Writers on Writing #82: Matthew Fogarty
On Starting
Every story is an impossibility and every time I start a new one there's a long moment when I believe in that impossibility. To write a story is to make something from nothing, to not only fill a glass with water but to manifest out of thin air the glass itself and the water and the table on which the water glass will rest and the walls of the room and the windows and the door to the hallway to the stairs leading to the foyer and the door to the driveway to the street to the city and the world in which the story lives. This is how starting a novel has been described to me -- like building a house from the inside out and plotting that house in a world with all the complexity and nuance of the real world.
But this world of the novel is not a real world or at least it's not our world subject to the rules we let determine the courses of our lives. It's a world in which anything can exist, anything can happen. A world in which there doesn't have to be any right or wrong, in which there needn't be any rules, in which anything is possible: real genuine human interaction, realization epiphany satori, unimaginable magic, the lives of beasts and beauties, the fantastical, satisfying resolution and lasting life change, and even the creation of something from nothing. In this way, every story is possibility and it's only when I believe again in this possibility that I can start a story.
In this case, the story is a novel and at the moment, after two-plus years of sketching, drafting, rearranging, reconceiving, reimagining, drafting, thinking, planning, I've started to move between impossibility and possibility. Only now is the novel beginning to seem possible. The more I convince myself that it doesn't have to be anything, the more I can see all the everything it could be.
***
Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer: "{T}he book has begun to grow inside me. I am carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the streets big with child and the cops escort me across the street. Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody pushes me rudely any more. I am pregnant. I waddle awkwardly, my big stomach pressed against the weight of the world."
***
This story, this novel, feels new in the way a novel should. But there's also something elemental and nostalgic about it, like I've had this story with me for all thirty-five of my years alive. I don't know when I first realized it, but I need to write this story. Not "want to," not "would like to," not "should." NEED. In the same way I need water and oxygen. To survive.
It is a part of me, this unwritten book, a malformed limb that I must make right, a limb no less important than an arm, an organ no less important than my heart.
***
I wasn't always convinced that I wanted to be a writer but I've always written. I'm originally from the Detroit suburbs, where hard work is its own reward and fiction isn't a serious pursuit. My mom taught elementary school and my dad worked for General Motors and they both wanted me to grow up to be whatever I wanted. They thought maybe I might be a chef, but instead I steered myself toward politics and law. At Michigan, I studied international relations and then spent a year as a legal assistant, more interested in understanding the clients and their businesses than copying and filing, and another year working for the government. Then there was law school and five too-fast years as an international lawyer. During all of this, nights and weekends between seventy-hour workweeks, I was writing -- after hours and on the side and not (I realize now) very seriously, but still: I was writing. I don't know if it was time I lacked or courage. Whatever it was, the passion for writing survived and two years ago I quit my job as a DC lawyer to attend the MFA program I'll be finishing in less than a year. I'd finally persuaded myself that it was more important to risk failing at doing what I at last realized I loved than to continue to hate myself for the life I wasn't living. And now the fear is that I've only just begun, that I haven't even started writing the novel, the story, that I need to write. The fear is that these last two years have been prefatory to nothing, that soon I'll go back to the real world and look back on this time as a vacation. The fear is that starting the novel is the first step toward failing to write the book I need to write and that, in failing, I'll look more fondly than I should on those soulless years of lawyering.
***
There's something about starting a story that feels vaguely destructive. Like there's this entire everything of possibility that's erased as the novel is written, one choice at a time. Like the writing of the novel progresses from impossibility to possibility to certainty, at each step pulling words, ideas, characters, events, story out of the impossible and into the possible and then, when it comes time to affix words to page, pulling them from the possible and into the certain, all the while killing off all else that might have been possible, that might have been certain had I chosen differently.
***
The length of a novel feels daunting.
When I read, I love to get plunged into a scene, to experience the entire everything of it, and then pulled out just as quickly not knowing what happened but nonetheless soaked in the story's world. The literary equivalent of being held underwater for a moment and watching an entire life flash before my eyes and knowing when I come up that nothing will be the same again, even if I'm not sure how.
