Writing that Makes You Want to Write

My year in reading and revising, including thoughts on Fosse, Heti, Krasznahorkai, Murnane, and others.

I look back on my year in reading which was actually a year in revising.

This was auto-generated by my photos app, pretty exciting year.

ON FOSSE

I started reading Jon Fosse’s Septology at the end of 2022, finishing early 2023. I think of it often. I like the way the narrator repeats himself over and over again as the book unfolds and then folds in on itself in a snake-eating-its-tail kind of way. Fosse the hypnotist. I don’t know if Septology is or isn’t a masterpiece that everyone should read—it might be and they should—but it is the type of totally singular book I’d like to see published more. Septology is why I picked up A Shining a year later. While I probably didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed Septology—it just wasn’t as monumental of an event—I liked its harsh winter night, its narrator astray, its reach for the transcendental. Classic Fosse. This is how I began my year of reading in 2024. 

A DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST AS AN IDEA OF A DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST

Early in the year, I was busy with my day job and I’d also started revising a novel again, two things that always seem to result in less time to read. Limited time meant I needed to pick a book that would really engage me, and because of the revision work ahead, I wanted to read a novel similar to mine in some way, whether that was in style or form or mood, to help me think critically about my work. It doesn’t always work, but reading someone else’s writing while working on my own gives me something of a sounding board. I settled on The Diary of A Country Priest by George Bernanos (1936), which had been on my shelf since I’d watched Robert Bresson’s film adaptation and because I liked the film and because I knew it was written as a series of journal entries. It helped that the narrator, a young Catholic priest, was inexperienced and already disillusioned. I was less enthralled by the dramas of the people of 1930’s Ambicourt, the small French village where the story takes place, and more interested in the priest’s inner workings, his illness, and commitment to faith. I liked the diary form of the book and the confessional nature of the choice; the priest relays to the reader the events of the day, chunks of text spanning across several pages, often with entire scenes containing multiple characters and conversations recounted for us. Sometimes the priest confessed to tearing out pages from the diary and I found these moments of meta-narrative the most compelling. But I realized something about the book’s form. In The Diary of A Country Priest, of course the diary isn’t actually a diary, it’s an imagining of a diary, a likeness, an idea of a diary, and it’s this idea of a diary that signals to a reader how to read the book. Form, in this instance, is a shortcut to familiarity which, in effect, disarms the reader. 

FIXED VARIABLES

I bounced back to the present by reading Sheila Heti’s latest. Fortunately, it allowed me to stay inside the literary diary zone. And speaking of, the form of Alphabetical Diaries is so important to its vision I could see how it might disarm a reader so much that they might not bother to read it, as in, it might seem like a gimmick. From the publisher: 

Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade's worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.

As the book unfolds alphabetically, it inevitably loses its diaristic nature in search of something more experimental. I read it in two different modes, simultaneously, as a result of knowing that the narrator’s life (Heti’s life) would be out of order. First, I zeroed in on the sentences, parsing them for meaning, comparing every sentence with the one preceding it, as I had a feeling that just because the sentences were ordered alphabetically, it didn’t mean the whole book happened by accident (though I’m sure Heti encountered some, if not many, happy accidents of meaning). Reading it this way, the book felt musical, like the sentences were the notes of a pianist’s extended solo. Second, I was constantly trying to zoom out to identify the larger narrative, which occurs over a decade of the writer’s life. I got the sense that no matter how much the raw material was revised, the narrator would remain constant. So, the question at the centre of this book is, do people change? I don’t think it’s a surprise to say the answer is that they do and they don’t. The answer depends on where we’re at in life, who we are at a certain moment, who we want to be, who is in our orbit, whose orbits we can and can’t resist, and, most of all, it depends on who is authoring the story and imposing the rules of change.

WHITE OUT

I see now I wanted to go beyond diary into pure memoir but I can’t remember if that was my exact thought process or not. I’d heard of Michael Clune’s White Out, buying a copy somewhere along the way, and decided to pull it off the shelf. It’s a pretty raw, first-hand account of drug addiction, specifically heroin, and while it's sad to witness Clune’s descent, he writes in a warm, loving way—but he’s not just writing about heroin, he’s writing about his life, ambitions, relationships, memories and future.

MORE BEACH 

I found Roberto Bolano’s Antwerp on a shelf in a bookstore during one of those visits to a bookstore when you don’t intend to buy anything as you are mostly there looking to kill time or to appear as though you’ve got something to do, but you then happen upon a book so slim and enticing it takes little to zero internal argument to commit to buying it. I feel like my Bolano phase is always right around the corner and this remains the case. I once read Bolano’s short story “Beach”, which I really liked for its single relentless sentence and stifling tone, it’s one of those stories that sticks, so when reading Antwerp, while I appreciated its chaos and the avant-garde of it all, it didn’t really land. I think I just wanted more beach. I was also feeling stretched thin. I wasn’t reading much by March, more accurately, I wasn’t reading as frequently.  

LATE SPRING, EARLY SUMMER

I was probably halfway through my book’s revision by this point. I’ve written specifically about the books I read during this time, but I had generally broken free of the limitations I set on myself at the beginning of the year. I didn’t need the diary as a touch-point, now that I’d found my footing with it in my own work, although I still craved first-person narration. I read Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and U and I in quick succession. Baker’s discursive style invites a reader into the narrator’s thought process which I think makes it seem as though we’re not reading a story but an interpretation of a story and while the interpretation of the story is actually the story, when compared to other stories, where a reader might, in a sense, engage with a story from some degree of remove, Baker’s books thrive in a middle distance between where the story and the reader typically exist. Moving on, I read a piece about Baker’s work by Jordan Castro and it intrigued me enough to read his novel The Novelist which I think captures perfectly what it’s like to live in an online world while trying to write. A lot has been said about “internet novels” and I’m sure lots more will be said. If you’ve ever picked up your phone to, for instance, make a note or set a reminder, but instead you get distracted by a notification and lose the next fifteen minutes to checking and scrolling your arsenal of apps, until you ultimately put your phone down in exhaustion, only to have forgotten to make the note or set the reminder altogether, this book is that in novel form—and what could be more online than that? Maybe it was the diaries and all the essayistic writing and life online being under the microscope, but this time culminated in a desire to think and write about books more often. I realized then this was a practice I’d let fall by the wayside in the few years since I finished grad school. I started ACCORDING TO PLAN. 

SLIM REAPERS

László Krasznahorkai. I read Satantango a few years ago and really liked it and re-read it since then and will dip into the audiobook to hear what Futaki or Schmidt or Irimiás are doing. Despite my love for Satantango, I didn’t immediately read Krasznahorkai’s other work. I tend to space out my experiences with writers, but if I ever see a Krasznahorkai in a bookstore, I won’t think twice. I picked up his short novel A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East and novella Spadework for a Palace over the last couple years and read these very slim books one after the other this summer. I didn’t decide to read both in advance, however, but once I’d finished A Mountain to the North… I realized I wanted more. In hindsight, I think A Mountain to the North… caught my eye this year because it takes place in and around a monastery in Japan. In 2023, I went to a retreat held in and around a monastery in rural Saskatchewan. A far less (or far more) exotic place than Kyoto, but the experience hasn’t left my brain and almost two years later I still think back on my time there, searching my memories for meaning. Prince Genji, the protagonist of A Mountain to the North…, floats through this mysterious place of worship like a memory, looking for something, while the tensions of time, space, and those who pursue him, close in. It’s a peaceful book that requires patience. Not all of the narrator’s digressions pay off (upon a first read, anyway) though it’s Krasznahorkai’s disregard for the conventional that compels me to keep reading. If A Mountain to the North… plays out like déjà vu in slow motion, Spadework for a Palace is more of a conspiracy theorist’s overflowing wet dream. It’s a paranoid and deluded rant from a neurotic librarian scheming away his spare time in New York City. I connected with its chaotic and urgent first-person energy immediately, finding it inspiring while I worked on my revision. I don’t regret going back to back with these two books and found the pairing quite nice, though if I had to pick, and obviously I do, I enjoyed Spadework for a Palace more. 

WRITING THAT MAKES YOU WANT TO WRITE

I ordered the first issue of the Australian journal Paraphase in April probably while I was having trouble connecting with the books I was trying to read. I don’t know for sure how it got on my radar. I’m a fan of Gerald Murnane, Jen Craig, Garielle Lutz, etc., so that’s probably it. I think it’s a beautiful looking journal, too. It also could have been the mission statement (excerpt): 

…We expect every journal to begin, by force of habit, with its own kind of mission statement. That is to say that every new journal, before it has begun, is expected to have cultivated some a priori understanding of itself. The only solution this journal could find to the problem of the mission statement has been to make it a mission to have no statement by making a statement about how it has no mission: This journal has no mission statement…

I hope to write a larger post about Paraphase. The journal deserves as much considering I read every piece of writing in it. Highlights include the stories from Murnane, Craig, and Lutz, clearly this issue’s headliners, but I was equally impressed with the mix of prose and poems from Jessi Jezewska Stevens, Max Lawton, Vanessa Place and Ursula Robinson-Shaw. I feel as though the editor Kasumi Borczyk deserves some recognition as well.

Beyond many dog-eared pages, I wrote a single note in the margin of Gerald Murnane’s story “Masthead of the World”: 

Writing that makes you want to write. 

In my experience so far, a Murnane protagonist always tends to be a writer or a writer-type reflecting on his life in a very metafictional way; the way the story comes together is as important as the story itself, if not more so. These tendencies, plus the rural Australian backdrops—which add a layer of the autobiographical—create a certain level of intrigue. I began reading Murnane’s Inland after the piece in Paraphase. I’d previously read The Plains and Border Districts, an early work and a later work. The Plains has a more concrete plot and maybe a more deliberate attempt at character compared to what I’ve described above (though it’s been a while since I read it), and after reading Inland, which was published a few years after The Plains, I can see the groundwork being laid for his experimentation with form. Critic Christian Lorentzen describing Inland in the London Review of Books: 

…Inland is narrated by a writer in Hungary who sends his manuscripts to the editor of a magazine called Hinterland, based in Ideal, South Dakota. […] The writer in Hungary lusts after his editor and grows jealous of her husband. He is sustained by visions of her reading his work on the virgin prairies. The equation of reading and writing with sex and landscape is just another example of Murnane’s principle of transformation, or imaginative multiplicity: ‘I learned that no thing in the world is one thing; that each thing in the world is two things at least, and probably many more than two things. I learned to find a queer pleasure in staring at a thing and dreaming of how many things it might be.’ 

Inland requires a reader’s patience, as do the other Murnane works I’ve read, and while the plot, as summarized by Lorentzen, sounds spicy and tense, my experience reading the book was far more cool and diffuse, but as I said earlier, reading Murnane is as much about the way he strings it all together than the story itself. I wonder if this makes Murnane a writer’s writer? I’m as interested in the actual author writing the actual book as I am the book’s author writing the book’s book. If I compare Murnane’s writing to Krasznahorkai’s, especially at the sentence level, it comes across lighter, and more matter-of-fact. Overall, Murnane’s work feels subtle, innate, and minimal compared to Krasznahorkai’s impish extravagance. I realize now these two writers helped me through my revision—which by sometime in July I was unknowingly around a month or two away from completing—certainly as points of reference for what can be accomplished through voice or style or form, but mostly they remind me not to compromise or settle for anything less than the vision I have for my work. I doubt either of them would. 

DIGRESSIONS

At this point, summer was ending and so was my novel’s edit. I’d tried something new with this version and spent the year reshaping the book. To help in the final stretch, I wanted to read a novel with a clearly defined but experimental structure and that’s when I remembered Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill, a book I’d read years ago. It’s semi-autobiographical, fragmented, and contains a shift in perspective. I pulled it off the shelf to see how it was done. As a wife and mother (the protagonist) navigates a strained relationship with her husband, a change in point of view occurs around the midpoint, going from a close first-person narrator to a distant third, replicating most obviously the increasing emotional distance she feels as their marriage declines. While the novel is written as what Joyce Carol Oates once referred to as “wan little husks,” i.e., fragments, compared to the dense pages of text from authors like Baker or Krasznahorkai, Offill similarly employs digressions in order to inject a layer of context or meaning into the story—facts and anecdotes about philosophy, science, and music, delivered omnisciently. I feel it’s worth noting because while in theory the digression as a device seems straight forward, I believe in practice it isn’t; it lacks mass appeal, it’s risky, it has to be worth it. 

INSANE TRUST

I finished the revision in September not entirely convinced of what I thought of it. I’ve spent a lot of time working on this book which always manages to get shorter and longer and shorter again. I sent it out to some friends. I’ll start another revision when I hear from them, though I’ve already made changes. Eventually, I will have to stop working on it because it would be insane to keep going. I have hopes of sending it out and taking it to the next level and I have other projects I’d like to finish. It’s been six years, but I’m not sure six years is that long in context. I began the novel because I felt I had this story in me, and knew it was something I wanted to do (and still want to do). I trusted myself, so it makes sense that trust—in what I read, in the process, in myself—will be the reason I finish. Trust. What else is there?

Most recent photos of the revision and me

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These are the books I’ve read since the revision: Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (which I briefly wrote about here), Greg Baxter’s The Apartment (recommended to me by another writer on here), Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava, Based On A True Story by Norm Macdonald, and Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes.

These are the books I started to read and never finished: The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild by Mathias Énard, Parade by Rachel Cusk, The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, My Manservant and Me by Hervé Guibert, and Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer.