Every story Lydia Davis writes begins in a notebook, but how does she know when they are ready
This morning I walk around the house feeling happy and I’m struck by
what I’m doing. Actually, I’m struck by only one gesture I happen to
make, but that one gesture inspires me to write a sentence describing
what I have just been doing. This is usually an effective approach in
writing because one striking element can be the culmination of a series
of more familiar elements that would not stand on their own.
So I go to my notebook,
which is lying open beside my “official” work – a typed and nearly
finished story that needs three or four changes. My notebook always lies
beside my “official” work because I write in it most when I am supposed
to be doing something else. So today I write down a sentence about what
I have just been doing. I write it in the third person. I write about
myself sometimes in the third person and sometimes in the first.
Thinking about it now, I realise what determines this: If it matters
that I’m the one doing something, if I am truly the subject, then I
write in the first person. If it does not matter who is doing it but I’m
simply interested that a person is doing this, then I write in the
third person – that is, I’m using myself as a source of material and I’m
more comfortable writing in the third person because then I (the
writing I) don’t get in the way of the character that may evolve from
this action. (Sometimes, the “I” has tended to become a “he” in the
stories – the “he” being a slightly overweight, feminine sort of man,
gentle, androgynous. More recently, the “I” usually becomes a “she.”)
So I write it down and then immediately revise it. In revised form it
reads: “She walks around the house balancing on the balls of her feet,
sometimes whistling and singing, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes
stopping dead in a fencing position.” Today I have revised this
sentence immediately; sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. Maybe it
depends on how interested I am in what I write down, or maybe I don’t
revise it if the writing is so simple or brief that it comes out exactly
right the first time. Today it isn’t quite right and I must be
interested because I revise it: I want it to be exactly right. I will
work on it until it is exactly right, whether or not the observation is
important and whether or not I think I’ll ever “use” it. In fact, I
don’t often use notebook entries in a story unless the entry turns into
the story.
I don’t generally use these entries because my stories tend to be
written in one uninterrupted “breath” and they usually don’t work if I
start piecing them together. Then why do I revise the notebook entries?
I’m not sure, but I will guess. For one thing, it is hard for me to let a
sentence stand if I see something wrong with it. Even when I’m writing a
grocery list it is hard for me not to correct a misspelling. For
another, I tend to follow my instinct in writing – I don’t question my
impulses. So if I want to revise, I don’t tell myself there is no point
in revising. I follow my instinct: there may be a reason for my doing
something, a reason that I don’t understand at the moment but that will
become clear later on. There may come a day when I will use one or more
of these separate notebook entries in a larger written work. I may turn
back a few years in the notebook, read an entry, and see how it could
become something larger. And if it is poorly written, if it is left
unrevised, I will have more trouble seeing what it wants to be.
There is also the constant practice I get from revising notebook
entries. And it may be that what I have worked out in the final version
of one notebook entry will inspire another sentence in a new story
without my even realising it. Or maybe the notebook is a place to
practise not only writing but also thinking. After all, when you revise a
sentence, you are revising not only the words of the sentence but also
the thought in the sentence. And more generally, by getting a certain
description exactly right, I am sharpening the acuteness of my
observation as well as my ability to handle the language. So there are
many ways to justify working hard on one sentence in a notebook, a
sentence that you may never use. But most of all, as I said, I follow my
impulses in writing (in the notebook) without asking whether what I am
doing is sensible, efficient, even moral, etc. I do it because I like to
or want to – which is where everything in writing should begin anyway.
(As for the question of morality – I won’t publish something if it seems
to me morally wrong to publish it, but the act of exploration that is
writing is very different from the finality and publicness of
publishing. Writing is still private until it is made public.)
The notebook is also where I write stories. Every story I write
begins in the notebook and in fact is usually written entirely in the
notebook. There is a good reason for that, though it took me a while to
realise it: in the notebook nothing has to be permanent or good. Here I
have complete freedom and so I am not afraid. You can’t write well – you
probably can’t do anything well – if you feel cornered. I am not afraid
because what I write in here doesn’t have to become a story, but if it
wants to, it will. In some sense, I don’t deliberately set out to write
stories any more. I used to, and I started them on clean sheets of
typing paper in the typewriter (this was actually at the time when I
took my one writing workshop, which was with Grace Paley – I must have
felt more professional working this way). Now the stories force
themselves on me. It took years for this to happen, and I’m not sure how
I got it to happen, except by pushing myself – if the stories weren’t
occurring to me, then I sat down and thought them up and wrote them no
matter how uncomfortable and forced that felt and despite the fact that
the stories were not entirely satisfactory to me.
First I wrote long stories because I thought a story had to be long.
My characters were based on people I did not know very much about, and
sometimes I guessed right about human nature. At least the settings were
sometimes good, because I knew the settings well. Then I realised I did
not have to write long stories – in fact I could write in whatever way I
wanted, and for a while I pushed myself out of a dry spell by writing
two paragraph-long stories every day. Most of them were not wonderful,
but a few were good, and that was enough. For a while after that, I
wrote only very short stories in short, neat sentences.
Eventually I didn’t have to search for ideas; a story would impose
itself on me or well up in me – now I feel I must write the story, I
must get rid of it. Nabokov said he never set out to write a novel but
to get rid of it. Maybe the notebook is also, for me, a place to get rid
of everything, and the more exactly I put it down the more completely I
get rid of it. Some sentences want to be stories right away. The latest
one that grew immediately into a story – still in rough form at the
moment – was “It took the Queen of England to make my mother stop
criticising my sister.” This happens to be true.
Sometimes the notebook entry becomes a story; in other cases, it is
nothing more than a sentence or a few sentences and will never be more,
or not for the foreseeable future; and sometimes it seems to want to be a
story and I go back to it from time to time, but it won’t grow. It may
be just too limited (or too absurd) to make a developed story, even
though it is striking. Or maybe I haven’t quite got the idea yet, and
I’m trying to develop the story in the wrong direction.
Speaking of not being afraid when you write, I see that I have
evolved quite involuntarily two habits that make me not afraid. One is
the habit of starting every story in the notebook, where it is under no
pressure to be a story; the other is that quite often I do what I did
today: I sit in front of the typed pages of a story that is nearly
finished and that I am not trying to finish, and instead of working on
it, I begin another story in my notebook and write that out until
nothing more occurs to me. It is easier to do that – to begin a story –
when that is not what I had planned to do. My unconscious, or whatever
part of the brain works hardest in writing something new, is very
relaxed and comfortable because there is a clear-cut task to go back to
when I have nothing more to add, for the moment, to the new story.
Meanwhile the typed story just sits there. The same thing may happen
the next day. Sometimes I have four or five, or more, stories in
progress at once. It is nice to feel that there is too much to work on
rather than nothing at all – the blank page. Some stories, not quite
finished, may get pushed out of the way in all this activity and may be
forgotten for a while – even months. But sooner or later I come back to
them and finish them, and it does not hurt them to let this time pass. I
see them more clearly.
On the day I’m talking about, my plan had been to finish the last
story of a collection of stories. I did work on it for a while, then I
noticed my behaviour walking through the house, then I recorded what I
was doing, then I stopped to think how the process of writing and
revision worked for me, and then I decided to write down this
description of it.
Of course, there is much more to say about notebooks. Many writers
have kept notebooks. Kafka kept a notebook full of ideas for stories,
beginnings of stories, complete stories, accounts of evenings he spent
with friends in cafés, and then also complaints about his family,
landlady, neighbours, etc. His complaints about his neighbours’ real
noises on the other side of the wall became written fantasies about
unreal people on the other side of the wall. A writer’s notebook becomes
a record, or the objectification of a mind. There were painters, like
Delacroix, who kept wonderful notebooks. And then there were writers who
never published anything else but their notebooks, like the
18th-century Frenchman Joseph Joubert.
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