The sin of sitzfleisch

Yesterday, I was reading the new profile of Mark Zuckerberg by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker when I came across one of my favorite words. It appears in a section about Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, who describes her husband’s reaction to the recent controversies that have swirled around Facebook:

When I asked Chan about how Zuckerberg had responded at home to the criticism of the past two years, she talked to me about Sitzfleisch, the German term for sitting and working for long periods of time. “He’d actually sit so long that he froze up his muscles and injured his hip,” she said.

Until now, the term sitzfleisch, or literally “buttocks,” was perhaps most widely known in chess, in which it evokes the kind of stoic, patient endurance capable of winning games by making one plodding move after another, but you sometimes see it in other contexts as well. Just two weeks ago, Paul Joyce, a lecturer in German at Portsmouth University, was quoted in an article by the BBC: “It’s got a positive sense, [it] positively connotes a sense of endurance, reliability, not just flitting from one place to another, but it is also starting to be questioned as to whether it matches the experience of the modern world.” Which makes it all the more striking to hear it applied to Zuckerberg, whose life’s work has been the systematic construction of an online culture that makes such virtues seem obsolete.

The concept of sitzfleisch is popular among writers—Elizabeth Gilbert has a nice blog post on the subject—but it also has its detractors. A few months ago, I posted a quote from Twilight of the Idols in which Friedrich Nietzsche comes out strongly against the idea. Here’s the full passage, which appears in a section of short maxims and aphorisms:

On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis (G. Flaubert). Now I’ve got you, you nihilist! Sitting still [sitzfleisch] is precisely the sin against the holy ghost. Only thoughts which come from walking have any value.

The line attributed to Flaubert, which can be translated as “One can think and write only when sitting down,” appears to come from a biographical sketch by Guy de Maupassant. When you read it in context, you can see why it irritated Nietzsche:

From his early infancy, the two distinctive traits of [Flaubert’s] nature were great ingenuousness and a dislike of physical action. All his life he remained ingenuous and sedentary. He could not see any one walking or moving about near him without becoming exasperated; and he would declare in his sharp voice, sonorous and always a little theatrical, that motion was not philosophical. “One can think and write only when seated,” he would say.

On some level, Nietzsche’s attack on sitzfleisch feels like a reaction against his own inescapable habits—he can hardly have written any of his books without the ability to sit in solitude for long periods of time. I’ve noted elsewhere that the creative life has to be conducted both while seated and while engaging in other activities, and that your course of action at any given moment can be guided by whether or not you happen to be sitting down. And it can be hard to strike the right balance. We have to spend time at a desk in order to write, but we often think better by walking, going outside, and pointedly not checking Facebook. In the recent book Nietzsche and Montaigne, the scholar Robert Miner writes:

Both Montaigne and Nietzsche strongly favor mobility over sedentariness. Montaigne is a “sworn enemy” of “assiduity (assiduité)” who goes “mostly on horseback, where my thoughts range most widely.” Nietzsche too finds that “assiduity (Sitzfleisch) is the sin against the Holy Spirit” but favors walking rather than riding. As Dahlkvist observes, Nietzsche may have been inspired by Beethoven’s habit of walking while composing, which he knew about from his reading of Henri Joly’s Psychologie des grand hommes.

That’s possible, but it also reflects the personal experience of any writer, who is often painfully aware of the contradiction of trying to say something about life while spending most of one’s time alone.

And Nietzsche’s choice of words is also revealing. In describing sitzfleisch as a sin against the Holy Ghost, he might have just been looking for a colorful phrase, or making a pun on a “sin of the flesh,” but I suspect that it went deeper. In Catholic dogma, a sin against the Holy Ghost is specifically one of “certain malice,” in which the sinner acts on purpose, repeatedly, and in full knowledge of his or her crime. Nietzsche, who was familiar with Thomas Aquinas, might have been thinking of what the Summa Theologica has to say on the subject:

Augustine, however…says that blasphemy or the sin against the Holy Ghost, is final impenitence when, namely, a man perseveres in mortal sin until death, and that it is not confined to utterance by word of mouth, but extends to words in thought and deed, not to one word only, but to many…Hence they say that when a man sins through weakness, it is a sin “against the Father”; that when he sins through ignorance, it is a sin “against the Son”; and that when he sins through certain malice, i.e. through the very choosing of evil…it is a sin “against the Holy Ghost.”

