Skinny Dipping

§75 [23.ii.24.a : vendredi] …which is unfortunately too true of me. My mind sits in front of a fence & pours out clouds of ideas; I have to stick spurs in sharp to make it jump. Just write. In the writing one finds one’s way. So many ideas, possibilities : I could write anything , so why don’t you?

I’ll spare you the details, but for the past several days I’ve been working on an outline or structure for my M.O. : how to arrange the material that is already written : ? (the architectonic phase). The structure itself is independent of the material, or it was originally so. I drew a diagram of what the novel should look like as a flow chart. I started with a very simple structure, sketched out in one of my notebooks on the 26th of February 2022, just about two years ago. Realizing that such a simple structure could not hold what I’d written, I immediately began drawing a more complex diagram. But that’s not what the book needed. Not to start with at any rate. / I’m thankful for one thing : I’ve kept up writing everyday, adding to the growing pile of paper with words in neat black blocks on each sheet, at the rate of two or three pages per day. I had a cloud of ideas and … well, one just has to write something, doesn’t one? so stick the spurs in and jump.

As a result of all this outlining, putting the text in some order, I feel elated, there’s an excitement : yes, yes, this is finally going somewhere. But then I think: It’s the same material, just shuffled differently. The building analogy is the most helpful: for twenty years I’ve been cutting lumber and stacking it. I’ve got plenty of lumber now, towering piles of wood, polished and straight. My granddad comes along and says, “What are ya gonna do with all that wood, son?” “I’m building a castle,” I say. “A castle!? Well, that sounds impressive. But it just looks like stacks of wood. When are you going to lay the foundation? When are you going to start framing?” “I’ll do that once I have enough wood.” “And when’s that gonna be?” “Dunno,” I say. “But I sure do like making wood.” “Seems like it,” says my granddad, “but you know there’s a storm comin’ and you might want to at least use some of that to make a hut.” “Yeah, I thought of that, but I really want to build a castle.” “Where you gonna put that castle when you build it?” “Up in the sky, I guess,” I say, thrusting my hands into my pockets.

I’ve heard it said … a work of art, a novel that the author intends as a work of art : what makes the novel a work of art is its structure, the actual arrangement of the material in a particular order — all those pretty sentences amount for nothing if you don’t put them in the right order. The implication of this is that if you take a novel, a great work of art, Mrs. Dalloway for example, and you shuffle the pages and read them in any old order, then those same words in a different order do not Mrs. Dalloway make. This seems a bit reductive to me. And that view of the novel leaves out what seems most important to me : style. When I read a book, I’m primarily reading (pretty) sentences and I do that sequentially, one after the other. If the sentences are interesting, then it doesn’t matter how great the structure is. Or maybe I just like working jigsaw puzzles. Okay, sure, it’s a combination of structure and style.

What I feel as I’m working on the structure, the plan, the arrangement of the already written words, is a sense of hope that these piles of paper with words on them written with style will become something, and what will it be? What will it be like to walk through the castle once it’s actually built? / Okay, coffee break is over. Back to work!