Friday Column: Writing About Writing

(Today we have a guest Friday Column by author Joshua Henkin. His new novel, Matrimony, was recently published by Pantheon and is a Book Sense pick and a Borders Original Voices selection.  For more about Matrimony, visit this site.)

It has been pointed out to me (as if I needed reminding!) that my new novel Matrimony took me ten years to write.  How, I’ve been asked, did this come to pass?  The short answer is that it took that long to get the book right; a novel needs to take as long as it needs to take.  I threw out literally thousands of pages, some of them good pages; they just didn’t belong in this novel.

The longer answer is that every novel presents its own difficulties, and this one posed several that seemed intractable until I discovered that they weren’t. One such difficulty was writing about writing.  My protagonist, Julian Wainwright, is, like me, a novelist, and I’d long believed that writing about writing was to be avoided.  It was narrow, self-regarding, and solipsistic, and I’d read enough bad stories about writing from undergraduates and MFA students to know better.  Not that I hadn’t read plenty of really good novels about writers.  Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Martin Amis’s The Information, and Scott Spencer’s Men in Black came readily to mind.  But those books were more fundamentally about the writing life than Matrimony is.  As some  reviews have illustrated, it’s possible to discuss Matrimony without dwelling on the writing life (in a few cases, without mentioning it at all). 

Matrimony is, at heart, a domestic drama.  It’s about what happens when a couple meet in college (he’s a Wasp from New York City, the son of an investment banker; she’s Jewish, from Montreal) and end up marrying sooner than they expected, and the ways that their choices (faithlessness, failed ambition, the decision whether to have a child) and things out of their control (health and sickness, the death of a parent) test the endurance of their relationship.  At the same time, when you are writing about people from the ages of eighteen until forty, the question of what they do professionally is bound to come up; it’s one of the things that characterize them.  What, then, is a writer to do if his protagonist is a fiction writer?

Tread carefully, for one.  Make sure not to be knowing, insider-y, or coy.  But what I discovered after many starts and stops, after countless drafts, is that you can tread too carefully.  Like the Harvard graduate who, when asked where she went to college, says, “In Boston,” the novelist who writes about a writer and then tries to dance around the subject is guilty of a kind of literary arrogance. 

My writing students get into trouble when they write a story that has absolutely nothing to do with writing but include a reference to a short story the character has written.  The reader recognizes a failure of imagination.  The writing student has writing on the brain, and so she drops into the story the first thing that comes to her mind.  But what if writing is not incidental to the narrative?  If the character is a writer, that’s part of what the novel is about, and the writer needs to embrace that fact, just as he would embrace the fact that his character is a butcher, an engineer, a secretary, or a mobster.  And this embrace was what I was reluctant to do, until I came to recognize what I should have recognized from the start—that if Julian was going to be a novelist, I needed to take that fact seriously because he takes that fact seriously. 

In earlier drafts, Julian was a less successful writer than he is in the final version, and I also treated the writing material more farcically.  But I’m not at core a farcical writer, and though Matrimony may be funny in places, it is not fundamentally a comedy.  What I understood, after years of writing the novel, was that I was hiding behind the farce as a way of not fully engaging my characters.  As soon as I realized that, as soon as I treated my characters with greater seriousness and empathy, everything about the book changed for the better.

What I needed to do, I finally recognized, was to imagine Julian better.  You would think that writing about a writer would be the easiest thing for a writer to do.  But that’s not the case.  You take it for granted that others understand what you understand when in fact they don’t.  You think you don’t have to imagine it because you are it.  But you always have to imagine it, perhaps most especially when you are it.

I’ve often thought of something Zadie Smith said when she was being interviewed about White Teeth.  She said—and I’m paraphrasing—There are things that seem not particularly believable in White Teeth, but I refused to allow my readers not to believe them.  I simply took them by the lapel and said, You can’t disbelieve.  Now, Matrimony is a quite different book from White Teeth, but I found Smith’s words instructive, and I think every writer should, too.  You have to refuse to let your readers disbelieve you.  And the way to do that is for you to believe you.  Above all else, you have to write with conviction.  You cannot do anything tentatively or half-heartedly.  If you take your characters seriously, if you render their concerns with grace and respect, your readers will respect them too.  Conviction is infectious.

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Comments

[LitHourati]

The hardest part for me in writing about a writer was making the obsessive observation writers engage in believable (not to speak of interesting) to non-writers. I'm still interested in the way the writer's thought process interferes with what others think of as life.