On Drunken Conversations and Metaphors
So we stayed up way too late and this morning my eyeballs didn't just feel as though they'd been rolled in sand, but as though they'd been fried and then screwed back into too small sockets. But that is the price of two writers hanging on the phone until drunk with fatigue (because all that's waiting for them once they let go of the night is sleep and the morning with students/meetings/study reports/children/work etc) talking about, among other things, the metaphors we use for the construction of a novel. At pushing 1 am I was not at all coherent in explaining my feeling-shape idea/sense/image. In the past I have made people laugh with my plaintive "But I'm not really a very verbal writer", but I'm not. I know there are people out there who start with a picture, or with a character, or with - inexplicably - a plot, who just have to listen to some inner play or watch some inner movie. Lucky them! I start with something that is non-verbal, non-visual and pretty much nonsensical, something I have variously described as a tone or a sense-shape. One writer on creativity described this phenomenon as a feeling-tone, as what happened when a writer started with a recollection or an impression that would not reduce to straight narration. I have a very spatial relationship to my work. The real book is a shape in my head. I want the words to make me feel that shape in my head. As it goes up, I feel myself inside it, working to make it the right shape. I once talked to my mother about this, and she recognized exactly what I'm talking about; although not a writer, she conceptualizes in exactly the same way. Lynda's word for what she desires in a scene is "muscular" - something that is doing work. And we both agreed that we also had a symphonic sense or metaphor for the emotional underpinnings to the work, though I think - I am not clear about this - that Lynda's symphonic sense comes as she edits and starts putting dynamic and tempo to the development, and I am aware that I am building symphonically from the start, which probably explains why I write those 200 000 word first drafts with variant chapters peeling off the whole like arbutus bark as I move from - another metaphor, mathematical this time - first order to higher order narrative solutions. First order solutions are those I think anybody could come up with - good generic stuff. By the time I'm into third and fourth order solutions, I'm into the solutions I feel are particular to MY novel, which are made inevitable by the characters and the events I have portrayed. For me writing is like crystal structure refinement - or even more like building a solution from NMR data, rounds and rounds of least squares regression, fitting the words to the model, the shape in the head.
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