Characters as vegetables, and this week's Creative Hour
Lessons from Jen Beagin's Big Swiss.
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The In Writing Creative Hour returns this Sunday 18 June, and this week it will be at 6pm London time. (Please note that that’s an hour later than usual. It’s very hot in London at the moment and 6pm feels more civilised.) Here’s a helpful timezone converter to calculate what time it is for you – just put your location in the second set of boxes.
Here’s some more info on what the In Writing Creative Hour involves – it’s a writing session on Google Meet. I hope you can join me! Look out for an email on Sunday with the link.
I finished an excellent book this week: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, the American novelist who also wrote 2015’s Pretend I’m Dead and 2019’s Vacuum in the Dark (both of which I must now get my hands on).
Big Swiss is the tale of a transcriptionist in the small, hipster town of Hudson, New York. She’s employed to transcribe the (anonymised) sessions of a sex therapist, but becomes infatuated with one of the clients whose sessions she is transcribing. Some professional boundaries and a confidentiality agreement quickly crumble and it all gets messy. It’s a strange, very funny, grim, very sad story and I found it to be, like all good novels, a wonderful place to live while I was reading it.
Reading something great while trying to be a writer, though, is a complicated experience – both inspiring and demotivating. So although I loved Big Swiss, it also made me want to either give up or, to put a more optimistic slant on it, try harder.
Beagin’s writing is very, very specific – Greta, the transcriptionist, lives in a freezing, dilapidated house that is vividly described and hilariously odd, with a beehive full of maggots in the kitchen ceiling and two miniature donkeys (Ellington and Pantaloon) living outside. Both she and the client have experienced stomach-turning trauma, but both of them – and the book itself – are a challenge to the way we talk about trauma now. They are traumatised and comic, grotesque, spiteful, horrible and lovable. Reading it, I felt depressed at it all being so far beyond the realms of my own imagination.
But then, every writer is drawing on what they’ve experienced themselves or seen or researched. Beagin, it turns out, was living in a house very like Greta’s when she wrote the novel, with miniature donkeys called Ellington and Pantaloon – and she has worked as a transcriptionist. I don’t know about her relationship with trauma but the above is enough to remind me to focus on the useful takeaway from this. I can’t write like Beagin because I’m not Beagin, but I can always do a better job of writing as myself – by learning from Beagin’s bravery and specificity.
The bravery is about taking a risk on writing something weird or unrelatable, because it resonates with you and how you see the world. The specificity is about the difference between somebody being unapproachable, and this:
Personality-wise, she reminded Greta of one of those exotic vegetables she was drawn to at the farmer’s market but didn’t know how to cook. Kohlrabi, maybe, or a Jerusalem artichoke. Not very approachable. Not sweet or overly familiar. Not easily boiled down or buttered up. Not corn on the cob. Greta felt an instant kinship with Sabine, since she, too, was kohlrabi.
People don’t remind me of vegetables – but reading this, I know exactly who Sabine is.
When I was an inexperienced journalist, an editor read a headline I’d written and told me, ‘See if you can make this work harder.’ It stuck with me as good advice generally. Writing is so difficult that it’s very tempting to get it to a good-enough point and stop there. Sometimes, you’re exhausted and that’s all you can do – but you could revisit it later, a bit fresher, and take it up a notch. Thinking more deeply about references and descriptions and characters, and making them more specific, is one way to do that. I think, to be honest, that a lot of books reach publication without working as hard as they might. I’m trying to avoid mine being one of them.
If there are books so good that they have filled you, a creative person, with joy and gloom and a determination to up your game, I’d love to hear what they are and why in the comments.
Looking forward to seeing some of you on Sunday. Until then, good luck with your writing this week!
Books that fill me with joy/gloom: too many to name but first one that came to mind was Candy House by Jennifer Egan. I enjoyed it so much but when reading it with a would-be writer's perspective I couldn't get over how intricate it was, how deep each interweaving story went with such economic use of prose and how she never lost me as a reader.
Honeytrap by Aster Glenn Grey. Or any of her books, actually. They so deeply inhabit whatever historical period they're set in. They fill me with so much joy, that writing can be THAT good.