Sitzfleisch, in short, is the sin of those who should know better. It’s the special province of philosophers, who know exactly how badly they fall short of ordinary human standards, but who have no choice if they intend to publish “not one word only, but many.” Solitary work is unhealthy, even inhuman, but it can hardly be avoided if you want to write Twilight of the Idols. As Nietzsche notes elsewhere in the same book: “To live alone you must be an animal or a god—says Aristotle. He left out the third case: you must be both—a philosopher.”

A visit to the chainmaker

In the landmark study The Symbolist Movement in Literature by the critic Arthur Symons, there’s a short chapter titled “A Note on Zola’s Method.” Even if you’ve never gotten around to reading Émile Zola—and I confess that I haven’t—it’s an essay that every writer should take to heart. After describing the research that Zola devoted to his novel L’Assommoir, Symons launches a brutal attack on the value of this kind of work:

[Zola] observes with immense persistence, but his observation, after all, is only that of the man in the street; it is simply carried into detail, deliberately…And so much of it all is purely unnecessary, has no interest in itself and no connection with the story: the precise details of Lorilleux’s chainmaking, bristling with technical terms…Goujet’s forge, and the machinery in the shed next door; and just how you cut out zinc with a large pair of scissors.

We’ve all read stories in which the writer feels obliged to include every last bit of research, and Symons’s judgment of this impulse is deservedly harsh:

To find out in a slang dictionary that a filthy idea can be expressed by an ingeniously filthy phrase…is not a great feat, or, on purely artistic grounds, altogether desirable. To go to a chainmaker and learn the trade name of the various kinds of chain which he manufactures, and of the instruments with which he manufactures them, is not an elaborate process, or one which can be said to pay you for the little trouble which it no doubt takes. And it is not well to be too certain after all that Zola is always perfectly accurate in his use of all this manifold knowledge.

And the most punishing comparison is yet to come: “My main contention is that Zola’s general use of words is, to be quite frank, somewhat ineffectual. He tries to do what Flaubert did, without Flaubert’s tools, and without the craftsman’s hand at the back of the tools. His fingers are too thick; they leave a blurred line. If you want merely weight, a certain kind of force, you get it; but no more.” It’s the difference, Symons observes, between the tedious accumulation of detail, in hopes that its sheer weight will somehow make the scene real, and the one perfect image that will ignite a reader’s imagination:

[Zola] cannot leave well alone; he cannot omit; he will not take the most obvious fact for granted…He tells us particularly that a room is composed of four walls, that a table stands on its four legs. And he does not appear to see the difference between doing that and doing as Flaubert does, namely, selecting precisely the detail out of all others which renders or consorts with the scene in hand, and giving that detail with an ingenious exactness.

By way of illustration, Symons quotes the moment in Madame Bovary in which Charles turns away at the exact moment that his first wife dies, which, he notes, “indicates to us, at the very opening of the book, just the character of the man about whom we are to read so much.” And he finishes with a devastating remark that deserves to be ranked alongside Mark Twain’s classic demolition of James Fenimore Cooper: “Zola would have taken at least two pages to say that, and, after all, he would not have said it.”

Flaubert, of course, is usually seen as the one shining example of a writer whose love of research enhanced his artistry, rather than diminishing it. In his takedown of a very different book, Allan Folsom’s thriller The Day After Tomorrow, the critic Anthony Lane cites one typical sentence—“Two hundred European cities have bus links with Frankfurt”—and adds:

When Flaubert studied ancient Carthage for Salammbô, or the particulars of medieval falconry for “The Legend of St. Julien Hospitalier,” he was furnishing and feathering a world that had already taken shape within his mind; when Allan Folsom looks at bus timetables, his book just gets a little longer.

