Even The Greatest Writers Have Their Troubles

 I am trying to get caught up with the blog, having spent too much time on family legal issues. All I have been able to do since stopping work on "Love Stinks" is a short play (which needs revision!)

Irish Murdoch is a writer I have read much about but have not been able to find the time to read myself. The Paris Review opened its paywall for their interview of Murdoch, Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction No. 117. Out of that interview, this jumped up out at me - that genius ahs the same problems as an old dullard like me:

MURDOCH

Yes, I do enjoy it, but it has, of course—I mean, this is true of any art form—moments when you think it’s awful, you lose confidence and it’s all black. You can’t think and so on. So, it’s not all enjoyment. But I don’t actually find writing in itself difficult. The creation of the story is the agonizing part. You have the extraordinary experience when you begin a novel that you are now in a state of unlimited freedom, and this is alarming. Every choice you make will exclude another choice, so that it’s rather important what happens then, what state of mind you’re in and what you think matters. Books should have themes. I choose titles carefully and the titles in some way indicate something deep in the theme of the book. Names are important. The names sometimes don’t come at once, but the physical being and the mind of the character have to come pretty early on and you just have to wait for the gods to offer you something. You have to spend a lot of time looking out of the window and writing down scrappy notes that may or may not help. You have to wait patiently until you feel that you’re getting the thing right—who the people are, what it’s all about, how it moves. I may take a long time, say a year, just sitting and fishing around, putting the thing into some sort of shape. Then I do a very detailed synopsis of every chapter, every conversation, everything that happens. That would be another operation. 

***

MURDOCH

It’s the one I mentioned earlier, the beginning, how to start and when to begin structuring the novel. It is this progression from complete freedom to a narrow cage, how fast you move and when you decide what the main things in the book are going to be. I think these are the most difficult things. One must consider what one’s characters are like, what jobs they do, what religion they have, what nationality they are, how they are related to each other, and so on. Here at the beginning one has infinite possibilities, this choice of what sort of people they are and what sort of troubles they are going to have, who wins, who loses, who dies. Most of all one must reflect upon their values, their morality, their moral dilemmas. You can’t write any novel without implying values. You can’t write a traditional novel without giving your characters moral problems and judgments. That is what is most difficult of all.  

What I learned on my own these past 13 years, is that writing is work. That I read Iris Murdoch as endorsing that Keep faith with yourself, keep working, keep trying to do better, and do not wait 40 years to take a chance.

Good luck!