Quote of the Day

If I don’t practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.

—Jascha Heifetz

How to repeat yourself

Writers are generally advised not to repeat themselves. After I’ve finished the rough draft of a story, one of my first orders of business is to go back through the manuscript and fix any passages where I’ve inadvertently repeated the same word in the same sentence, or within a short run of text. Knowing how often you can use a word is a matter of taste and intuition. Some words are so common as to be invisible to the reader, so you can, and should, use the word “said” exclusively throughout a story, even as dialogue can usually be varied in other ways. Other words or phrases are so striking that they can’t be used more than once or twice in the course of an entire novel, and I’ll sometimes catch myself maintaining a running count of how often I’ve used a word like “unaccountable.” Then there are the words that fall somewhere in the middle, where they’re useful enough to crop up on a regular basis but catch the reader’s eye to an extent that they shouldn’t be overused. Different writers fall back on different sets of words, and in my case, they tend to be verbs of cognition, like “realized,” or a handful of adverbs that I use entirely too often, like, well, “entirely.”

Whenever I’m sifting through the story like this, part of me wonders whether a reader would even notice. Some of these repetitions jar my ear to a greater extent than they would for someone reading the story more casually: I’ve often revisited these pages something like fifty times, and I’m acutely aware of the shape of each sentence. (Overfamiliarity can have its pitfalls as well, of course: I’m sometimes shocked to discover a glaring repetition in a sentence that I’ve read over and over until I can no longer really see it.) But I encounter this issue often enough in other authors’ books that I know it isn’t just me. Catching an inadvertent repetition in a novel, as when Cormac McCarthy speaks twice in Blood Meridian of something being “footed” to its reflection, has the same effect as an unintentional rhyme: it pulls you momentarily out of the story, wondering if the writer meant to repeat the same word or if he, or his editor, fell asleep at the switch. And a particularly sensitive eye can pick up on repetitions or tics that even an attentive reader might miss. In his otherwise fawning study U & I,  Nicholson Baker complains about John Updike’s overuse of the verb “seemed,” which even I, a massive Updike fan, hadn’t noticed until Baker pointed it out.

But repetitions can also be a source of insight, especially when you’re coming to grips with an earlier draft. A writer can learn a lot from the words he habitually overuses. If you find yourself falling back on melodramatic adverbs like “suddenly,” you might want to rethink the tone you’re taking—it’s possible that you’re trying to drum up excitement in a story that lacks inherent dramatic interest. My own overuse of verbs like “realized” might indicate that I’m spending too much time showing characters thinking through a situation, rather than conveying character through action. You can learn even more from longer phrases that reappear by accident. As John Gardner writes in The Art of Fiction, discussing a hypothetical story about Helen of Troy:

Reading…lines he has known by heart for weeks, [the writer] discovers odd tics his unconscious has sent up to him, perhaps curious accidental repetitions of imagery: The brooch Helen threw at Menelaus the writer has described, he discovers, with the same phrase he used in describing, much later, the seal on the message for help being sent to the Trojans’ allies. Why? he wonders. Just as dreams have meaning, whether or not we can penetrate the meaning, the writer assumes that the accidents in his writing may have significance.

And the comparison to dreaming is a shrewd one. “Repetitions are magic keys,” Umberto Eco writes in Foucault’s Pendulum, and although he’s talking about something rather different—a string of sentences randomly generated by a computer—there’s a common element here. When you write a first draft, you’re operating by instinct: you accept the first words that come to mind, rather than laboriously revising the text, because you’re working in a mode closer to the events of the story itself. At its best, it’s something like a dream, and the words we select have a lot in common with the unmediated nature of dream imagery or word association in psychoanalysis. Later, we’ll smooth and polish the surface of the prose, and most of these little infelicities will be ironed away, but it doesn’t hurt to look at them first with the eye of an analyst, or a critic, to see what they reveal. This doesn’t excuse us from falling back on the same hackneyed words or phrases, and it doesn’t help a writer who thinks entirely in clichés. But it’s in our slips or mistakes, as Freud knew, that we unconsciously reveal ourselves. Mistakes need to be fixed and repetitions minimized, but it’s still useful to take a moment to ask what they really mean.

Quote of the Day

Strive always to improve the instrument.

