An Artist Chooses

I read them all the time, as an editor and as a teacher. Stories of characters whose lives never move beyond their status quo, where scenes vanish before my eyes, where the point of view is either nonexistent or as slippery as a greased tadpole, fictional stories that should be memoirs, and memoirs that should be stories—not to mention stories so fundamentally clichéd they might best not have been written in the first place.

Nearly all of an artist’s challenges come down to choices. Until an artist limits her choices, nothing close to art will happen.

“Everything,” said Antonin Artaud, “is the enemy of art.”

The antidote to “everything” is making, and standing by, one’s choices.

1}INVESTING IN IMAGINATION:
HOW TO DIVE OFF A CLIFF

In making choices, we take risks; we invest heavily and wholeheartedly in our own imagination, and hope and pray that our investment pays off.

And we should make our choices fearlessly. To make art is to take a running dive off a high cliff.

But fearlessness in the absence of technique is a recipe for disappointment if not for disaster. Any one of our brave choices may determine whether we end up with a masterpiece or an “experiment.”

Not that experimentation is bad. As John Cheever told The Paris Review, “Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. One never puts down a sentence without the feeling that it has never been put down before in such a way, and that perhaps even the substance of the sentence has never been felt. Every sentence is an innovation.” When our experiments succeed, they cease being experiments and become works of art.

2}ON CHOOSING WELL: PLAUSIBLE,
UNIQUE, ORGANIC, AUTHENTIC, SIFTED, & SORTED

Spinoza said, “All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the objects to which we are attached by love.”

As writers our happiness—or grief—depends largely on choosing the right things to write about.

Any idea, situation, or character can serve as raw material. But for that material to work as fiction it has to pass certain tests.

For a start, our situations should be plausible: not necessarily by the standards of our everyday lives, or even of life anywhere in the known universe, but in the context of the world that each story generates for itself, from its first words. “One morning Gregor Samsa awoke from a restless dream to find himself transformed into a giant beetle.” In the world generated by these words—the opening of Kafk a’s The Metamorphosis—men awaken from restless dreams to find themselves turned into monstrous insects. In this one sentence, Kafk a establishes his world—one that parallels (however strangely) our own, and in which such events are plausible.

A story—of any length, including a novel—must present us with unique events, and not mere routines. Had Gregor Samsa been a giant beetle his whole life, there would be no story, no “metamorphosis.” The story’s first sentence prevents this: We enter the story at the moment when the transformation has taken place. That event makes it a story.

Next, a story should be authentic. It should be made of stuff that—if not entirely original—hasn’t been appropriated from other forms of narrative art, from other stories or from movies or television. Or, if it has, it should be sufficiently reprocessed through the author’s unique sensibilities so the resulting work has its own authenticity.¹

A story should generate its own actions and emotions organically. Any supplied artificially result in sentimentality or melodrama and subvert or destroy authenticity (see Meditations # 28–37). Similarly, characters constructed as heroes or villains or other preordained “types” will undermine a story’s authority.

Finally, our material should be sifted and sorted to serve the story being told. Any detail or fact that doesn’t serve our stories or their themes will likely detract from their effectiveness.