This morning I wrote my standard 1000 words, which is the minimum I attempt to accomplish when I’m working on a novel and not suffocated by the termly demands of the day job (it goes up to 2000 words if the family’s out for the afternoon, and 3000 if my hypochondria becomes fatal). It went really well. In fact, I had to avoid the urge to sing my prose aloud to strangers.
That felt important, because it often doesn’t go well. The only time I can recall the writing flying onto the screen recently was the time I took my daughter to a playcentre and didn’t see her for two hours. I loaded up on coffee and opened the laptop and one hundred and twenty minutes later I had something that worked. But most of the time, writing’s unpleasant. You know how pigeons eat - all those headbutting pecks at breadcrumbs that simply fling the food three feet away? Writing makes a pigeon's dining habits look easy.
But what if those days hadn’t gone well and the writer took three swings at the ball instead of just one? Would the book still end up the same, ultimately? Or what if those bad days, when the pigeon pings his crumbs all over the park and flies home starving, had gone better? The right words in the right order. The best words in the best order. Or is that simply the job of the edit? Does it all come out in the wash?
Determinism posits that, in a situation where a person makes a decision or performs an action, it’s impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or acted differently. But thoughts leave their vapour trails, and the inspiration that supplies a work of art is different on any given day. There are millions of versions of every book out there, with subtle differences and nuances, and a further million interpretations by a waiting readership, the jury who decides its critical fate.
Note-taking and research lead a writer to a certain point and then the book, in a sense, writes itself, does it? Is such causality actually proof that fiction is out of the author’s hands?
The story behind Kubla Kahn has always fascinated me. If you don’t know the myth of the most famous unfinished poem in human history, it’s simply this: Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a ton of opium, fell asleep and dreamed a poem. He woke, wrote it down and was interrupted by a ‘person on business from Porlock’ before it could be completed. It wasn’t published for twenty years. He didn’t work on it, edit it, try and finish it, for two decades. It wrote itself, with Coleridge as conduit, and any attempt to master it slipped away like the food of our pigeon in desperate need of a spoon.
There are three fateful conditionals at play:
IF that uninvited guest hadn’t knocked, the poem would have been complete, if not perfect.
(Out of the writer’s hands, indeterminism showed its cards and no artistic decisions were made; rather chance, and unpredictability, played a major part)
IF he hadn’t partaken of his ‘spiritual medicine’, Coleridge wouldn’t have had a poem at all.
(His decisions were his own and yet he felt led to those decisions - therefore determinism)
IF he’d worked on the poem further over the years, he would have reduced it.
(A refusal to make any decisions at all without the author-God present)
The liminal space between determinism and indeterminism is Kubla Khan's very unfinished nature, if indeed it truly is ‘unfinished’. We’re not talking about a demo version of a song that went on to be a chart topper; we’re talking about a work of art that its creator decided to publish as it was, therefore announcing it as final. We’ll never know how that poem was supposed to end; the interruption Coleridge suffered would forever be a part of its art. Assuredly, if he’d finished it, it would never have found fame as the Edwin Drood of poetic verse.
I suspect a novel, too, is a mixture of determinism and indeterminism. Artists steer their works, chip away until the art beneath is as the gods intended. Plenty of good authors have written bad books with a great premise. If the conditions had been different, might those novels have been classics? Did time constraints or illness or lack of enthusiasm prevent a higher quality, or was the book always destined to be not-quite-great?
(By the same token, there are dozens of hack writers who made one undeniable masterpiece that could never be replicated. The stars aligned for them.)
To put it another way, when I wrote that 1000 words I wanted to sing about, did I just get lucky?
If so, how can an artist guarantee they repeat that success in the future? Routine? Subject matter? The right coffee beans in the right playcentre?
Too many questions.
Ultimately, that's what writers yearn for. Those golden days when the writing writes itself. That beautiful paradox at the heart of creation: a birth that's both painless and carried to term by someone else, but which you get to call your own.
Comments