How Flannery O'Connor Helped Me Feel Better About My "Failed" Novel

So that novel that I mentioned I'd be starting?  It's certainly not going as planned - on several different counts.  The story hasn't turned out quite how I anticipated (which is part of the writing process), and my ability to keep up with the required word count has also not quite gone how I envisioned.  Life and all of its chaos and complications have gotten in the way, and that seems to be frowned upon in the NaNoWriMo universe.  I keep receiving pep talk after pep talk via email encouraging me to let laundry and self-care fall by the wayside in favor of churning out words.  Once I realized that I actually felt better when the laundry was done, I decided to let go of the expectations placed upon me (or that I submitted to when I signed up for the project)...

My novel also kind of freaked me out.  In an attempt to write with an authentic voice in a limited amount of time (read: can't do extensive research, or any research at all, really), I drew heavily from my own experience.  The narrator's voice became difficult to separate from my own, and I got uncomfortable.  When she did things that I do on a regular basis, I analyzed them too closely.  When I wanted to make her do something I wouldn't do or haven't done, I felt like I was betraying... someone?  myself? the character?  Writing became draining instead of enlivening, exhausting on a deeply personal level - not just tired from cranking out words.

And so I have decided to put the novel aside.  November is a crazy month, and this November particularly is perhaps too crazy for me to embark on this endeavor.  Retaining whatever semblance of sanity I have is more important to me right now.  So maybe I will go back to this novel at a different time.  Maybe January or April will be a time for me to start a novel with a different angle - one that allows me to have enough distance from the narrator that I will be able to really appreciate the process of creating a unique voice. 

Plus, I have really missed getting to write here, in this space.  And somehow, whoever is next on that list of authors that I scribbled down so long ago seems to pop up with unbelievable timeliness.  This time is no exception: Flannery O'Connor holds the #9 position.  The connection between O'Connor and my own novel-writing-angst is so peripheral: my own inability to extract myself from the pages of my story stands in stark contrast to O'Connor's insistence that her work not be interpreted in light of her own biography.  As much as I see writing as an artistic extension of self that requires vulnerability,  O'Connor reminds me that the art also stands on its own.  I don't have to force myself to write about those things that are most personal to me, but I do have to be brave enough to stand up to those themes if they do come up in the story.  Writing requires vulnerability, but it doesn't have to be self-flagellating to be art.

O'Connor also was my first real introduction to Southern literature (because I for sure don't count the cursory reading of Faulkner in my sophomore year of high school), which actually happened in the South from a Southern professor - absolutely fantastic! - and the first author who showed me the depth and expansiveness possible in short stories.  And she - not unlike Kingsolver and Lamott - found the sacred in the gritty and sometimes gruesome moments that punctuate human life.  Every word in her stories holds meaning, and her stories demand returning to them again and again.

I've spent the last ten minutes trying to figure out how to connect O'Connor back to my novel writing disaster (because blog posts are supposed to be somewhat cohesive, right?).  It's funny how even writing the smallest piece brings you to places you didn't necessarily anticipate going.  I didn't see this month ending without a finished novel, and I hadn't planned on re-reading the stories in A Good Man is Hard to Find before Thanksgiving - but I think I'm pretty glad about how plans have changed.

A Potentially Stupid Adventure (or, Anne Lamott and Novel-Writing)

The timing is impeccable that I have landed on #8 on my list of most influential authors today.  See, I'm embarking on a strange journey for the month of November, one that might take me away from this blog a bit more than I had anticipated.  I have signed up for National Novel Writing Month, a crazy project in which would-be writers across the country agree to each write a 50,000-word novel between November 1 and November 30.  I first heard about this project a few years ago when I was still in school, and there was no way I would be able to complete such an endeavor while also doing marginally well on my assignments and papers.  So I put it off.  And now I'm not in school and can't find any other reason to justify not trying this out, so there it is. (I know, I'm so enthusiastic, right?)