—Henry E. Steinway

The most delicate moment

The moment always comes when, having collected one’s ideas, certain images, an intuition of a certain kind of development—whether psychological or material—one must pass on to the actual realization. In the cinema, as in the other arts, this is the most delicate moment—the moment when the poet or writer makes his first mark on the page, the painter on his canvas, when the director arranges his characters in their setting, makes them speak and move, establishes, through the compositions of his various images, a reciprocal relationship between persons and things, between rhythm of the dialogue and that of the whole sequence, makes the movement of the camera fit in with the psychological situation. But the most crucial moment of all comes when the director gathers from all the people and from everything around him every possible suggestion, in order that his work may acquire a more spontaneous cast, may become more personal and, we might even say—in the broadest sense—more autobiographical.

—Michelangelo Antonioni

The ten commandments of Leó Szilárd

1. Recognize the connections of things and laws of conduct of men, so that you may know what you are doing.
2. Let your acts be directed toward a worthy goal, but do not ask if they will reach it; they are to be models and examples, not means to an end.
3. Speak to all men as you do to yourself, with no concern for the effect you make, so that you do not shut them out from your world; lest in isolation the meaning of life slips out of sight and you lose the belief in the perfection of creation.
4. Do not destroy what you cannot create.
5. Touch no dish, except that you are hungry.
6. Do not covet what you cannot have.
7. Do not lie without need.
8. Honor children. Listen reverently to their words and speak to them with infinite love.
9. Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.
10. Lead your life with a gentle hand and be ready to leave whenever you are called.

—Leó Szilárd

“Thanks, Mom. I know…”

Note: This post is the seventh installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 6. You can read the earlier installments here.)

For the most part, I’m proud of my work as a writer, but I’m also aware of one flaw that my published novels all share: they’re about individuals, most of them psychologically isolated, and they have little to say about larger social units. None of the primary characters in these books are married. Most don’t seem to have interesting personal lives outside the bounds of the story. Ilya is an orphan—both his parents died while he was in Vladimir Prison—and we learn next to nothing about Maddy’s family or life history. When a more conventional relationship is introduced, it’s largely to advance the plot, as when Maddy and Ethan briefly drift together and fall apart in The Icon Thief. And the books are almost entirely lacking in sex. Needless to say, I’m far from the only suspense novelist to focus his energies on a narrow slice of human experience: even someone like Frederick Forsyth, who can otherwise write about anything, fumbles when it comes to talking about men and women. You could even argue that isolation is a necessary aspect of the conspiracy thriller, which tends to pit its individuals against the world. But in terms of my own growth as a writer, and of my ability to treat subjects and stories that don’t fit into the neat confines of the plots I’ve made, it’s a limitation, and a serious one.

I’ve spent a lot of time asking myself why my books are so emotionally constrained. Part of it, as I’ve just mentioned above, has do to with the way in which they’re structured: these are intricate plots that need to move quickly from one story point to the next, so there isn’t a lot of time to take in the emotional landscape outside the frame. Another factor might be my own life situation when I conceived the book that set the template for the series. When I wrote The Icon Thief, I was in my late twenties, living alone in New York, and still several years away from marrying and becoming a father. You write what you know, consciously or not, and at the time, I knew a great deal about being single in a big city and not much firsthand about anything else. It’s also possible that my approach to fiction in itself made it difficult for me to construct convincing relationships. Writing about Saul Bellow in Cannibals and Christians, Norman Mailer observes:

Bellow’s one major weakness…is that he creates individuals and not relations between them, at least not yet…It is possible that the faculty of imagination is opposed to the gift of grasping relationships—in the act of coming to know somebody else well, the point of the imagination may be dulled by the roughness of the other’s concrete desires and the attrition of living not only in one’s own boredom but someone else’s.

Now, I’m not about to compare myself to Bellow, and the passage above probably tells us more about Mailer in any case. But I can’t help finding a distant echo here to my own situation. I approach writing as an act of imagination, and particularly of invention: I take pride in my ability to come up with intricate plots and complications. This is an inherently solitary activity, and even as I treat fiction as an excuse to explore the world, the impulse remains one-sided, even mercenary. When I look at a location or an idea or another person, the writerly part of my brain is asking: “How can I use you?” Everything is turned into material to be worked out later, in private, which doesn’t lend itself well to unpacking human relationships. I tend to use fiction to create problems—to generate complexity—and not to untie the knots of ordinary interaction that I see around me. For the most part, I’m content with this: all writers evolve along certain lines, picking and choosing which battles to fight. The work informs the personality as much as the personality does the work, and I like constructing my little puzzles. But whenever I can, as much for the sake of my own growth as for the story itself, I try to inch a bit further toward those aspects of life that I’ve left underexplored.

