William Landay

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Archives for June 2010

Inventing Laurie Barber

Last Friday I turned in a second version of the manuscript of my novel-in-progress, and this week I got back notes from my editor and agent. The changes they suggest are mostly minor — an off-key note here and there, a few details to clarify. The book is in good shape, for the most part.

One not-so-minor problem continues to dog me: the novel still does not have a title. The latest suggestion, Cold Spring, was rejected (rightly) as “not big enough.” [sigh] It is hard to believe I have been puzzling over this title as long as I have, only to find on the eve of finishing the book that I have no idea what to call the damn thing.

The tallest task in this rewrite, though, is to breathe life into the female lead, Laurie Barber, a suburban mom whose 14-year-old son is accused of murdering a classmate. For reasons I can’t quite articulate, Laurie still feels a little flat to me. My editor and agent both are women (as are most editors and agents) and both expressed reservations about this character. I wonder if they are more alive to the gaps in her presentation — if they sense something missing that I had not, until now. They suggested only tweaks in Laurie’s character, “I wanted to hear more from her” or “I didn’t think she would really say this on page 22.” But to me the problem is bigger: Laurie does not come off the page and live the way the other characters do. She still feels faintly artificial, a creation of words. You don’t sense a real person with a beating heart behind all those words on the page.

Of course women are difficult for a male writer to create, as men must be for women writers — as any alien character, a Belgian or an extraterrestrial, would be for any writer. It is quite a leap to imagine the actual experience of being the opposite sex. Which is odd, since I have had no problem imagining the experience of being all sorts of homicidal or otherwise deviant characters. (Empathize with the Boston Strangler? Sure. But a suburban mom? Impossible.)

The task is made harder by the fact that I don’t like to base my characters on real people. I prefer to write them into existence from a blank canvas. That is obviously a more laborious, painterly process, sketching them in with ever more detail until somehow, mysteriously, the girl in the picture quickens into life.

I have two weeks to accomplish it. One last chance before I turn to the next project. Who are you, Laurie Barber?

The Way We Virtually Live Now

According to recent media surveys, the average American spends some 8.5 hours a day peering at a screen — TV, computer, or cell phone — and that number continues to rise as smartphone use explodes. We’ve reached a point, in other words, where it’s more likely than not that we’re looking into a screen at any given moment when we’re awake.… What happens to the human self as it comes to experience more and more of the world, and of life, through the mediation of the screen?

— Nicholas Carr, “Not addiction; dependency”

A Hangman’s Metaphysics

We no longer have any sympathy today with the concept of “free will.” We know only too well what it is — the most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind “accountable” in his sense of the word, that is to say for making mankind dependent on him…. I give here only the psychology of making men accountable. Everywhere accountability is sought, it is usually the instinct for punishing and judging which seeks it. One has deprived becoming of its innocence if being in this or that state is traced back to will, to intentions, to accountable acts: the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty. The whole of the old-style psychology, the psychology of will, has as its precondition the desire of its authors — the priests at the head of the ancient communities — to create for themselves a right to ordain punishments, or their desire to create for God a right to do so…. Men were thought of as “free” so that they could become guilty; consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness (whereby the most fundamental falsification in psychologicis was made into the very principle of psychology)…. Today, when we have started to move in the reverse direction, when we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions, and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming with “punishment” and “guilt” by means of the concept of the “moral world order.” Christianity is a hangman’s metaphysics.

— Frederick Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1889 (via)

The Pleasures of Imagination

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination — to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. While citizens of other countries might watch less television, studies in England and the rest of Europe find a similar obsession with the unreal.…

Why do we get pleasure from the imagination? Isn’t it odd that toddlers enjoy pretense, and that children and adults are moved by stories, that we have feelings about characters and events that we know do not exist? As the title of a classic philosophy article put it, how can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?

— Paul Bloom, “The Pleasures of Imagination”