I'm writing a book. Unless tastes change dramatically, everybody's going to hate it. The more I write, the more abstract it gets. Every idea I have makes it ever more off the wall, more difficult to market, more difficult to comprehend, more difficult to read. With every new idea, the reader has to do tons more work, while I, the writer, am just lucky to have ideas.
I have no idea how to write a book. I just think of whatever I can then throw word-darts at a board that may miss the bullseye by a factor of yards. The ideas are all in my brain, and yet the moment the ideas hit the page, they become fragmented. The nerve and confidence leaves the page, and all that's left is the kind of fragmented story that bores the shit out of everybody but academics.
My editor tells me 'be more considerate to the reader.' I have no idea how to do that. Everything that comes out in these essays with relative clarity becomes incredibly avant-garde when they come out as fiction. Nobody will want to read this. I write it to please me, if one can even call it pleasure. I have no audience and too little to do with my life. If I'm not creative, my mind will leave me.
And yet I have no idea if I truly have an audience for these essays either. Perhaps most people respond to them out of a sense of pity or well-meaningness, but the fact that I seem to have readers means I can imagine the sort of reader I want to read this and communicate to them. I want readers who are 'friends', not 'fans.' I hope, at least, that readers struggling with their lives or watching others struggle can read essays like mine and feel a little less lonely.
"The book", however, has only an editor and a few friends whom I irregularly ask to read, all of whom give me contradictory feedback. So this book has no ideal reader, just a flotsam of a thousand ideas conceived during a period when I was at my craziest, felt as though I was getting ideas from the ether, and imagined myself a kind of mystic who could inspire the world. But really, this novel is just following the basic record of what happened over 4000 years of (Jewish) history. What happened in history is sufficiently dramatic that if you do this right, you just need the barest framing devices and you can bring thousands of characters to life - or at least a better writer than me can....
I've worked on this giant book for well over ten years and started over at least six or seven times. Where are the ideas derived? They're derived from a clearly fucked up subconscious, a subconscious explosive enough that it's gone through periods of my life controlling my conscious mind. I have a terrible suspicion that the few who read it sometimes think I write from my personal life, but it's these essays where I put my personal thoughts - they are literally where I organize the conscious self in battle with a subconscious that takes parts of my brain over for years at a time. I once tried what's now called 'autofiction' (presumably "autobiographical fiction" takes too long to type). In two different versions of this book, it produced one good 90% autobiographical story about a family row over Pesach, and one time that I tried to write in a voice that was clearly my father's, but both times, the quality died a quick death and I put the auto into storage.
Fiction is a place of the subconscious. The mind can only take dictation, not be dictated to. The subconscious is ever appeased only temporarily before it demands more attention lest it explode with obsessive and sometimes delusional thoughts. Thoughts from my own life do not come intentionally from the personal, and any potential resemblance would serve no didactic purpose. They are random brainwaves from a brain that is particularly beset with the noise of random brainwaves.
Like the music I wrote that few people listen to, the fiction I write is the product of a subconscious. This subconscious may not be particularly interesting, but it is mine, all too close to my conscious mind, and ever blackmails me with threats unless I give it space for conscious release.
The last few weeks I've managed to calm down the unconscious thoughts imbuing my brain with terror much more than I have in... years?
Nobody likes to accept that they've been through trauma, particularly because when one explains what's traumatic to others they may well not agree that it was. But whether the many 'triggers' were trauma or not, living in this head is frequently traumatic, and all the moreso if you force yourself to consider that everything the head believes may be correct. Once you let yourself think of these thoughts as a very deep sort of mental abrasion, perhaps one can truly begin the process of clearing one's head of an enormous mental load that no one should have to bear.
Will greater peace calm the subconscious or free it to be more creative and outrageous? I don't know, but what I do know is that it's still here, and I'm doing everything I can to give it a proper place that lets it explode to the outside rather than letting it continue trying to implode this head.
I don't know what my future holds. Hopefully I'm in the second half of my worst physical health crisis for a long while, and when your body is dysfunctional, you can't afford to get too depressed or anxious. It can kill you, and I want to complete this book nobody will read. Whether anybody does, the record that I did something with my life, however tawdry, and will be there for anyone who wants the challenge. I hope, I pray, that one day I'll have readers to appreciate me for what I've done, what I've written, and the blood it took to make me write. But even if not, at least I know there is a record of what I've done, and even if I'm writing a stupid book, I will have tried my best to create something worth living a life for.
Amen
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