OUR BRILLIANT EXCUSES - THE PROBLEM OF OMNISCIENT INDULGENCE
IF WRITING IS A MACHINE FOR CHOICES, IT IS ALSO A MACHINE FOR TEACHING DISCRIMINATION AND HOPEFULLY HUMILITY
I’ve been writing Epic Gilgamek for eight months now, and as usual I’ve had to make all sorts of decisions, countless decisions, throughout the entire process. John Ciardi wrote A poem is a machine for making choices. This is true of all literature — to write is to never stop making choices.
Some choices are easier than others, some choices take time to reveal their solutions, and some choices seem dead set on keeping us in their ambivalent grips forever. I’m suffering one of these longitudinals in Epic Gilgamek, a decision that’s messed with me the entire process, one that I haven’t been able to crack: whether to include a key character in the current narrative or defer them for a possible sequel.
The character in question is Enkidu. For those who are not familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose broadest outlines I’m “borrowing” for my novel, the hero Gilgamesh starts out an oppressor, and the Gods create the wild man Enkidu to oppose Gilgamesh. In the end Enkidu becomes Gilgamesh’s legendary companion, a friend Gilgamek “loves like a wife.”
My “Enkadu” (note the spelling change) is a different type of companion meant to serve a very different purpose, but as in the original epic, equally central to the narrative. The problem is the actual writing took the story in another direction altogether.
Very early on it became apparent that that the story could easily survive without Enkadu. The Enkadu material was pretty dynamite (in my humble opinion) but for all of its pyrotechnics it seemed to add an unnecessary layer of complexity to the novel. Enkadu made the novel less streamlined, burdened our hero with an additional core relationship he had to wrap his head around and a mysterious faction whose secrets could not be revealed until the possible sequel later.
If you write enough long stories you’ll inevitably encounter these types of originary artifacts, narrative fossils who helped ignite the tale, but who ultimately don’t have a place in the finished work.
Problem is, every time I take Enkadu out of the story a few weeks later I find myself trying to fit them back in. This now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t dance has been going on for the entirety of the project, eight months.
Driving me a bit wild but there is always something to learn from our labyrinths. For example: I’ve wisened up to the possibility that what I’m calling my Enkadu Dilemma might be one of those rare edge cases where both versions of the tale (Enkadu in or Enkadu out) might be viable and I’ve also gotten hip to the the fact there are decisions that can only be decided by completing the story. But what’s really been edifying about the Enkadu dilemma is how it has me wrestling with a fundamental challenge of being a writer.
The problem of Omniscient Indulgence.
See: we might not be the smartest people in the world, but when it comes to our own writing there’s no one smarter. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. Because you know your work best, are its genius in every way possible, you can devise solutions few other folks could possibly imagine — and you can also miss shit an outside reader will pick up easily. But more dangerously to the task of good writing: Smart people have a fantastic ability to make excuses sound smart.
And as the smartest people around our work, we writers tend to make some of the wildest excuses about our writing fails sound Toni Morrison, Satya Mohanty, Eduard Glissant smart — Toni Morrison, Satya Mohanty, Eduard Glissant plausible.
Sometimes the excuses we make are at the sentence level; sometimes they are systematic. Sometimes our excuses are easily identified by a reader or editor and sometimes only the writer can put their finger on it. Sometimes we are able to struggle through to acknowledge our excuses, sometimes we writers refuse to recognize the excuse for an excuse, no matter what the struggle — see it only as evidence of our awesome all-powerful intelligence.
These are questions we all have to wrestle with as we write and also as we live. If, as I’m arguing via John Ciardi, writing is a machine for choices, it is also a machine for teaching discrimination and hopefully humility — for teaching us through deliberation, through inner inquiry what choices we’re making because we think our excuses are smart, what choices we’re making because they’re smart for the stories.
Excuses are never healthy for the work, not at sentence level, not at story level, not for our inner writing selves. Arnold Schwarzenegger may have put it best: You can have results or excuses. Not both.
Given all that’s happened, I suspect my Enkadu dilemma will not resolve itself until I finish the story, but it’s been edifying for me to spend these last eight months wrestling with my excuse-making habits, with the fallacy of Omniscient Indulgence, and realizing as an outcome that humility and discrimination are not only the prerequisites to good writing and good humanity, they are processes that often require many good choices before they can be achieved.
Hello Junot, just stumbled upon your StoryWorlds here, thank your for these thoughts, good way to start the week with - although I sympathize with your struggles. I was invited a month ago to participate in a panel orchestrated by the Writers Union of Iceland to discuss AI and the future of fiction and I recounted there a story from another author, who had taught art at the Art Academy for twenty years. She said that the nature of teaching had changed now to a level that the worst exercises she received from students were now the best ones - the good ones were simply to good and too right. Original thought now rested in the labyrinths, if I may borrow your word, or we might say in the errors, dead-ends, etc.
Similarly, I said, I think AI ultimately forces us to recognize the fossilized standards of a "good story", the standard behavior of stories, of pace, character development, etc. etc. and might even help us defy them. My "worst" decisions as a writer, where I refused to obey my editors, turned out to be the most discussed aspects of my novels, is what polarized my readership, and what people continue to address me about to this day. We can always intuitively streamline a story into a shape we know is good but I would like to argue that bad decisions are absolutely vital, not for the journey of writing the thing, but because creating bad decisions is what ultimately separates us from machines making endless good decisions.
I completely get the idea that writing has the potential for teaching humility, having had a multitude of opportunties for recognizing that my story-telling choices weren't working--weren't in the best service of the story. But I'm not sure I believe there are "bad" choices. Getting to the heart of a story is an iterative process--at least for us mere writing mortals.