So back to the list... #8 is Anne Lamott, perhaps most well known for her collections of autobiographical essays, like Traveling Mercies and Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.  I read Traveling Mercies in college, and am still hard pressed to find someone more authentic and genuine about their faith journey.  It also really helps that she is laugh-out-loud hysterical.  She's super self-depricating, but not at the expense of self-worth - she gives herself and her faith credit for the good moments, the peaceful moments when clarity shines in through the cracks. 

Lamott also wrote a book called Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  It's a bit older than her more famous books, and chronicles lessons learned by Lamott as she has navigated the world of writing, editing and publishing.  I kind of got hungry to get through every book Lamott had written, and this one somehow landed on my plate.  By the time I finished the book, I found that being a writer wasn't something that someone decides on, but rather something one can't help but be.  And even though there's something of a sense of calling in being a writer, which invokes all kinds of associations of inspiration and providence, there are things that can and probably should be done to cultivate the writing life.  Things like - writing lots and lots of first drafts and not getting mad at yourself when they are crappy, being willing to let go of the ideal of publication, and taking small bites (going "bird by bird" instead of trying to cover the whole flock).

Somehow I've ended up trying to write a novel.  And I know that the point of writing a novel in 30 days is to write A Novel in 30 days, not to write The Best Novel That's Ever Been Written in 30 days.  Whenever I tell Beau that what I've got so far is not good, he says, "That's not the point.  The point is that it is, not that it's good."  So if I'm a bit less bloggy in the next month, it's because I'm trying to crank out 1,667 words every day to make my goal.  And even if nobody ever reads it but me (which will most likely be the case!), I'm still going to do it, bird by bird.

Spelling Errors and Marjorie Suchocki

I can be extremely hard on myself.  I don't know what it is about my personality, but I can go from being completely and utterly self-absorbed and absurdly confident in myself to wallowing in self-pity and doubt in a matter of seconds.  And the thing that might push me over the edge can be the most insignificant thing - like seeing all those nasty spelling errors in my last post made me question if I should ever be writing for public viewing, because why would anyone want to read my mindless dribble, particularly when there are grammatical errors and words missing forcryingoutloud?!?  Geez...

My dear, sweet, long-suffering husband has come to anticipate these giant swings in my emotions. (He no longer asks, "What just happened? You were okay like two seconds ago..."  He just knows.)  Beyond anticipating, he has also taught me how to talk kindly to myself.  The things I psychologically beat myself up over are things I would never think twice about in someone else's life.  Who cares if you make spelling errors?  They don't matter in the grand scheme of things - especially not in a blog, an unedited, somewhat stream-of-consciousness medium.  Beau reminds me that the way I talk to myself sometimes fails to match up with who I believe God is and how value and worth and meaning are formed in the lives of people.  We matter because we matter - not because of what we do or how well we do it. 

Marjorie Suchocki is a feminist process theologian whose work I explored in my senior project (that one on The Poisonwood Bible that keeps coming up here).  Without getting into the nitty gritty details of process thought (that's not even another post for another day - that's another blog entirely), Suchocki is number seven on my list of influential writers because in her theology, relationships and interconnectedness are the heart.  I was going to say that they play an important role, but even that's inadequate - the fact that all of life is connected is the very ground from which her theology grows.  I am connected to you, to God, to Beau, to the mint plant growing in a pot on my porch, to the animals being grown for food in mostly less-than-humane ways, to those people who have died, to those who have yet to be born, to those who have been wounded, and to those who have done the wounding.  Everyone matters. 

And when I get too caught up in my own self-pity, Suchocki's work nags at the corners of my mind.  Sometimes she reminds me that my problems are not more important than everyone else's, and sometimes she reminds me that I deserve kindness from myself too.  She's just that good.

