I’ve written myself into emptiness. Over the last year or so, I’ve produced about five hundred and eighty or so pages of prose. Some of those pages include photographs and pictures, so it’s not all my prose. But still, subtract fifty pages and it’s still a hell of a lot of writing. All of it has been in the retrospective mode. The document with all the images is what I think of as a memoir, which I’ve titled Still Don’t Know What I’ve Been Searching For. It takes seven chapters to complete, one for each place that I’ve lived, from Cienfuegos, Cuba to Miami to Harrisburg to State College, Pennsylvania to Cambridge to Carlinville, Illinois and finally to Reading, Pennsylvania. Seventy-four years of experiences. Like all memoirs, it’s only a partial account of what I experienced. Anything more would take another seventy-four years to complete. It’s also partial insofar as I leave out some things and focus only on events and people who seem to me significant, for whatever reason. I have no intention of doing anything with the document beyond maybe sending chapters to Carlos, my son, so he can get some sense of why his father is so strange a human being. I don’t know how interesting it would be for anyone else, or even for him.
The second bit of writing that I’ve done, this one all in the last month, is a fiction, which I’ve titled Never. It's long enough to be a novel, but I hesitate to call it that because it sounds ambitious and pretentious. It’s a fiction. The idea is loosely based on my experiences in the first term of my undergraduate career at Penn State. I don’t mention the school by name in the fiction, but it’s obvious what I mean. The characters in the story are also transparent. I change names, of course, and none of the characters are copies of real human beings. But the intent of the representation is, to me who wrote it at least, self-evident. I suspect that anyone who was around with me in those olden days of yore would be able to figure out the relationship between the fictional characters and real people.
The curious thing about writing the fiction was that the whole thing just came out of me without any effort on my part. It poured out like Coleridge’s ceaseless turmoil seething. I’d sit at my laptop and open the document, and the story just came. Even when I took time off from the laptop the story insisted on issuing forth. I’d be in the basement exercising, as I’m in the habit of doing because otherwise my whole body would simply atrophy, and in mid weight-lift ideas, events, dialogues would come into my brain and I would have to stop the lifting and type out an email to myself on the downstairs laptop recording whatever my brain had concocted. The same happened sometimes as I was walking around the neighborhood, also something I do to prevent physical atrophy. Without a laptop handy to type out an email, I would start the recorder app on my iPhone and speak what had flowed out of my mind.
The direction of the narrative took its own course as well. I was certain that the narrative would end up sad, verging on tragic. Instead it went in the opposite direction. A happy ending, verging on sappy rather than tragic. That part of it, at least, did not track with my experiences in that first year of college. Not that what I lived through back then was tragic in any sense. It was sad only insofar as something that had seemed precious came to an end, entirely because of my own stupidity I might add. But the fiction did not want to go there. It took a turn that, honestly, I could not have predicted—again, without any planning or pre-plotting on my part. It just happened because that’s the way the play lay, to paraphrase Perdita in A Winter’s Tale. That has never happened to me before. Hell, I’ve never written a fiction before, so there’s never been any time when what came out in my writing was not directed by my rational mind.
It’s true that I’ve often said to myself that I don’t know what I think about some subject or topic until I’ve written my way into it. But that is not at all the same thing as I experienced with this fiction. Writing my way to knowing what I think about something is a quite deliberate, rational process. Writing simply helps me think my way through to a conclusion. If I’m then going to turn what I’ve worked out for myself into an essay for publication or for presentation at a conference, I will begin the formal writing with the conclusion I’ve reached more or less as the thesis that I will argue. With the fiction none of that ratiocination took place. It just happened.
I remember reading many times comments from authors who said that their writing worked in that way, that it just came to pass as if the writer were transcribing something produced by someone else. Joan Didion has a wonderful essay, “Why I Write,” that traces out exactly that phenomenon as she experienced it in writing two of her major works. Her conclusion in the essay, her answer to its title, is that she writes in order to discover what happens. I’m no Joan Didion, but I now see exactly what she meant.
I have no intention of doing anything with Never. I did forward it, all two-hundred and ninety-six pages of it, to my wife. She hasn’t read it yet. I suspect that she’ll find it not just sappy but silly. That’s ok. I have no ambition to be a novelist nor of publishing what I’ve written. But I am curious what she will say about the dialogue. I think I’ve done that ok. It’s something I never thought I could do. I’ll be happy if she doesn’t hate the dialogue.
