Novels Are Not Non-Linear Enough

(This rumination was inspired by an essay by Jim Murdoch on how long it should take to write a novel.)

I love reading novels, although I think the ideal length for a novel is the novella, and most of what we get these days is pretty bloated. I read and re-read certain authors on a regular basis, and many of these are authors of novels. I'm pretty much always reading at least one or two novels at any given time. I read faster than most people, I have discovered, so I can read a lot more than many people do. I read broadly, with no loyalty to any genre of novel-length fiction except that which excites, illuminates, stimulates, and surprises.

I'm drawn to Virginia Woolf's least "narrative" novels, such as "The Waves," but also to "To the Lighthouse," one of the greatest novels ever written about the tension between the artist's temperament and the non-artist's inability to comprehend that temperament. I've read all of James Joyce, and most of Samuel Beckett. I've read all of E.M. Forster multiple times. I watch Doctor Who. I read theoretical physics, for fun, and because I'm interested in it and can understand the concepts if not all of the math. Richard Feynman is not over my head, but that's mostly because he was such a gifted teacher and thinker. I've read many of Michael Moorcock's books, including his literary criticism essays. I've read pretty much all of Nikos Kazantzakis, fiction and non-fiction alike, drawn to it because of his courageous encounters with the unknown mysteries that some call mysticism and others call existentialism. I read Peter Matthiessen's novels as well as his creative nonfiction, since he is a master of both. I read all of Jim Harrison's books, finding a voice therein that I feel kinship to out of similar experience and background, who is also different enough that I am stimulated with new ideas and directions of thought.

I read a lot of novels. Yet I don't read many bestsellers, as I find them very predictable. I don't many thrillers, which is what we call adrenaline-inducing suspense fiction written in the very plain "no-style style" of naturalistic narrative nowadays. And I don't read much "literary fiction," the genre of "naturalistic" fiction set in the present day, usually set in The Big City, that defines itself as being the only genre of narrative fiction that is not in fact a "genre" (as opposed to those categories booksellers use to help you find the books easier on their shelves: mystery; science fiction; self-help; etc.). In most thrillers and many mystery novels I usually figure out Whodunit well before it's revealed to the reader; the only time I don't know in advance of the reveal is when the perpetrator is deliberately concealed behind a screen of distractions, as I find most Agatha Christie type of mystery novels to do. I find John D. McDonald's and Raymond Chandler's mystery novels to be far more compelling, because they are character-driven rather than puzzle-driven, wherein sometimes their plots aren't very linear, their heroes and villains neither one-dimensional nor easily predictable. In most mainstream literary fiction, I am drawn to the outliers (Matthiessen, Kazantzakis, etc.) almost because they are considered outliers, a little bit odd, not quite in the mainstream. I was originally drawn to the Beats for the combined reasons that they were literary outlaws, and because several of them were openly practicing homosexuals. We find our (literary) role models where we can.

I do like to read stylistically experimental fiction (William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Richard Brautigan, etc.), and metafiction (Jorge Luis Borges, etc.), but not because it's obscure and difficult—indeed, if I find it to be obscure mostly for the sake of being obscure, a kind of stylistc mannerism rather than form dictated by content, I throw it away—but because experimental fiction uses language poetically, in ways that shapeshift your mind into different ways of perceiving and experiencing reality. (Which is something that science fiction written from an alien species' viewpoint does too, at its best.) I like to experience thinking from inside the alien mind, even if that alien is a human from a different culture, or from a radically different psychology. I like to be surprised, and to experience new ways of thinking, of being.

