Boredom
In her book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres) talks quite a bit about boredom—that is, the causes of a writer becoming bored with his work-in-progress. She outlines four possible causes of boredom:
Ignorance, confusion, fear and the inner critic.
I can see, for myself, the truth of all four causes, but I’ll address one here, now.
Boredom from ignorance arises, she suggests, when the writer does not know enough of his or her own story: where is it going, how did it get where it is. On the one hand, I think—and others have suggested as well—a writer needs a certain amount of ignorance when he writes. To know too much is to write without the delight of discovery and surprise. In one of the most familiar aphorisms about writing a novel, E.L. Doctorow compares writing the novel to driving at night on an unlighted highway: the writer can see only as far ahead as his headlights illuminate. Flannery O’Connor talks about her own process of writing “Good Country People,” in which a dishonest Bible salesman steals the wooden leg of a woman he seduces. O’Connor once said that she had no idea he was going to steal the leg until the moment she wrote the sentence telling the reader that he did. So, yes, surprise is vital. Discovery is vital or the writer succumbs to another kind of boredom.
But I fully admit that for the longest time I haven’t known where my story was going. Partly this arises from fear of committing to a specific story: What if it’s not good enough? Maybe something else would be better. I think of a character in one of William Trevor’s stories (the title escapes me now) about a woman who persists in going to a hotel bar, looking for the man of her dreams. She is, by the time of the story, in dire financial straits. In the principle scene of the story, she runs into an ex- who suggests that maybe they could give it another go. He is charming, she likes him, enjoys him—but she rejects him, because he is not the man of her dreams. The reader knows the woman has blown it; she will never find the man of her dreams but will continue alone and dreaming.
The truth, however, is that a story just has to be a story. There is no such thing as the story. I think of the title of John Dufresne’s book on writing: The Lie That Tells A Truth. He doesn’t say, “The Truth,” but “A Truth.” There is nothing absolute about what you write. It is a small step in the journey of literature (or, if the notion of literature is too daunting—a small step in the journey of fiction—or a single brick in the edifice of fiction. A single brick in a wall can have all sorts of flaws—the flaws cannot be structural; the brick cannot fall to dust—but it can have all sorts of cosmetic flaws: pock marks, small cracks—and still do what it’s supposed to do: fill that specific space in the wall. That’s all it has to do.
All a writer needs to do is tell a story. A story.