Even Flaubert’s apparent mistakes, on closer examination, turn out to be controlled by an almost inhuman attentiveness. In his novel Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes quotes a line from the literary critic Enid Starkie: “Flaubert does not build up his characters, as did Balzac, by objective, external description; in fact, so careless is he of their outward appearance that on one occasion he gives Emma brown eyes; on another deep black eyes; and on another blue eyes.” When the narrator, who shouldn’t be confused with Barnes himself, goes back to the text, he finds that Flaubert, in fact, describes Emma’s eyes with meticulous precision. In their first appearance, he writes: “In so far as she was beautiful, this beauty lay in her eyes: although they were brown, they would appear black because of her lashes.” A little later on: “They were black when she was in shadow and dark blue in full daylight.” And just after her seduction, as Emma looks in the mirror: “Her eyes had never been so large, so black, nor contained such depth.” Barnes’s narrator concludes: “It would be interesting to compare the time spent by Flaubert making sure that his heroine had the rare and difficult eyes of a tragic adulteress with the time spent by Dr. Starkie in carelessly selling him short.”

This level of diligent observation is a universe apart from the mechanical gathering of detail, and there’s no question that writers should aim for one, not the other. But to some extent, we all pay visits to the chainmaker—that is, we conduct research aimed at furnishing our stories with material that we can’t get from personal experience. Sometimes we even get this information from books. (Tolstoy seems to have derived all of the information about the Freemasons in War and Peace from his reading, which scandalizes some critics, as if they’ve caught him in an embarrassing breach of etiquette.) If an author’s personality is strong enough, it can transmute it into something more. John Updike turned this into a calling card, moving methodically through a series of adulterous white male protagonists who were distinguished mostly by their different jobs. In U and I, Nicholson Baker tries to call this a flaw: “He gives each of his male characters a profession, and then he has him think in metaphors drawn from that profession. That’s not right.” But after approvingly quoting one of the metaphors that emerge from the process, Baker changes his mind:

Without Updike’s determination to get some measure of control over his constant instinct to fling outward with a simile by filtering his correspondences through the characters’ offstage fictional professions, he would probably not have come up with this nice little thing, dropped as it is into the middle of a paragraph.

I like that phrase “measure of control,” which gets at the real point of research. It isn’t to pad out the story, but to channel it along lines that wouldn’t have occurred to the author otherwise. Research can turn into a set of chains in itself. But after all the work is done, the writer should be able to say, like Dylan Thomas in “Fern Hill”: “I sang in my chains like the sea.”

The moderate novelist

Note: I’m taking a few days off, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite posts from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a somewhat different form, on November 6, 2012.

I never wanted to be a moderate. Growing up, and especially in college, I believed in coming down strongly on one side or the other of any particular issue, and was drawn to the people around me who embraced similar extremes. I didn’t know much, but I knew that I wanted to be a writer, which to my eyes represented a clear choice between the compromises of an ordinary existence and a willingness to risk everything for the life of art. My favorite classical hero was the Achilles of the Iliad, who might waver or sulk into prolonged inaction, but always saw the world around him in stark terms, with cosmic emotions that refused to be bound by the standards of the society in which he lived. And although I hadn’t read On the Road, I suspect that I might have agreed with Kerouac’s initially inspiring and then increasingly annoying insistence that the only true people were the ones who burn “like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

No one has ever compared a moderate to a roman candle, fabulous or otherwise. Yet as time went on, my views began to change. In many ways, this was just part of the process of growing up, which tends to nudge most of us toward the center, on the way to the natural conservatism of old age. But it also had something to do with the realities of becoming a writer. Writing for a living, at least on a daily basis, is less about staking out a bold claim into the unknown than about coming to terms with many small compromises. It’s tactical, not strategic, and encourages a natural pragmatism, at least for those of us who want to write more than a couple of novels. You learn to deal with problems as they occur, and a solution that works in a particular situation may no longer make sense when it comes up again. Above all else, as a writer, you need to figure out a way of life that is mostly free of hard external dislocations, which are murder on any kind of artistic productivity. Hence my favorite writing quote of all time, from Flaubert: “Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.”

