What is the Point?

These things happen in a day:

1) The sky breaks bright but the neighbor's chimney steams, predicting the weather to come. You sit with the writing that wasn't working yesterday, and then you add one word to a once-stuck sentence and the passage tilts and the world opens, but just for a moment.

2) A crane flies just west and lands on the roof of the house that stands on the diagonal across the street. The house they've been building for two years now. The house that has yet to suggest welcome. Then the crane takes off again and you're at the window of your office, chasing it with your eye, wondering what it knows that you don't, and where it's going.

3) A friend reveals the things the friend has grown to envy; the list is almost precisely your own. Not wealth. Not things. But talent, yes, and sentences that come when you beckon. And also (not on the friend's list, but yours): Beauty unimpeached by regret.

4) You face a long list of things that must be done, and precisely because of that you read the latest New Yorker instead. The Daniel Zalewski article about Ian McEwan. The thousands of words. The penultimate paragraph. You have to read that far to get the matter you need, which on this day echoes the thoughts in your head, only with greater and more resolute precision, for this is McEwan, after all:

"You spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They've got that twist, a little trip, that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you're fiddling around with something that's already there. You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be."

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McEwan on Present Tense

I was in my thirties and helplessly uninformed when I joined Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons for a workshop in Spoleto, Itay. In a small room whose contours I remember still, among people whose faces I won't forget, we talked tombstones, genre, and the trick of tense, among other things. Past versus present versus future. What one loses with each, what one gains.

It's the tense conversation that always floats its way back to me, especially now, as I return to an historical novel that unfolds via multiple voices and tenses.

This morning, I picked up ATONEMENT and leafed through for the sound of it, for insights into its making. I was surprised to find this passage on page 294, surprised I didn't have it stored somewhere in my obviously increasingly sieve-like brain. These instructions to a young writer come from a publisher whom Briony, the book's heroine, has contacted. He has something keenly smart to say about the use of present tense:

"The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry; it allows a writer to show his gifts, delve into mysteries of perception, present a stylized version of thought processes, permit the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self to be explored and so on. Who can doubt the value of this experimentation? However, such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement."

Note to self: Don't ever forget the forward movement.

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