So I read a lot of speculative fiction—which is usually called science fiction, or fantasy—because it puts your inside a completely different way of thinking about life better than any other literary genre. Speculative fiction is by definition a literature of ideas. Speculative fiction at its best gets my emotions engaged, because it is still telling a human story, even those told at a distance of centuries in the future, which actually is no more alien a territory than the profoundly human stories given us by Shakespeare centuries in the past. I've heard some critics argue convincingly that some of Shakespeare actually could be called science fiction, for the same reasons that Mary Shellley's "Frankenstein" is considered by many to be the first modern science fiction novel: fabulist tales told of incredible and amazing adventures in places not quite real, either in time or space, in which human beings act out the archetypes of story which such gripping writing that we are captivated and find ourselves mirrored in those distant and strange lives. Speculative fiction engages my intellect and sense of wonder, as well, because it is the literature of ideas. Sometimes it can be literally "wow!" mind-blowing, and you finish a novel that makes you think about things in ways you never had before. It can literally "change your mind," if you're receptive and open to that.

I read a lot of "regional" fiction, stories in specific times and places, stories written by writers strongly associated with particular places on the North American continent that happen to be neither New York City nor Los Angeles, the self-involved centrifugal linear accelerators of anointed Literary Establishment mainstream linear narrative novel writing. I like to read stories in places I know well, places I have lived in, places I love; places like San Francisco (which is always a character in any movie filmed there), Wyoming, New Mexico, Chicago, Ann Arbor, the Great Lakes region including Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin. Fiction set in places where you nod your head in recognition of both name-checked street names and locations, and the habits and customs of the local inhabitants. Of course, by this criterion New York City fiction is very much a regional fiction sub-genre (albeit often a very provincial one), and so is fiction set in Los Angeles. One of the things that draws me to "regional fiction" is, again, that it is marginal, not in the mainstream of the East Coast Literary Establishment. I have lived a significant portion of my life in the "flyover zone" between New York and Los Angeles, and I find that writers living and writing from within the heartlands of the continent often have much more to say to me than do writers of the New England or Southern California literary circles.

I also read a lot of shorter fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. I probably read (and write) more essay and poetry than anything else.

So I read a lot of novels.

But of all literary forms, the one I am least, LEAST interested in writing is a novel.

Some of that is because I'm not patient enough to want to write something that might years to complete. It's not that I don't work at making art, and work hard at it, and give my complete concentration and dedication to everything I write. It's that I like seeing a project completed, and another one begun. As a writer, the creative process is what engages me, more than does the artistic product.

And there is also the issue of my fundamental mindset: I simply don't think in terms of narrative. I am science-trained and can think very logically and sequentially, but perhaps that's the problem: a carefully constructed linear plot doesn't engage me very deeply because it's too easy to skip ahead logically and figure it out in advance. I don't even think in terms of linear time (between theoretical physics, a lot of reading in mysticism, and Doctor Who, my experience of time hasn't been linear in a very long time), so making a story conform to the norms of a linear narrative simply does not work for me. I liked how Richard Brautigan used to break up narrative into small vignettes, not always strung together in linear sequence. I like Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness in books such as "Big Sur" and "The Dharma Bums," which is more like Virginia Woolf than anything on the New York Times bestseller lists. As a writer, I have no natural "feel" for plot, narrative, or even linear time.

I am not really a storyteller. Well, I am, because every teller of stories is a storyteller, but I'm not a "storyteller" in any conventional meaning of the term. Thomas Merton was a storyteller, so was Kazantzakis, but their stories were told in ways that no one invested in linear narrative fiction would ever really like. The kinds of stories I most like to tell, or to hear, loop around and around themselves, explore ideas from multiple directions, and step "outside" the linear narrative to look at it from a different angle. (Samuel R. Delany's "Empire Star" is a science fiction space opera that does this unlike almost any other, expanding the narrative viewpoint from straightforward linear narration to multiply-layered causal time-loops that drive the original story by making it happen after it had happened.) So when I act as a storyteller, I almost always get bad feedback from people who want easy, linear, narrative stories—I suspect because on one level they're comforting and affirming, a hedge against the chaos of life that gives comfort by giving chaos structure and order and narrative.

