Malcolm Sutton | Issue 34
I write this because of a manuscript that landed in my inbox today, by a writer I think is absolutely amazing.
“The best writing advice I have ever taken was: just write how you write. It was the most freeing, it allowed me to write.”
Four Fiction Manuscripts
1.
Occasionally something comes up that is so beyond my everyday, leaving me at my desk still and without words. Even though such a thing might have happened before, I am left disbelieving what is happening now. Almost immediately I want to share it—I want to share it with someone who will be as impressed by it as I am, someone who will be impressed at me for my involvement or implication in it, and I’m at a loss. I write this because of a manuscript that landed in my inbox today, by a writer I think is absolutely amazing. Her last book was my favourite of the year. This one arrives out of the blue, and I get to read it before the rest of the world does. I continue to think about who to tell, and I realise the only one to be impressed in the way that I want to be impressed would be me, but my approximately twenty-eight-year-old self, myself twenty years ago, star-struck by this encounter. And real-struck, as in feeling like I have come to a place where I can encounter the real thing, an arrival at an impossible place beyond how I see myself.
But no matter how meaningful it would be to him, that twenty-eight-year-old self is not able to see it. A day later, I know that that twenty-eight-year-old, if he were allowed the view I want to give him, would feel a rush, but then if allowed more time in my house in 2023, he would have great concerns. He would have a lot of questions, particularly about how things do not match whatever fantasy image of the future he is conjuring. He might ask, what is this place you are living in that seems so distant from the part of the city you should never leave, the centre, and what has happened to you to turn so grey, and what are these responsibilities, and why do you still have the same problems, the same bad posture, the same anxieties, but more acute, shouldn’t you have improved? What of all this?
I really don’t know how he would weigh those big concerns against the manuscript’s glorious arrival.
I look around the house for someone to share the manuscript thing with, and the only one here is my son, who is nine. I look at him and know it could go either way. Sometimes he will read partway through a sentence on my screen and then finish it with “blah, blah, blah.” Many months ago, I saw him reading some of my writing on my left-open laptop. He was supportive then, saying, “Pretty good” without me prompting him. This was the first time I ever considered him a reader of my writing. But for this manuscript that emits such a golden aura—like the accumulation of literary endeavours from the last century—I need more, and I know that a nine-year-old will not care. Nine-year-olds do not have a good sense of history, and auras, and have not lived long enough to reflect on different stages of life, personal change, in the same way that older people do. And then I wonder, why do we adults think we are superior because of this age and because we believe we have a sense of personal change and history? But it is true, that other times we feel overwhelmingly inferior, because a nine-year-old is so much better at living in the present, and their present is likely to be much longer than ours.
Instead of telling him about the manuscript, I tell him that he’s in the book I’m writing, and I ask him if I can interview him. That excites him. That is sort of what I was looking for.
2.
Reviewing a manuscript, considering if I would like to work with it and its author. That a stranger’s writing is sometimes very familiar, like you are reviewing your own writing but what you wrote twenty or twenty-five years ago. You feel close to the current manuscript: the closeness of familiarity, the remembrance of self-loathing. The wince of hearing your voice played back on a recording. Writing from a time in which you were under the spell of a famous writer. You read the present submission full of these thoughts about a style that you ultimately rejected, perhaps because you saw others doing it in a more surprising or deeper way. Or when you saw those others doing it you realized how profoundly inauthentic your version of this style was, how thin it was, because you did not take it further, on a path through your own experiences to a place of clear insight and truth. If voice is what we have, one’s own voice, it is worth letting go of a dead-end version of it. The best writing advice I have ever taken was: just write how you write. It was the most freeing, it allowed me to write. I scroll up and down through the pages of this submitted manuscript. Perhaps this is the younger writer’s authentic voice, not under the spell of a famous writer. I will have to do something, as it is my job to do so, and the reality is to be fair, which means to throw out all of these reflections on my own trajectory. It is not my writing, it has other concerns, it comes at another time in history, another generation of writers, it has an authentic voice. At very least it deserves that.
3.
A manuscript that reminds me of writing that I loved twenty years ago. A style built on constraints, where formal play is foregrounded and the author’s life story is background or entirely absent. It is well written. It works. But I would only want to read this present manuscript for reasons of personal nostalgia, to take me to a certain time when I was a different person and enthralled by writing that used constraints. And then I realize even that is not true. Because nostalgia, that loss that feels good insofar as it makes you really feel something heavily, that shoots through you and you are helpless to, requires a return to the same, the very same book of twenty years ago. I can recall the room where I read the book, the couch I lay on with afternoon sun coming in, the used bookstore I bought it from on the small street by campus, the people I might run into. This current manuscript leaves me without all of that. It is misplaced in time, out of a shared sequence of writing events, and without a quality of nostalgia. I don’t know whether it is of any use to tell a writer that their work feels dated. That could hurt them so much. I am left to sit with the unhappy task of judging the value of something against the backdrop of whatever is going on right now in literature, at our historical moment, when in fact an individual like me can only absorb a thin slice of present reality that best suits them or that they just happen to encounter. That slice then becomes universal – we universalize our little slice – at the moment we send a rejection letter. If we look to pop music for confirmation of this approach, we will see that it’s bad, because we are surrounded by super-popular throwback music. What is old for an older person is new to a younger person. But writing is not pop music. It has a different relationship to age. So, no it is.
4.
Working on a final edit on a novel that is largely based on the writer’s life. The writer is meticulous, a joy to work with. We meet up at a cafe to go over those last changes, mostly things that she is flipping back and forth on without landing firmly. In one instance she asks if she should include “more” or just leave it as “miraculous.” “More miraculous” or just “miraculous.” Either makes sense in the context of the sentence. I sound out the sentence in my head. I speak the two alternatives out loud, with and without “more.” I add some of the adjacent sentences and try it out loud again. I listen for rhythmic differences and think about whether the inclusion of “more” is too much or just right. In our editing process we have tended to simplify in order to make meanings less explicit, less determined by the writer, more open for the reader. I stare at my screen and wonder if one way is better than the other. But at a time like this I keep feeling that they are simply different, one not better, one not more appropriate. I finally say that I like “more,” maybe because it adds the slightest amount of strangeness to the sentence and that slight strangeness attracts me as a reader. But I don’t feel that the meaning changes.
With a novel, there is a definitive edition, the one that gets published. I recall the story, probably told by Barthes in one of his essays, about Flaubert constantly changing words in his drafts, not for improvement, but because he needed the sentences to keep feeling new to him. I have done that to my own writing. One always wants the spark of surprise of that first encounter.
Malcolm Sutton works as a writing instructor at University of Toronto Scarborough. He is the fiction editor at Book*hug Press, where he also designs many books. His fiction and articles have appeared in Maisonneuve, Joyland, C Magazine, and Border Crossings. He is the author of the novel Job Shadowing and is currently finishing a book on listening to improvised music in Toronto.
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