I was thinking about my last vomit about how my writing style has changed, and how grateful I am to have induced and witnessed that change. I was also thinking about how this change might be a useful metaphor to think about how I navigate reality in general– digressive, flitting constantly from thing to thing. I’d like to change the way I think and the way I act, in exactly the same manner that I have changed the way I approach writing.
It’s not so much about “changing who I am” in a “discarding one identity for another” sense [1] as it is recognizing that digressive free-association and general randomness is merely one tool in a larger toolkit. What I actually want to be able to do is to use the right tool for the job. So I’m not “betraying” my old self– I’m expanding myself altogether. I’m becoming more than I was before. I have not forsaken anything. I can still do everything I used to do. I can still write an entirely incoherent, random passage of text if I had to. In the long run, of course, I’ll always be best at jobs that benefit from the free-association stuff. That’s a useful thing to know, although it’s probably more useful to recognize that reality rarely presents us with such perfect opportunities. There are always schleps en route to anything worth doing.
I found myself thinking then about the challenge presented by these word vomits. Writing word vomits is something I’ve gotten pretty good at. I enjoy it, it’s satisfying, it feels good. I’m about 40% done with the writing part. But as these vomits build up, I realize that I’m going to have to do more than just write. I’m going to have to re-read them, I’m going to have to tag them, edit them. Writing is fun. Editing is not so fun. It will be fulfilling to have edited, and there is learning to be had, and growth, and it will be very fun to successfully complete editing and analyzing my 1000 vomits when I’m done. But it will be harder than the writing. And it’s the part that I didn’t quite plan for. [2] But I will do it. It is a necessary thing that needs to be done in order for me to complete this project, and it’s not going to happen by itself. So I will do it. There is an end-state I desire, and this is the schlep that needs to be undertaken.
I then found myself thinking about a conversation I had with a couple of my colleagues over dinner about these very things. I took a little too long to start writing this, so now I can’t quite remember the precise details. What I remember is the title of this post, which I recognized as valuable (to me) the moment I said it:
“Good conversations do not write novels.”
I used to write– over and over again, even before I started my word vomits– that I love good conversation. When I’m feeling reflective and cosmic, I think about how everything that is beautiful and joyful in the world is a sort of conversation. Deep, thoughtful engagement. The pleasurable challenge of communication, of exchanging information, of interpreting not just what is said, but what is embodied. Good conversations are my favorite thing about life, and they can be expressed in many ways– in play, in sport, in sex, in reading, in writing, in communion with nature. I love good conversation and I want to have lots of it.
I’m also starting to get more precise about the idea that I really want to write and publish a novel someday. I’ve always loved books. I love that they exist. I love what they represent. I love words. I love ideas. I love stories. I love characters. I love the smell of printed paper. I love sitting in bookstores and just inhaling books.
Will it be a fiction novel? Will it be non-fiction? Will it be a series? Will there be many? I don’t know yet. Will I start with short stories? Most probably. Ray Bradbury suggested so, and I’m willing to follow his lead on that. What will it be about? I don’t know yet, though I can guarantee that it will have to feature good conversations. Really, really good conversations.
But again, here’s the key insight that I think I’m really starting to recognize [3] and embody:
Good conversations do not write novels.
Novellists write novels. And they do it by writing pages and pages of words, most of which never make it to print. They do it by writing plot outlines, and character sheets and histories, many of which they will have to discard. They do it by editing their own work, ruthlessly, over and over again.
And no amount of conversation with smart people about novel ideas will make a novel happen.
So it is with anything worth doing. So it is with a good life.
And the grand kicker, I think, might be this: Once you write the novel, once you edit it, once you publish it– you unlock a whole new set of conversation opportunities you never had before. Because then you’re not talking about the novel you’re going to write someday, or about how limited and predictable all the novels around you are. You become the man in the arena.
Of course, then you’re going to learn that it isn’t quite what you had hoped it would be. You’ll have to recalibrate your expectations again. You’ll have to deal with people who obstinately and willfully choose to misunderstand your work. You’ll have to deal with being blamed for things that you have nothing to do with. Or you’ll have to deal with being completely irrelevant and obscure.
But that’s a better life than living on the periphery, wondering what if, and trying to rationalize why you aren’t in the arena.
_____
[1] I suppose I COULD frame it as discarding the old self. In a sense, we’re recreating ourselves every moment of every day. Again, many different way of looking at things– the question is which lens is most useful to the matter at hand? I currently find it more useful to describe this as an expansion. In another mood, in another context, it may be more useful to frame it as the destruction and exile of a weaker self. I find it useful to have access to both lenses.
[2] I’m reminded of Bill Gates talking about how he never set out to be a businessman– he just wanted to do cool things with writing software, and in the pursuit of that he found that he had to learn how to run a business, and that included hiring and firing people– the latter of which is never a pleasant or fun experience, no matter how good you get at it. But it’s just the price that reality demands– it’s the price to pay to have fun doing interesting, cool, fun things.
[3] Usually when I’m first flirting with a truth, I acknowledge it begrudgingly. Intellectually. But it doesn’t seep into my bones, into my nerve endings, my being. I lock it away in a box marked “true”, open it from time to time to assess its truthfulness, acknowledge it, and then shut the box again, to be rediscovered much later. But this one feels different. This one feels universally true. It feels like something I will not be able to walk away from. It feels like it’s gotten into my bloodstream.