You can see a few tentative stabs in this direction in City of Exiles, which is the first novel I wrote in full awareness of how emotionally constrained these stories had become. Later on, we’ll meet Powell’s father for the first time, in a chapter that comes as close as anything in these novels to providing a window on character for its own sake—and the result is one of my favorite scenes in the series. First, though, we’re introduced to Wolfe’s mother, as a voice on the other end of the phone in Chapter 6. At first glance, their interactions function as comic relief, and I like the juxtaposition between Wolfe’s conversation with her mom and the work she’s doing: she begins the chapter by tracing the weapons found at the murdered armorer’s apartment and ends it with the revelation that Ilya is back in the city, all while fending off her mother’s questions about how often she goes to church. But it also gets at something important about Wolfe’s character. Rachel Wolfe is in transition, caught between two stages, and her mother’s voice on the phone reminds her of how hard it is to let go of the past, even as she moves into something less defined. Like most of the other players in the story, she’s a lonely atom, an exile, but being alone isn’t her natural state, as it is with Ilya. It’s a path she’s chosen. And for once, we’re given a sense, at least as far as these books can manage, of what she’s left behind…

Quote of the Day

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

—G.H. Hardy

How do you know when you’re done?

If the scariest image in the world, as Stephen King likes to point out, is a closed door, a blank page can’t be far behind. I’ve had to face one nearly every day for the last decade or so of my life, and although I no longer regard it with the dread I once did, some residual fear still remains, especially for the few few minutes before I start work every morning. The fact that I’ve managed to fill that page so many times before somehow doesn’t carry much weight when it comes time to do it again: I usually feel a little nervous when I type the opening sentence of a new story or chapter, as if this, of all days, will be the one where the magic finally fails. The fact that it generally doesn’t, and I’m always able to get at least a rough version down on paper after the usual length of time, has nothing to do with talent or inspiration. It’s more a result of the handful of tricks I’ve learned that actually work when it comes to filling that empty expanse. And although it might seem that a writer’s primary problem is figuring out how to get started, I’ve found instead that the real challenge—and the key to unlocking what limited reserves of productivity I have—is knowing in advance when I’ll be done.

This means having a general idea of how the project will look when I’m finished, in full awareness that the final version will probably take a form that I can’t anticipate. The most obvious variable here is length, and I’ve found it useful to set down a target—whether in words, paragraphs, or pages—for the first draft, basing the estimate mostly on pieces I’ve done before. For a blog post, I aim to generate about four paragraphs of text; for essays or articles, ten to twelve paragraphs; for novelettes, ten to twelve thousand words; for a novel, fifty to sixty chapters of somewhat less than two thousand words each. This kind of writing by numbers may seem mechanical, but that’s part of the point. The final length of any piece of writing is always determined at the revision stage: I tend to cut more than I add, but individual sections often end up being longer or more involved than they were the first time around. Yet setting an arbitrary length for the first draft of a project gives me a kind of template, a certain square footage of canvas on which I can start sketching. 

That’s also the real reason I love outlines so much. An outline isn’t really about laying down a fixed plan: everything I’ve ever written has deviated, in large ways or small, from its initial conception. It’s more like a list of benchmarks, or points in the narrative where I can pause, knowing that I’ve done my work for the day. If I place so much emphasis on the idea of a plot as a series of clear objectives, it’s as much of a courtesy for the writer as the reader. Structuring the plot as a sequence of problems gives the reader a thread to follow, but it also provides the writer with a crucial map and compass. Its great advantage is that it gives you unambiguous information about what remains to be done. If the problem is solved, the story, or the scene, is over; if it isn’t, it probably isn’t. Obviously, there are all kinds of exceptions—not every story or scene needs to end with the protagonist getting what he or she wants—but having those markers along the way makes the road easier to travel. And just three or four pieces of information can make the difference between a formless string of events and a story whose ultimate shape, while still open to change, can be dimly glimpsed from the start.

After you’ve done it a few times, it gets progressively easier to intuit how the final product should look. I tend to turn to my old work for a sense of how long something new will be—I figure that if I’ve written one decent 10,000-word story, I should be able to do another—and I’ve come to understand my own rhythms as an author, which include the lengths in which I’m most comfortable working. I don’t have a lot of experience, for instance, with very short fiction; I like having the additional breathing room for development and payoff that a novelette provides. When I’m uncertain about other parts of the process, which is most of the time, I’ll stick to the forms that I’ve come to know best. Over the longer run, of course, it’s necessary to break out of the routines you’ve established, which may involve starting a project when you don’t know what the final form will be. (And there’s no shame in taking works by other writers as a model, much as the author Harry Crews broke down Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair scene by scene.) But when it comes to filling that blank page, the best approach is still putting one foot in front of the other, moving toward a goal you’ve laid out clearly on the map, even if it turns out to be in a different country entirely.