All these things tend to encourage a kind of reasonable moderation, at least on the outside—there’s a reason why most writers have boring biographies. And in my own case, it also shapes the way I see the rest of the world. There aren’t a lot of clear answers in ethics or politics, and as much as we’d all like to be consistent, dealing with reality, like writing fiction, is more likely to impose a series of increasingly messy workarounds. A novel forces you to deal with issues of character, behavior, and society in a laboratory setting, and even when you control the terms of the experiment, the answers that you get are rarely the ones you set out to find. In a defense of moderate thinking in the New York Times, David Brooks once wrote: “This idea—that you base your agenda on your specific situation—may seem obvious, but immoderate people often know what their solutions are before they define the problems.” And this describes bad fiction as well as bad politics.

As a result, my own politics are sort of a hodgepodge, and like my fiction, they’ve been deeply shaped by the particulars of my life story. I’m a multicultural agnostic who has spent much of his life under the spell of various dead white males. Not surprisingly, my strongest political conviction remains that of the power of free speech, but I’ve also got a weird survivalist streak that once left me more neutral on issues like gun control—although I’ve since changed my mind about this. I spent years working in finance, and I mostly believe in the positive power of capitalism and free markets, but I also think that it leads to conditions of inequality that the government needs to address, for the good of the system as a whole. And I could go on. But the bottom line is that I’ve found that a writer, and maybe a citizen, needs to be less like Achilles than Odysseus: adaptable, pragmatic, capable of changing his plans when necessary, but always with an eye to finding his way home, even if it takes far longer than he hoped.

Quote of the Day

Great art is scientific and impersonal. One should, by an effort of the spirit, transport oneself into the characters, not draw them to oneself. That, at any rate, is the method.

—Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to George Sand

The first Madame Bovary

The story or plot of a novel is of no interest to me. When I write a novel I have in mind rendering a color, a shade. For example, in my Carthaginian novel I want to do something purple. In Madame Bovary all I was after was to render a special tone, that color of the moldiness of a wood louse’s existence. The plot of the novel was so little a subject of concern to me that, a few days before beginning to write, I had still in mind a different character to the one I created. My first Madame Bovary was to have been set in the surroundings and painted in the tone I actually used, but she was to have been a chaste and devout old maid. And then I saw that this would be an impossible character.

—Gustave Flaubert, as quoted by the Goncourts

The moderate novelist

I never wanted to be a moderate. Growing up, and especially in college, I believed in coming down strongly on one side or the other of any particular issue, and was drawn to the people around me who embraced similar extremes. I didn’t know much, but I knew that I wanted to be a writer, which to my eyes represented a clear choice between the compromises of an ordinary existence and a willingness to risk everything for the life of art. My classical hero was the Achilles of the Iliad, who might waver or sulk into prolonged inaction, but always saw the world around him in stark terms, with cosmic emotions that refused to be bound by the standards of the society in which he lived. And although I hadn’t read On the Road, I suspect that I might have agreed with Kerouac’s initially inspiring and then increasingly annoying insistence that the only true people were the ones who burn “like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

No one has ever compared a moderate to a roman candle, fabulous or otherwise. Yet as time went on, my views began to change. In many ways, this was just part of the process of growing up, which tends to nudge most of us toward the center, on the way to the natural conservatism of old age. But it also had something to do with the realities of becoming a writer. Writing for a living, at least on a daily basis, is less about staking out a bold claim into the unknown than about coming to terms with many small compromises. It’s tactical, not strategic, and encourages a natural pragmatism, at least for those of us who want to write more than a couple of novels. You learn to deal with problems as they occur, and a solution that works in a particular situation may no longer make sense when it comes up again. Above all else, as a writer, you need to figure out a way of life that is mostly free of hard external dislocations, which are murder on any kind of artistic productivity. Hence my favorite writing quote of all time, from Flaubert: “Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.”

