Start it and When it's Over, Finish It

The other day, I had the pleasure of interviewing Irish writer Colm Toibin for a profile I'm doing for Out Magazine. In person, Toibin turned out to be charming and witty, overflowing with wise and funny observations about life and writing, and in fact, I couldn't fit them all into the piece I wrote.

One thing he said has stuck with me. He was talking about a story he wanted to write and trying to figure out how to structure it. Finally, after two years of struggling, he came up with the following. "I thought fuck it, start the story at the beginning of the story and when it's over, just end it. Tell the fucking thing. No framing shit. No Calvino, no Borges, no being told by two different narrators, almost no flashbacks... and I do think I got it right for once."

Writers today are under a subtle but perceptible pressure to develop some kind of narrative gimmick, a telling trademark style that makes their writing unique and immediately identifiable. David Foster Wallace? He's the guy with the clever footnotes. Rick Moody? He writes long sentences punctuated with italics that pop up seemingly for no reason. Jonathan Safran Foer? He makes experimental writing reader-friendly, even poignant. The list goes on.

If you don't have a stylistic gimmick, it's helpful to have some kind of personal story to make your mark. Who can forget J. T. Leroy's shyness about public appearances? Or the fact that Zadie Smith was ONLY 23 when she wrote her first novel, or that Nick McDonnell was ONLY 17 when he wrote his novel Twelve, etc., etc.

These kinds of considerations have everything to do with publicity but very little to do with the business of writing, which is simply to choose your story that you need to tell and figure out the best way to tell it. The author as a person is free to vanish within the text, and it's perfectly acceptable, even honorable, for the author's hand to seem almost invisible.

Recently I've been reading the work of Jean Stafford (a former student gave me a book of her stories as a gift). What's remarkable to me about these radiant stories is the use of adjectives, the precision with word choice, and the intensity of the pain faintly palpable underneath the highly-polished surface of Stafford's writing. It's interesting to note that Stafford was married to the poet Robert Lowell and suffered from disease and depression most of her life, but it doesn't change the quality of her writing, which doesn't need pictures or footnotes or italics or words in capital letters to be powerful.

I wish that the people in our media who decide which books get attention and which books don't would start thinking more seriously about what makes for a groundbreaking work of literature. Today it seems that it isn't enough for a book to be well-written; a book has to also signal to readers and reviewers that it is well-written with a host of post-modern devices that in many cases are so showy that the book turns out to be less well-written as a direct result. But what about those writers who don't feel the need to imitate Calvino or Kafka or the latest spawn of literary imitators of W. G. Sebald? I love David Foster Wallace as much as anyone. But what about writers who commit the radical act of telling a story simply, starting at the start and finishing when it's over, with words instead of punctuation marks and graphics, with calm, steady voices instead of shrieking? They deserve a little attention too.