This is why I write short things, why I write mostly flash fiction, very short stories that pull and trap and inhale and evoke and linger. It's what I love about reading great things and it's the challenge of writing a novel: to elicit this polyglot feeling -- of immediacy, of provocation, of intensity, of irrevocability, of discovery, of inevitability, of astonishment, of wonder -- in a long work as effectively as in a very short work.
***
I have a hard time outlining stories before I begin. I know there would be some comfort, some safety in having an outline, a guide. But it doesn't work for me. Where for some writers, writing is speaking, communicating, for me, writing is exploring and discovering. I write because it's the only way I've ever had any success in figuring out myself or the world around me. To start with an outline would short-circuit this process of discovery, like Magellan charting his course around the world before leaving shore and without knowing the challenges or joys each wave may bring.
They say every novel has its own rules and form but it's only by writing, by starting, that you discover them.
***
Things few authors talk about: the grueling, at times torturous physical act of writing. Try sitting upright in the same spot for more than an hour.
Other things few authors talk about: the grueling, at times torturous mental act of writing. Try focusing on one thing -- one thought, one sentence, one word -- for more than an hour.
A good writing day is a sore back and a headache and a few words on paper that I won't hate tomorrow.
***
I love writing. I don't think I say this enough. I love writing. I love it.
***
Have you ever seen The Hold Steady live? I have. It was a street festival and I was with my partner. She and I were a few weeks into the same MFA program and had just started dating after a quick, unexpected coming together. It was still new -- that special kind of exciting electric that made it hard to hide our new relationship from others in our cohort -- and we stood near the back of the crowd at a safe but difficult-to-maintain distance from each other. The band came on stage, its infectious energy immediate in effect. The band's lead singer, Craig Finn, hopped around the stage, swam through the air, cradled the microphone, reached for the crowd. To be sure, some of the moves were choreographed, thought out in advance or just developed into habit or muscle memory over the I don't know how many shows in their decade of existence. And yet there was something new, something started in the moment, about every motion. He danced with the eyes and smile of a kid taking a present from under the tree, as though this were the first and only show he'd ever played.
There are two joys I remember from that night: the joy of this new woman in my life, these ecstatic moments of near-touching, these momentary reliefs of touching, this feeling of resistance when our hands would move too far from each other, that snapped us back toward each other like a rubber band; and the joy of Craig Finn, a man so in love with this job of his, that this is what he does for a living, this thing he inspires in others, that he discovers in others, that every night is a new gift, a new ecstasy.
Whenever it seems too hard to begin, whenever the story feels too big, too impossible to sit down and write, I think about Craig Finn and his joy. And in the year and a half since that concert, my partner and I have discovered so many other types of joy, so many different versions of it, and so many other types of resistance, too, so many other things that hold us together. It's easy to think we've become so familiar with one another that there's nothing of that original spark left, that we'll never experience it again. And then she walks into the room or she turns a certain way in a certain light.
There is the joy of life in these stories, there is joy in creation.
Whenever I lack inspiration, feel like there's no way I can write or no sense in trying, in even starting, I listen to The Hold Steady or I look into the eyes of my partner.
***
Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer: "A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails … {A}nything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness."
***
It's hard to explain without sounding pretentious and/or ridiculous. But I rarely start with a story in mind. More often, I start with an idea or a moment or a line or a premise or a character or whatever provides the seed for the story, whatever photosynthesis. Some people plot everything out in advance. I don't. I can't. I'm not that smart. Stories exist in a world, characters are real people in that world with real agency in that world. There's no way I can know what a person would do until I get to it. Create a character that's a real person, put him/her/it in a situation, and let him/her/it surprise. If I'm not surprised by anything in the story when I'm writing it, there's no chance the reader will be surprised and surprise is the thing. Surprise means interest and emotional investment which equals a story that exists in more than just the pages or plot that I've written, that resonates beyond the page.
***
Sometimes it feels like there's nothing inside. Other times it feels like there's everything inside. I think we all feel this way. We all feel like nothing and everything.