Judgment, Struggle and Love (or, How to Sound Pretentious by Using the Word "Existentialism")

I was on the phone with my mom last night, and somewhere in the middle of our hour-and-a-half-long conversation we started talking about judgment - how we both have these tendencies to cast down judgment upon others from our own position on high (because we're right, dammit), and also how we're both learning more and more that judgment wounds people, and inflicting those wounds is never worth the perceived value of whatever ideal we're holding the world to at that particular time.  My mom and I come to the Bible from somewhat different perspectives (the main difference being that she comes to the Bible a lot more often than I do), but we're both pretty sure that God's injunction not to judge others is a rewording or different manifestation of the command to love others.  As we were discussing how our understanding of judgment has changed, I found myself using the language of struggle - that I see over and over again in the biblical text a struggle for communities to figure out how to stay in healthy relationships with each other and with God, that difficult things and interpersonal and social conflicts are never totally eradicated, that new questions and concerns are always threatening to break down relationships, and that the important thing for us today as readers is not necessarily how these specific communities delineated the boundaries of their relationships but that we learn from them how to stay committed to each other and to the struggle.  In terms of judgment, I think that when we place more value on an abstract ideal than on the person standing right in front of us, we have checked out of the struggle.

In the middle of this diatribe (and apologies for being preachy), I thought about how much I've been shaped by the work of Albert Camus - conveniently located at #6 on my list, next in line for the blog-treatment.  In his lifetime, Camus resisted being labeled as an existentialist thinker, but many of the themes that appear in his literature do seem to be existentialist (if that can even be defined, blah blah blah).  The importance of choosing to live fully in each moment, to create our identities in our choices, to see the gravity of the human plight and to respond by living anyway - to be committed to the struggle - those are things that show up again and again for Camus. 

I have this weird thing about authors I love - I need to know about who they are or were as a person, as a writer.  Art has that strange relationship of being both eternally connected to and infinitely separate from the artist at the same time.  When I was reading Camus, learning of his involvement in politics, labor rights, and the liberation of Algeria helped to flesh out what struggle really meant to him.  Life is hard, and it will continue to be hard, but that doesn't mean that we should give up.  And when we are faced our neighbor, to whom we are also eternally connected and from whom we are infinitely separate, we must resist our inclinations let the separateness overwhelm the connection.

Truth, Fact, and The Things They Carried

When I was making my list of the fifteen writers who have been the most influential to me, the first four were no-brainers - they were authors who have been on my radar for years, and their influence has been significant for a long time.  After I got through listing those, I began thinking back to those writers I had encountered at an earlier time, whose work may have inspired and fueled my love affair with literature but has not retained its place on the front burner.  I was fortunate to have some really fantastic English teachers in high school, teachers who truly loved literature and loved their jobs (at least as far as us student-folk could tell).  For my senior year, I took AP English Literature with Paul Vanek, a man who reveled in intimidating students ("Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" from Milton's Paradise Lost hung above the door to his classroom) and all too often perched awkwardly on a student-size desk instead of standing for his lectures.  In that classroom, I quickly learned the camaraderie that forms when students who really care about what they are studying are gathered around a text that ignites conversation.  We did read Paradise Lost that year, along with other books deemed classics - but we also read some other books, more contemporary books, including The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien.  

I haven't read anything else by O'Brien, and I haven't even picked up that excellent collection of interwoven short stories about the Vietnam war in years, but something about that text sticks with me.  Much like Everything is Illuminated, the main character in The Things They Carried is named Tim O'Brien.  The character seems to be about the same age as the author, and based on his biographical information they shared enough life experiences to make me assume that this collection and recollection of stories was an exercise in autobiography.  But when I began the chapter "How to Tell a True War Story," I was caught off guard: the first line reads, "This is true."  Talk about a disruption!  I was struck with doubt about whether or not I could trust the narrator anymore - was everything prior to this chapter a lie?  What kind of arrogance must the author possess to be so manipulative in using his own name in a fictional story?  How can I be sure that his simple declaration actually does mean that this portion of the story was "true"? 