Quote of the Day

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one’s nose, taking shortcuts.

—Italo Calvino

“Like catching a fish with your hands…”

By now, many of you have probably seen the New York Times profile that revealed that Martin Cruz Smith, the author of such acclaimed suspense novels as Gorky Park, has suffered secretly for nearly two decades from Parkinson’s disease. Any reader of his stories knows that Smith doesn’t lack for ingenuity, and he’s managed to deal with the symptoms to the extent of publishing five books over the last dozen years, with even his publisher unaware of his situation until recently. It was clearly a novelist’s nightmare: the tremors prevented him from taking notes, sketching, and ultimately even typing, and it made it increasingly hard for him to do research on location. In the end, he was able to rely on his  wife, Emily, as an amanuensis, dictating to her in his office while he typed. As Pam Belluck, the article’s author, shrewdly points out, the process was fraught with pitfalls:

Writers often “think” through their fingertips, not knowing exactly what they’ll create until their hands are at the keyboard. Could Mr. Smith, whose novels braid history, suspense, deadpan humor, and subtly surprising characters, write a book one step removed?

Yet it seems to have worked, at least to a point, although not without a lot of mental and psychic toil.  At a time when novelists increasingly use their personal stories as a sales tool, Smith’s decision to conceal his condition for so long speaks both to his desire for privacy and to a kind of ingrained pride in his tools to which all professional writers can relate: it’s hard for us to admit that we may be operating at less than our best. And it would be a mistake to give Smith the wrong kind of credit for what he’s accomplished. Working with Parkinson’s took courage and tenacity, yes, but also inventiveness, resourcefulness, and superhuman concentration, all of which are qualities that he’s shown before in his writing. Gorky Park is a model thriller that manages to pull off a difficult dance between politics, reportage, and character development, while also constructing an exciting and finely detailed mystery, and it served as a valuable source of inspiration for The Icon Thief. Any writer capable of producing such a book—not to mention so many others over the years—inevitably learns a great deal about tackling complicated, seemingly unsolvable problems.

It’s impossible to know if being a novelist, who is often keenly conscious of the gap between his intentions and his capacity to perform them, really gave Smith greater resources to cope with his condition, but his case reminds me of other writers who have been forced to work under similarly difficult constraints. Borges, of course, went blind, and although it represented an undeniable loss to his fiction, he dealt with it by switching focus, moving away from the intricately literate stories of his early period to poems, fables, lectures, and tales drawn from his own memory of Argentina. Solzhenitsyn suffered from a different kind of deprivation: in the gulag, he had a fellow prisoner make him a rosary out of pellets of bread, which allowed him to compose and memorize long passages of poetry without access to pen or paper. None of these writers went so far as to romanticize their predicaments, and I don’t doubt that Borges would have gladly accepted the return of his eyesight and Solzhenitsyn of his writing materials. But it’s a testament to the power of our need to tell stories that it repeatedly survives under the most trying circumstances.

Cruz, not surprisingly, describes his experience with the vividness of a writer who has had a great deal of time to think about what it means and how it feels. Writing by dictation is “like playing football, except you’ve got two quarterbacks.” Typing with Parkinson’s “was like catching a fish with your hands.” And most memorably: “It’s not like Hillary conquering Everest. It’s like Mallory never coming down.” And his efforts speak volumes about the impossibility of giving up the act of telling stories. Smith’s books have done well; if this were simply about earning a living or seeing his name in print, he could have retired long ago. But writing is central to who authors are, and that impulse breaks out against even the most daunting of odds. Noting that he sometimes fails to find the first word he wants, Smith finds a particularly writerly way of putting the situation into a better light: “I like new ways of expressing things. It makes the work alive.” And after revealing that he sometimes suffers from hallucinations, including a black dog that appears in unexpected places, he notes drily: “Having hallucinations for a fiction writer is redundant.”

Quote of the Day

It’s four-dimensional chess, it’s strategy, and it’s being painfully honest, and unbelievably deceitful, and everything in between.

—David Fincher, on filmmaking

The great unread

When you love books, and especially if you like to think of yourself as a voracious reader, there’s always the temptation to pretend to be familiar with authors you haven’t read. We’ve all experienced that moment at a cocktail party, during an otherwise harmless conversation, when someone mentions a writer—George Saunders, say, or Alice Munro—whose work you’ve been meaning to check out for a long time, but who still remains untouched on your bookshelf, or in a blur of good intentions. If you’re anything like me, you always pause for a fraction of a second, wondering how to play it. Do you confess and say that you’ve only skimmed the latest Saunders story in The New Yorker on the way to the cartoons? Do you try to get away with repeating something clever you vaguely remember about Munro from the writeup you saw in the Times? Maybe it’s best just to smile and nod, hoping that the problem will go away. Or, if you’re particularly shameless, you can just fake it and agree that Saunders is great. (I admit to doing this on more than one occasion, although it usually involves feigning familiarity with movies I haven’t seen.)