And the everything builds up and there's no way to get it out and we're just stuck with all this matter inside us. You could make a whole other being out of it; or armies: you could make armies out of it, kings even. It sits there inside the walls of the body, gloms onto the walls of the body. I can't cope with it, this hellstorm of who-knows-what that just sits there like bile except that it's happy, if conflicted, bile -- it's praise the lord we're "young and alive and a king all at the same time" bile and "how tragic that no one will know" bile.
To get some cognition of the hellstorm, the ARRGHGWHARRSH, inside, to give words to it, to find some form that'll handle it, to arrange the words the right way, to cut out some part of my soul and liver it on the page, with the hope that it might do something for someone else but in any event to get rid of it, to expel this matter that corrodes the lining of my insides.
I write because maybe in the process of writing, trying to figure everything out and sharing it, together we can do something real special: we can capture a few moments of the excruciating ecstatic of being alive.
At the start of things, before I've written anything, this task seems impossible.
***
On need:
There are things about myself I don't understand. Most specifically, this nostalgia I have for a time that didn't exist. I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. The first hint for me of something awry was in John Hughes movies. These idyllic burbs with the two-car garages and the perfectly potted plants. Parents with decent jobs. But Hughes questioned it, told us to question it. Home Alone: This life they lead, they're too busy even to notice us, to see us or help us develop agency, independence of spirit. Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Their rules are arbitrary and keep us from growing through real life experiences. The Breakfast Club: We've been raised to try to fit in and, in the process, to develop high walls to keep in whatever might differentiate us.
Life in the suburbs was plain and unremarkable except when it wasn't. I don't know what it means but one morning when I was 9, our neighbor down the street, an out-of-work stockbroker, came out of his house in a mask and shot his wife to death as she backed their car out of the driveway.
***
We had a master class last year with Marilynne Robinson, author of such novels I've loved as Housekeeping. I asked how she starts, how she decides she's ready to write a novel. She responded that it's all about the voice, that there's a voice that one day, suddenly, comes alive inside her and she notices it and she hears it and she spends some time listening to it and when that voice has a certain heft -- a heft that might carry a novel -- she lets it take over, lets it flow through her onto the page.
I like Jonathan Lethem's idea better: that we wade into some unknown territory, unknowing, but with faith in what we do and what comes next because every once in a while like lightning striking the horizon, the land before us lights up and we can see the whole of it and we hold onto that image of the whole when it's dark. We turn it over in our imagination, map it best we can. And we write toward this unknown we can only occasionally see.
***
The older I get, the more unlikely it feels that I'll ever write anything of value or importance, the more I feel like I've closed up, that everything ordered and civil has been too ingrained for me to even think of anything so anarchic as a novel, much less an important novel.
This is when my partner reminds me that Henry Miller started writing Tropic of Cancer when he was thirty-nine, that I've got at least four years before I even need to start writing my masterpiece.
Still, it never feels like enough time. Like I don't have time to sleep.
***
Annie Dillard in Holy the Firm: "We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of light uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home. There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times."
***
…how to start and where, how to love and when...
***
Here's what I think:
I think there's no right time to start, no anything that you need to have figured out, that the right time is now, that a novel isn't written in a day or in a draft but in a while and in a life and the only way to overcome impossibility is to prove the possible and in this case, the possible is only possible by writing. It may not be perfect in the beginning and it may not be perfect in the end but we're not perfect ourselves -- the condition of all mankind is imperfection and impossibility. But imperfection and impossibility can be cured by dedication and possibility and heart and joy. All we have are our words and our will and there's no way to write the world without either, no way a novel is possible without both. So I might as well start now.
Born and raised in the square-mile suburbs of Detroit, Matthew Fogarty currently lives and writes in Columbia, where he is editor of Yemassee. He also edits Cartagena, a literary journal. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, Fourteen Hills, Smokelong Quarterly, and Midwestern Gothic. Look for a few of his flash stories in the upcoming print issue of Passages North. He can be found at matthewfogarty.com or on Twitter at @thatmattfogarty.
