Here’s news– or is it?:  I did not make my Thanksgiving deadline.

There are lots of reasons for this, one of them being that, while Thanksgiving is on a Thursday, preparations and their busy-ness for it begin Well In Advance of that, which meant that I was doing nothing like writing those days.

And then there were the days of Thanksgiving itself: those three beautiful days on eastern Long Island, with my parents and my aunt and some cousins and my sister and her family. Nothing could induce me over those three brief days to steal away– even if only for an hour– to work (by myself) on a book.

So, no, I didn’t make my Thanksgiving deadline to finish my novel. And that’s fine. It really is. The entire goal was, to be honest, probably somewhat foolish, or bold, or both. Aren’t they often the same thing?

*sigh*

I made myself a new goal, which was Christmas, and which Lynne wisely pointed out was likely unlikely due to all the Everything. She’s right about that.

“It takes years to write a book– somewhere between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out suchbooks?”– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Still, I am plugging away, sitting down for an hour or two (or more, if I can manage it) to churn out the words, making my incremental progress, telling this bit, discovering that, uncovering for my own self what the means of this story are. Sometimes it’s dreadful (the silence, the idealessness, the yawning blankness of my laptop screen). And sometimes it’s like holding to the end of a firehose while it’s letting loose with full force in my hands. Then it’s allIcando to seize an idea and jet out a paragraph, full of fear lest the next realization escape me.

It’s good work and hard work, and I’m getting used to it– to its claims on my energies and brain, to its constant insistence.

What’s troublesome about it much of the time is its lack of beauty. There. I said it. It’s not the novel’s fault, and repairs– I tell myself– are on the way. But for now I am just telling it, getting it down, doing what I imagine those wonderful NaNoWriMo people do: spitting it out. The edits (I tell myself, I comfort myself) will come later. I can’t wait for that– but I have to.

My brilliant advisor in grad school said as much about my thesis: if you can’t say it the way you want to now, just write the idea down badly. You can always go back and fix it.

Of course, he was Far More Eloquent than that, and his was excellent advice.

So for now I am being obedient to my craft and I am writing it down badly– but at least I am writing it down. I try not to wish for Something Else, like a sudden giftedness in writing poetry, say, which is ohsoefficient a medium. No. What I’ve got to work with is sentences and paragraphs, chapters and even (gasp!) the occasional dialogue. Thomas Mann comforts me:

Each separate unit of a work requires its special bulk, a certain mass of reequisite significance for the whole.  — Doctor Faustus

It is taking a Very Long Time.

As my friend Rachel said to me recently, “You are writing a novel.”

Indeed.

The post The Reason Why appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It has been – I am not kidding — an amazing experience. No, the daily-ness of it hasn’t amazed me. It has been nothing like convenient to have, almost all the time, pressing reading and writing assignments leering over my shoulder. While other stay-at-home moms might finish their laundry folding and leaf through a magazine before bed, I’m lying awake trying to finish reading this essay by Freud or Walter Benjamin. I let all my magazine subscriptions run out Long Ago.

And the actual attending of classes—arranging with Bill the childcare, making sure I get the children where they need to go and getting to class on time and (greatest miracle) finding a parking place—has been, from time to time, an aggravation or, at the very least, Something Else to do on a weeknight.

But, really. This program has been Amazing. And I cannot tell you, here in this brief (?) posting how it has been amazing. I can only tell you that, over the last five years, it feels as though someone has peeled off the top of my head, and Made Room, changed my thinking and expanded it, and given me So Much More to think about. I am changed, and I am grateful.

The professor I have now is hands-down my favorite. I stumbled into his first course offering when I got bumped off the Internet during registration, and this was one of the most serendipitous accidents I’ve known (never judge a misfortune at first glance). He is German with a gentle accent and a really phenomenal vocabulary. In truth, I spend a significant amount of time during his class writing vocabulary words in the margins of my notes. Words like “instantiation” and “inchoate,” words that express Far More in their few syllables than I, in strings and strings of syllables, can even comprehend. And my professor’s German-to-English skills really boggle the mind. Do you know anyone—Anyone?—who can read Nietzsche in the German and translate it aloud, as he goes, into English? You know, when you are taking notes, you are not supposed to write, word for word, what the speaker is saying. But this man’s syntax, his vocabulary, border on the poetic. I do take notes word-for-word in his class, when I can. I Do. Because it’s just That Beautiful.

This is my third class with this professor, this genius. And he has, happily, agreed to work with me and serve as my advisor for my thesis project; this, because he hasn’t yet discovered my Inferior Intelligence.

All three of the courses I’ve had with him have been about modernism. With multiple references to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Darwin, and even Wagner, we’ve plumbed the depths of modern man’s despair, of man’s decadence, of the shifting terrain of modern living in the literature of George Eliot, Goethe, and Thomas Mann.

Yes, Thomas Mann. This writer of whom I’d barely heard five years ago has been the subject of serious study for me lately. He was a stellar writer, and has taught me much about irony and philosophy even as he has laid out, again and again, plots and characters intricate, delicate and glorious. I love it.

My Masters thesis, in fact, will be on Mann and memory, memory and Mann in Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers. I am looking forward to it.

For Wednesday’s class, I am preparing a paper on the role of memory in his Buddenbrooks. And I also have to finish reading (about 150 pages to go) Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March.

I spent much of Friday evening on research for the Buddenbrooks essay. I spent more time on it yesterday afternoon, and last night read about 60 pages of the Roth novel. I thought, after I was ready for bed, that I’d get a few more pages in.

But when it came to it, I couldn’t pick up the Roth or the Mann again. Nope. Just couldn’t do it.

Because although both of these books are brilliantly written (and who doesn’t read for the writing—really), although they flesh out some philosophical ideas and practical realities that are intriguing, they are also… well, Sad.

I realized, as I climbed into bed, that I was tired of early twentieth century Europe on the brink of World War I. I was tired of decline and mental lassitude and bourgeois misery. Yes I Was.

And what does one do in circumstances such as these? Simple. One goes home. To Annie Dillard (oh my, yes) and Pittsburgh (ah!) and Life Through Words in ways that defy words for explanation.

She knows, Annie does, what it means to be alive, and to attend to that living. One can’t live—not all the time—in pre-WWI Europe. No. It’s good, from time to time, to come Home.

In the living room the mail slot clicked open and envelopes clattered down. In the back room, where our maid, Margaret Butler, was ironing, the steam iron thumped the muffled ironing board and hissed. The walls squeaked, the pipes knocked, the screen door trembled, the furnace banged, and the radiators clanged. This was the fall the loud trucks went by. I sat mindless and eternal on the kitchen floor, stony of head and solemn, playing with my fingers. Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.

Who could ever tire of this heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be? It drives you to a life of concentration, it does, a life in which effort draws you down so very deep that when you surface you twist up exhilarated with a yelp and a gasp.

-Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

Thank you again, Annie, for the rescue.

The post Masters Thoughts appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.