Yet unless you’re Harold Bloom or James Wood or Michiko Kakutani, you’re always going to have blind spots in your literary education. In my case, these authors fall into three categories: those I haven’t read at all, those I’ve attempted and abandoned, and those I’ve read to various degrees, but who leave me with a nagging sense that I haven’t read enough. The writers in the first category include—deep breath now—William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, John Dos Passos, Eugene O’Neill, William S. Burroughs, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, E.M. Forster, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Edith Wharton, and a library’s worth of others. Authors I’ve tried but never managed to finish include Victor Hugo, Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, Gabriel García Márquez, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, and a lot, lot more. And in the last, most insidious category are writers I know fairly well but not well enough: I may never get past the sense that I need to read more Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kafka, Austen, Chekhov, Vonnegut, or Roth.

And this rankles me, because I love reading, and I don’t have much of an excuse. There are times when I feel like a birder grimly trying to check off all the sightings in a big year, and I’m always looking for loopholes. White Noise is a lot shorter than Underworld, so maybe I’ll make that my DeLillo, and maybe seeing Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire counts as reading Tennessee Williams. Part of me worries that by approaching it as if I were crossing items off a list, I’m losing touch with the whole purpose of reading: you should pick up a book because it calls to you, not because it allows you to feel smart in some hypothetical conversation, and it certainly shouldn’t feel like homework. Yet I also feel strongly that canons matter as a guide to books that otherwise wouldn’t leap off the shelves, and I know from my own experience that many novels I approached with a sense of dutifulness—The Magic Mountain comes to mind—became treasured companions. After a certain point, you find that moving randomly from one book to the next only leads you in circles, and you need a nudge from outside to push you in directions that so far have only been trodden by others.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way, it’s that the list of unread books doesn’t diminish over time. If anything, it expands, and whenever you tackle a new author, the list seems to double in size. Every great writer points to others, or forces you to revisit books you thought you knew, and the more you read, the more deeply you understand how much remains unexplored. The goal of a lifetime’s reading isn’t to be smugly reassured that you’ve traversed the Great Books of the Western World, but to gain perspective on the tracts of territory that you still haven’t experienced. And there’s something oddly comforting in the thought that so many great works of art are patiently waiting their turn. In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson, who has probably seen more movies than anyone else alive, writes of the Japanese director Mikio Naruse:

Naruse sounds wonderful…I will see [his work] one day. But like all lifelong filmgoers, I know the allure of films unseen…There is nothing like knowing that one has still to see a body of great work. And no gamble as interesting as pushing the desire to its limit.

In a later edition, Thomson confesses that he’s finally seen Naruse, whom he finds “ineffable.” So I may as well admit that I’ve also picked up my copy of The Portable Faulkner. There’s a world full of books that I still need to read, and there’s no better time to start than today.

Quote of the Day

If art finds the temple closed, then it flees into the workshop.

—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Cindy Sherman and the viewer’s vertigo

Ranking artists and their works may be little more than a critical parlor game, but as games go, it’s fun and sometimes instructive, and it’s hard for me to resist a good list. I’ve been fascinated for as long as I can remember by the Sight & Sound poll of great movies, as much for its alterations over time as its current snapshot of our cultural canon: Vertigo‘s rise, Bergman’s fall, the ascent of such directors as Abbas Kiarostami and Wong Kar-Wai. Contemporary visual art doesn’t have a similar cyclical poll, but maybe it should, if only for what it tells us about our shifting tastes. Vanity Fair recently conducted a survey of art world luminaries to determine the greatest living artist, and at first glance, the results are more or less what you’d expect: Gerard Richter at the top, followed closely by Jasper Johns, with such familiar names as Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, and Ellsworth Kelly appearing lower down. The omissions, too, are fascinating: Damien Hirst got a paltry three votes, Julian Schnabel none at all, which only reminds us how quickly the critical consensus can change, or how little auction prices and celebrity count in the long run. Yet a poll like this says as much about the way we see art as about the artists themselves, and I’d like to focus, in particular, on the most highly ranked woman on the list, Cindy Sherman, whose career reveals so much about the kind of art that grabs and maintains our attention.

