On didactic fiction

A friend of mine is going through some serious shit right now, some of the most serious shit I've seen a person go through. It involves a mentally ill spouse, a messy divorce, and very few viable good options. He's been seeing a therapist, understandably. As most people who see therapists find, however, the supposed expert on life choices has precious little actual advice to give. It's the usual song and dance about how it's not his job to tell my friend what to do, but to help him decide for himself what to do. The rub, of course, is that his life is such a flaming wreck right now, he is utterly unable to decide for himself what to eat for breakfast, much less how to handle the real decisions he has to make in life. He needs the therapist to fucking well tell him what to do. It doesn't even matter much if it's the best possible choice. He needs some direction so he can go do something.

One often hears that the role of the fiction writer is something akin to how most therapists see themselves. One popular cliche of modern times goes something like: "It's not the role of fiction to provide the answers, but to make the questions clear." It's the same crap therapists try to sell us. I dearly hope that fiction writers are not, in the end, as utterly useless as mental health professionals are, because if that's true, I've wasted a lot of my life.

I was discussing these things tonight with a friend in conjunction with my thoughts on having finished a little more than half of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which this friend from tonight had encouraged me to read. There are lengthy passages in Jest about Alcoholics Anonymous. One recurring idea is that even though every idea AA gives its adherents is plainly a cliche and bunk and full of intellectual holes, it is also true that the people who do the steps, even if they don't believe in them, find that those steps work. In other words. AA tells them what to do, and even though it's not great advice, it somehow works.

Unlike nearly every publisher today, I occasionally like didactic fiction. It's hard to do well, but I also think I have something of a tolerance for when it's not done perfectly. The important thing when writing a story that seems, in some sense, to tell the reader what to do is to not write a story that sounds as though you knew coming into it what advice you had to give. It has to feel as though the advice came organically through the story.

I don't think a lot of the fiction I've read in the last ten years, the exemplars of America's best fiction, have given much clear advice about what to do. I'm not looking to be hit over the head with aphorisms, but it would be nice to be given some sort of clue as to what I'm supposed to get out of a story. My own writing has been influenced by these kinds of hands-off-the-reader's-personal-life stories. I think I'm going to try to resist that influence a little more going forward. If it means I don't get published, then I don't get published. That's already not happening much lately, anyway. If I'm going to fail, I'd like to fail writing the stories I like. 

Is this a typo or do I not know English?

Because I've submitted to hundreds of writing journals, I get constant email reminders to submit to them again. I ignore most, but for some reason, I opened up one from the Cincinnati Review yesterday. I did this even though I've submitted there four times, never been accepted, and they accepted a story that sounded kind of dumb written by Jane Villanueva in Jane the Virgin.  Here's what the banner said:

I believe this is a typo, and they meant "bring us your finest literature." The only time I've ever heard "literatures" as a plural was in a comparative sense, e.g. "The literatures of Spain and Portugal are not as similar as one would think." But here, it seems to be using it to mean "multiple pieces of literature." In this sense, when I write two books, I don't just produce literature, I produce two literatures.

My spell check doesn't even like that word. Am I crazy here, or is the reason Cincinnati Review never accepted me because I'm too dumb to even know the possible uses of the word I'm supposed to be producing? My Googling seems to support me, but maybe insiders in the profession are starting to use the word in a new way?

Reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is a microcosm of the writing life of a would-be writer

Mrs. Heretic asked me, when I started reading Infinite Jest, why I was reading it. I had a little bit of difficulty answering the question. I've had more difficulty continuing to answer it since I started reading it. I put the book down intending to definitively quit on page 134, but felt guilty two hours later, and now am on page 182. That's a week's work. I guess I've also read 13 pages of the footnotes at the back of the book, two of which were several pages long.

Why am I reading this book? Because of late, I've been thinking that maybe literature isn't the stupidest thing for me to invest my time into. Because it's considered one of the most important fiction books of the last 50 years. Because if I'm going to invest time into literature in a serious way, it's a book I ought to have read. Because what I know of David Foster Wallace seems interesting. For example, his belief that literature can and should be sincere. (Contrast this to Harold Bloom's dictum, "All bad poetry is unfailingly sincere," which had a lot of influence on me twenty years ago.) DFW also wrote about other quaint ideas, like how the point of literature is to decrease our feeling of loneliness. He seemed to have believed in a lot of classic, humanist ideas about what the point of literature was. So if there was a guy whose oeuvre was worth sinking a lot of time into, it was him.

It's not an easy task, though. First of all, I'm a terribly slow reader. I get distracted easily. I have no idea how some people read entire books in an evening. I made it through graduate school by being willing to put forth super-human effort to get my work done. If it took me ten hours to read something most people read in five hours, then I would spend ten hours reading it. But this is 1,000-plus pages of fairly dense writing, and there are a lot of other things I could be doing.

