2023-02-06 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Monday 🗓 Date: February 6, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 6 – Feb 12, 2023

Don’t think I finished my morning pages yesterday, and I don’t know if I will today either. I’m writing this at 5:30 from the airport, about to head out to Chicago. So it goes. I’m surprisingly Not That Sleepy, so who knows how today will go. This is always how it starts, though: I crush it for the first 4 hours and then sleep for the back half of the plane ride. I also have pretty obnoxious stomach cramps, so that might keep me awake for a while.

One of the things I’m struggling with, weirdly, is suspending my own belief when thinking of story arcs. I’m often trying to think of interesting premises, and some of them have potential, but then I haven’t built enough of the world to say why these situations make sense. Of course, one could easily apply this logic to other stories if you were being intentionally malicious: why do the Chandrians kill people who sing about them? Why does the girl in 1Q84 get transported to an alternate dimension? Why was Billy Pilgrim chosen among all people to visit the Tralfamadorians? In a way, there isn’t supposed to be a reason for many of these. They’re cosmic flaws, karmic inheritances from actions beyond our control. In fact, you could go so far as to say that’s the point. The Chandrians enacting senseless violence makes them the bad guys, (I don’t remember enough about 1Q84 to talk about the girl being transported), and Billy Pilgrim was chosen largely because he’s an incredibly average human. There’s not really a reason to all of this other than the random interactions of the entire universe.

Let’s also be clear here: that’s not a nihilistic perspective. It’s not arbitrary or meaningless, it’s serendipitous. That’s the perspective I think I need to adopt as I sit with various ideas. Why is someone’s parent a secret agent or whatever? Well, somebody has to be, and they just so happened to be your mom.

All of this stems from a bit of frustration, honestly. Thinking of novel ideas is difficult, but also there’s not really any seemingly consistent process. Some people write until they come upon something interesting, others don’t set pen to paper until they have the whole thing planned out. I’d like to do the latter because there’s comfort in a plan, but I think to some degree I really should be doing the former. Uncovering who characters are over and over again, seeing who they run into, watching them bounce around like marbles feels more organic. But I also just love the well-planned coming together of a good story. There’s this sort of capital-L Literary style where stories feel organic, like plants in a jungle. Stories are messy, wild, untamed, and raw. There’s a beauty to that, like pulling a rock out of the dirt and seeing all the soft, squishy creatures inside. But there’s also something about a story told so skillfully too. Watching these threads come loose and tie up again, over and over, into this ever-expanding, elaborate piece of craftsmanship. Thinking back to some of my favorite books, I suppose it’s a bit ridiculous to assume they were well-planned from the start, because every novel is going to get its internals shifted around, rewritten, and thrown out over the course of editing and discovering the novel. But I also do feel like there’s something to knowing the higher-level plans for the plot, and letting the inner stories twirl their way into place as they see necessary to fit the overall plot. Like, there are probably a thousand ways the Kingkiller Chronicles could be told, but at the end of the day, each little piece is about the stories and relationships built up by Kvothe as he’s moving towards his final goal of avenging his family. There’s a clarity to always having that end point in mind. And, the reader is never at a loss for why Kvothe is doing certain things — there’s several layers of plot, but they’re always in service of something. Contrast that with, say, Pure Colour, which I read not too long ago. I think we can guess about where the main character is going and what they’re doing, and there’s some idea of their motivations, but it’s all so vague that you get a little lost. The whole story becomes a “meditation,” which is a cop-out word often used in literary circles to mean a story with little plot but a ton of detail about someone’s interiority. I think that’s a bit of a slight to meditation, honestly — there usually is a goal to meditation, whether that be something small (”I want to orient myself towards lovingkindness today”) or large (”I want to achieve Enlightenment”). Meditations are often still structured. They may be improvisatory at times, but that doesn’t mean formless or unstructured. Again, improvisation often happens best within a larger structure. I think to some degree I’m being a little unfair to Pure Colour at the moment, because there in fact was a larger structure to that novel — the idea that there are different types of people and the idea that God was taking a step back from his canvas and would soon reimagine the world — but that structure was, to me, low stakes.

As much as I enjoy that style of fiction, I think there needs to be a bit more structure and pacing to the story to pull readers along. There’s some amount of toeing the line here that has to happen, where there should be sufficient plot to maintain momentum, but not so much happening that characters don’t have time to reflect, adapt, or change.

Hmm, now I’m reflecting a bit on the whole goal of novels in the first place. I think I often would have said they’re about the characters, that the characters are why we come to them in the first place. I think I feel a bit less sure about that. In one of Rob Burbea’s talks, he talks about the idea of desire and how our desires are really layered down. At the very top is the surface level, “I want this person to love me,” “I want to accomplish X,” “I want to travel the world.” But while it requires some amount of reflection, those desires aren’t things that necessarily provide nourishment to his. For example, in the first example, the nourishment isn’t because this person loves me; it’s nourishing because the desire is to give and receive love, because that is vital to the human experience. Similarly, accomplishments aren’t about achieving X — it could be that X provides social validation, and thus what you really desire is to feel like you belong somewhere, or maybe X does a social good, in which case you may still be doing it for validation, or you may be doing it because you desire to alleviate suffering. In some way, these are the stuff of novels, these requisite loves. Why does Kvothe need to go after the Chandrians? Because doing so is the way he honors his family, where he comes from, it’s his ground. What he wants is, indeed, to return to the love of his mother and father, of the joy of their music, of the community inherent in the Edema Ruh. It’s not compassion or heroicism: remember that when the Chandrian attacked that wedding, Kvothe didn’t give two shits about the people at the wedding. He wasn’t deeply mourning there loss; no, he was simply there as a stepping stone on his way back home.

Perhaps it’s better to work backwards from there. What are some of our deepest desires? What are the things we most yearn for? The brahmaviharas, say: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Those are, in some ways, a peek into the numinous that was discussed in The Classic Course a bit. We yearn the most for times when we feel limitless, when the boundaries between ourselves and the world around us fade away. Aldous Huxley I believe used the phrase “pure perception,” much like the “bare attention” of many Buddhists. “Emptiness” doesn’t really have as nice a ring to it, but that’s what these really are: the realization that the self is constructed, and that when it is worn away, things become far richer than we can imagine.

Anyways, I started this in an airport and am finishing this on the plane. Fingers crossed this actually saves to Notion since I don’t actually have internet connection at this very moment. Good night, I love you. You’re not inferior to anyone. I’ll see you in the morning.