Writing Worth that Last Sentence

“A great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own.”

I begin with what another slide of consciousness has projected upon the back wall of your head (and mine). With a similar stained glass-type of refraction I also think to begin writing for National Novel Writing Month which is coming up in 11 days. 

Two years ago I wrote in a shadow of a novel. As I was inking away rather pixellatently, a story began to articulate, a plot line that, when I was asked what I was writing about, I could actually verbalise. That made me happy. I should have realised then that that is part of my "writing process" - writing for understanding, and understanding what I write only after I write it. I backspace often when I write, because I am not used to thinking before writing or saying, partly because I find it difficult to keep many thoughts in my mind at once. Writing allows me to have it there for me. When I write an essay for university, I write it sentence by sentence, carving each as I go, having some whisperthread of thought as to where it is going but often losing hearing of it when my attention concentrates on trying to make one sentence echo what silence might be pooling in my mind. I can repeat myself in the same paragraph. My attention to my writing flickers depending on the environment I am in, so I don't find it easy to focus on one idea and charge with it if the environment allows me to get into habituated procrastination or several ticks I only do in private. Right now I have lost sight of what I was writing about. This is the work of concentration, this focus. When it is there, it is there, but I think often I zoom in so much that I forget - actually lose thought - of the larger idea. When I talk, this clearly happens. You hear me speak and I ramble incoherently in half-sentences, trip over demarcations between ideas, make faces at fences between thoughts, and overall tie knots in the conversation. My memory pops. In and out. Thankfully the interlocutor seems to be paying enough attention (thank you) so as to remind me which train I was on before I tangented. This gets them confused at times (sorry), but it's also kind of charming - there's an element of unpredictability, an always-almostness that grasses out from behind ideas. I say charming because I think it is so. It's a nuisance, too, it's harder to make sense. When I talk to the children at work, I tie myself in circles in front of their blank faces. Thankfully my boss trusts me and doesn't listen in on every explanation I give to them so doesn't quite know that I mumble and mix up my words. With adults, it is easier to converse - not because I stumble mentally less, but because I can tangent in quirky ways and circle back to my thoughts as if it's a show. I use odd words not because I'm trying to be funny or particularly comical but because in the moment, that is the word that I feel like using. That is why I make up new words - not to be funny, but to be more precise as to what I want to say. I am not then, an effective communicator, but I'm somewhat of a builder.

That paragraph was getting a bit long and there were a few ideas there that could probably be expanded upon but on I go. Thinking for me is like being a... bipedal light... in the process of walking along a long corridor of mirrors and trying to not shine everywhere. That's not exactly right, actually, I don't quite get that distracted. But my mind likes to focus, and it can - if there is one thing to focus on. If there are two, it cannot focus on both. If I am talking to someone, the environment will be one focus, them another, what I am saying another... and I cannot split that focus. It is just alight, and whatever it wraps itself in, it blazes with. Whatever is not within its light, remains in a beautiful kind of cold.

Writing allows me to organise my focus - to devote it where it is needed, as much as it is needed, then go on to the next thing, knowing that the thing it had just begun carving (like a laser) is not going to melt or disintegrate. Writing allows me to keep some memory of my thought that I have formed and that is necessary for me from another time or someone else to read and follow like a crucial detail on a sculpture. Writing gives me and you a chance to see that there is not just one dent (which is what I see when I write it) in this wood carving, but an actual wood carving of a thing full of dents in different places.