All these things tend to encourage a kind of reasonable moderation, at least on the outside—there’s a reason why most writers have boring biographies. And in my own case, it also shapes the way I see the rest of the world. There aren’t a lot of clear answers in ethics or politics, and as much as we’d like to be consistent, dealing with reality, like writing fiction, is more likely to impose a series of increasingly messy workarounds. A novel forces you to deal with issues of character, behavior, and society in a laboratory setting, and even when you control the terms of the experiment, the answers you get are rarely the ones you set out to find. In his recent defense of moderate thinking in the New York Times, David Brooks writes: “This idea—that you base your agenda on your specific situation—may seem obvious, but immoderate people often know what their solutions are before they define the problems.” And this describes bad fiction as well as bad politics.

As a result, my own politics are sort of a hodgepodge, and like my fiction, they’ve been deeply shaped by the particulars of my life story. I’m a multicultural agnostic who has spent much of his life under the spell of various dead white males. Not surprisingly, my strongest political conviction is that of the power of free speech, but I’ve also got a weird survivalist streak that leaves me more neutral on issues like gun control. I spent years working in finance, and believe in the positive power of capitalism and free markets, but that it also leads to conditions of inequality that the government needs to address, for the good of the system as a whole. And I could go on—although I’ve long since realized the futility of trying to impose these beliefs on anyone else. But the bottom line is that I’ve found that a writer, and maybe a citizen and politician, needs to be less like Achilles than Odysseus: adaptable, pragmatic, capable of changing his plans when necessary, but always with an eye to finding his way home.

“As Ethan spoke, Maddy studied him…”

(Note: This post is the twenty-third installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 22. You can read the earlier installments here.)

Character is a mystery. In case it isn’t abundantly clear by now, I’m a left-brained, systematic, architectural novelist who loves his outlines and plans, but even I’m frequently surprised by the ways in which my characters evolve—although it’s important to qualify this. When E.M. Forster said that the characters in his novels often behaved in unexpected ways, Nabokov scoffed, saying that his characters were galley slaves. Of the two, I’m probably closer to Nabokov than Forster, and indeed, on a line by line basis, my characters’ actions are laid out meticulously, moving from one clear objective to another. When I stand back, however, I’m often amazed by the patterns that have appeared on a larger scale, almost as an emergent property of the text. As I discussed in yesterday’s post, themes tend to inevitably appear over the course of several novels without the author being aware of it, and character, too, is something that can’t be entirely planned. And as much as I try to keep the individual building blocks of the plot under control, there’s often something inexplicable slouching to be born in the background.

While writing The Icon Thief and its sequels, I’ve been repeatedly taken off guard by how my characters have grown, often by finding a small hint dropped in one book and expanding it in the next. The most obvious example, and one that won’t be fully clear until City of Exiles comes out in December, is that of Rachel Wolfe. Wolfe began essentially as a character of convenience, simply because Alan Powell, one of my three major protagonists, needed someone to talk to. Given the nature of the plot I had in mind, I knew this character would be an FBI agent, and the idea of making her a woman came fairly late in the game. Even after I wrote the first draft, Wolfe remained a fairly colorless character, and I vividly remember trying to figure out ways to make her more distinctive. For a while, I toyed with the prospect of making her Indian, which would later manifest itself in an important character in the second book. When it occurred to me that, instead, she could be a Mormon, the idea was immediately appealing, and at first, I saw it as a convenient way to flesh out her role with a few small character details. What I never could have anticipated is that this version of Wolfe would seize my imagination to the point where, incredibly, she became the lead character in City of Exiles, a book in which her Mormonism is central to the story. It seems inevitable now. But that certainly wasn’t the case at the time.

Characters, in short, tend to emerge from a combination of factors: they’re shaped by the demands of the plot, by inspirations from real life and fiction, by my own inner life, and by what I can only call moments of serendipity. Nowhere is this more clear than in the characters of Maddy and Ethan. They’d been knocking around in my brain for a long time, ever since my freshman year in college, when I wrote a fragment of a screenplay that began as a character study of two of my close friends, then evolved into a ridiculously ambitious script that would engage the two greatest American movies ever shot in Technicolor: Vertigo and The Searchers. Very little of this project has survived in the present book, although the characters still retain the names of their inspirations—the roles played by Kim Novak and John Wayne in their respective films. Later, I thought about reusing these characters in a very different storyline, inspired by a tragic pair of suicides that took place in the New York art world around the time I was conceiving the novel. This was a much stronger influence on the first draft, and it was later minimized in the revision in ways I’ll explain at the proper point. But the central idea—of two smart, attractive people joined in a kind of folie à deux—remains central to The Icon Thief.