Yet Virginia Woolf said, and experience has brought me to emphatically agree: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." E.M. Forster in most of his fiction has some sense of unexplainable mystery, a break in the ordinary plot of everyday life, which often cannot be explained but which always has a profound effect on the people involved, from his "The Story of a Panic" culminating in "A Passage to India." Beckett, well, Beckett is actually very funny, people miss that about his writing; but it's gallows humor, hospital humor, the humor of those who have survived the unthinkable void at the center of destroyed lives and need to laugh because it's better than crying. Joyce experimented with stream of consciousness, but in a different direction than Woolf; some say he went too far into the terrain of the unreadable, and some have tried to come up with pat explanations for why he might ventured off the edge as they perceive it.

I am having some short stories published early nest year in a literary journal. But really they're prose-poems, and pretty nonlinear. That's how I think, that's how I write. Not in any normative traditional linear narrative style.

But I'm an artist. I'm heavily trained in science, and I know how to think like a scientist, and think logically and sequentially, but I am an artist.

Art is not engineering.

Engineering can be creative. My favorite uncle was an engineer, an inventor, a builder; I helped him build a deck on his house one summer, which he designed himself, and the deck is still there forty years later. He had a very creative attitude towards all aspects of life, which manifested as a problem-solving approach to many things, and which worked.

I see a problem when artists start to think that what they are doing is problem-solving first and foremost. (I see this a LOT among designers and graphic artists, who are also very creative people but whose work tends to consist of more problem-solving than inspiration.)

One of the reasons I don't read many mainstream literary fiction novels is that I find them depressingly predictable, especially the ones oriented more towards plot than character. I find many substitute style for actually having something worth saying. I've read Don DeLillo, I've read John Updike, Saul Bellow, and many other darlings of the East Coast (meaning New York) Literary Establishment.

So I'll probably never write a novel. It's just not a form that works for me as a writer.

Well, actually, I might. I have it in me to write a science fiction novel, maybe two. I've had the basic idea and plot in my head for years, and someday I might write it. I've started writing it two or three times over the years, only to leave it unfinished due to other things becoming more urgent and important.

Novels are generally not non-linear enough for me. The novelistic fiction that I am most drawn to breaks those "rules" of "naturalistic" narrative rather than affirms them. Like certain theoretical physicists and mystics, I view that entire form of linear progressive narrative to itself be a fiction. Or as Doctor Who once said: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but ACTUALLY from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey . . . stuff." Yeah. Exactly.

In the Bone

I was searching for more things to write about Halloween, for more bones from the boneyard, when I came across an old exercise and workshop.

Back a few years ago, when I was involved in poetry workshopping with others, I was asked to craft an exercise, present a writing prompt, however you want to put it. I wrote an introduction and essay on stream of consciousness writing in poetry, and then presented an exercise about one way to do it, and how to mine it for ideas.

One only has to murmur the phrase "stream of consciousness" and many poets look up in alarm. We have come to think of this style of writing as: diary fodder, illegible nonsense, meat for a poem but not yet itself a poem, awful drivel, teenage journal-rambling, and worse. But we perhaps miss the fact it can be done extremely well, if it's done with concentration and attention. More to the point, it's a valuable tool in any poet's briefcase: even if your poem only starts in that vivid stream, it's a fine place to fish. A poem can be made from the mush. The free flow of words doesn't have to edited till later. Revision as visioning. You can be a completely metrically-minded formalist poet and still mine poems from this exercise. You don't have to mine anything but the mood, maybe an image, you're not required to recycle any of the language. Maybe all that happens is that a door opens to possibility.

A lot of contemporary poetry is too intellectual, too planned, too verbal in origin (as opposed to imagistic, or somatic), too left-brain. The list goes on. With this workshop prompt, I was hoping to get some good responses, to shake some people out of their writing habits, and I did, if only temporarily. The poets who participated presented first their raw passages, then the poem they had extracted from the flow. It was fascinating to observe. A real lesson in how consciousness works, and how the editing mind pulls out of the random flow something that has a shape and form. I heard comments from participants along the lines that this had stretched them out of their usual ways of writing; I heard comments that this had produced unexpected results, atypical poems, different sorts of writing. The project was declared a success, and pretty much everybody went back to doing their writing the usually do. Habits weren't really changed. A door was briefly opened. People made their own choices as to whether to go through it.