Where to place the dents, or where to ink the needlepoints is a question of craft to some extent. I have learned craft by going to university, and continuing to study writing, I will continue to learn the effects of different crafting. Reading gives me a chance to see craft at work in crafting a consciousness I borrow for the duration that my nose smells the pages/Kindle ink contained within a particular work. But it is more than craft, as Zadie Smith would agree (I feel) - she is the author of the quote at the beginning of this write. It's something other than craft, probably hand in hand, maybe. I haven't thought it through yet, which is evidenced by my sleepwalking/cliché use. What I am trying to say though (I have just reread the starting sentence of this paragraph and that has jogged my memory of what my point is that I am trying to make) is that when I write, I place the needlepoints not so much according to conscious crafting choice, but from nonverbal instructions from something else. If it is habituated, it will end up in a cliché and I will feel it a betrayal, a non-representation of what I want to say because it's not me that is saying it, it is a borrowing that is doing the saying for me and I want to use my own voice to say it. So I don't know what I'm going to write before I write it. I like that. Because that way I can't keep it in my mind, but in the act of writing, in the act of sitting and pushing keys, it waves and blasts and rummages through me, looking for ways to be known. So the advice that I'd been thinking I'd have to follow to "make it" in the world as a writer, to make up stories that people can relate to... I cannot do that consciously. If someone relates to what I write, beautiful. But I cannot write a story about New Zealand, for example, by thinking I have to write a story about New Zealand. The story has to surprise me. It has to be dented without me knowing, and then only partway through or at the end upon taking a step back will I note that... this is a story about New Zealand. The story has to surprise me with itself.

Now, I thought, of course, that is too hard to achieve. Writers that can rely on craft can write great stuff... I don't think I am one of those. I don't want to be. I want to be surprised. And I was very happily surprised by what I wrote in November 2010, that NaNoWriMo novel. The novel existed within me, unpieced by consciousness, and then during that month, it was woven into a text, in the fibrous sense of the word. Thoughts became threads, became text.

Novels, moments of unpieced consciousness, globules, whatevers, blurs, live within me. Like, wonderful haves in a haven of wow. I learned that whatever is written is a function of its writing system... so technically language is a filter that my thought will go through. As a filter, it is limited, and because it is limited, it is not going to be the end all. I write because it comes out. Zadie Smith writes because she stays awake through it. I empathise and experience that, too. I write because I cannot sleep - though I do sleep, it is not sound. Even though my language is rushed to get this post done and it's not all creative and it borrows so much from clichés and things you already know, and it's not revolutionary in the writing itself or anything... all of these are betrayals to those moments of writing, but they are betrayals that I accept for the moment so I can get something else out in the open... the idea that I feel writing. Reread the quote from the beginning.

“A great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own.”

That intimation of a metaphysical event I can never know... that tickles me in a way that makes me want to write, to satisfy, to try and undoubtedly fail (I'm told I'm a limited human being) at transcribing or translating it into words. What I produce will never be enough of what I feel. But my standards are not, at this stage, perfection and wholetranslation. That's impossible. I don't really care to get to the paragon, because I won't get there by trying to get there anyway, since my writing has to surprise me. And I also don't care because it satisfies me to just try and get there. Getting closer satisfies me more, of course, but if Lacan's philosophy regarding jouissance is in order, then objet petit a is out of reach. Words aren't it, so they can't quite walk that far. But my God... beautiful it is when I don't know what I am writing about actually feels like something... and that something is felt by another person... as if there is another slide of consciousness on the back of their heads. Writing allows that accessibility because the reader has to pick up the writing and project the slide it offers onto their wall and see that world. That is their responsibility - to actively read, if they want to know what it is like to feel like they can be another.

I don't know what my first NaNoWriMo novel is about. Death, innocence, these are themes I can churn out... but it's something else too. It's not crafted well enough to be known as a text except by my eyes. It's blurry, too much so. But it's what came out of that contact with the light, it's what was burned. If the smoke ever clears around it, I will look upon it and see if any of that rawth can be salvaged and built into an ouvrage that another consciousness can hear.

I have a title in mind for what I want to write this year. Speckles of ideas. I honestly though am excited just because I want to see where the dents will be. What will I write? The beautiful, exciting, wonderful, palpable feeling of it is... I will never know what I have written. What it came from, I will always have, but what the writing will be will always be but a trace, a not good enough trail.

But what I want it to be is as good a not good enough trial as I can try make it be.