Journal of the Novel

August 8, 2009

In what feels like a delicate and precarious place with the work. I have written up through some climactic stuff and now am at a moment that has felt so huge and important since the very beginning. And I am finding it very difficult to go there. I wrote one sentence hours ago and have been stalling ever since. People who love to read but don’t write would never believe how hard this is, how intimidating to make it up as you go along, page after page, after page. It feels like a walk out onto the high board. It never seemed all that high when you were looking up from the water, but from up there, it felt like the top of the world, not fun but terribly risky.

Today I read through some pages that I had not looked at for a long time, and did have that strange experience of hardly recognizing it as my own writing. That’s a crazy feeling. But often a happy one. Reading something I wrote myself and enjoying it as I would if it was written by someone else, is a good feeling. Also have wrestling with the plot (so what else is new?). I actually opened the MS in another doc and started trying to do something different, trying to excise the character of Sh_, and it was just hell. I think I need to keep her, but it still feels like the characters have far too many moments of being yanked hither and thither simply in service to my outline. It is such a house of cards, though, to imagine deconstructing parts. Scary.

Still wrestling with language. I decided that I will continue to use Mandarin translation for the few words I need. I will then vet those with J_—god bless J_, I am so grateful to have her on board to help. When the draft is basically complete, I will look into getting old Xiang (Hunanese) translation help—although I’ll probably have to pay for that. I also have to make a final decision on the name issue, but I’m not going to do that until I feel the story is basically finished. It is just too tedious to figure out right now, with the other writing bearing down on me.

Plot and character are so inextricable. Elizabeth Bowen once wrote:

“Action is the simplification (for story purposes) of complexity. For each one act, there are an x number of rejected alternatives. It is the palpable presence of the alternatives that gives action interest. Therefore, in each of the characters, while he or she is acting, the play and pull of alternatives must be felt. It is in being seen to be capable of alternatives that the character becomes, for the reader, valid.”

And I have found this statement of hers amazingly true:

“The novelist’s perceptions of his characters take place in the course of the actual writing of the novel. To an extent, the novelist is in the same position as his reader. But his perceptions should be always just in advance.”

This is so apt! Over and over I have found that I absolutely, positively cannot PLAN what will be the next thing a character does—the actions of my people stay in the unknown until I begin to excavate them by the physical act of typing the words onto the page. I find this a great mystery and the heart of the creative act. It is what I love and hate about this work. When it is happening and I am watching it happen, I am delighted and feel something akin to creative bliss. When I am at a sticky point it feels like trudging through a bog on a moonless night, no map in hand, no one to shine a light and call “Hey, over here!”

Where Have All the Housewives Gone?

Now I understand why June Cleaver was such a stiff. Look at the Evil Clown at her right elbow! Scary! Imagine the nightmares for poor Beaver.

This week in advanced fiction we workshopped a creative short piece by one of my young female classmates. The story is set sometime in the near-ish future, with a protagonist who is also a young woman (twenty-five). During her research, the protagonist "discovers" a syndrome called 'Housewive's Depression.' There are some brilliant descriptions, lists of things the housewives talk over with the researcher that clearly show they are suffering from a large dose of Feminine Mystique. But the bottom line is that, in this fictional world, Housewive's Depression is a groundbreaking field of study.

During workshop, the three women in the room who are over 50--the professor, a journalist at Stanford on a Knight Fellowship, and me--all came at the story with the same question: Why is Housewife Depression being hailed as a new discovery? This has been done, said the Knight Fellow. Seems there should be a gesture acknowledging the work of earlier feminism, says the professor. Isn't the term housewife an arcane reference for a piece set in the future? I ask.

When it was the writer's turn to speak, she was quite clear in letting us know that she is a feminist studies major and she know about all the women's movement of the sixties and seventies. She's read the books, you see. There was a pretty strong feeling of nettlement coming from her side of the table. I felt that I could almost see we three mature women through her very young eyes, a trio of fading females treading on her story idea, perhaps too locked into the rhetoric of the feminist movement as it used to be to truly appreciate the fresh place from which she was trying to write. Well, maybe.

I feel about this rather as I felt when my youngest son, at the age of 12 or so, waxed expansive on the relative demerits of a car I mentioned liking the look of. I smiled and asked where he got his information. "I've been under the hood," was his answer. Say what?

What the feminist studies major does not (and cannot) grasp is what it actually felt like to be walking around in a pre-feminist American culture. I wasn't allowed to wear pants to school until I was in junior high. For crying out loud--no pants! I used to hang from my knees on the monkey bars. Damn those pipes were cold. Every girl had to take Home-Ec in the ninth grade. No exceptions. It was legal to pay a woman less than a man for the same job. It was legal to pat a female co-worker on the ass. There was no such thing as marital rape. Hell, there was no such thing as domestic violence.

Sandra Day O'Connor recently spoke at Stanford. Back in the day, when Ms. O'Connor whizzed through law school and set out to get a job with her shiny new law degree, she was told during an interview that she would not be hired because she was a woman. The man told her "the clients just wouldn't stand for it."

I was born into a world where there was no birth control pill and no legal abortion. Where women still wore gloves when they went out of the house. A world where the only thing I could think to say when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up was "teacher" or "nurse" even though I didn't want to be either of those things. Once, playing in my best friend's backyard (we were on the monkey bars again) she said to me, "It's better to be a boy." This was a conventionally feminine young girl--she wasn't confessing questions about gender identification. She just saw the limits the world wanted to slap on her. I was surprised, and I asked her why. "Everything is just a lot easier for boys," she said. "They get treated better."

And that's why we old girls don't hesitate to speak up, you see, to dust off the rhetoric when we feel like it's being taken for granted. We've been under the hood. Really.