When it comes to writing or video, spontaneity is a challenge for me. I wanted to throw off the shackles of planning, so one day I just launched my camera app, put on a hat to hide my bad hair (okay, not very spontaneous), clicked the Record button, and said a few things that came to mind about my new novel.
But then… I couldn’t help myself, I had to do some post-production, because my talking head just doesn’t give enough feeling for the content of the book. Here is the semi-spontaneous result. I hope you’ll take 56 seconds to watch it. Then continue reading below.
For this video to function as intended (to give an impression of the book’s content), it required editing. It needed a second pass. Vocal flubs had to be removed, other images added, music mixed in, all accomplished with a certain precision that was not present in the first spontaneous effort. Obviously, it’s a lot like the process of writing: a first draft, then revisions, then a final edit.
How do they do that? I won’t attempt to answer that question.
What I am interested in is the driving force. A robin is driven by eons of evolved instinct to build its nest, and to build it in just that way. It does not make a decision to do so; it just begins building when the season triggers the instinct. Free will is not involved.
To what degree is free will involved in my so-called “decision” to write fiction?
I’ve spoken to other writers who’ve had an experience similar to mine. Feeling discouraged with the marketplace, we’ve decided to give up writing. Maybe we feel briefly relieved of a burden. But not for long. Soon, maybe within mere days, we’re back at it, either forced or enticed by… something. What? We may claim it’s the characters speaking irresistibly in our heads. But what is behind that?
Perhaps there’s an elemental compulsion with which one is either in tune or hopelessly struggling against, on the order of Dylan Thomas’ “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” The life force. A law of nature, a bedrock truth.
“It is first of all an art that is indistinguishable from the life of the artist who makes it…an art that is the direct expression of the effort to express itself. In other words, an art of hunger.”
In a review of the collection, the Chicago Tribune says, “Auster clearly shows that literature begins and ends outside literature, as something one does to live.”
Writing as an act of survival. Writing because one has no choice.
In a fundamental way, this connects to my new novel, A Book with No Author. The book is an investigation into where stories come from. What is the difference between life lived and life told? Do you own your life story? One of the characters is a writer who appears to have stolen the life stories of others – but without understanding how he did it. Among the last words we hear from him are these: “Believe me, I tried to stop it, this mad dictation. But... I couldn’t dodge the influx, the dive-bombing stream of language targeted on my cerebral cortex. The words, the voices, the images, they just wouldn’t leave me alone.”
He had no choice. Is this mental illness, or is it simply the plight of an artist? And what is an artist but one who is born with this inexplicable drive?
I started this exercise by talking about spontaneity. To be fully “spontaneous”... isn’t that just to follow an irresistible impulse? A naturally-occurring drive, just like the one that tells us we must eat to live? The frequent lack of spontaneity that I perceive in myself is actually only recognizable as a surface artifact of the fundamental, ever-present hunger for self-expression, which will have its way, spontaneous or not. To resist it is doom.
We humans are so silly.
