A Season in Hell: December 18-23, 2022

On saying the quiet part loud, finding abundance, and entering the endgame

A Season in Hell is a series of journal entries I wrote in 2022-23, chronicling the last few torturous months I spent working on my novel The Bright Sword—going from stuck to unstuck. If you want to take it from the top, start here.

December 18

How much or how little is a novel supposed to tell you about what it’s actually about? These are the kinds of micro-decisions that novelists agonize over. Is there a point 4/5 of the way through the book where somebody just drops all the artful obliqueness and symbolic shadowplay and blurts out some immortal summary of what it’s all really supposed to mean? “And then he realized that X was just a Y—a Y like the Y we all have inside us …” “And then he Z’d, as he’d been trying to Z all his life. All he’d ever wanted was to Z. And yet which of us can truly Z …. ?”

A character sticks his head out of a novel to assess the meaning of his story. (Actually this is a 19th-century engraving of somebody exploring the cosmos; it was long thought to be medieval in origin, which would’ve been cool, but that idea has been largely debunked.

It gives the reviewers something to quote. But maybe it’s better to let the reader infer-slash-feel the meaning without it being baldly stated. Is it more powerful that way?

I always remember the bit in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons when the doomed Pavel (my favorite character, though I know you’re supposed to like Bazarov) hits bottom. The narrator tells us: “At that moment the whole of his wasted life stirred within him.” Too much? Shouldn’t Pavel just have symbolically demonstrated his wasted-life-stirring somehow — dropped his glasses and stepped on them, I don’t know—and let us fill the meaning in ourselves? After all he’s already (if memory serves, my copy is in storage) sobbing uncontrollably. But Turgenev says the quiet part loud.

And of course it’s not too much. It’s immortal. Gatsby sails even closer to the wind that way: “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him …”

This isn’t really a character moment for Nick, he’s just giving SparkNotes at this point. I do some veil-lifting in Bright Sword, especially toward the very end, just to make sure everything’s landing properly, but I think it’s fine as long as everybody stays in character. As long as they don’t understand more about their own stories than they believably could. These are medieval knights after all, not English graduate students. But Arthur understands quite a lot. And Morgan le Fay even more. And Guinevere most of all.

December 19

Sometimes writing feels like you’re trapped in a vice and with every word you’re slowly turning the handle. Every sentence you write narrows and constrains who the characters are and what they can plausibly do. The clay hardens as you work it.

But of course that’s the wrong way to think about it. Your book is not clay. It’s a field of ever-expanding possibilities. Every word begets more meaning, more forking paths, in ever-increasing abundance. To remind myself of this I write the word ABUNDANCE on a yellow sticky and stick it to the wall in front of my desk, alongside the one that says DON’T BE A SUTPID FUCKING IDEIOT

December 21

I spent two days reading through the first half of the book. Twenty-four chapters.

The pieces seemed to connect up with each other. The events followed each other more or less causally. In the later chapters people seemed to have interesting feelings about each other and what happened in the earlier chapters. The hero changed. The minor characters looked differentiated and not generic. It was funny in places, sad in others.

I liked it. It almost felt like a whole thing, something separate from me, a book I could imagine reading. I knew this feeling for what it was: the beginning of the end.

This is not exactly a precipitous development. I’ve rewritten this book five times from beginning to end over the course of eight years. I have promised many times to turn it in and either failed to turn it in or turned it in thinking it was done and been wrong. I said I would turn it in by the end of last year. Then by the end of January. Just two weeks ago I said I would turn it in on Wednesday. I didn’t. My editor proposed a week later. I agreed. I did not turn it in. If I had to work with me I would be well and truly sick of me.

But now I know I’ll turn it in next week. It’s not going to to be done, but the endgame will begin, and the outcome of the match is now foreordained.

I won’t get much of a sense of triumph out of it, though. It’s too late for that. More like just belated relief.