Writing: Story Ideas & Learning From Other Writers

Business, commerce, has not been of interest to writers for a long time, then I ran across the review Fate and fortune in the 21st century (Engelsberg ideas). The review mentions the scarcity of fiction dealing with business. Read the following and decided if Alexander Starritt (who I never heard of before) has found a way of bringing life to an old genre.

Drayton and Mackenzie, Alexander Starritt, Swift Press, £16.99

In Drayton and Mackenzie, his ambitious third novel, Alexander Starritt has accomplished something few, if any, of his millennial generation have even attempted. He has taken the Bildungsroman, the novel of intellectual formation, the journey from youth to maturity, and given it a new lease of life. He has done so by infusing it with elements of the European and American realist traditions, in which a whole era is held up to the light.

Yet the result is something else entirely: a novel of ideas that tells the story of a firm in gritty detail. What Starritt implies is that the ideas that count now are business ideas. Whatever alchemy may take place in the laboratory of science or humanity, it is only when the power of capital can be harnessed that the mind is able to take wing, to mould the affairs of men and women and lend meaning to their lives.

This focus on the literary potential of commerce was normal in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but has become rarer since. It evidently owes much to the author’s unusual career trajectory. Now 40, Starritt began life in the business world, as one of a team behind the policy platform Apolitical. By his early thirties, he was prosperous enough to become a professional writer. His first novel, The Beast (2017), was a latter-day Scoop, mocking the prejudices and pretensions of the tabloid press. Starritt was raised in Scotland but spent much of his youth staying with his German grandparents. This resulted in a second novel, We Germans (2020). This reminiscence of the last days of the Second World War depicted a soldier, based on his grandfather, coming to terms with the grim reality of what he and his comrades had experienced and done. It was a critical success and has been translated into German and other languages.

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Although James and Roland are by no means physically attracted to each other, their relationship is more like a marriage than a business partnership. At a crucial juncture, when Roland needs to persuade Alan, a canny Scottish engineer, to join their still non-existent enterprise, he finds himself delivering what he realises is a ‘wedding speech’ about his oddbod friend. ‘On his gravestone it would say “He actually did it.” As in, loads of people say, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to start an energy company?” But his thing is that he really does it.’

A portrait of the human cost of entrepreneurship – its highs and lows, its triumphs and tragedies — emerges that is convincing enough to make us care about these two privileged and somewhat spoilt man-children. Both are indulged by devoted parents who let their sons live at home indefinitely but can, when required, provide ‘a few hundred thousand’ for a flat. Yet neither is driven by money: Roland is careless about it and James doesn’t know what to do with it.

James in particular is an example of the ‘worldly asceticism’ that Max Weber saw as the characteristic source of the Protestant work ethic. Roland draws inspiration, rather, from what John Maynard Keynes called the ‘animal spirits’, without which the rational calculus of capitalism doesn’t add up. Between them, they possess a complementary combination of brainpower and people skills that can withstand the fluctuations of fashion, fate and fortune. 

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When I said that this was a novel of ideas, I didn’t mean the occasional glimpses of the author’s political beliefs — which one suspects are pretty much those of the protagonists. This is the world according to the Weekend section of the Financial Times. (Sure enough, Drayton and Mackenzie was longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year — a rare distinction for a work of fiction.) Rather, what gives the novel its intellectual heft is the attempt to delve into what makes a young person acquire ambition. This is not straightforward at all: for the first half of the novel, Roland is constantly looking for an escape from the iron cage in which James has captured him. It is only by following the example of others that we learn to spread our wings. Yet human beings are motivated by the desire for fame far more than fortune. And it is only by the pursuit of ideas, often obscure ones, that the whole rich tapestry of human commerce and endeavour is conjured into existence.

When I think of the business novel, I think of Theodore Dreiser. (Which reminds me, I have his The Bulwark lying around here unread.) Dreiser is not in good repute. (I keep worrying that my prose is as flat as his.) He had his novel of ideas, too. Perhaps this is one reason why novelists turned away from putting the businessman under the literary microscope. Then, too, there is Babbitt, where Sinclair Lewis turns the businessman into an uncool sap. Third, there was ever so much examining American capitalism through a socialist lens; thinking of John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy here. Finally, how many writers know of the business life, especially in these days of the MFA writer?

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit comes to mind, although I know only of the movie, not the novel. And it has been long decades since I saw last saw the movie. Reading the Wikipedia entry for the novel, the plot brings to mind Lewis more than Dreiser; Dos Passos seems to have the building.