But I realized for myself, those years ago, how important writing in the flow was for my own process. I already knew this, but this exercise helped crystallize my self-awareness. I articulated it clearly to myself as a method, perhaps for the first time.

(I later rewrote this workshop exercise as an essay, which can be read here. And the poem I myself contributed to the process, seen below, was published, as mentioned here.)

Here, in the theme of Halloween, Samhain, October light, the Day of the Dead, the boneyard piling up with fresh bones, is what I myself wrote for this workshop exercise. I leave it more or less unedited, to show how the exercise worked: first you write in the flow, not pausing to "fix" the language or make it pretty; then you pull a poem out of what you're written.

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stream-of-consciousness flow writing exercise:

Samhain

that time of year: the cold dripping rain outside tonight getting into everything bones heart lungs and cheer; taking the trash outside before bedtime, 2am, stopped raining, ground still wet; I'm the only one awake in the neighborhood; trees move in the wind, shipping streetlight shadows across grass and driveway and cold pooling water, gutter choked with leaves; smell of burning, somewhere distant; memory of candles being snuffed, whiff of matchblack and quenched wick, waxtouch and watery shiver; the walls getting thin: the walls between worlds; easier to hear those voices, inner and other, this time of year; walls between worlds thinning till All Hallow's, they break through, and all over Latin America children play with their dead ancestors in cemeteries decorated for afterlife birthdays; raucous and wild, the spinning fireworks, sparklers on a wheel;

coal black eyes in the trees; roosting wild turkeys beaks tucked underwing; sleep of prey and predator alike, the game resuming in cold dawn; roost high, roost lightly; drone of tires on the highway past the river, past the fields and woods; find in the centre something like a nutshell, cracked, opening, black light within; what the right hand says to what's left; palmlight glow both hands burning with ornage fire; every year, this time, scrying; i rememebr the boy that was, blood luck dripping from both hands, standing crucified before the iron doors of a schoolyard in the cold wind and rain; wanting to be loved, wanting to not go in, knowing what would happen: fright, what is unknown and different scares us; trying for years to fit in, be like everyone else, incapable of pulling it off, incapable of effective masks; crippled at last by self telling self to hide pretend to powerlessness; and the blue electric explodes shimmering pop of fire falling from the skypole onto the snow, hands punching through drywall and stem unbruised, unbloodied, capable beyond capability; I become the thing we fear the most; I become capability;

candles in a circle of silver; Buddhalight; litter of otters spilling across my grandma's secretary desk; leave pull and fall all around; orange leaves, gold yellow red green amber, all together, scatter under tree, stillfall leaffall notyetfall; all one tree, all reflections of that One Tree; what do you tell people who can't see the archetypes directly like you can; what do you tell as a lie to make them love you, to pretend to be less than you can see; parlor tricks and seances, masks to cover the truth of experience; when you open wide, things get in, not all of them friendly; shunt attention and pain to a dot four feet in front your eyes, pain fades, goes away, jawache subsides to root and readiness;

dark brown wood of memory and longing; masterful emulation of something real, without being anything more than hashmarks on blank white page; superstition of the printing press; turbulent anticipation of the doors between worlds opening, and the dead stepping out from between the trees, watching benignly and wanting to tell you their stories, all their stories told silent and austere and with mouths filled with bees and leafrustle and mold; the dead open their hands: their hands are filled with light; the dead move easily between trees, gathering dreams and memories like fuel for an invisible fire; signal fires on the hills; bonfires leapt by naked young men and women, sparks rising into the clouds that reflect fireglow from the high peaks; castoff and dionysiac, emblems of blinded third eye remnant pressure behind the forehead exploding out into the night, you see, you see, you cannot help but see;

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poem made from the writing exercise:

come see: how quietly they move through the stones.
parchment fingers rustling their leaf tambourines.
the dew is on the grass. their feet, in all their wanderings, do not touch.
they float above the earth, or dissolve near to it, into it.
their compass rose is of the greater earth: these leaves fall through them.

we rise up out of the very fields we tilled: these cemeteries, plowed anew.
every year, the miracle of wheat. sweep the garden for next year’s roses.
snow falls around us, whitens our scalps: no summer’s day outruns us.
shake the leaves off the headstone: a million butterflies take wing.
the ash tree whispers: home; we’ve come home.

