How to rest

As a practical matter, there appears to be a limit to how long a novelist can work on any given day while still remaining productive. Anecdotally, the maximum effective period seems to fall somewhere in the range of four to six hours, which leaves some writers with a lot of time to kill. In a recent essay for The New Yorker, Gary Shteyngart writes:

I believe that a novelist should write for no more than four hours a day, after which returns truly diminish; this, of course, leaves many hours for idle play and contemplation. Usually, such a schedule results in alcoholism, but sometimes a hobby comes along, especially in middle age.

In Shteyngart’s case, the hobby took the form of a fascination with fine watches, to the point where he was spending thousands of dollars on his obsession every year. This isn’t a confession designed to elicit much sympathy from others—especially when he observes that spending $4,137.25 on a watch means throwing away “roughly 4.3 writing days”—but I’d like to believe that he chose a deliberately provocative symbol of wasted time. Most novelists have day jobs, with all their writing squeezed into the few spare moments that remain, so to say that writers have hours of idleness at their disposal, complete with that casual “of course,” implies an unthinking acceptance of a privilege that only a handful of authors ever attain. Shteyngart, I think, is smarter than this, and he may simply be using the luxury watch as an emblem of how precious each minute can be for writers for whom time itself hasn’t become devalued.

But let’s assume that you’re lucky enough to write for a living, and that your familial or social obligations are restricted enough to leave you with over half the day to spend as you see fit. What can you do with all those leisure hours? Alcoholism, as Shteyngart notes, is an attractive possibility, but perhaps you want to invest your time in an activity that enhances your professional life. Georg von Békésy, the Hungarian biophysicist, thought along similar lines, as his biographer Floyd Ratliff relates:

His first idea about how to excel as a scientist was simply to work hard and long hours, but he realized that his colleagues were working just as hard and just as long. So he decided instead to follow the old rule: sleep eight hours, work eight hours, and rest eight hours. But Békésy put a “Hungarian twist” on this, too. There are many ways to rest, and he reasoned that perhaps he could work in some way that would improve his judgment, and thus improve his work. The study of art, in which he already had a strong interest, seemed to offer this possibility…By turning his attention daily from science to art, Békésy refreshed his mind and sharpened his faculties.

This determination to turn even one’s free time into a form of self-improvement seems almost inhuman. (His “old rule” reminds me of the similar advice that Ursula K. LeGuin offers in The Left Hand of Darkness: “When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”) But I think that Békésy was also onto something when he sought out a hobby that provided a contrast to what he was doing for a living. A change, as the saying goes, is as good as a rest.

In fact, you could say that there are two types of hobbies, although they aren’t mutually exclusive. There are hobbies that are orthogonal to the rest of our lives, activating parts of the mind or personality that otherwise go unused, or providing a soothing mechanical respite from the nervous act of brainwork—think of Churchill and his bricklaying. Alternatively, they can channel our professional urges into a contained, orderly form that provides a kind of release. Ayn Rand, of all people, wrote perceptively about stamp collecting:

Stamp collecting is a hobby for busy, purposeful, ambitious people…because, in pattern, it has the essential elements of a career, but transposed to a clearly delimited, intensely private world…In stamp collecting, one experiences the rare pleasure of independent action without irrelevant burdens or impositions.

In my case, this blog amounts to a sort of hobby, and I keep at it for both reasons. It’s a form of writing, so it provides me with an outlet for those energies, but it also allows me to think about subjects that aren’t directly connected to my work. The process is oddly refreshing—I often feel more awake and alert after I’ve spent an hour writing a post, as if I’ve been practicing my scales on the piano—and it saves an hour from being wasted in unaccountable ways. This may be why many people are drawn to hobbies that leave you with a visible result in the end, whether it’s a blog post, a stamp collection, or a brick wall.

But there’s also something to be said for doing nothing. If you’ve devoted four hours—or whatever amount seems reasonable—to work that you love, you’ve earned the right to spend your remaining time however you like. As Sir Walter Scott wrote in a letter to a friend:

And long ere dinner time, I have
Full eight close pages wrote;
What, duty, has thou now to crave?
Well done, Sir Walter Scott!

