I’m fascinated by the question of whether there really is a line between one’s inner and outer experience. How much of what we “objectively” experience is “in reality” ha ha ha a projection of our inner lives?

I’m not going to prove out the answer to that question on this blog. Leastways not right now :-D However, when it comes to fictional worlds, the conclusion is foregone. By definition, the world a novelist creates is an inner world — interior to the writer as it’s created; interior to readers as it’s read.

Yet it must also depict what appears to be an “outer world” from the perspective of its characters.

And here’s where the fun begins, because from the perspective of the characters, that outer world must be an extension of their inner worlds. Perhaps, in real life, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar. But in a novel, it must always, always be something more, because the novelist can’t spare a single word. Williams’ “no ideas but in things” is not a pretty platitude. We are slaves to it. We must wield every “thing” in our novels as the ideas that they are. If we don’t, the novel becomes cluttered with dead weight, and quickly renders itself irrelevant at best, unreadable at worst.

A SORT OF A SONG

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

William Carlos Williams

I’ve been writing professionally for years, and making quite a decent living at it, but the writing I’ve done for my day job has been article-length stuff. And then I did a non-fiction book and was amazed at how it stretched my mental muscles, to manage something so long. But even non-fiction can be broken down into chunks — that’s what an outline is, after all, the book’s subject matter divided into pieces, and each piece treated as a discrete piece of writing.

Not so with a novel. With a novel, even if you work from an outline, you can’t really treat each piece discretely; they are all part of the whole, and sooner or later as you work you are going to have to hold that whole there, in your mind, and all at once. The characters’ inner and outer lives, every last scrap of them, and by that I don’t just mean the part that will end up on the page — the part that ends up on the page is the tip of the proverbial ice berg, thank you very much, the tip you’ve laid down just so, to suggest the shape of the behomoth below the surface — what you must hold in your head is 1000 times more. 10,000 times more — you must hold in your head the world, and the worlds within the world.

Even reading a novel doesn’t come close. When you read a novel you are fed the tip, and from that you make inferences. And inferences are light, and easy to wield — even when they are charged with feeling — it is like watching the worlds from a window.

Much easier.

Writing novels is hard.

Writing novels is hard.

(Somewhat related: the perils of abstraction in writing.)