Little if any of this is obvious to the casual reader, but these tangled origins invisibly influenced the final versions of these characters, and contributed, at least in my eyes, to the richness of the resulting story. Chapter 22 is when Maddy and Ethan really interact for the first time, after crossing paths more briefly as rival analysts at the art fund, and at first glance, it’s a simple chapter, consisting entirely of them talking at the party and exchanging dueling interpretations of Duchamp’s life and work. But there’s a lot going on under the surface—their mutual attraction, their recognition of the qualities they share, and the sense that until now they’ve misjudged each other—and it’s a direct result of the path that these characters have followed in my head over the last decade. Reading the chapter now, I can see how they’ve evolved by a process of accretion, like a coral reef, with aspects of their personalities that I conceived ten years ago overlapping with elements that I added much later, inspired by relationships I’ve witnessed, authors I’ve read, and the changes that take place in any writer’s life over a long period of time. I care about them more than the clockwork plot around them may suggest, and I’ve been especially glad to revisit them in the novel I’m writing now. I wouldn’t go so far as to say, as Flaubert did of Madame Bovary, that Maddy Blume is me. But although I didn’t plan it this way, it can’t be an accident that their initials are the same…

My twenty favorite writing quotes

It’s hard to believe, but over the past two years, I’ve posted more than six hundred quotes of the day. At first, this was simply supposed to be a way for me to add some new content on a daily basis without going through the trouble of writing a full post, but it ultimately evolved into something rather different. I ran through the obvious quotations fairly quickly, and the hunt for new material has been one of the most rewarding aspects of writing this blog, forcing me to look further afield into disciplines like theater, songwriting, dance, and computer science. Since we’re rapidly approaching this blog’s second anniversary, I thought it might be useful, or at least amusing, to pick out twenty of my own favorites. Some are famous, others less so, but in one way or another they’ve been rattling around in my brain for a long time, and I hope they’ll strike up a spark or two in yours:

Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.

—Gustave Flaubert

An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.

—Edgar Degas

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

—Linus Pauling

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from such things.

—T.S. Eliot

Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.

—Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Luck is the residue of design.

—Branch Rickey

The first thing you do when you take a piece of paper is always put the date on it, the month, the day, and where it is. Because every idea that you put on paper is useful to you. By putting the date on it as a habit, when you look for what you wrote down in your notes, you will be desperate to know that it happened in April in 1972 and it was in Paris and already it begins to be useful. One of the most important tools that a filmmaker has are his/her notes.

—Francis Ford Coppola, in an interview with The 99 Percent

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

—Lionel Trilling

The worst error of the older Shakespeare criticism consisted in regarding all the poet’s means of expression as well-considered, carefully pondered, artistically conditioned solutions and, above all, in trying to explain all the qualities of his characters on the basis of inner psychological motives, whereas, in reality, they have remained very much as Shakespeare found them in his sources, or were chosen only because they represented the most simple, convenient, and quickest solution of a difficulty to which the dramatist did not find it worth his while to devote any further trouble.

—Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art

As a writer, I’ve tried to train myself to go one achievable step at a time: to say, for example, “Today I don’t have to be particularly inventive, all I have to be is careful, and make up an outline of the actual physical things the character does in Act One.” And then, the following day to say, “Today I don’t have to be careful. I already have this careful, literal outline, and I all have to do is be a little bit inventive,” et cetera, et cetera.

—David Mamet, Some Freaks

Great narrative is not the opposite of cheap narrative: it is soap opera plus.

—Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama

You must train day and night in order to make quick decisions.

—Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

—Kurt Vonnegut, to The Paris Review

The best question I ask myself is: What would a playwright do?

