So it’s the
first of August, which means I owe cyberspace two months’ worth of consumption
diaries and probably a whole lot more.
Like, what’s
going on with my novel? The one I had 12 months full-time to write in Dunedin in
2017 and for which I am leaving money on the table in 2018 to work part-time
and finish the f**ker off.
Well, for
starters it’s called Nailing Down the
Saint. For now at least.
In May I
sent the manuscript to one of the US agents who came a’knocking when The Mannequin Makers started getting
good reviews in the States. I also sent the manuscript to the publisher here in
NZ that’s put out my first two books.
I have
comments from the NZ publisher, which translates to a bunch of small tweaks and
some more fundamental questions that I may or may not have to action (I’m doing
the tweaks first and hoping for a eureka moment that tells me exactly what I
should change and how). If I can turn around the next version of the manuscript
by mid-September, then it’s on track to come out in July 2019. No contract or
anything yet, but that’s the pipeline. My experience of these processes is that
the publication date inevitably gets pushed back. And I’m not going to send
something off in September if I don’t feel happy with it.
Right now, I’m
a little tender about it all. I find it hard going through the edits. I could
tell when I got my wife to read the version before the one I sent to the agent
and the NZ publisher that she wasn’t that into it. And there’s a lot of “I didn’t
get this” or “explain this for the reader” type comments on this latest version
that I have to weigh up. Which I might ordinarily find helpful, but at this
stage in the process I’m like a baby rat: pink, hairless, vulnerable. Any
breeze is chilling. Any light too bright for my still-sealed eyes. I feel
attacked. Which is weird. I’ve
written before about how necessary and, ultimately, positive the editing
process is. Even with this perspective, I feel an uneasy and contradictory
mixture of exposed, misunderstood, worthless, frustrated and tired.
Mostly
tired.
(Meanwhile
at my day job, I’ve spent the last six months trying to get the green light for
a multi-million dollar change project. A green light I received in July, about
the same time I got my NZ publisher’s comments. However, trifling things like
the budget and resourcing are proving harder to nail down than “Approved” might
have you believe.)
It doesn’t
help that it’s radio silence from the US agent. Of course she hated it. Look at
everything that was wrong with it. All those basic errors: “bought” instead of “brought”,
“disinterested” instead of “uninterested”. The slow patch in the middle. The
too-fast, too-oblique patch towards the end (okay, the whole last forty pages).
At times
like this I feel like I should never write a novel again. The short story is so
much more forgiving. My writing muscles are fast twitch, meant for sprints not
a marathon. When I look at my manuscript, all I see is text. Words placed for manipulative
purposes. No matter how much I want it to be a story, to have narrative, to be
an immersive experience for the reader, it’s the opposite.
 |
| The Chalice |
The image in
my head is Neil Dawson’s sculpture, ‘The Chalice’,
which stands in Cathedral Square in Christchurch. The words are the structure
of the chalice, starting solidly enough at the base, but getting more and more
sparse as it rises. And at its centre? Nothing. The further from the base you
get, the clearer the nothingness is.
Writing a
novel is a confidence trick twice over. First, you need to trick yourself, then
you need to trick your reader. Right now, I’m falling at the first hurdle
(albeit with a 110,000 word manuscript to wring my hands over).
I keep
saying things like “right now” and “at times like this” because I know it’s
just a mood. I’m at a low ebb. It’ll get better. But the peril is real. This
book might suck. The tweaks to make the intended meanings more clear might just
bring out the suckfulness. The wordiness. The nothingness.
A lot of
this stems from how and why I attack the novel form. I do so as a short story
writer with oodles more space. I want a patterned, complicated web of meaning.
I don’t ever think in terms of “theme” while plotting or writing, but the best
term I’ve come up with for my novelistic approach is “thematic maximilism”.
I begin to
build a novel around two unlikely elements. With The Mannequin Makers it was shipwrecks and department store
mannequins. With NDTS, it’s Hollywood
and a levitating saint. I then build a bridge between these two elements, which
inevitably centres on characters. For TMM the most obvious bridge is The
Carpenter/Gabriel Doig, who goes from being a figurehead carver to a mannequin
maker, via a shipwreck and extended period as a subantarctic castaway. For this
current novel, it’s my protagonist, who is a floundering Kiwi filmmaker in
Hollywood, given a lifeline in the form of a location scouting gig for film
about the life of San Giuseppe da Copertino.
