War of the Words

At first glance, you might easily mistake Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel for a human interest magazine. Between its covers, you can find pictures of the World Trade Center, tennis player Lleyton Hewitt, and Laurence Olivier as Hamlet. Foer isn't alone in including non-typographical embellishments in his work. Ever since Dave Eggers's celebrated memoir came illustrated with various charts and graphs, young literary writers of fiction and non-fiction have rushed to furnish their texts with all manner of pictorial elements to liven up the tedium of all that black ink. Add to that the critical acclaim accorded to the prose of the late W. G. Sebald, and the practice of mixing image with text now comes stamped with a highbrow pedigree. If a European middle-aged man (who met an early and tragic demise) writing about the Holocaust can illustrate his prose with pictures, surely nice young middle class American boys and girls can do it too.

This generation isn't the first to use extra-textual decoration in their work, as anyone who's read Jon Dos Passos or Donald Barthelme knows. However, Dos Passos and Barthelme were writing in a time when there was no Tivo or HBO on Demand, when people filled their home libraries with books instead of DVD sets, when the written word wasn't constantly being debased in favor of visual excitement.

Now more than ever, we as writers need to cling firmly to our belief in words. We need to venerate the magic transaction that occurs when black ink marks on a page paint pictures, when black ink marks make us feel more in one sentence than reams of celebrity photos or hours of our favorite Sex in the City episodes.

This is not to argue against experimental writing, but rather to argue for authors to conduct their experiments with language. Have we really exhausted the possibilities of language so thoroughly that we have to resort to telling stories with pictures? If that's so, then how do you explain the glorious surprises achieved by David Foster Wallace's footnotes, Lorrie Moore's self-help stories, Rick Moody's italicized snarls, and yes, Safran Foer's enchanting play with English as a second language in his first novel, Everything is Illuminated? And what about writers like Michel Houellebecq whose work leaps off the page without the help of Lleyton Hewitt or footnotes or any other stylistic fireworks, but simply because of the powerful clarity of his voice and his vision?

If you feel that no word or combination of words can express your vision as powerfully as an image, then the question must be asked, what business do you have working with words? Why not be bold and honest enough to go all the way and declare yourself a visual artist? It's much easier to compete as a writer among artists than with other writers. And these days you don't even need to take your own photographs or paint your own pictures to be taken seriously as a young artist. Simply select a nice image, add your text above or below, choose a sleek black frame, and you've arrived.

To be fair, I haven't read Foer's book, so I can't comment on whether his particular experiment has failed or succeeded. Perhaps he has succeeded brilliantly and his book is a worthy heir to writers like W. G. Sebald and Donald Barthelme and others who effectively use elements other than texts in their books. Still, as much as I admire them, I want these writers to remain glorious exceptions, not models for the future. Also, writers like Sebald and Barthelme are prose magicians, who use pictures to amplify their already finely-wrought sentences, not as substitutes for places in their writing where they're stuck and don't want to bother searching for just the right word any longer. Can the young practitioners of scrapbooks as literature honestly say the same thing about their own work?

In Praise of Dribs and Drabs

People often ask me, "How do you find the time to write a novel?" To tell the truth, I wish I could produce more work that I have so far. But for what it's worth, here's my secret.

Last week I was off from work and decided to catch up on some well-needed rest. This semester I'm teaching seven classes in addition to working on my writing, so sleep is one of the several activities that have gotten short shrift recently, meaning I usually manage about five, six hours a night during the week, sometimes as much as six and a half.

So last week I slept as long as I wanted, enjoyed nine to ten hours of sleep a night, and during the day I was a zombie, drifting around Manhattan like poor shell-shocked Septimus Smith from Mrs. Dalloway wandering around Hyde Park. By contrast, now that I'm back to my regular sleep-deprived schedule, I'm buzzing from class to class, tearing through a staggeringly accomplished lost classic novel called Three Cities by Sholem Asch, churning out revisions on my new novel, a couple of essays, and this blog that's in front of you right now.

In the same way, I've often found that when I've had plenty of free time to write, long empty stretches of hours with nothing to do but focus on my work, it can take me forever to get anything done. But when my schedule is full and I'm forced to carve out half an hour on the subway, an hour when I get home, plus another hour after dinner and then maybe sneak in another fifteen minutes before bed, I'm much more productive.

You'd think that working in these dribs and drabs would result in a pile of scraps with little relation to each other. In fact, my new novel Faith for Beginners was almost entirely completed this way, and I'm knee-deep in the middle of another novel whose first draft was composed drib by drab on the subway ride home from Brooklyn.

How many times have you heard the complaint, "I wish I could write more, but I just don't have the time"? Or "I'd write if I didn't have to work, but I can't afford to quit my job to be a writer."

The reality is that few writers, even ones who've been published, have the luxury of quitting their jobs to pursue their life's calling. Luckily, there are always little wasted bits of time every day that can be recaptured and used for valuable work time. I recently read that the effects of exercise are cumulative, and four fifteen-minute blocks of exercise scattered throughout the day are equal to a continuous one-hour workout. It's my firm belief that the writing process works in much the same way.

Many writers I know invest an almost mystical belief in the necessity of deep concentration to get their pens moving. Maybe that's why there seems to be a general belief out there that if you can't work for three hours at a time, there's no use in trying to get anything done in two hours, one hour, or even half an hour. For me, the trick has been to break down the process into smaller tasks that can be completed in thirty minutes to an hour and a half. These tasks might include re-reading the previous day's work and making light revisions, re-writing a stubborn paragraph that hasn't been working, or jotting down notes for a scene that hasn't been written yet. Sometimes I'll just work on one or two pages that seem to form some kind of thematic unit in themselves, then take a break to tackle some chore I need to get done, and then pick up my book where I left off.

I'll confess that at some point in whatever project I've worked on, I've needed stretches of uninterrupted time when I could focus for longer than an hour or so. In the past, I've used holidays or vacations to block out that kind of prime writing time. However, those precious stretches of free time would have been worthless if I hadn't generated raw material during my usual hectic workweeks. So if you have a life outside of writing, as most of us are required to do, and you want to generate enough material for a collection of stories, a novel, or a book of poems, you may find the drib-and-drab method could work for you.