarity of others.
Dear Gentle Readers & precious patrons,
I don’t have a long piece for you today, as I’m swamped with article deadlines and trying to become an instant expert on everything from the modiolus (a fibromuscular structure at the corner of the mouth in humans but not in gorillas—stay tuned for more!) to organ donation procedures in the United States to infant language acquisition, and still very distracted by the pressing and intolerable fact of 2+ million human beings being bombed to oblivion in Gaza while the world looks on (and as hatred of both Jews and Muslims and anyone who might be mistaken for either skyrockets around the world), and by the other political-existential crises facing all of us…while still trying very hard to make dinner and get out of bed and keep moving every day on the novel. But that’s the good news that I wanted to report: I am writing a novel!
I mean, you knew that, and maybe you believe it because I’ve said it authoritatively, and also perhaps because I’ve been writing a novel for as long as you have known me (regardless, in most cases, of how long you have known me). But all along I’ve been writing, and groping towards belief in the dystopian and delicate world I’ve wanted to create, while being someone with extreme difficulty visualizing things or thinking on my feet (so I can’t just say imagine something into being with words, I first seem to have to write it, then edit it, then add details, gradually fleshing it out, then erasing the details that are wrong, then finally it begins to seem like something that somebody else created and that I believe exists and only then can I easily populate it with stories and characters and believe in it, for real). And so it’s been such a fragile project. It remains such a fragile project, though it has a beginning and a middle and an end, it has characters and theme and a story, it has a world. But I can see it now.
I knew that the most recent bit—twenty pages from the new beginning of the old novel—was solid. I have a lot of faith in my ability to recognize when my work is decent and when it sucks. Still, it was incredibly gratifying and reassuring to see people in my workshop respond the way you want readers to respond to the characters and the setting and the story—in the way people respond to something that really exists, not to a monster that only you can see, with contours that fade away even as you try to describe them.
We are, for very good reasons, not supposed to talk about what goes on in our fiction workshop, to keep it a safe and private space for everyone there (the most wonderful thing about it is the sense of solidarity, that we want to see each other succeed in keeping the flame of imagination alive and turning it into finished books worth reading, with each member therefore striving to give and receive serious and meaningful comments that respect each person’s abilities and intention). But I think I can share my delight that the feedback I received was positive, it was delighted, it was useful, it was encouraging (it’s always encouraging in some way at least), it gave me work to do and decisions to make and a sense that that work and those decisions pose some urgency, that it’s important that they be made and that there will, somehow, be readers eager to hear their outcomes. In short, it was real!
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