The Danger of Remembering

The first critiques of my work are in and I’m thinking about them. “You must be more generous with us,” says Don, my partner in life, as well as in art.  He is a great writer as well as cinematographer. We are essentially engaged in the same cultural critique and I trust his pronouncements completely. “These people may be stoic, but you, the author, don’t have to be.” Of course, he is right. Anna says “Often the beautiful description seems to take over and distracts me from the story and characters. I feel the author is more in love with the tiny details than the people.” Though both of them are supportive, I realize I must go deeper, see these characters more fully, in their rich and rounded essences. And not just the protagonists, but equally those adults and others who provide the crucial context in which they find themselves.

I believe the problem is partly that I am working with memory and remembered life, though trying to be present, of course. It was Gertrude Stein who laid out most clearly that remembering doesn’t make anything live. “When you write you try to remember what you are about to write and you will see immediately how lifeless the writing becomes that is why expository writing is so dull because it is all remembered,” she said in a lecture in 1936. “The business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to express that complete actual present.” We all know, even more today, that each present moment is incredibly pregnant with life, and why write anyway, if you cannot call out that life.

Nostalgia is not my intention in writing. However, my childhood in North Dakota and northern Minnesota is what I know, what I came from. I can go back there and sit in those years as if they were the present. If I don’t describe the characters and their feelings enough, it may be because they are so real to me, almost part of me. I think they don’t need exposition. But I will go back and bring these characters into the “complete actual present”, if I can.

The way I see the books is really as a symphony. Each of my protagonists has their own theme, which plays against the others. Each of them will have their own movement, in which their life comes to the fore while those of the other siblings recedes. The composition of the melodies, the harmonies, the instrumentation are what I work with. But time has a part, and that time must be the eternal present.