The trouble with fiction

I lent out another copy of my favorite novel of all time, and have (again) given up ever getting it back. Which is quite alright–I think everyone should be issued a copy upon their 30th birthday, and be given a week’s vacation to read and digest. The replacement arrived last week. I’ve been fending off just re-reading the whole damn thing for the dozenth time (because I’m involved with too many other books right now, and literary polyamory has its limits) by snacking on select passages, stealing bites here and there.

Duncan is a kick in the teeth for me, as a writer. It’s not just that he writes what and how I want to write–intelligent, rich, complex, honest characters in rhythmic, funny, heartfelt, buttery prose–but that he writes so bravely. There’s an open heart on every page, all vivid nerve and muscle.

Behind the scenes of this here blog, much has been a-percolating. The mushrooms I chose for a header weren’t entirely accidental–there are all sorts of strange little fleshy shoots springing up in the dark ’round here. My trouble is deciding which to foster, when, really, I want to tackle all of them, at once and with gusto.

One thing you might notice about me, if we spend any time together, is that I have no sense of proportion, at least when it comes to matters of work, of being productive. I don’t just bite off more than I can chew; I will whittle a second set of teeth just so I can chomp some more. Part of it, I’ve decided, is my own personal brand of red herring–if my to-do list is long enough, padded with mundane tasks and repetitive chores, then I can excuse myself from actually accomplishing something significant. Didn’t write anything today? That’s because I was reorganizing the closet and cooking forty pounds of food for my coworkers (not kidding) and making tomorrow’s to-do list… I was being productive with my time, after all.

It distracts me from the hard work, which is to say, it distracts me from what I most want to be doing.

(Re-)reading something like The Brothers K is the smelling salts to my predicament. Forget the housecleaning–I’ve got a bottleneck of writing stops and starts to sort out, some sense to make of the legions of orphan passages that litter my desk.

More than that, I’ve got some peace to make between me and fiction. (And here’s where the bravery part comes in…) It seems counterintuitive, but I’m finding that saying something that’s technically untrue is worlds harder than saying that same thing plainly. Put another way, fiction is proving more daunting for me because of its elasticity–the made-up or un-true elements allow what I’ve written to stretch until it touches or envelops damn near anything. Put yet differently: nonfiction is bounded, poetry is stretchy but finite. Both can move and touch and motivate, but they also have the kind of clear boundaries that therapists the world over wish they could bottle and sell. Fiction, on the other hand, can (and probably does) have parts in it of every person I’ve ever known, every place I’ve ever been, every sight sound taste smell I’ve ever sensed–and that makes it the most intimate thing I can do on paper, even with the untruth of it to protect me.

But The Brothers K could never be anything but fiction and still retain its power to make me laugh out loud and cry a river and dive into it as into a warm sea, over and over again. It, and all the other books like it, remind me that courage has its reward. The honest novelist might be the bravest soul you’re like to meet.