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Gratitude

Our driveway in snow and sun

What would it mean to write for an audience of no one?

As I begin looking for an agent, dropping query letters into the void, I can’t help asking myself this question.

I’ve written the book. Rewritten it. Made it as good as I possibly can. Then rewritten it all over again, and made it still better.

What if that turned out to be all?

No matter what comes next, I’m grateful for these things:

1. I have a better understanding of how hard it is to write fiction. As a literature professor, I should already know this, but there’s nothing like trying a difficult craft yourself as a way to cultivate humility. I used to wonder whether scholarship or fiction was harder to write. Now I have my answer: fiction is MUCH harder.

2. I’m reading more. I read all the time: it’s my job. Since beginning to write fiction, though, I’ve decided to keep on reading “for fun” right through the thick of every semester. I’m discovering amazing new books and authors, most of them completely unrelated to the things I’m an “expert” in.

3. I’ve brought the story into being. That was what it asked for. I may not have been the right person to do it, but there was no one else. Even if no one reads it, the fact that it exists in the world is significant.

4. Sharing my writing with friends and family has been fun -- and incredibly useful. I’ve had generous help and detailed comments from at least ten different people at this point, and encouragement from many more.

5. My scholarship is better. Writing fiction about the material I research has allowed me to see it in a different way, and given me ideas for new articles – the first of which is forthcoming in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies this spring.

6. I’m learning how to fail. As I was crying over one of my many drafts, Sam asked me, “is this the first thing you’ve ever failed at?” That made me stop and think. Yes, I decided – if we only count things that really matter. That’s amazing, too: how lucky was I, to avoid significant failure for half my life?

7. I’m writing something new. There’s a manticore.

One Cabbage

Flowers, chard, Brussels sprouts, weeds... and hidden cabbages

“I found a cabbage in the garden,” says Sam.

To understand all the implications of this statement, one has to understand our garden: knee-deep in some invasive, creeping thing that we’ve pulled out again and again, only to discover that it takes root wherever we throw it. Clogged with fallen tomato cages, smothered in pumpkin vines. Cabbage was one of the things we’d given up on. We planted ten cabbage seedlings last spring, only to lose them to slugs, ants, and digging cats. Then planted ten more from seed, only to discover that they were actually Brussels sprouts.

Now Sam acts as if he’d just been handed a marvelous surprise, while I stand at the sink trying to wash enough pots to cook dinner in. It would appear that he’s perfectly all right with the chaos our garden has become.

I’m not.

There’s a reason why I don’t write much about this so-called farm of mine. This person trying to hold down a full-time academic job, push through the sixth revision of a novel, support a teenage daughter in one crisis after another, stay married, and have a farm too? She is utterly insane to think she can do even half of this. Certainly, there’s no need for her to share that insanity with others.

But Sam is happy about this one cabbage. And it does make an amazing coleslaw, with that flavor you just can't buy in the produce section of the grocery store.

Our garden may look like a weed pit, but it's also yielding like crazy. A big barrel of potatoes, stored in the basement. A full year’s supply of garlic and onions. Kale, chard, Brussels sprouts, and leeks that we’ll be eating well into fall. Enough tomatoes to fall from the vines and rot in the paths. And, now we’re clearing away some of the summer plants, cabbages. It seems a few of them survived after all. There were just so many other things in the way that no one knew.

The book and the garden have a lot in common. A friend said to me, when she got the massive tome of the fifth draft in the mail, “I can’t believe you wrote all this!” What’s really unbelievable, I wanted to tell her, is all the pages I deleted before they got as far as you.

Now, one draft further on, the sprawling pumpkin vines of the imagination will have to go. Taking this manuscript down from 133,000 words to 100,000 promises to involve pruning out some 50,000 words, then wedging 20,000 very different ones back in just the right places. Remembering, at every turn, the shape and structure of the whole. Weeding. Something I’ve never been very good at.

I’m at home in the chaos. It’s all too easy to proliferate words into still more words. Focusing on that one cabbage, though, appreciating it for what it is. Now that takes practice.

A Gift

My writing shack. It's every bit as scrappy as it looks. So is what gets written in it.

Some days, writing a novel gets ugly. Like the day I drop the computer on my foot.

I’ve been complaining. Why me? I didn’t ask for a story to tell. And why this particular story, which demands that I rewrite history in the most ludicrously inaccurate way possible? Couldn’t this idea have picked on someone else, someone who could actually handle the challenge?

Or, with apologies to Scrooge: “why do stories walk the earth, and why do they come to me?”

So I am being, ahem, a bear to my whole family when my laptop slides off the coffee table and crashes directly onto my foot.

And of course I have backed up nothing I’ve written in the past... week? Month? How long exactly has it been? At that moment, I’m not even sure.

Lesson learned. I am happy when the computer turns out to be fine, and even consider it a small price to pay when my foot swells up to twice its normal size.

I attribute this incident only partly to my habit of stacking my laptop on top of books on top of papers in the middle of the living room. Mostly, it’s a rebuke from the universe. It must be one I still need: even now, months later, my foot gets twinges. Especially in yoga class, where every posture seems to involve sitting on it.

The writer Elizabeth Gilbert understands the creative process in a mystical way that I would never believe if I hadn’t experienced it myself.

 “Ideas have no ma­teri­al body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will,” she writes in her new book, Big Magic.