Notes on Experimentation: Stream of Consciousness

Reading one of Dave Mehler's poems recently, I was reminded of the technique of stream of consciousness (SOC), and its place in experimental poetry. Here is an excerpt from the poem's opening, reprinted with permission:

Fueling at the Pilot on Steele St., Denver, CO

Remembrance sweet routines early morning routine I must have performed a thousand
rituals thousands of times fuel up at the Pilot truckstop

Hook up or hooked up drive the couple blocks from the terminal steering pulling swing
low swing wide sweet chariot into any open bay

Inserting the card magnetic strip up put on gloves stained soaked unscrew the cap lifting
the nozzle off and place into the tank

Squeeze the handle lock it up hear watch the fuel gush release the rubber strap securing
driver side of the hood walk around the front undo the strap on the passenger side

Lift the nozzle from the satellite pump unscrew the cap so dirty so covered with diesel
road grime oily dirt grasp the pump nozzle in the right gloved hand

Grey leather blackened shiny on fingers back of the glove canvas pin-striped white and
blue and thin red—smell of diesel raw fuel pouring in a rush and gush by gallons

Smell of twin-stacked exhaust filling lungs waking me the jolt up ritual two-thirty
Ogalala or Casper four am Ft. Morgan Sterling . . . .

Dave has presented this poem using a couple of different formal layouts: one of them as blocks of text, as above, which can be read as single long lines; the other broken into a more traditional enjambment. I far prefer the more SOC-like version, as it looks and feels more like actual stream of consciousness, a person having idle thoughts in a flowing internal monologue with interruption or pause. I feel this far more accurately represents actual mentation. I feel that breaking such a piece into enjambed lines not only breaks up the flow of SOC, but it also makes the poem more self-consciously poetic. I love the long-line single-breaths that this unpunctuated long-line form also implies: it leads me to want to perform the poem with a sense of continuous rhythmic rushing, with long breaths and long phrases, rising and falling. There is the sense, from that, of the endless journeys taken via truck, the long road stretching out before one, the hum of the tires on the tarmac: all evoked, implicitly, by the layout and rushing flow of the text. I feel this makes for a very successful poem.

Stream of consciousness is a writing technique that attempts to depict the psychology of mentation. many experiments have been made in the attempt, ranging from the continuous flow of surface thoughts written down by the writer, to very experimental texts using no-standard syntax, typography, and illustration. In many ways, it's an impossible task: writing anywhere near to the speed of thought, the speed at which the mind moves, gives us a majority of uninteresting, mundane thoughts. A true depiction of ordinary thought-consciousness would most likely be trivial and boring. There is an art to writing stream-of-consciousness. It looks artless and random, but in fact it takes work to get to that point. The artfulness comes in selecting what to include, and what to leave.

How does one depict stream of consciousness?

One famous example of SOC writing is the last chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, the Penelope chapter. This chapter depicts the inner monologue of Leopold Bloom's wife, Molly, who is of course Penelope to Bloom's Odysseus; her continuous flow of thoughts is homely and erotic, detailed and general, highly charged, and almost completely unpunctuated.

Another example of flowing SOC writing is Samuel Beckett's short prose-poem piece, Lessness. This is a good piece to read aloud to one's self.

