Why Do Writers Abandon Novels? – NYTimes.com

Apr 112011
 

¶ Why would a novel be, in Chabon’s parlance, “wrecked”? Authors, always sensitive creatures, might abandon a book in a fit of despair, as Stephenie Meyer initially did in 2008 with her “Twilight” spinoff “Midnight Sun,” which she declared herself “too sad” to finish after 12 chapters leaked to the Internet. More dramatically, in 1925 Evelyn Waugh burned his unpublished first novel, “The Temple at Thatch,” and attempted to drown himself in the sea after a friend gave it a bad review. (Stung by jellyfish, Waugh soon returned to shore.) More dramatically still, Nikolai Gogol died a mere 10 days after burning the manuscript of “Dead Souls II,” for the second time.

¶ Sometimes success intrudes on a writer’s plans, transforming what once came easily into an impossible slog — as happened to two old friends, Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Lee had written more than 100 pages of her second novel, “The Long Goodbye,” before “To Kill a Mockingbird” was even published in 1960. But the attention accompanying the wild success of “Mockingbird” slowed her output to a trickle. After years of fitful work, she seems to have given up, telling her cousin, “When you’re at the top there’s only one way to go.”

¶ Capote, meanwhile, published chapters from his long-gestating “Answered Prayers” in Esquire, and the resulting fallout — longtime friends, recognizing themselves in the barely veiled portraits of desperation and decadence, cut Capote off — infuriated and hurt him. “What did they expect?” he asked his editor. “I’m a writer, I use everything.” Some think that Capote wrote more, but that the chapters were destroyed or lost; many, including his longtime partner, Jack Dunphy, believe he never wrote another word.

via Why Do Writers Abandon Novels? – NYTimes.com.

Why Is This Damned Thing So Elusive? Thoughts from an Apprentice Writer

Mar 242010
 

This post is extemporaneous, un-edited and un-solicited.  (Have I caveated it enough?)  My struggles to understand writing have reduced to this:  failure must be a significant part of the process.  I hope.  Nothing in my life (perhaps golf?) has prepared me to face failure and utter disgust with my own ability quite as much as the last year and a half, and the last two months in particular, with these little frissons of joy at a sentence, a phrase, a moment captured.  Yet every time I think that my hands have grasped something concrete, it slides away.  It’s character. No, it’s structure.  But what level of structure?  No, it’s the verbs.   I feel like I’m trying to wrap my arms around a jello-mold!  Yet, as my wife has pointed out, I’ve never been more happy, never more satisfied with anything I’ve ever done.  How does failure satisfy you?  How does ineptitude qualify as joy?  But there it is.  My ego has been stripped raw.  My brain fried.  My confidence reduced to doubts about every comma, every verb.  Yet what else would I rather be doing?  Perhaps being attacked by a killer clownfish, but beyond that?

—Richard Farrell

Failure & Other Happy Thoughts for the Weekend.

Feb 122010
 

Perhaps in relation to the aftermath of packet one, I spent part of the morning reading Michael Dennis Browne’s essay, “Failure,” which examines failure in writing.  (This essay is found in The True Subject: Writers on Life and Craft, an anthology of essays edited by Kurt Brown, and part of at least 3 volumes published by Graywolf Press.)   Browne borrows ideas about failure from a number of writers as he explores the potential usefulness of failing in the artistic process   He looks at his own ‘failures’ too, and how they have guided him as a poet.

Might every book have to seem to be a failure to the writer so that the next one becomes necessary?  Is there a way in which we can see acknowledgement of a books’ ‘failure’ not as something that quenches the imagination, that robs the writer of confidence for future work, but rather as an incentive to—forgive the hearty phrases—do it better, to get it right, the next time.

He cites the Irish poet, Eavan Boland, whose quote follows. I happen to really like this quote…it makes me feel somehow hopeful about learning and toiling.  From Boland:

I always think of myself as working at a rock face.  Ninety days out of ninety-five, it’s just a rock face.  The other five days, there’s a bit of silver, a bit of base metal in it.  I’m reasonably consistent, and the consistency is a help to me.  It helps me to stay in contact with my failure rate, and unless you have a failure rate that vastly exceeds your success rate, you’re not really in touch with what you’re doing as a poet.  The danger of inspiration is that it is a theory that redirects itself toward the idea of success rather than to the idea of consistent failure.  And all poets need to have a sane and normalized relationship with their failure rate.

I love the notion that there is danger in moving toward the concept of success.  Little of my education, my work life, or my social life accepts this notion of failure.  I do not yet have a ‘sane and normalized relationship’ with failing, but I’m working on it.  This semester should help!  The idea of accepting failure runs so counter to our society’s notions of bottom-line success.  I also respond strongly to the idea of the rock face.  That writing is not only about learning to live with the failure but continuing to toil, to chip away despite the ninety days of failure.   As I’ve heard repeated so often in Montpelier, worry about the process, not the product.

Brown quotes at length a variety of other writers on this topic:  George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Isaac Newton, T.S. Eliot, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Boris Pasternak, Robert Lowell, and William Butler Yeats.  He also uses examples from his own writing, and shows how his mistakes have led him deeper into his own poetic imagination.   This is Browne toward the end of the essay:

It is an old idea that the end is the journey itself, and that in the experiencing and accepting and embracing of failure we become most fully human.  Through daily personal and artistic discipline we can work to be more receptive, even if we often come to realize that the maps we have made are not the territory, that our persistent examining leads us to the conviction that, as Auden says, the truth is a silence towards which words can only point.  We can see this as pathology, a problem, or as a mystery, one to live as fully as possible.

—Richard Farrell