At the end of the day, I often feel like watching television, and the show I pick serves as an index to how tired I am. If I’m relatively energized, I can sit through a prestige drama; if I’m more drained, I’ll suggest a show along the lines of Riverdale; and if I can barely see straight, I’ll put on a special feature from my Lord of the Rings box set, which is my equivalent of comfort food. And you can see this impulse in far more illustrious careers. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who thought harder than anyone else of his century, liked to relax by watching cowboy movies. The degree to which he felt obliged to unplug is a measure of how much he drove himself, and in the absence of other vices, this was as good a way of decompressing as any. It prompted Nicholson Baker to write: “[Wittgenstein] would go every afternoon to watch gunfights and arrows through the chest for hours at a time. Can you take seriously a person’s theory of language when you know that he was delighted by the woodenness and tedium of cowboy movies?” To which I can only respond: “Absolutely.”

In defense of plot

Earlier this week, critic John Lucas of the Guardian wrote an article alarmingly headlined “Has plot driven out other kinds of story?” He points to what he calls the resurgence of plot in literary fiction—giving Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad Love Story [sic] as an example, although he gets the title wrong—and wonders if contemporary fiction, influenced by film, has privileged plot above all other elements. (This seems manifestly untrue, at least on the literary side, but we’ll ignore that for now.) He wonders if Kafka would be published today, conveniently overlooking the fact that most of Kafka’s work wasn’t published at all until after his death. He makes the common but unsubstantiated claim that plotless or unresolved fiction is truer to life than its plotted equivalent, and gently slaps the wrist of novels in which, heaven forbid, “every scene advances the action.” In his conclusion, not surprisingly, he hedges a bit:

Plot, as one of many literary strategies, is fantastic: employed carefully it can lend extraordinary emotional resonance to a text. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is not the only pleasure to be derived from great literature.

Lucas’s article isn’t a bad one, but I disagree with almost everything it says. Take the assertion in the second sentence quoted above. I don’t think that anyone, anywhere, has ever claimed that plot is the only pleasure to be derived from great literature. If anything, the opposite is true: people tend to underrate the importance of plot in our greatest writers. There’s a common assumption that Shakespeare, for instance, didn’t care about plot, or wasn’t especially good at it, because he took most of his stories from conventional sources. The fact is, though, he was great at plot, and clearly relished it. The sources of Hamlet or Lear contain only the barest outlines of the story, which Shakespeare ingeniously enriches with incident, character, and structure. His plays have the busiest plots in all of literature, and they’re far more intricate than merely commercial considerations would dictate, which implies that he enjoyed plot for its own sake.

I’ve talked about the merits of plot in a previous post, so I won’t repeat all of my points here. To me, though, plot is a joy, both in my own writing and in the work of others. Plot is both a heightening of reality and a reflection of it: life is full of plots and stories, and the construction of a plot that feels true to life and satisfying as art is one of the most extended challenges a writer can face. Removing the plot, with its necessary pattern of constraints, leaves the author free to indulge all of his worst impulses, a freedom that few writers have the discipline to survive. Indeed, I’d argue that the greatest thing about plot is its impersonality, even its coldness. In On Directing Film, David Mamet reminds us that a story is moving to the extent that the writer can leave things out, especially what is deeply felt and meaningful. And in the honest construction of a logical, surprising, inevitable plot, there’s very little room for affectation or self-indulgence.

In the end, plot isn’t the enemy; bad plots are—just as we need to guard against bad style, characterization, and theme. No element of fiction is inherently more worthwhile than any other, and attempts to privilege one above all others generally lead to what John Gardner calls frigidity, an elevation of one’s own personality over the demands of the story. Conversely, when all the elements work together, the effect can be overwhelming. A novel like J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, which the Guardian‘s sister paper recently named the best British, Irish, or Commonwealth novel of the past twenty-five years, is as beautifully plotted as they come, a work in which the structure of the story is inseparable from its deeper themes. For most of us, then, plot is the necessary matrix in which a novel can grow in ways that are true to the fictional dream, not to our own preoccupations. Plot, at its best, is a cure for vanity.