(See a review of Big Magic here, and a fascinating -- and somewhat creepy -- Radiolab interview with Gilbert here.)

Sometimes, an idea will begin to haunt you. What you do next is up to you. You can talk to it, find out what it wants. Or you can snarl at it, in which case it might just change its mind and go away.

Here are your gifts, says the universe. An impossible story. An autistic daughter. Not because you can handle them (you can’t), but because they are for you. They will torture you, and also enrich you immeasurably. Figure it out.

When I sit on my foot in yoga class these days, I have a little conversation with Alec Guinness – the Alec Guinness from the last scene of Doctor Zhivago.

This story may not go anywhere, I tell him. I may destroy it simply by trying to cut it down to size. Or I may work on it for another year and still not get an agent. Or I may get an agent and still not get a publisher.

He smiles his Alec Guinness smile at me. “Ah,” he says. “Then it’s a gift.”

(Whatever you think of Doctor Zhivago, you probably need to watch Alec Guinness do this again.)

Apples Far From the Tree: Retelling, Fanfiction, and Stories that Keep Going

You can just view people as this peculiar byproduct that stories use to breed. Really, it’s the stories that are the life-form — they are older than us, they are smarter than us, they keep going.       – Neil Gaiman

Picked while walking the dog: they may look less than perfect, but nothing beats these heirloom varieties for taste.

The story of King Arthur is one that keeps going. It’s been inspiring retellings for over a thousand years, from Chrétien de Troyes to Malory to Spenser to Tennyson to T.H.White to Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mary Stewart. In fact, as I like to tell my students, every version of the Arthurian Legend is a retelling. There is no original. And that in itself may be as good a definition of myth as any.

But there’s one part of this story – and a BIG part, to the tune of 7,000 pages of raw material – that hasn’t been retold at all since the fifteenth century.

That’s reason enough for any scholar to put away her MLA style manual and retrain herself as a fiction writer.

The Golden Knight meets the Questing Beast, from a 15th century manuscript of Perceforest

The late medieval French romance Perceforest is a supremely imaginative, wildly grotesque, and unbelievably long prequel to the story of King Arthur. Or a gigantic postscript to the story of the Trojan War, depending on which end you look from.

It’s fanciful, absorbing, filled with monsters and magic – but it’s also thousands of pages long and written in middle French. Oh, and until just this year, when a team of French researchers finally completed their scholarly edition, most of it had been out of print since the sixteenth century.

Title page of an early print edition of Perceforest.

There is still no full translation into any language, so those who don’t read middle French are out of luck. (Although I recommend Nigel Bryant’s “compressed English translation,” at 781 pages, or a bit more than 1/10 the length of the original, that’s very compressed. Okay, it’s really just a summary. Nonetheless, a summary of something absolutely thrilling.)

I’ve worked on Perceforest as a scholar for about ten years now, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this remarkable book needed something more.

Maybe it was the day my six-year-old found me engrossed in volume 2 of part 3 (the romance has six parts, but the now-complete modern edition fills thirteen fat volumes).

“Mom, I always see you with that book. Read it to me. No, read it to me.”

Well. Even when you’re comfortable in middle French, off-the-cuff translation into English is difficult. I kept stumbling, and she kept telling me to keep going. Eventually, I found it was easier just to write the stories down for her.

Moments of origin: the Fairy Queen turns Sir Estonné into a bear, as rendered by a six-year-old

She’s almost fifteen now. She’s still telling me to keep going.

The small slice of Perceforest that I’ve been writing and rewriting for several years now isn’t exactly a “retelling.” It’s about as similar to the medieval version as The Mists of Avalon is to Chrétien de Troyes. That’s precisely what makes it worthwhile.

Opening page of an early print edition of Perceforest.

I try to keep the bones of the myth, to capture the spark that made this story stand out among all the others I’m fortunate enough to work with as a scholar. I also try, through a series of carefully considered changes, to correct the original where I believe it goes wrong. The result is an argument about the true version of the story.

Which is to say it’s a fanfiction.

Writing fanfiction is an authentically medieval enterprise. Medieval romancers were rewriters: they understood that writing was a kind of reading, that books were in dialogue with other books. But there had to be a reason to retell a story: sometimes, that previous redactors got it wrong. As Thomas of Britain says, in defense of his version of the story of Tristan and Isolde over those of his predecessors:

Assez sai que chescun en dit

        E ço qu'il unt mis en escrit,

        [...]      

        Il sunt del cunte forsveié

        E de la verur esluingné. (Thomas, Tristan, 2117-18, 2151-52)

(I know well what everyone says about it, and what they have written. They have strayed from the story, and gone far from the truth.)

The "truth" Thomas references is a mythographic one, based on a necessity that he finds in his source material. My version of part of Perceforest arises from a similar necessity: it's based on something the fifteenth-century writer overlooks, but that the myth itself clearly demands.

Learning to write fiction is overwhelming and confusing. There are days, many of them, when I long for the clarity of academic writing. That’s when it helps to remember that none of this is about me. I’m not “a writer” – I’m just the person who hears what this story says.

The story is what keeps going. I'm just there to help it along.

David Aubert, fifteenth century scribe -- some say redactor -- of Perceforest.

Yes, fanfiction can be good, and even literary. See some famous examples here.