I’ve been a Sherman devotee for a long time, ever since discovering her Untitled Film Stills in my sophomore year in college. In some ways, Sherman is the secret muse behind my novels: along with Diane Arbus and Susan Sontag, she’s the artist who first got me thinking about the ambivalent relationship of photography toward its practitioners and its subjects, a thread that runs throughout The Icon Thief, in which one of her photos makes a cameo appearance. And it’s no accident that all of these artists were women. The story of women and photography is a tangled one, tinged with notions of power and powerlessness, agency and objectification, the male gaze and the need to document lives that might otherwise go unseen. Arbus is best known for her photos of others, in the most literal sense, but we’re also fascinated by her self-portraits, and Sherman has always been her only model. The Untitled Film Stills are hugely powerful—I vividly remember my first encounter with one—but they’re also beguiling acts of mimicry and disguise. Sherman, who always enjoyed dressing up as imaginary characters, began photographing herself almost as an afterthought, and the result is a set of images that remain endlessly evocative. Each suggests a single enigmatic moment in an ongoing narrative, to the extent that you could use them as a collection of story prompts, like an eroticized version of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, and even after thirty years, they’re still compelling and seductive.

Which brings me to an uncomfortable point about Sherman, and one that doesn’t always get enough emphasis in critical discussions of her career, which is how shrewdly her earlier pictures utilize her own sexuality to draw male viewers into her work. Sherman was and remains an attractive woman, and it’s hard to imagine her photos troubling us in the way they do if her own face wasn’t so naturally suited to being transformed into a fantasy object: sex kitten, ingenue, working girl, ice queen. Taken as a whole, these metamorphoses are troubling and mesmerizing, but when you view them in isolation, they slip uneasily into the same category of image they’re meant to satirize. Even as her work plays on clichés of feminine iconography, she seizes our attention by appealing to the same part of the brain. Two her framed prints live in my office, so familiar by now that I barely even notice them, but if I had to explain why I put them there, I’d have to admit that the impulse isn’t that different from when I’d decorate my room as a teenager with album sleeves and magazine cutouts. I like the way they look, and when I was younger, they ended up on the cover of more than one mix tape. Sherman spoofs and subverts the idea of the female art object, but in the process, she turns herself into the very thing she’s trying to undermine—a pin-up for readers of Art in America.

In her later work, Sherman would assume increasingly grotesque and horrifying masks, and her recent run of clown pictures, for instance, isn’t something you’d hang on a dorm room wall. Yet there’s no denying that her early fame and continued appeal rest on the way in which her most famous works simultaneously embody and undermine their sources: it’s no accident that the recent collection of her Untitled Film Stills used a cover image of Sherman at her most glamorous. Which may be her most enduring lesson. So many works of art stick in the imagination because they oscillate between surface appeal and darker depths: Vertigo is both the ultimate Hitchcock thriller, with its Edith Head costumes and lush Bernard Herrmann score, and also the most psychologically complex of all Hollywood movies. Like its opening shot, it starts with the eye, then plunges in deeper, and much of its power comes from how we identify first with Scotty, then with Madeline and her unwilling Shermanesque transformation. Sherman, like Hitchcock, draws us in with the story she seems to be telling, then forces us to rethink why we care about such stories at all. (It’s also true of Kara Walker, the only other woman on the Vanity Fair list, whose paper cutouts and silhouettes evoke classic children’s illustration while confronting us with the horror of slavery.) This requires both enormous technical virtuosity and a curious kind of naiveté, which we see whenever Hitchcock and Sherman discuss their work. We’re left intrigued but unsettled, unsure of how much of our response comes from the art itself or from our own misreading of it. And in the end, we realize that we’re in the picture, too, just beyond the edges of the frame.

Quote of the Day

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

—James Fenton

“A plan, however, is necessary, but a plan that is vague…”

To draw up in advance an exact and detailed plan is to deprive our minds of the pleasures of the encounter and the novelty that comes from executing the work. It is to make the execution insipid for us and consequently impossible in works that depends on enthusiasm and imagination. Such a plan is itself a half-work. It must be left imperfect if we want to please ourselves. We must say it cannot be finished. In fact, it must not be for a very good reason: it is impossible. We can, however, draw up such plans for works whose execution and accomplishment are a mechanical thing, a thing that depends above all others on the hand. This is suitable and even very useful for painters, for sculptors. Their senses, with each stroke of the brush or chisel, will find this novelty that did not exist for their minds. Forms and colors, which the imagination cannot represent to us as perfectly as the eye can, will offer the artist a horde of these encounters which are indispensable to giving genius pleasure in work.