Well, it seems like the questions I was asking were exactly the questions O'Brien wanted me to ask.  The remainder of the book explores the boundaries that we all construct between truth and fact, between the emotions evoked in the writing and reading and telling of a story, and the factual, verifiable details that can be empirically testing regarding a specific occurrence.  O'Brien's work shows how trauma serves to break down the categories we construct around what is right and wrong, true and false, good and evil.  He questions the priority given to factual information when perhaps what is most true is perception, individual and communal experience of events and their aftermath.  What matters is not necessarily the most exact and precise retelling of what happened in the jungle of Vietnam, but rather the fact that lives were changed and people were hurt, killed, and emotionally and mentally destroyed by what happened.  It is the task of the storyteller to bring the reader into that space, even at the expense of accuracy.

The questions I asked about The Things They Carried are questions that have stuck with me: Can I trust narrators?  What is my relationship to the text as a reader?  Can I write anything other than my own autobiography?  If I try to write something else, will it be my autobiography that emerges, perhaps against my will?  Is vulnerability required of authors?  What is the task of literature, of fiction, of storytelling, of art?  What does it mean for something to be true?  Do I have the strength to tell a story that is true?

That disruption I felt when I got to page 64 left me unsettled and unsatisfied - but in the very best way possible.  And even though O'Brien is not one of those authors to whom I am instinctively drawn, the effects of my encounter with his writing have endured.

Rainy days and proper names

Today, I really miss Nashville.  For the last week, the weather here in Claremont has resembled December-weather in middle Tennessee - bullet gray skies, drizzly-misty-not-actually-rain-but-wetness-nonetheless, and cold enough to warrant more than my fair share of tea and hot chocolate to keep warm at work.  It's the weekend of the Vanderbilt Divinity School reunion, too - I'm not one of those folks who jumps at the chance for reunions, but you can bet big bucks that I would be there if we lived close enough. 

In the midst of my home-away-from-home-sickness, I called and left a message for Victor Judge, VDS's registrar, my senior project advisor, and one of the dearest people I have ever met.  I took several classes with him, and for one of those classes he assigned the book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, by Philip Hallie.  It's a book that I read for a required Christian Ministries class at APU, but my encounter with Hallie's work at VDS had a huge impact on my life and my thinking and how I understand my work in the world.  So in honor of Nashville and Victor Judge, today's the day to write about Philip Hallie, number four on my list of most influential writers.

Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed is the story of the French village Le Chambon, a small insulated community brought together by Andre Trocme, the local pastor.  During the Holocaust, the people of this village were responsible for saving the lives of thousands of Jews, mostly children, who were trying to escape the tyrannical regimes working actively to kill them.  The book points out that the people of Le Chambon did not see themselves as heros, or as people faced with a moral dilemma of how to respond to a violent political reality.  They were people who saw other people who needed help, and they gave what they could in response.  Their goodness - a bright spot in the midst of a very dark time - flowed out of the way they lived their lives, without thinking, without seeking credit, without anything other than genuine concern for the well-being of other people.

I've read some of Hallie's other work - he is an academic ethicist who initially started his work on the study of evil, which led him to devote his attention to the perpetrators of the Holocaust.  As he studied the lives of people who committed some of the most horrendous acts of violence and dehumanization, he saw more and more that the lines between good and evil were perhaps not as clearly defined as he had once thought.  Some people committed evil acts for reasons traditionally thought of as good - like the desire to provide for one's family.  Others took part in good, lifesaving action for less-than-admirable reasons.  For example, in a separate article, Hallie wrote about the Nazi officer responsible for overseeing the region in which Le Chambon was situated.  He knew about the way the villagers were secretly harboring Jews, and he turned the other way - because he didn't want to shake up the system.  He was benefiting by the state of perceived order in the region, and turning in Le Chambon to his superiors would bring chaos, which would disrupt his way of living.  He wanted to appear capable in the eyes of his supervisors.  Good things happened as a result of his desire to thrive in the hierarchy of the Third Reich.