Lessness piece is more artfully constructed than it appears, with poetic repetitions of imagery and phrase that loop back around to create a state of dynamic immobility: always changing, but always the same. The piece was constructed using fragments that are arranged using partially aleatoric (chance-method-based) means to determine order and placement in each section. What I find when I read this piece aloud, though, is that it takes one into a state of mind that seems to accurately depict stream of consciousness. It appears random. It feels random. (Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haahr wrote an interesting paper on Lessness, focusing on randomness and stream of consciousness, and also discussing aleatoric construction.)

Beckett stated an intention to depict "the chaos of consciousness" in his work, to accomodate the randomness of surface thought processes in linguistic form. In his shorter prose works, such as Lessness, and in some of the shorter radio plays such as Cascando, I think he succeeded in depicting stream of consciousness accurately.

Other examples of SOC writing, on a much larger scale, are Virginia Woolf's two best novels (in my opinion), To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Particularly in The Waves, Woolf allows her characters to depict their SOC to the reader as directly as possible: the entire novel is written as internal monologues spoken by the 6 characters; and interrupted only by descriptions of the waves on the shore, throughout the course of a day.

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Let's try an exercise in stream of consciousness writing:

1. Sit down with a pad of paper, or a new file on your computer. A blank page, be it longhand or at the keyboard. Sit quietly for a moment, and listen to your own thoughts. Try not to judge or dismiss anything, just listen.

2. Start writing whatever comes into your mind, and whatever your hand wants to write down. Don't edit, don't break the piece into enjambed lines (you can do that later, if you wish), and don't stop. Write down your thoughts as they emerge, and let them stream out onto the page without getting in their way.

This is one of those techniques where getting the mind "out of the way" produces better results than if one allows one's internal editor to sit in on the process. Getting the mind out of the way means paying attention to your surface thoughts without judging them. Every thought is equally valid, and can be detailed. Everything that comes up can be written down. Don't edit. Editing comes later.

3. IMPORTANT: For the purposes of this exercise, don't use a lot of unnecessary punctuation. Or, use a reduced set of punctuation. Get a feel for how some kinds of punctuation (including line-breaks) actually stop or interfere with the flow of SOC. Try to avoid stopping the flow. If that means writing words with no punctuation, do that. If that means running words together without letterspaces, that's okay too. Short paragraphs with only commas are good. Long pages with no breaks and no paragraphs are great. Go back and look at Dave Mehler's poem above, and the Beckett and Joyce examples, for a sense of style, if you find that helpful.

When I write this way in my longhand journal, i frequently only use semi-colons and commas for punctuation; this gives a feel of continuous thought; I might stop and take breaks, but the text keeps moving; and ending a paragraph with a semi-colon leaves a sense that the thought goes on even after I finish writing; it continues, as life itself does; it never comes to a full stop, with a period, but uses only conditional, partial pauses, depicted with semi-colons;

4. The object here is to flow, without stopping or breaking, and to sustain the flow as long as possible. Most of what you write will be nothing special, and you will likely discard most of it. But don't stop yourself to make those editorial decisions while writing—do that later. Keep the flow going for at least a few minutes or pages before taking a break.

5. Now, after you stop writing, take a breath, take a short break: get completely away from what you have just been doing, for at least a few minutes. Have a cup of tea, watch TV for awhile. Step away, and give yourself a moment to do something completely unrelated. You may discover that you are in a slightly altered state of consciousness, for awhile.

This exercise can shift the normal flow of random thoughts, merely because we have been paying more attention to them than we normally do. When we start to Pay Attention this closely to what we are thinking and feeling, it can alter our state of mind.

Don't come to your writing till you have shifted back to a normal state of mind.

6. When you come back to what you have written, look for those sections—there may be many, there may be few—that seem to flow the way consciousness flows. You may wish to copy them off to a new page. Look for repetitions (consciousness is often very repetitive) and cycles, and recurring themes. Begin to arrange them on the page so that they look completely spontaneous and artless and natural.

This exercise is a good way to do "morning pages" as a daily writing exercise: spew without editing, then mine the page for the golden bits, later.