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| Untitled. 3-16-2006. |
| I’ve learned over the years that when someone calls your writing “ambitious,” what they really mean is “disorganized.” By that measure, my new book—which, thankfully, I still have ten months to polish—is my most ambitious work to date. One key piece missing at the moment is a title. I find that my titles tend to come either very early on in the process or at the last possible moment—never along the way. Occasionally an image will leap out of the recesses of my consciousness and dog me until I give it a home; I have written whole plays (and one book) around titles. Other times—such as now—I get stuck for months, unable or unwilling to commit. In these cases, pinning the work down with a single phrase feels limiting. Yes, I say, the story is about X, but it’s also about Y… This seems to be a problem more endemic to novels, as plays are often unified around a single action or setting. I think I went through about thirty-odd titles before settling on Sunstroke. The best titles are rhythmic, mysterious, an introductory rite by which the reader or spectator is initiated into the world of the story. Slaughterhouse Five; Bonfire of the Vanities; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—these powerful ideas condition us to receive the text that follows. Part of the difficulty in selecting a title for my new book is that, while its theme hasn’t changed over the course of the writing, the story I’ve used to convey that message has. “We are our own worst enemies”; “love hurts”—these are themes that anyone can write about. It’s the execution that makes a difference; and I’ve been chiropracting this book’s backbone to no end. The narrative permutations of any given abstraction are infinite. This, to me, is what’s so (literally) awesome and overwhelming about writing fiction: in the end, all the decisions rest in the hands of one person. In my case, me. That's insane. Personally, I wouldn't put me in charge of a colony of sea monkeys. It’s a cliché to talk about the writer as god, but I will point out that one way the God of the Old Testament has traditionally exerted His influence is by naming and renaming. He adds a letter each to Abraham and Sarah; He gives Jacob a second identity, as Israel; and He Himself carries an arsenal of monikers, euphemisms, personalities. Remember also the episode in which Adam the is given the right to name all the creatures in the Garden of Eden—an act that helps secure man’s dominion over the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky. As I fix the new book up, winnow away its imperfections, my options for a title get fewer and fewer. The search for a name will, I imagine, coincide with the last revisions; knowing what to call the book, how to seal it up, will be a sign that I’ve finally finished, that I am incapable of adding anything more. This last act of creation is the first step of another, equally important rite: namely, divorcing the book. It’s strange and a bit sad that the moment we get to know our work most intimately--well enough to sum it up in five words or fewer--is the same moment we begin to let it go. The author may be a god, but if so he's a very weak god, a god who cannot see the future. He may be better described as a parent, who creates and names and tries to love, whose greatest success is to render himself irrelevant. |
