Writers Gonna Write

I know that it is August, and my primary task for the month is to ensure that my courses are ready to teach by later in the month (and that I have trimmed down my ISSS conference paper to 20 minutes and created the Powerpoint for it), but although I have done some work on my courses--which are, fortunately, all courses I've taught before--my mind has not yet quite settled into course-prep mode. It remains, mostly, in fiction mode.

Now, if I were a sane person (but are writers sane?), I would see about making progress on another of my close-to-done novels, which currently number two. In fact, I know which one ought to be finished next; it is the one I had intended to finish this summer, but which lost out to one that was closer to done. (There is some, if not much, method in my madness.)

Perversely, however, a new idea popped into my head. And it's not even the only new idea for a novel to come up in recent months; my cousin Cheryl and I have been plotting another one that we think I should write one of these days. That one, admittedly, will be a major project and I am not ready to embark on more than preliminary planning for it.

This one is a smaller project, I should hope (maybe a novella, even), and it began to percolate in my mind as I contemplated the fact that all of my novels (completed, underway, planned) are set between ten and ninety years in the past. (Well, one also has some portions set much further back than that, but the main action occurs in the 1980s.) Surely it might be a fine thing to, for once, dash off something that is still about the present day by the time I finish it?

I attempted to quell this feeling, which has so much against it (too many other projects, too little time, too much climate change and other life-destroying unpleasantness), but next thing I knew, I had an actual idea and some actual characters. For this, I blame Muriel Spark, as I had just reread her last novel Finishing School. Finishing School is quite short and mildly strange, and while I wouldn't class it as one of her best, it had made me say to myself "I too can dash off something about this length, provided I can write the damned thing start-to-finish rather than in my usual patchwork manner." (As I tend to plot as I go, starting at the beginning and moving along to the end is only sometimes an option, but when I can do it, I can write quickly.)

It may not be fair of me to blame Muriel Spark, who has been dead for 13 years now, for my own demented hubris. It may also seem bold of me to imagine that just because one of the major writers of the 20th century could dash off sometimes fairly short novels in very reasonable amounts of time, that I should aspire to do the same. Still, I know I can do it, because I've done it before. The novel that is out being contemplated by editors and contest judges is one I wrote in a three-month period, and it is not even remarkably short. (Having stolen the plot from a classic of Western literature helped immensely.)

It is fair to say, however, that while there are many authors that I love and admire, or even simply devour as light reading when tired, there are relatively few who give me that sense of get-up-and-write, and Muriel Spark is often one of them. If I could become some sort of amalgam of Muriel Spark, Robertson Davies, A.S. Byatt, and Italo Calvino, for instance, I would not be at all displeased. (Note that these writers are not all that similar.) I note, too, my Complete Works of Nathanael West lying carelessly nearby and we could throw him, too, into the mix.

However, literary name-dropping is not the point here, beyond that I want to announce that everyone ought to read André Alexis, who is actually still alive, unlike most of the above-mentioned.

No, in the back of my brain I'm sorting through things about this novel(la), which I've begun, and which could perhaps be written quickly, if I don't have to get bogged down in looking at old emails about political and ecological matters that will need to be mentioned in it. It's not a project I expect to find especially delightful (delightfulness can extend the writing process), but as I'm ahead of the game on writing my fall conference papers and suchlike, there's at least some possibility that I could write this item in a reasonable span of time.

No promises, but it could happen.