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Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Music

I once had a literature professor, lecturing in 'The English Novel' , who opined, rather crudely, that writers are people who like to carefully roll their shit into little balls before disposing of it. She might have just said that writers are anal retentive, which I guess was her point in the first place, but hey, there are some oddball professors out there with their own methods of imparting wisdom, or their version of it, anyway. 

I don't know how accurate the woman's observation was, but I've always retained it, for some reason (maybe because I'm anal retentive?). But I tend to resist such generalizations, and I can't help but reject the notion that a love for words and for the arrangement of words is somehow akin to manipulating balls of shit. Perhaps the crass nature of the professor's observation says more about her own internal response to a talent that she admired but did not herself possess. Was it a matter of painful envy which in turn gave rise to a need to degrade? Who knows? 

To me, writing is like music. You listen to it in your head and then you put it on the page. You are, in some sense, transcribing something that is already there. At the best of times, it discovers itself as you engage with it. It becomes more than you meant for it to be, more than you initially knew it to be. As a composition progresses, it finds its own next notes, finds the harmony intended. Factual matter, the skeleton of the thing, melts into the freedom of invention. You begin with a memory or an event, with some solid experience, and the thing (memory, event, experience) begins to speak more fully of itself until, finally, it tells a story that is both different from what you originally intended and more completely, more truly what you intended. You have in short, through process, discovered what you did not know to begin with. 

I once published a short story in a literary periodical. The editor of the magazine was quite captivated with the story, and was certain, as she conveyed to me in a letter, that the events of the story had actually taken place in my life, just as I had written them. They had not, but I didn't have the heart to tell her so. 

In the same way, people will occasionally recognize some event or experience or personage and then feel alarmed when the subsequent narrative departs from their recollection of actual facts. They have made the mistake of thinking that a piece that mentions a "fact" must adhere to all the facts, as if it were an autobiography rather than a creative invention. But the fact of fiction is this: that every event, every experience, every incident is just an individual note, each with its own destiny in the music that ultimately appears. 

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