a propos of a quote

"I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. ...Can you say something about nothing? That's what it finally boils down to." - Huxley, from Brave New World (er, p. 70 in the Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition, because if I don't put all that info in I feel wrong)

Mostly: "Can you say something about nothing?" (I'll ignore my interior monologue telling me to launch into some sort of bullshit "What Is Nothing?" type pseudophilosophical diatribe and move on) -- I run around in circles with this and I'm going to try and see if I can sort through this in a manner that anyone else might find comprehensible (i.e., all of this is so tangled in my head that I'm not sure I'll be able to get it out in under-40-word sentences, but doing so will nonetheless be the goal).

Issue number one, which will be returned to: words are hugely important. I feel like I should be doing my best at all times to use them well, especially as I spend most of my time ripping apart words. Good writing, really really wonderful effective writing, is probably not as rare as I think it is (as in, I need to get my head out of academic books). The last time I got really wrapped up and soaked in words that somehow wove themselves into me was when I finally read His Dark Materials over the summer. Fucking amazing. I couldn't pull myself away, I couldn't put the books down, I actively fought having to stop reading for anything other than food. I felt like my brain was firing all over the place, emotions were ripping through my body, and when I finally did finish I felt simultaneously fulfilled and drained and wonderfully satisfied. So a week later I picked the books back up, determined to go through and figure out to whatever possible degree how the hell he did that. That lasted for about a third of the Golden Compass before I got just as sucked in as I had the first time, and I ended up polishing off all three books in a matter of days yet again. I think part of my fascination is in picking apart Pullman's reading of Paradise Lost, but part of it comes in trying to figure out how he managed to balance his interpretation of Paradise Lost with everything else he has going on, and how he managed to get me so wrapped up in the Lyra/Will relationship that the end of the Amber Spyglass reduces me to tears every time. I suppose it's all in the subtleties, but it can't completely be. When I'm reading any of those books, I never stop and think "FFS SRSLY?" at either a bad phrase or some inane plot twist. I never stop and think. I get so wrapped up that I actually forget that I'm reading. To be able to write like that would truly be something incredible.

To come back to the quote and my own writing then, I suppose my ultimate goal would be to write something that would allow the reader to forget that they were reading. (and to this point I'm finally glad for once that I'm making myself blog, since that is literally the first time I've been able to think that) To do this, then, would take pretty much a total paradigm shift in how I think about writing. Academic writing forever forces the reader to remember that they are reading - theorists in particular are fond of shoving together words or breaking words up (his/story for history comes to mind). The whole idea ends up being a way to remind the reader that the encounter with a particular text is an act of interpretation which requires work on the part of the reader. That's all good and fine or whatever (perhaps headdeskingly pretentious) to do, but I hate reading like that and I fervently hate writing like that. I feel like dissertation writing is somehow an assumption on my part, a role that I don to please necessarily critical readers. It also ends up feeling like a whole lot of writing about nothing.

To write then, to write for real rather than according to some criteria that I don't want fully to ingest (for fear that if I do, it will take over me completely), requires that I write about *something*. Hence the decision to do NaNo in November: an attempt to find something to write about that is somehow more violent, more intense (as though anything could be less intense than ripping apart mechanisms of institutional change in some manuscript no one else has heard of). But then the question comes up of what to write of, and I find myself again with nothing. Or not really nothing, but something plotless. I felt like I should write about something I feel like I (partially) understand - relationships - but I can't do full-on romance without the snark sneaking in and I don't feel like I really want to write a "lookitmebeingallironical" type novel because then I'll just feel like a douche. So romance as a genre is out. But I still want to write about relationships, so I'm shoving all writing attempts for the moment under the guise of "fiction" and will, I suppose, try to stop categorizing it beyond that until we see whether or not I actually end up writing something worthwhile.

I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, to be honest. I mean, yes to everything I've just said, but I don't harbor any real fantasies that anything I write over the course of the next month will ever see paper or a publisher or anything. The few attempts I've made at a short story sound more like Stephenie Meyer than Philip Pullman. Maybe I'll just title the novel Practice or something. If I want to do anything real with writing, practice is what I need. So I will tell myself that this next month is practice, and that it doesn't need to have a goal beyond that.