But the orator, the poet, and the philosopher will not find the same encouragement in writing down what they have already thought. Everything is one for them. Because the words they use have beauty only for the mind and, having been spoken in their head in the same way they are written on the page, the mind no longer has anything to discover in what it wants to say. A plan, however, is necessary, but a plan that is vague, that has not been pinned down. We must have above all the notion of the beginning, the end, and the middle of our work. That is to say, we must choose its pitch and range, its pauses, and its objectives. The first word must give the color, the beginning determines the tone; the middle rules the measure, the time, the space, and the proportions.

—Joseph Joubert

Repetition with a difference

I am the kind of writer who rewrites and rewrites. I am very eager to correct everything. If you look at one of my manuscripts, you can see I make many changes. So one of my main literary methods is “repetition with difference.” I begin a new work by first attempting a new approach toward a work that I’ve already written—I try to fight the same opponent one more time. Then I take the resulting draft and continue to elaborate upon it, and as I do so the traces of the old work disappear. I consider my literary work to be a totality of differences within repetition.

I used to say that this elaboration was the most important thing for a novelist to learn.

—Kenzaburō Ōe, to The Paris Review

“A voice in his head told him to walk away…”

Note: This post is the sixth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 5. You can read the earlier installments here.)

The Icon Thief and its sequels are dense, crowded novels with a lot of characters, and they frequently switch from one point of view to another, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that the central figure is Ilya Severin. He’s the only character to play an important role in all three books, and his emotional arc is the most pronounced: the first book opens with him killing a man in cold blood, while the last ends with an act of mercy. Yet I was always very careful, even protective, when it came to the extent of his role in these books. I left him in the background as much as possible, and even when a chapter was told from his point of view, I did my best to preserve his secrets: we learn a bit about his past as the series progresses, but certain key elements—his relationship with his parents, his youth and childhood, his fall into the world of organized crime—are left unresolved. Early on in the writing process, this was a way of keeping my options open in case I wanted to go into greater detail in later installments, but ultimately, it became a narrative strategy in itself. Heroes, as William Goldman reminds us, must have mystery, and since Ilya was the antihero at the heart of this series, I wanted to hold back as much about him as I could.

This is why he’s kept in reserve for much of the opening of City of Exiles. I go briefly into his thoughts at the end of the prologue, but we aren’t properly reintroduced to him until Chapter 5, or almost forty pages into the novel. This was partially a structural strategy to keep him at an arm’s length: I deliberately gave him fewer chapters than the other major characters, reasoning that if I kept him offstage, I wouldn’t run the risk of overexposing him. Looking back at the novel, I think this was the right choice, and if anything, I feel as if I could have walked his scenes back even further. I’m happiest writing novels, not movies, and there are things I can do in this medium that I couldn’t do anywhere else, but film does have one big advantage: you can evoke a character with a glance, or a shadow of an expression on an actor’s face, while a novel can’t avoid entering his head. Ideally, I would have tried to depict Ilya entirely through action, with only a hint of what he might be thinking at the time, but there were problems with this approach, too. Ilya’s motivations, to put it mildly, are complicated, so there was no way to avoid spelling them out from time to time, at least if I wanted to keep the reader properly oriented.

As a result, the opening of City of Exiles presented a tricky balancing act. Ilya’s natural tendency is toward withdrawal and detachment, to preserve the freedom that he briefly gained at the end of the previous novel, but on a dramatic level, he’s interesting only to the extent that he plunges deeper into conflict. Justifying his decision to involve himself in the story already unfolding in London was a challenge, and while I think that I pull it off, it’s a close call. After his return to the city, Ilya learns that a criminal in Stoke Newington has been murdered—this is the man whose body Wolfe examined three chapters earlier—and he recognizes the name as that of a gun runner he’d met years before. For reasons left unspoken at the moment, but which will be clarified later on, he also senses that this is an intelligence plot connected with the attempt on his life in Marbella. Pushing forward becomes an act of self-preservation, a way of maintaining his own safety, even as his inner voice tells him to walk away. And that voice isn’t necessarily wrong. As a writer, all I know is that if he leaves now, there won’t be any novel, so I do what I can to make his decision seem like a reasonable one.

This gets to the heart of an issue that every novelist confronts at one point or another, which is the degree of freedom that characters possess within the requirements of the story. Writers who claim that their characters determine their own actions may be telling the truth, and it’s certainly preferable to forcing them into a formula that you’ve cobbled together before the fact, but in most cases, the reality lies somewhere in the middle. You start with characters at one end and the broad outlines of a story at the other, and you hope that they’ll meet halfway. Ideally, you end up with characters who are defined by what they do as much as who they are, so someone like Ilya is inevitably shaped by the kind of novel he was destined to occupy. He isn’t someone who would just fade away again; he cares about justice, or at least righting the balance; he wants to bring down the system that lied to him for so long. In retrospect, all these qualities arise naturally enough from his character, in which so many factors—both within the world of the story and in the larger process of writing it—exist in constant tension. But in the end, Ilya sometimes acts in certain ways because he’s living in a thriller. And I want him to stay at the center of it…

Quote of the Day

This man, while truly mastering his craft and always striving toward greater refinement, nevertheless manages never to burden his listeners—especially not with his creative labors!

—Karl Barth, on Mozart

Keeping it short

Yesterday, I noted that Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s epic film about the Holocaust, uses its own enormous length as a narrative strategy: its nine-hour runtime is a way of dramatizing, assimilating, and ultimately transforming the incomprehensible vastness of its subject. But there are other valid approaches as well, even to similar material. Here’s Elie Wiesel talking to The Paris Review:

I reduce nine hundred pages [the original length of Night] to one hundred sixty pages. I also enjoy cutting. I do it with a masochistic pleasure although even when you cut, you don’t. Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them.

Instead of expanding his work to encompass the enormity of the events involved, Wiesel cuts it down to its core. It’s just one of millions of such stories that could have been told, and its power is only increased by the sense that it’s a single volume in an invisible library of libraries.

A big book is immediately impressive, even newsworthy, but if anything, the author’s hand is more visible in shorter works. The implicit premise of a long book is that it’s giving us an entire world, and in many of the great social epics—from War and Peace to A Suitable Boy—the writer himself is invisible by design. A short work, by contrast, is more about selection, and it foregrounds the author’s choices: the boundaries of the narrative are set within a narrow window, and the result is just as evocative for what it omits as includes. Every painter knows that one of the hardest decisions in making a new composition is knowing where to put the frame. If a big novel is the literary equivalent of a huge pane of plate glass, a short book is more like what the great architect Christopher Alexander has called a Zen view, a tiny opening in a wall that only exposes a fraction of the landscape. When we see a spectacular panorama all at once, it becomes dead to us after a day or two, as if it were part of the wallpaper; if we view it through a tiny opening, or glimpse it only as we pass from one room to the next, it remains vital forever, even if we live with it for fifty years. A short work of narrative sets up some of the same vibrations, with a sense that there’s more taking place beyond the edge of the pane, if only we could see it.

A shorter length is also more suited for stories that hinge on the reader’s suspension of belief, or on the momentary alignment of a few extraordinary factors. This includes both comedy and its darker cousin noir. Great comic works, whether in fiction, film, or drama, tend to be relatively short, both because it’s hard to sustain the necessary pitch for long and because the story often hinges on elements that can’t be spun out forever: coincidence, misunderstanding, an elaborate series of mistakes. Another turn of the screw and you’ve got a thriller, which tends to be similarly concise. Some of the best suspense novels in the language were written to fit in a pocket: The Postman Always Rings Twice is maybe 120 pages long, Double Indemnity even shorter, the Travis McGee books a reliable 150 or so. Like comedy, noir and suspense are built on premises that would fall apart, either narratively or logically, if spun out to six hundred pages: characters are presented to us at their lowest point, or at a moment of maximum intensity, and it doesn’t particularly matter what they were doing before or after the story began. That kind of concentration and selectiveness is what separates great writers from the rest: the secret of both comedy and suspense is knowing what to leave out.

And that’s equally true of the movies, even if it’s something that a filmmaker discovers only after hard experience. Cutting a novel can be agonizing, but it’s all the more painful to excise scenes from a movie, when the footage you’re removing represents hundreds or thousands of hours of collective effort—which is why an editor like Walter Murch never visits the set, allowing him to remain objective. There’s no better contemporary model of cinematic brevity than Woody Allen, whose movies rarely run more than ninety minutes, partly because his own attention starts to wander: “For me, if I make a film which is one hour forty minutes, it’s long. I just run out of story impetus after a certain time.” And although he’s never said so in public, it’s clear that he arrived at this artistic philosophy in the late seventies, after laboring hard with the screenwriter Marshall Brickman on a three-hour monster of a comedy. Its working title was Anhedonia, and it was going to cover every aspect of its protagonist’s life—childhood, career, romance—with countless surreal sketches and fantasy sequences. The result was an unwatchable mess, so it was only with the help of editor Ralph Rosenblum that Allen was able to find its heart: a quirky, focused love story, with only two major characters, that ran a clean 93 minutes. It was Annie Hall.