One Thing Leading to Another

Every now and then (wait: that would be more than every now and then) I get myself into literary trouble. This holiday weekend I did it again. In the early hours of each day I was at work on this wild mash of an adult novel—a scene involving, among other things, a mind in the midst of repair. In the afternoons I was reviewing the final edits for the YA novel set in Juarez, The Heart is Not a Size. At one point I was answering questions about Nothing but Ghosts, and always, always, I was fighting for the time to read Colum McCann novel, Let the Great World Spin.

I was, in other words, all kaleidoscoped with voice and place and desperate to get traction.

I don't typically seek out such collisions, but when they happen, I try to learn from them. I study the first-person present voice, for example, for fault lines (when does it fail? what happens when it gets pushed too far? what happens when a story is a was and not an is?). I weigh interior monologues against dialogue chains against the power of the omniscient narrator, and decide: what yields, what confines, what exacerbates? I ask myself how I might have approached a scene in the McCann book (McCann's book begins with the famed 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Towers, a story also richly told in a documentary I recently watched, "Man on a Wire"), and then I try to imagine what McCann might have done had he chosen to weave insanity inside his book, or a south-of-the-border squatter's village, or a garden. What would McCann do with a garden?

As writers we are never finished; we never know enough. We write each book as if it is our first and also our last, and when we are brave, we go back and look over our own shoulders and ask, What might we have done right there to make this a better book?

We are always desperate to write the better book.

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This is Me (and the books I should be reading)

The books are stacking taller and taller about my tiny house—beckoning, desired, and unread. No One You Know (Michelle Richmond), which I won from Presenting Lenore, who lists it as a favorite book. Halfway House (Katharine Noel) and Home Schooling (Carol Windley)—gifts from a certain editor at Grove. John the Baptizer, by Brooks Hansen, a long-time friend and an Alane Mason author, Alane being my first editor. The Language of Things (Deyan Sudjic), also an Alane book, and The Little Strangers (Sarah Waters), because I adored Waters' The Night Watch and because I trust the independent film producer who suggested that I add Strangers to my list. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery), because everyone is talking about it. Brooklyn (Colm Toibin) and Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann), because they are books by two of my favorite living writers.

I have been out, I have been dancing, I have been taking photographs, I have been Body Pumping and Zumba-ing and walking the streets of Philadelphia and running this business of mine. I have not been reading, and I have barely been writing, and I've gotten that ache in my bones.

It is 6:40 AM, a Sunday.

Today I read.

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Eureka, Gamma Waves, and Colum McCann

Joseph Dorazio, a poet and friend, alerted me to a recent Wall Street Journal article titled "A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight" (Robert Lee Holz, Science Journal, June 19, 2009). There's an emerging science of epiphany, apparently. There's proof that daydreaming matters.

"Sudden insights," Holz tells us, "are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically."

Eureka moments, Holz reports, are accompanied by "a distinctive flash of gamma waves emanating from the brain's right hemisphere, which is involved in handling associations and assembling elements of a problem." Moreover, in EEG-assisted research scientists have seen that "that tell-tale burst of gamma waves was almost always preceded by a change in alpha brain-wave intensity in the visual cortex, which controls what we see. They took it as evidence that the brain was dampening the neurons there similar to the way we consciously close our eyes to concentrate."

Well, now, I like this, and Joseph knew that I would. I like it because in my memoir, Seeing Past Z, I made a long argument for the value of daydreaming—for giving kids room to imagine. I like it because I spent much of yesterday blanketed into a couch, trying to see the next scene in the novel I am writing. My thoughts were uncontainable. I could not keep them tethered. They wound in and out of the sound of rain, through conversations I'd been having, through images of my past, through the old newspaper stories I've lately been reading. Anyone trying to measure my thought's progress would have given up and left me for useless (I was about to do the same, just ask Reiko, who rescued me with a mid-daydreaming email) when, all of a sudden, I had a breakthrough on the novel I am writing. I felt the bright burst of gamma waves.

The novel inched forward.

This coming week, on Tuesday, one of my very favorite authors, Colum McCann, is releasing his fifth novel, Let the Great World Spin. Few authors trust their imagination, their process, as thoroughly as the entirely lovable, provocatively talented McCann, and I urge you to visit his website so that you might learn about this book that soon the literarily privileged will be reading. There's a video of McCann talking process on his site (and on Amazon.com). He's the real thing—aching and wanting like the rest of us, but somehow always pushing through. He's a writer worth listening to.

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