—Dennis Lehane, to The Writer Magazine

Mechanical excellence is the only vehicle of genius.

—William Blake

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

—Attributed to Leonard Bernstein

If you have taken the time to learn to write beautiful, rock-firm sentences, if you have mastered evocation of the vivid and continuous dream, if you are generous enough in your personal character to treat imaginary characters and readers fairly, if you have held onto your childhood virtues and have not settled for literary standards much lower than those of the fiction you admire, then the novel you write will eventually be, after the necessary labor of repeated revisions, a novel to be proud of, one that almost certainly someone, sooner or later, will be glad to publish.

—John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

—Stephen King, On Writing

You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the f—king game.

—Harlan Ellison

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator—though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.

—John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”

Quote of the Day

It takes more genius to say, in proper style, “close the door,” or “he wanted to sleep,” than to give all the literature courses in the world.

—Gustave Flaubert

Quote of the Day

What a bitch of a thing prose is!

—Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Colet

The pleasures and perils of research

When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

—Jonathan Franzen, to The Guardian

Recently, I’ve had research on the brain. Over the past month, which I’ve designated as a kind of free sandbox time for Midrash, I’ve read all or part of something like twenty books, along with many articles and old notes. On Sunday, I’m going on a very short trip to London, which means cramming a month’s worth of location research into less than a week. For the next few days, then, I’m going to be talking a bit about research—how a novelist does it, where it fits into the different stages of the writing process, and how to balance it with the other elements of storytelling. Today, though, I’ll be addressing a more general issue, which is whether deep research has any place in a novelist’s life at all.

As I see it, there are two main objections to research in fiction, only one of which can be easily dismissed. The first objection is that research is somehow alien to the true novelist’s art, either because fiction based on research is inherently less valuable than fiction drawn primarily from the author’s own experience, or because information itself is becoming increasingly worthless. The former argument is very old, but the latter has gained new resonance in the information age, as Franzen implies above. Information is everywhere. It’s a mouse click away. So it isn’t hard to conclude that the novelist’s traditional role as an investigator of reality is no longer relevant, or useful.

Franzen is right about one thing: voluminous research, in itself, is no longer enough to make a novel. But was it ever? The role of the novelist has never been simply to acquire facts and details: it’s to arrange those details into a previously unsuspected artistic pattern. If anything, this role is even more valuable these days, when our diet of information tends to consist of specific units of disposable data. The art of the novelist is to uncover order in apparent chaos, even if the ultimate goal is to undermine it. With so many facts at our disposal, but so little knowledge, we need that ordering function more than ever—especially because a novelist is one of the few remaining artists with no choice but to haunt libraries and read the books that nobody else reads.

As for whether research has a place in serious fiction, it’s only necessary to point out that research has served as an indispensable foundation of many great novels—including Franzen’s. Flaubert, the quintessential novelist, deeply researched all of his books. So did Tolstoy. More recently, works as distinct as Atonement and Gravity’s Rainbow have been masterpieces of research and structured imagination. It’s still true that, as Willa Cather said, the basic emotional material of a novelist is acquired by the age of fifteen. But if the novelist is looking for meaning outside his or her own range of experience—to explain “how the world works,” as Zadie Smith puts it—research is the necessary first step. The ordering, the pattern-making, will come later, but not without the raw material that creative research provides.

Which brings us to the second, more relevant objection to research, which is that it can be an excuse to put off the real work of writing. Research is a seductive pastime in itself, and because there’s always another book to read or location to visit, it can be all too easy for a writer to never actually begin the novel. Unlike the previous objection, this danger is very real. Later this week, I’ll be talking more about how to keep research in line with the rest of the writing process. For now, though, I’ll say this: research is not primarily about factual accuracy. It’s about acquiring material for dreams. Ultimately, it’s about freeing your mind to play the most serious game in the world. It’s true, from a factual perspective, that you can never have enough information. But before long, perhaps before you realize it, you’ll have more than enough material to play the game.

Quote of the Day

Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.

—Gustave Flaubert