I am still trying to find the way to tell the overarching story for my "The Dead and The Dying" stories. It was a found theme, not an intentional one: the effects of deindustrialization in an Indiana factory town. The industry was initially a local creation held by a family, then they sold out to a New York corporation; the New York corporation shuts the company down eight years after its purchase, sending the town into shock. I did not intend that when I started, but it is pretty much what happened to my hometown of Anderson. General Motors had colonized the city and then abandoned it. The locals are left trying to get by, or trying to be heroes and restore the town to what it was. The heroism doesn't work because capital has deserted them. What may succeed - and I leave success contingent - is a radical creative who never intended to give life to the city's economy, combining with others. It is not the heroic individual capitalist but a group - a democratic movement - has promises life. I am still trying to figure out how to sharpen the stories. Both the collection and a novella consolidating the stories are making the rounds. The novella focuses more on one particular character as a thread through the stories. I keep thinking of revisions to the collection, but not of the novella. Even while writing this, visions pop up in my head.

Working through something else, I ran across a sight I spent time on a few years ago, but have not been visiting of late: The Modern Novel. The proprietor has a page of lists, My Book Lists. I am looking at Neglected Writers and The Great American Novel. I am just saying here may be something to spark you.

10/26 

Continuing the theme of literary fame's slipperiness and promoting writers you might not have heard of:

Myths of Meaning: Kay Cicellis’s The Way To Colonos by Rachel Cusk (Paris Review)

This savage little book is a recasting of three Sophoclean tragedies into the modern era. It unfolds for its reader certain human situations that are familiar enough, with an absence of sentimentality that renders them entirely shocking and strange. Its themes are the pain of youth and the disillusionment that comes with observing the less-than-faithful relationship between authority figures and the truth, but its originality resides in its broaching of the force of tragedy in ordinary human relationships. This is not to say that existence is presented as merely nihilistic or absurd: on the contrary, the characters here are beset by almost ungovernable emotion. What is tragic is the infallibility with which their natural love of justice and truth is taken from the hands of these young protagonists and bruised or broken by the people on whom they rely—rely not just for survival but for the explanation of life and the example of how to live it that their elders are meant to provide.

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Today’s reader of Kay Cicellis will find in her voice another missing piece of the female literary puzzle, a woman before her time in her scrutiny of intimate relationships and her effortless shrugging off of the conventions that adhere both to the living and to the representation of them. She is a writer who has lacked a category, and it is to be hoped that her writing will now find itself beyond categorization, free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority who wish to see the world through sharp, fresh eyes. 

I can say now that I have read Rachel Cusk; even if not any of her novels.

Also from The Paris Review is The Female Picaresque: Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver by Amanda Fortini taught me that Jack Kerouac had a daughter who wrote two novels, and they are nothing like his. It may also finally brought out what has left a little towards On The Road, that it hid behind lyrical prose the hardscarabble lives of Americans.

And for something completely different: Processing: How Erin Somers Wrote The Ten Year Affair (Counter Craft):

As an author of both stories and novels, how is your approach to those two forms similar and different?

Short story is the one true form, in my opinion. You can get a short story a lot closer to perfect than a novel. A novel is going to be flawed, and even as I know this, it sort of drives me crazy. With short story writing, if things are going well and an idea has legs, I draft a story in four or five extended sittings. Just really focused and fast. I try to draft them as clean as possible as I go. Then I’ll revise and edit over a few weeks. I don’t like to over-revise the short fiction. I try not to kill what is loose about the form, or gestural, with lengthy explanation or backstory.

With novel writing, on the other hand, I revise endlessly. Some sections take me five to eight drafts. Some I never get exactly right. In the drafting phase, I work through a novel in chronological order and write 500 words a day. That’s a number I can hit, and often exceed, even if I have work or life obligations on a certain day.

In both cases, I work best from a place of zero ego and zero hope. I call this state being “lower than a worm.” A feeling that nothing will ever come of what I’m working on is crucial. A feeling of my smallness in relation to the world. I gotta be below the dirt. I am nothing and nobody. That frees me up. Who cares what a worm thinks, you know?

That worm idea works for me. I have no idea what I am doing - editors and friends are too kind to say so, but it's the truth. I do think I am finally getting a grip in the short story - 50 years since I wrote my first one. I not a slow learner - I am a very slow learner. 

Growing up with having no idea how real writers worked and thought, I try to collect sites where writers do talk about their work. Granta Podcasts is such a resource.

Writing Literary Fiction - Renée Watson & Jabari AsimI:

I did not know the writer before the video. She is a delightful conversationalist, and one that is also inspirational. Wannabe or published writers would do well to spend time here.

sch 11/14

I read one of Walter Benjamin's books while in prison, and I understand his importance to Western intellectuals, but I have to admit the writing rules in the following video seem commonplace other than in their expression: