Nude Writers
To read an incomplete manuscript is to catch a writer in the nude.
Prague 2011
To read an incomplete manuscript is to catch a writer in the nude—yes the pages reveal some truths, yes the pages reveal a portrait of the writer’s mind, but, no, the pages almost certainly don’t resemble what was meant for public eyes. Nor is there a simple way to assess all the blots and blemishes and little faults that you’re sure to find. An incomplete manuscript is, at best, a snapshot of a single moment. Even if you perceive the scaffolding for a finished story in that snapshot, you won’t perceive the writer’s uncharted paths, or how subtle shifts in emphasis during a rewrite might trigger grand shifts in narrative. Instead, your mind will skip from sentence to sentence without noticing all the latent transformations that the writer, given a new page, might explore. To think otherwise is to describe a writer’s appearance as final after startling them awake in the middle of the night—this writer with the unbrushed teeth, the uncombed hair, without any clothes.
Perhaps most famously much of Franz Kafka’s work is incomplete—we have fragments, stories without endings, inchoate ideas, missing pages. Thanks to Max Brod ignoring Kafka’s plea to burn all of his papers, you can still read the work, and you might even begin to discern a solution to some of those puzzles. Potential endings never reached. An explanation for the missing pages. But the larger truth is that any guess is the result of shadows, mere hints of what Kafka might have done—because a narrative comes with infinite potential, and it requires more than a little arrogance to presume that our imagination can predict Kafka’s pen.
What’s even more peculiar, however, is the assumption that we could somehow answer our questions about Kafka’s stories with just a little more information; if the ‘true’ ending to The Trial were found in a lost notebook, for instance, there’s an assumption that we would learn Kafka’s ending to The Trial. Yet this seems more than a little confused about the power and potential and creation of a story. An outline isn’t a story. Neither is a list of events. You have a story once you’ve created something that’s more than the sum of its individual parts. It results from the fusing of elements, by what’s triggered once the beginning encounters the ending, in that mysterious, opaque process that can only occur on the page. An outline for a novel isn’t akin to architectural blueprints—you can’t examine the measurements and order the correct materials and follow the instructions to construct a novel. If that were true, we wouldn’t read novels, we would read outlines of novels, and we’d give literary prizes and have award dinners and celebrate those authors who truly excel at creating outlines. Knowing the intentions of the writer, and assuming that those intentions give you any clue whatsoever about what that same writer will eventually create is a mistake so great it shows a fundamental misunderstanding about storytelling.
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Perhaps I’ve always sensed that the cocktail which induces creativity is a little more elusive than it first appears, but I have certainly become more accustomed and willing to accept the more mysterious ingredients in recent years. There’s a lot of space between the first intimation of a vague idea and the placing of that idea onto the page, with much of the most profound writing coming about when a writer manages to convey this process—when they reduce the distance between the sensation in their mind and the sentence on the page, without ever forgetting that there’s always a distance, and that the formation of thoughts into sentences will shape those very thoughts. Of course there’s still much we can control, and we can certainly influence the likelihood for creativity in our work, but what appears on the page is not simply the result of adding time and intention.
Recognizing the distinction between plans and creation reminds me of Joan Didion’s exasperation at hearing an English professor dismiss F. Scott Fitzgerald because The Last Tycoon wasn’t a good novel.
The Last Tycoon, I said, was an unfinished book, one we had no way of judging because we had no way of knowing how Fitzgerald might have finished it. But of course we did, another guest said, and others joined in: We had Fitzgerald’s “notes,” we had Fitzgerald’s “outline,” the thing was “entirely laid out.” Only one of us at the table that evening, in other words, saw a substantive difference between writing a book and making notes for it, or “outlining it,” or “laying it out.”
This professor has the mentality of someone who wakes to a partially remembered dream, examines the dream fragments for a logical structure, and then extrapolates outward to determine the dream’s ending. I find it difficult to believe that anyone who has ever faced a blank page with open eyes and a bold intention and who has ever written lines that come alive with vitality and gusto and even a bit of playfulness could ever believe something so preposterous.
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