Paying Attention to the Silence

This Paying Attention to… series on writing fiction concentrates, for the most part, on what to do when writing. More exactly, it covers things I need to remind myself to pay attention to — particularly as I’ve been working on Seems to Fit.

In this post, I want to look at what to when not writing — particularly, while writing-blocked.

Ask me about my first novel, and I will invariably tell you about a mystery, Crossed Wires. In doing so, I’m not counting the book I started in the mid-1970s: a picaresque science-fiction extravaganza called As Luck Would Have It. It was humorous, or rather “humorous,” and (or so I imagined) intellectually wide-ranging, and full of all sorts of stylistic  pyrotechnics like punning character names and a portentous prologue.* While I never finished even a single draft of the book’s manuscript, and indeed the manuscript never even made it to digital form (I’d handwritten and typed it), I always liked and remembered the book’s central conceit:

ALWHI‘s version of the future was a dark but funny place, with people’s lifestyles, careers, friendships, and important events all decided in advance — not by government or cultural fiat, but by the truth of a scientific discovery some decades before. Biochemists and biophysicists had learned, to put it simply, that coincidence was a thing, a substance, inherent in all life and particularly in humans. And this substance attracted luck, as a magnet attracted iron filings: determined how much of it, and what type, one had. Some people were naturally lucky and would always be. Some people never had anything but bad luck. Most people swung back and forth, with luck better or worse, to a greater or lesser degree, at various points in their lives. And a small group of individuals seemed insulated from luck altogether: nothing unexpected happened to them, good or bad.**

The discovery itself had, of course, been accidental. The reason no one had picked up on it before was that they’d all been looking in the wrong place, albeit with increasing sophistication: they’d looked at matter. They’d been investigating molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles, sub-nuclear particles, and so on, in a crazily spiraling and apparently endless chain of ever-smaller things.

No one, before the discovery of true coincidence, had ever thought to look at the empty space between things. And that’s where coincidence lay.

Isn’t that the way we regard most situations in life — not just things, but events, relationships, all the rest? We notice and remember the concrete anomalies, the solid clumps of whatever-it-is, the islands of things which “matter.” All the other stuff: just background; static; glassy-flat oceans of who-cares.

Under the circumstances, it doesn’t surprise that the process of writing follows the same pattern. Maybe you sit down at the same time every day to write, for more or less the same amount of time. Maybe you write on a catch-as-catch-can basis, as the opportunity or the inspiration offers itself.

In either case, to the extent that you can call yourself a writer, you’re governed by how much and how often you write, by the clumps of writing. All the other stuff is just dull gray background — important and/or interesting and in nearly every way, the other stuff is without question what really counts in your life. It’s just not writing. It’s… well, it’s the opposite of writing.

So what happens when the not-writing expands to fill the allowable time? What happens when writing time (and/or inclination) shrivels to a pinpoint? Assuming the block feels wrong, what can you do about it?

These questions have bedeviled me for the last few months, during which I have fitfully but never successfully tried to continue writing Seems to Fit. With over 120,000 words in the can already, this draft “should” have been done by now. I “should” have broken open a mini-bottle of champagne, and “should” be well into revisions. My subconscious “should” be already framing the query, already imagining the agent who will injure him- or herself getting to the phone fast enough to say Yes.

Not happening. Oh, sure, real life and day job have played their part. But they’re not (as the saying goes) The Boss of Me. They didn’t make me stop writing. They didn’t create the silence. And it’s been driving me nuts.

Finally, towards the end of last week, I stopped trying to hammer writing into place against the background of everyday life, like notes on an empty musical staff. I decided, in effect, to let my writer’s mind’s eye squint at that matte gray wallpaper, go out of focus: or, changing senses, to listen to the silence, and maybe hear what it might be saying to me.

Which was not, hallelujah, Give it up.

It was, rather: You are far enough along that you need to stop writing and start understanding what your book really is. That is, I need to examine the whole thing I’ve got so far, to see the size and depth of the gaps in it  (and see what must fill them).

On Saturday, I grabbed the only complete draft of the book’s climax I’ve ever done, reworked it structurally — not editing it, simply breaking it apart and assembling the pieces correctly — and dumped it at the end of what I’ve got so far of the most recent draft. Then I sent the whole thing to my Kindle. I’ve made it, in short, my next reading project.

Because, as they say, the most important thing you can do for your writing is to read — and surely the most important thing to read is your own writing.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ve been reminded to do the next most important thing, too: to listen to the not-writing.

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* I’d recently read Thomas Pynchon’s first two books and apparently decided that while what he did was probably hard, he wasn’t the only guy who could do it.

** Of course, you always had to treat these coincidence insulators — or c-ulators — carefully. You could never know for sure if one might turn out to be a latent c-variable: at any instant, as though they’d been storing up a hidden charge their entire lives, they might suddenly, implosively, draw a cloud of wild luck to themselves. C-ulators tended to end up in jobs where you wanted things to go predictably — nuclear reactor crews, for instance — but you never wanted to be anywhere within a mile of one who’d been incorrectly typed.