As I say, I awoke, feeling unbelievably refreshed, at three PM New York time. I had one of those new leases on life you always hear about, which I now am better able to appreciate as a sign of my immanent downfall. Still I had no problems staying up, as I would go on to, almost a full twenty-four hours, during which the following events transpired.
I first sat at my desk to do some writing. And the miraculous thing was, I actually wrote. Not only had I awaken with a new lease on life, but with a niggling sentence startling me from sleep, away from my tumultuously leaden dreams and into a startlingly clear light, clean and clear, and what was startling was not the sentence itself, which I immediately proceeded to write down, but the clarity with which it was intoned—the clarity and the cleanness of the light against the white corners of my room. Oftentimes I wake up, going around, completing tasks, doing everything with an alcoholic slowness that could be mistook for meditation; I have even come to relish the spasmodic languor, the baroque emptiness of the hangover, to wallow in its warmth, a sure sign of my relationship to drinking having grown too cozy, too complacent; but this morning—which was actually the afternoon, and the sun was already lined perfectly with my window, peeking over the parapet that guards my room in the basement from the hoi polloi at ground level—this morning was one of those mornings where instantly you awake alert and ready, as though every internal mechanism, finally attuned, has attained to a finely ground equilibrium, and your mind like a speckled axe has been polished to a perfect and perfectly limpid, diamondiferous luster.
I found I was able to write with foresight and brio. Foresight can be folly for a writer—in how it routinely outpaces brio—but this morning—this afternoon—seized as though drunk by the animus of that first sentence and all the promise it held, I boldly took promise at its word, and, enthralled, endeavored to catch it, or at least to follow after. I was too enthralled to do otherwise. No, this was more than just a sentence that had been delivered to me by the subconscious in pure and perfect form. It was the start to a novel. Foresight reared its not uncomely head again: the next time I reached out to my editor about my “new novel,” I thought, with unfettered glee—I wouldn’t even be lying!
As it’s described, by writers, this unbreaking of flow that sometimes occurs, where suddenly a writer is no longer beholden to the hobble that binds one’s fingers to one’s thoughts, but where instead this hobble becomes a belt, driving the hands one uses to write directly from the gear of the mind, and thoughts appear as instantaneously on the mind as the page—what is so often left out is that in order for this occurrence, this ease of access, to be meaningful at all, one’s mind needs to be generating cogent thoughts, and germane to the story (or the essay or the, I don’t know, expense report or musical-comedy libretto) at hand. Actually, a generic flow state, where what the hands write or type can express accurately the workings of the mind, is quite easy to achieve; and what is difficult is unbreaking a flow of stylish, interesting thoughts. That is the flow that’s been broken in the first place. Usually one’s thoughts are nothing special at all, and certainly not worth reading, let alone the bother of putting them down. To put them down accurately would be more a disservice than anything else.
Sometimes, however, a writer finds, and is pleased to find, that all the data he’s gleaned from experience, and the insights he’s thought once, only to fling into oblivion, have not been lost, but rather have been collated somewhere that, while inaccessible to him, is prone to leaks. And, just like that, the torrent is unleashed. He is pleased to find that despite his sieve-like brain he has actually remembered everything he’s read; he finds himself able, as he dictates his thoughts, to sniff out like a truffle pig the next semicolon, and what will work best here, a comma, or a dash—he discovers he is able to dredge up vocabulary so far from everyday speech, vocabulary he or she may have encountered only one time that they can remember, that he doubts it is even a real word; only to discover of course that it is, and not only that, that it is the word, the mot juste. He is amazed to discover this.
(And I only say he because I am he. “She” could also do this, and in fact, often does.)
That afternoon was one such occurrence. As though embedded in that first mustard-seed sentence itself, I watched as though happening outside myself the narration of—I had determined—my second novel, come into telescoping fruition. The fully-formed sentence that was a gift, unfolded into the next sentence. And then one sentence led to another. These took more work, and didn’t always come to me fully-formed right out the gates, far from it—but the work was pleasurable and, I think, successful—which added to the pleasure. They weren’t stupid, like most thoughts (and like most sentences) usually are. I found them to be quite poignant, mellifluous—witty, even. I was reminded of the bliss I felt when, writing my first novel, in certain passages, my narrator took aim at the character of his older brother—and every embittered joke I kept inside, every argument I lost but should have won, every sidelong remark tossed in my direction, came rushing back to me from a childhood spent with my two, actual, real life older brothers. Suddenly, I found I could let loose. The voice of the narrator of my novel served as an outlet for the long-since broken flow of acrimony that I had experienced towards these now-absent, and who would remain absent for some time to come, figures in my life. The older brother in the novel was a minor character—but inspired by a major one. To that point, I do feel that a part of me has to hate what I’m writing about in order to better “unbreak” a flow. I have to have a lot of resentment stocked up that, once I get going, I can sustainably draw upon.
Of course, while miraculous—especially when you haven’t been able to sit and write for a while—the unbreaking of flow, and the spontaneous arrival, and then another one, of the fully-formed sentence, like the spontaneous arrival of so many prodigal sons, is not exactly rare, and indeed, is immaterial and even useless to the professional novelist, for whom what is of the essence is not the fully-formed sentence or even multiple fully-formed sentences, but pages upon pages veering on hundreds of pages of the things; so that the spontaneous occurrence of a fully-formed sentence, even an especially beautiful or poignant or trenchant or witty one, if it does not lend itself to the long-form story at hand, is more of a distraction than anything—more “golden calf” than “manna from heaven.” For the professional novelist, or even the amateur—and for me, who is a little of both—what is of the essence is to actually write a novel, and novels are very rarely, if ever, written in one sitting, directly upon waking. They should be, but they aren’t. There aren’t enough hours in a day, and there are way too many sentences in a single novel. No, this is not the rare occurrence, and in fact, if you look through the output of my entire career you will find hundreds and hundreds of one or two or three or ten page documents, beginnings and middles and endings, all fragments and no stories, all derived from a single fully-formed godsent sentence—and only one novel. All of these vestigial documents I have told myself I will one day return to, and indeed in my interior life I am, prospectively, a novelist of prolific and visionary outlook; but all of these one days have not once come to pass. This is where all of my foresight converges to a point, and all of my brio vibrates in place like a hummingbird.
Really good stuff, keep it up!