In the Labyrinth

When Struck by Fear of Writing, Refer To The Masters For Help

In anxious moments while working on the current novel, I turn for assistance to a 1968 Paris Review interview with the great Canadian author Robertson Davies, where he describes his writing process, a laborious and methodical investigation long before the narrative is written.

"I am at the moment winding up to write another novel, and when I say “winding up,” I mean I am making notes and plans and perpetually building up what I will eventually write; that is how I work. I make very, very careful plans and a great many notes—so many notes indeed that sometimes they are as long or longer than the eventual book. And sketches of characters and suggestions and references to things that will be useful. All that takes a long time. Getting to work on a new novel is a dismal business, for the beginnings never seem to get any easier with the passing of time. I toil like a swimmer who feels himself about to sink beneath the waves at any moment. Like all my novels, this one began with quite a simple idea, but as I work on it, a mass of complexities assert themselves, and I have to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by extraneous detail. But then—at least the way I work—when you begin to write, you can write quite briskly because you have done all the preparatory work beforehand. I hope it turns out well. But with novels, like cakes, you never know. Even when I finish a book, I’m never sure whether it is good or rubbish."

So, I am making furious notes, plotting, character studies, and the rest -- and I pray the cake will hold. And that will be good. And can I just add, that I love even more that Davies used a food analogy -- another habit of my family when talking about literature that is close to my heart.

Being Good At Problem Solving is a Problem

Mostly because its not my problems that I am solving. I seem to have spent the last five days putting out fires, rebuilding lost websites, reputations, getting other people's work done, and completely ignoring my own. How does that happen? I am too much of a competent fixer of problems not my own. And as happy as I am to help, it has become a burden of my own making -- an excuse not to solve my problems or face my own hard things.  

I need to be more like woman below, the problems of others muted into a much smaller elephant, nudging at my side.  But she is calm and won't be moved, focused (not unkindly) on enjoying her coffee and her own thoughts.

 Top photo: Haying in Cogne, 1959 by Pepi Merisio. Bottom photo: A photo of Dame Daphne Sheldrick, one of Africa's best known conservationists, who with her husband worked at Tsavo, Kenya's biggest National Park. She wrote an autobiography, Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story, published in 2012.  (Thanks to Sarah for the heads up on this photo!)

A Middle of the Night Meeting With the Commedia

I realized in the middle of the night that everything I had imagined about the plot structure of Three Sisters was insufficient unto the task. I had assumed I could move from one sister's narrative to another, forming discreet and somewhat separate interludes. But, I realized as I turned over on the pillow that If I stuck to that plan, the novel wouldn't have a wholeness about it -- it would lack an integration of ideas, themes, and characters. It would just be like transplanting three short stories into an artificial frame. I wouldn't be taking the extra step as a writer to make it mean something more than a reproduction of the fairy tale plots of the sisters. So who then to help me make the stories work together? I needed characters naturally endowed with the gift of storytelling and a nomadic way of life. Characters whose profession is to transform the local tale into art, and art into an evocative display of the universal human condition (along with some decent naughty jokes to spice it up).

And all at once, there were there. The Libertini, a Commedia dell' Arte troop (who livened up the pages of The Innamorati), appear sporadically in the early chapters of Three Sisters. And what woke me in the night, beside that nagging plot problem, was the realization that my intuitive brain had written them into the background, knowing before me that I would need them -- need their expertise at improvising, need their brilliant observations of human nature, need their mythic masks that speak through the actors with unvarnished voices. And...a wagon and a portable stage so as to be nimble enough to move across the different plots and localities of the sisters' tales. The Libertini might well be the ones to bring all the stories together. And there it was...enough of an answer to allow me to return to sleep, assured that my problems once realized, were also half solved.

But, now, in the light of day, I am a staggering around, trying to re-think the entire plot structure to give my performers a little more stage time so they can do their job of explaining it all to me. The next few days are going to be pretty interesting. But like Pulcinella below, this is how I do my best work at problem solving when it all proves too much.

  Art: French School, Scene of Commedia Actors, (ca 1580), Jan Miel, Commedia dell'Arte Actors on a Wagon in a Town Square (ca. 1650), Giambattista Tiepolo, Pulcinella asleep after a night of drinking (ca. 1755).