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Rebecca van Laer’s hybrid novella, How to adapt to the dark begins with former poet Charlotte reading the poems she wrote in her 20s and reflecting on her maturation as a person and a writer. It’s a fascinating project of literary self-criticism that sees Charlotte analyze how each poem came to be, what it’s trying to say and what it actually says in the end, finally reading between the lines of her own character development.
I was captivated by the thoughtfulness of this book, by its kinship with Maggie Nelson’s Blue, and her meta-textual depiction of the experience of being a writer—or someone concerned with writing “well” or “enough.” While the novella accomplishes many things I admire (a compelling narrative voice, a satisfying arc, an intriguing theoretical framework), I loved it most for its ability to engage with feelings honestly and unassumingly.
I am grateful to Rebecca for taking the time to talk about the various aspects of the writing experience explored in her book.
There is always self-awareness in the process of reading your own writing, as Charlotte’s experience shows. Do you find that time translates this into writing wisdom that helps you develop your craft, or is re-encountering your own work just a useless way to worry too much about the parts of yourself you reveal publicly?
There is definitely discomfort, but there is also a gift in seeing the distance between yourselves and in particular how you can now resolve not only the personal issues but also the artistic issues that your young self revolves around. You look back at your own writing and think, “I should have gotten out of that relationship that made me write all those depressing poems earlier”—but you can also think in terms of what you’re trying to achieve, and find a way to do it Better. That’s the valuable part of getting back to old writing: finding artistic solutions to problems you’ve struggled with and bringing them to new projects.
When Charlotte returns to her own verses, she is quite harsh. She discourages the idea of a poem: she tells us how she wanted her professors to get at certain things about her, or imagined a poem being read to a lover, or would share a poem with a partner so that the poem would be trying to communicated something… The scaffolding around creating a poem is not invisible, as if she believes she is manipulating people into thinking she is a real writer. Is it possible to encounter the old writing without the voice of this inner critic?
When I was writing this book—which contains my actual poetry—the voice of the inner critic was strong, especially after I switched genres and started writing prose. “I can’t write poetry already” became “I could never actually write poetry.” Charlotte’s self-criticism in the book is an exaggerated version of how I viewed my own writing. I told myself that I always try to achieve an interpersonal goal through written or textual means. Ultimately, I think this is too critical.
So how can we look back without that voice of the inner critic? The book is an analytical project, and the goal is to uncover something, to get to the truth about something, or to cut away everything until only what is of value remains. But there are other ways to look back. I wrote most of the How to adapt to the dark in 2015-2016 and five or six years later I can very happily go back to it without thinking it’s rubbish. I think time and age and distance help you feel more tenderness for earlier versions of yourself—and that’s something we all probably need to work on as we have compassion for our child, adolescent, or adolescent writer.
Yes me in the morning I’m basically asking you how not to be critical of yourself, which is probably impossible.
It’s funny. Sometimes you want to find something brilliant in your younger self, and then the same frustration you bring to your writing as an adult will backfire on you if your expectations are too high. So it may be a matter of setting better expectations for yourself, past and present.
To get back to the audience that Charlotte is aware of as she writes and rereads, I’m curious how aware you were of the audience when writing this book. I felt it was more of an internal space, like Charlotte looking back at Charlotte and no longer interested in her readers. In general, I’m also curious if you think audience visualization can be useful.
This book was kind of a special book for me because I didn’t know if it was a book or not and I didn’t think about the audience. From the beginning, I thought that if it was published, it would be a small press book (due to its hybrid nature), so I had a lot of freedom when writing it. I didn’t think about how much money I would make or even if it would be long enough to be a “real” novel.
It was a special experience that I could not repeat. In the books I’ve worked on since then, I have a sense of the market, my comparable titles, who my reader is, and what I want to say to them. This is great from a marketing perspective, but it can also feel quite limiting. with How to adapt to the dark, I really felt like I could go either way. I recommend this to all writers: to work on a longer project without aiming for commercial success. This is especially useful for introspection or research projects. Sheila Hattie, for example, a writer I love very much, had this personal Yi-Jing-inspired practice of coin tossing and journaling that ended up being part of her novel Motherhood. There is great benefit in starting from this place of personal research and writing without thinking about publication, at least sometimes.
I think that takes you to a really interesting space as a reader. You’re familiar with something that you can tell wasn’t written for you, and that’s really nice. Just to think about the writing identity for a moment, I remember at one point in your book Charlotte says that when she didn’t write for a while, she had to detach from that part of her identity, telling people that she wasn’t I’m already a poet. In a newsletter, George Saunders recently wrote that “even if you’re not actively writing because you’re too busy, you’re still a writer because of the way you look at the world—with curiosity, interest, and some love. ” I wanted to contrast the two points of view. Charlotte’s opinion aside – what do you think?
I think what George Saunders said is absolutely true. It is largely a way of looking at the world and looking for meaning in experiences and how that meaning can be transformed into something else. It can take the form of a story you tell a friend, or a story you tell yourself about a bird you see without ever being written on the page.
In my book, the force with which Charlotte moves away from her identity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and requires her to become something else: the writer of How to adapt to the dark. But dry spells are part of writing. Sometimes it takes a really long time to refill your own well or reach an idea worth pursuing—out of obligation, habit, or fear of losing your identity as a writer.
How you refill the well?
Reading helps. In particular, reading things that are good that I don’t read because I need to review them or for market research purposes because they sound similar to my works in development. Returning to favorite books or books that can connect you to your love of literature. And beyond that, rest, self-care, and gentle note-taking.
Since you mentioned rest — I’ve noticed that whenever she’s struggling, Charlotte redoubles her efforts, which she applies to her writing routine as well. How do you feel about measuring writing productivity, setting goals like writing a poem every day?
At one point I had a boyfriend who wrote a poem every day. You generate a lot of material and practice your skills this way, and for a long time I envied that, but I’m no longer interested in working on things that I have no faith in. At this point, I feel that my goal is not to have the biggest production possible, but to do things that are good and that I care about.
Do you believe in writers’ New Year’s resolutions? Are you setting any up?
I don’t think I’ll put any. There was a period in my life when manifestation was important to me and I liked to imagine the year ahead – now I’m more focused on what I can control and I don’t think I can even control a decision like “I’m going to write four great told this year. I could, could you can control “I’m going to write four short stories this year,” but if they’re all bad, why put yourself through that? I would say that for 2023 I would like to write a few short stories if I have good ideas, but if I don’t, I can’t bring myself to write bad ones.
While we’re on the subject of bad writing – in your book, Charlotte abandons her novel in verse after a writing instructor is unimpressed. Outside of writing programs, how do you know when it’s time to abandon a project? How do you rate your own work?
It’s hard. You can ask other people all you want, but I don’t think most readers will ever say “throw it in the bin, it’s no use”. It’s hard to make a choice, there’s always the temptation to tinker or see what you can salvage. How do you really know if something is dead? I’ve said before that nothing is ever dead and you might just come back to it a long, long time in the future, but I think if you feel dread when you read it, you should stop working on it.
Good rule in my opinion.
You may have fear and still get encouragement from friends who think you need to work on it, but I think you need to listen to the fear.
What is your favorite thing about writing?
The freedom to explore the questions I have in my real life through fictional scenarios, people and structures and answer them myself. To go places that I won’t go to in my real life, where I don’t really want things to change that much, but to go on an adventure and experiment and learn more about myself. In other words: satisfying my own curiosity and expanding my inner world.
How to adapt to the dark can be purchased from Long Day Press, your local independent bookstore, Bookshop.org, or Amazon.
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