I’m deep in the problems and working-out phase of a new novel. I’m plotting and getting words down and deleting them and moving things about. This isn’t a new process for me, but the way I am approaching it is: trying to nut out problems and find solutions earlier than I usually do. In the past, I’ve written my way into the work - more like ‘pantsing’ than ‘plotting’ - which works for me but also takes a lot of time, lots of words and lots of dead ends. I’m trying to be more efficient this time around - in part because I have a shorter deadline, but also because I reckon it’s a good creative experiment.
In his Story Club post this week, writer George Saunders (who I had the great privilege of interviewing for the First Time podcast here) wrote about his approach to solving a ‘potentially book-ruining problem’ as he wrote Lincoln in the Bardo. It’s an excellent post and well worth a read if you’re a paid subscriber (which I highly recommend becoming if you can!).
Why me? Why this? Why now?
As part of my doctoral research on shape and structure and how I put The Hummingbird Effect together, I’ve been writing about the ‘problem’ of realising the novel I wanted to write was something altogether different from the manuscript I had produced and how I was inspired by the work of artist Paul Klee to try a different form.
When I talk about this process at events and with other writers there are always lots of questions and sometimes even aha moments, so I thought I’d share a little of that work here. If you’ve read The Hummingbird Effect and look closely at the images you’ll notice that I made many more changes after this process - to shape and plot, words and characters. For example, there’s no longer a monk’s clock, or Percy’s 1917 story - which I referenced in my last post. But as a ‘slice of the process’ (which we sometimes call it in PhD land) I’m hoping this is helpful to other writers looking at restructuring their work, or creatives looking to other mediums for inspiration for their own art.
Finding Klee
Klee was a new-to-me discovery; I didn’t know his famous painting Angelus Novus, and yet as I read his collected notebooks The Thinking Eye (1961) and The Nature of Nature (1973) and pored over his drawings and paintings online, I felt I could see the kind of shape my novel-in-progress might eventually take. Specifically, the way in which that shape might help create connection between ideas of cause and effect, progress, circular time and inheritance that were key to the novel.
I came to Klee via an Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on progress where I first read the words of Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History:
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Benjamin, 1941, p. 257–8
Benjamin’s description and the eerie Klee painting both spoke to the ideas I wanted to explore in the novel: how we are shaped by the past, who we are now and who we might become, the idea of the ‘storm of progress’, turning one’s back on the future and being blind to the consequences of the damage we sow today. And kind of magically I thought, the word ‘chain’ appeared, a touchstone of the novel in terms of automated factories, labour and generational inheritance. The words and image had the elements of ‘heat’ I associate with material I need to pay attention to during the creative process. Charlotte Wood describes this ‘heat seeking’ aspect of the creative process as “the way artists separate promising from unpromising material by sensing and following the ‘power’ or ‘energy’ coming from any part of the work” (The Luminous Solution, p 27). Going to the heat is a big part of how I write.
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