Once I have
the two poles and the character-based bridge, I go about filling in all the
blanks that are necessary to translate my daydreaming into something that might
be meaningful and enjoyable for another human being. So characters need other
characters to interact with, they need jobs and motivations, passions and
secrets, they need to have a look and a way of talking. When searching around
for one of these things, let’s say it’s a job, I wait until I hit something
that chimed with, or off, an element that’s already in the novel.
In TMM, when I was looking for what Eugen
Kemp would be after he left New Zealand, and I came up with a surf lifesaver,
that clicked because of the link with physical culture and the teachings of
Eugen Sandow, and also the idea that he would spend the rest of his life trying
to save people after not being particularly save-y (and in one case, being the
exact opposite) in his teens. With surf lifesaving in place, the final section
began to echo the first and second, while also pushing the interest in physical
perfection (which might get called a “theme”) somewhere a little different.
In this next
novel, there are clusters of association around scepticism and belief (Catholic
saints, the feats of mystics, a modern cult; but also: Hollywood visual effects).
The process of writing the novel was one of challenging my innate scepticism
and the general laziness of my generation when it comes to anything beyond the
superficial and instantly gratifying. The surface of the novel is still papered
over with scepticism and contemporary references (the playlists the characters
make for their roadtrip, the machinations involved with making a Hollywood
movie), but underneath it there should be something more timeless, more
confronting. I want people to see both the surface and the subterranean. I don’t
want the chalice to be empty. But I don’t want to be too obvious about it. And that’s
where I’m mired at the moment: an endless string of decisions about what I
spell out, what I foreground a smidgeon more, and what I let lie beneath.
All the
while having more instantly gratifying and superficial pleasures like playing Fortnite or watching Netflix instead of
the mental gymnastics required to decide what are my minimum requirements and
what are my readers’.
At the
moment, I’m questioning if my imagined reader really exists. Like, there are
people who’d get the references to
Toad the Wet Sprocket and Wolfenstein, but do they read for pleasure anymore? Do they?
Should I
spell things out for a more likely readership, and in the process alienate the
one or two readers who come closest to what I’d be like if I was to pick up
this book with no prior knowledge?
I don’t want
to write something for Boomers or even Gen X. If they get it, great. But I
wanted to make a book for cuspers like me, with one foot in the digital but one
back in the analogue. People who vaguely remember having a rotary telephone, distinctly
recall the first time they used the internet (that dial-up modem screech!) and
spend most of their waking life trying to be good people on an ever-shifting identity
playing field.
I’ve tried
to write a novel about (inter alia) being
a middle class, cis, heterosexual, pakeha male; one that is honest about the
blind spots such characters can possess and acknowledges the bar must be raised
for what passes as good enough when white dudes grab the mic; that suggests passing
the mic down the row without adding your self-aggrandising reckons is
acceptable without having to make it heroic (aside: how fucking hard is it to
make your protagonist do the right thing in a traditional Western narrative
from without it having to be heroic?)…
But at the
same time I wanted the book to challenge where we draw the line about what’s
important and what should be re-evaluated. If levitation is possible for some
people (I know this is a big IF, but if it helps to suspend your disbelief try
and think of this as a metonymy for anything the conventional materialist
worldview dismisses as paranormal) does that mean there’s a kind of
psychokinetic fluidity? How would you respond when asked to consider this possibility
in the context of a traditional quest narrative?
Maybe I
should just give up trying to order this spider’s web of words and meaning and
just pass the mic down the row. Because Fortnite
and Netflix and spending time with my kids and taming my garden and delivering
a kickass change programme for the way we measure the quality of learning environments
at schools is a pretty full and potentially fulfilling life… if I draw the line
short of where I’ve gotten to in my head and step back over it.
Maybe I
should just write about the music, books, film & TV I’ve consumed these
past two months and pretend everything is hunky dory (when it’s more Aladdin
Sane).
Or maybe I
should give it a day, let my baby rat eyes open, my translucent skin toughen,
and get back to nailing down this novel that keeps threatening to float away.