It's not so dense I can't do it. It's not Joyce. It's not Derrida. The question isn't whether I can read it, it's whether it's worth all the time. And that's how reading this book is like writing itself. Each step forward requires not just effort, but faith that the effort will be worth it. Dave Eggers' forward to Infinite Jest notes that it took him a month to get through it. That means it'd likely be about six weeks for me. That's six weeks where I'm plowing forward, hoping the effort will pay off in the end. With a book like this, it's a little difficult to tell as it goes along whether it's going somewhere worth going. So I have to believe that all those people who finished it already and declared it worth the effort know what they're talking about.

I wouldn't expect it to be the best of all possible uses of those six weeks. That would be like expecting the person you marry to be the best possible match of all the billions of people in the world. But it would be nice if it were the best of the several uses of those weeks I was otherwise immediately considering.

The concern that I'm wasting my time is actually one of the most common thoughts that distract while mid-reading. At least once an hour, I have to fight back the feeling that this is all a lot of effort for nothing, that it's not really going to change me or how I see things in any meaningful way. The same thing happens while writing a story--the odds are always long that anything I write will get published, that anyone will share with me the breakthrough I think I've had while writing it. 

I used to get through this feeling when I was younger by telling myself that even if what I was doing wasn't the best use of my time, that wasn't a problem because eventually, I would work so hard I'd read everything and do everything, and in time, I would hit upon the best selections. But I'm far too familiar now with my own limitations to still think that.

It's humanist optimism that pushes me forward, the belief that by applying my intellect, I can improve myself in some sense and maybe the world around me. But in many ways, that's like thinking I can bail out the ocean with a bucket. In my case, my brain isn't the most effective bucket, either. Still, I've been committed for a long time now to the quixotic quest to try to bail out that ocean, even while knowing the whole time it's a fool's quest. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to books like Infinite Jest--or Moby Dick or Gnomon. Books that indulge a bit, that invite criticism like "there is a well-crafted 400-page novel somewhere inside this 750-page book"--those books are the ones to me that encapsulate the spirit of throwing oneself with abandon at an impossible project.

I recently became the same age DFW was when he gave up trying. Maybe that's why I feel such a sense of urgency to keep pushing. If I stop feeling like I need to put everything I have into it, I'm afraid I'll feel like it's no longer worth putting any of myself into it.

I guess that's why, when I'm done writing this, I'm going to try to force myself to sit down for another hour or so and see how much more of this book I can chip away at.

There is nothing new under the sun, which is a totally original idea I just came up with

"The Bare Naked Ladies Sang 'It's all Been Done,' and even that was done a 100 years ago." -a college professor of mine, who probably doesn't remember saying it because he was likely stoned when he said it. 

Of course, every writer knows the moment he starts whacking at the keys there is precious little that can be said that hasn't already been said in some way before. The best you can hope for is maybe a new juxtaposition of old ideas, or maybe bringing an old idea up-to-date by putting new clothes on it. Still, I thought in the first short story I ever got published, "American as Berbere," that I'd at least started off with a fairly fresh simile:

When he was twelve, Tesfay came to the conclusion that all Habesha music had a drumbeat that sounded like somebody had chucked two shoes into a Laundromat dryer, and soon thereafter developed a contempt for Ethiopian music—and perhaps Ethiopia in general—that stuck with him.

If you've ever listened to a typical song in Amharic or Tigrinya, you might recognize what I'm talking about. Here's an example, with the drums picking up around the one minute mark:

I was listening to that song back when I was trying to teach myself Tigrinya. It might have been the song I had in mind when I wrote that line, but there are thousands of songs like it. In any event, that idea of a dryer spinning around with a pair of shoes in it really was how the music made me feel. I could imagine some guy at a laundromat at four in the morning, strung out and bleary-eyed, falling into some sort of feverish reverie as the shoes circled around, then hit in two quick thuds over and over. Maybe he'd had to wash them when he stepped in dog shit on his way home from somewhere. I thought the simile fit the sound and the feeling. I was pretty happy with that image.

This week, I started the project of reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which I've put off for a long time. On only the third of the book's 1000+ pages, I read this line:

My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it. 

Well, shit.

I mean, we used the imagine in different ways. I'm not even sure how a heart can beat like shoes in a dryer, because a heart goes blam-blam-blam when it's beating hard, not bump-bump. There's the "lub-dub" you can hear with a stethoscope, but I don't think Hal felt that inside his own chest as his nerves rose during his college interview. It's a throwaway simile for Foster Wallace, whereas it was important enough to me I led with it. But still, he used it 20 years before I did.

I don't know if it's freeing or crippling to realize you can't do anything new. Maybe it's nice to know you can't really succeed at newness, so that takes the pressure off. On the other hand, I hate the notion that I might be called out on plagiarism charges at any time for something I didn't even know existed.