Hallie has said that history is found in the study of proper names.  A human life always contains both good and evil - each of us has within us the capacity for both.  And as the stories of our lives unfold, we see that pushing people into stringent categories that separate and divide and label and quarantine ultimately does more harm than healing.  Hallie's writing and approach to ethics has shaped the way I see the world.  I'm someone who is far too comfortable with harsh judgment and black-and-white delineation of who is good and who is not.  Hallie has helped me see that the people, not the ideas or abstract values, are what's really important, and that telling stories works to deconstruct the barriers we put up between each other.

Audio books, libraries, and Jonathan Safran Foer

As someone who loves the physical experience of reading a book - the heft of the book, the feel of the pages, the art of the cover, the choice of font and layout - my encounter with audio books has been relatively limited.  I know there's an art form to giving voices to characters and losing yourself in the lost art of vocal storytelling, but I really like to visually read stories.  But there was one summer during grad school that I absolutely needed an audio book, and that is the first time I encountered the work of Jonathan Safran Foer.  (Hint hint - he's favorite writer number three!)

I was working at Vanderbilt's Central Library one summer, and as summers aren't usually the busiest time for circulation desk employees, I was assigned to a special project.  The old periodicals had been labeled with stickers sometime in the mid-18th century, and they were pretty much falling to pieces.  They were faded, the adhesive was patchy at best, and the stickers were cracked and peeling off.  I had to use a pointed nail file to scrape off the old labels, remove all remaining bits of adhesive from the spine, and place a new label and clear cover on each volume.   Oh, it's about as fun as it sounds.  My hands were raw from grabbing the sharp edges of the nail file, I had bits of sticky plastic all over my hands, arms, clothes, and even face, and I very quickly grew tired of listening to music to pass the time (I was already bored spitless, so much so that the music served to lull me to sleep more than keep me interested). 

Our library carried a small handful of Playaways, which were audiobooks self-contained in a small handheld playing device.  As soon as I realized that listening to one of these wouldn't require me to find and carry around a huge Discman, I began scouring the shelves for something I was excited about reading.  My eyes fell on Everything is Illuminated, Foer's first full-length novel.  By this time, the film version had already been produced, so I had heard of the title and remembered several friends recommending it as a good story.  Little did I know that when I put those totally unsanitary library headphones into my ears for the first time that I would be transported to a different world - well, actually, two different worlds.

Everything is Illuminated has a dual narrative structure - which is so tricky to try to explain but so easy to get lost in.  The protagonist is named Jonathan Safran Foer, and he is an author.  The main plot of the story centers around Jonathan's trip to Ukraine to track down his own family history.  He hires a tour guide - Alex - whose family business is to help American Jews find out what happened to their relatives during the Holocaust. Though Jonathan is the main character, Alex is the narrator - the perfect role to showcase his thesaurus-heavy method of learning English.  I haven't laughed so hard in a library... maybe ever.

The other half of the story is character-Jonathan's manuscript that he is writing to tell of his family's history.  His lyrical, fantasy-ridden style is vastly different from Alex's malapropisms and intense desire to be a cool guy.  The two narratives strike a real sense of rhythm with each other - balancing each other, playing off each other, enhancing and heightening and illuminating the other.

I also can't remember another time I cried in a library.  As is to be expected with literature featuring the events of the Holocaust, the drama of the story was powerful and intense.  I have to give Foer credit - it's this story that sparked my interest in generational identity, in finding oneself in stories - real or imagined, but always true - that tell about where we came from, who our loved ones are, and what holds us all together.

Foer's other works - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Eating Animals - are also amazing, and I could write tons about each of them.  But I will never forget listening to Everything is Illuminated sitting on a dirty stepstool, with glue all over my hands and tears streaming down my cheeks.