Rewriting is redreaming. Rewriting is redreaming till it all thrums.
Let me return to Graham Greene. The compost heap of the novelist, the repository that exists apart from literal memory, apart from the conscious mind, is mostly made up of direct, sensual life experience. But it is also the proper place for all the fiction craft and technique that you properly and necessarily consciously learned. It is also the proper place for all the wonderful fiction you've read. All of these things must first be forgotten — at least while you are in your creative trance — before they can be authentically engaged in the creation of a work of art.
3. Yearning
What I'm going to talk about tonight is an essential of fiction as an art form — as essential as color is to painting and movement is to dance and sound is to music.
I would say that of the three fundamentals of fiction, there are two that aspiring writers never miss: first, that fiction is about human beings; second, that it's about human emotion. Even when fiction writers are writing from their heads, abstracting and analyzing, they're mostly analyzing emotions; so even if they're not getting at the essence of emotion, they're trying to.
But the third element, which is missing from virtually every student manuscript I've seen, has to do with the phenomenon of desire.
Fiction is a temporal art form. Fiction exists in time. Poems by contrast are very condensed objects, virtually exempt from time. A poem may capture a fleeting momentary impulse; and the length of a line is usually a part of its essential form,
so the poem is also an object on the page. But as soon as you let the line run on and you turn the page, you are upon a time, inevitably. And, as any Buddhist will tell you, you cannot exist as a human being on this planet for thirty seconds without desiring something.
My favorite word in this regard — a word you will hear often when we discuss your manuscripts — is yearning. We yearn. We are the yearning creatures of this planet. There are superficial yearnings, and there are truly deep ones always pulsing beneath, but every second we yearn for something. And fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning.
Yearning is always part of fictional character. In fact, one way to understand plot is that it represents the dynamics of desire. It's the dynamics of desire that is at the heart of narrative and plot.
Those failed manuscripts of students and aspiring writers — many of them showing a lot of talent — contained characters with problems, attitudes, opinions, sensibility, voice, personality — all of those things, and often a wonderfully evoked milieu to boot. But none of those things automatically carries with it yearning. The dynamics of desire can be utterly missing from a story that is rich with all of those things.
James Joyce appropriated from the Catholic church the term epiphany. An epiphany literally means "a shining forth." He brought that concept to bear on the moment in a work of art when something shines forth in its essence. That, he said, is the epiphany in a story or novel.
What I would suggest is that there are two epiphanies in any good work of fiction. Joyce's is the second, the one often called the climax or crisis of a story. The first epiphany comes very near the beginning, where the sensual details accumulate around a moment in which the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth. The reader responds in a deep visceral way to that first epiphany — and that's the epiphany missing from virtually every student manuscript I've read.
It is an element also, of course, missing from much published fiction. Various stories you read may leave you a little cold, distanced — you may admire, maybe you have a kind of "smart" reaction — but nothing resonates in the marrow of your bones, and the reason is that the character's yearning is not manifest.
This lack is interesting, because writers who aspire to a different kind of fiction — entertainment fiction, let's call it, genre fiction — have never forgotten this necessity of the character's yearning. Maybe that's why they're selling books and we're not — because you cannot find a book on the bestseller list without a central character who clearly wants something, is driving for something, has a clear objective: I want to solve the crime. I want to kill the monster. I want to go to bed with that woman or that man. I want to win the war. You name the genre. Every story has a character full of desire.
The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level. Instead of: I want a man, a woman, wealth, power, or to solve a mystery or to drive a stake through a vampire's heart, a literary desire is on the order of: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other. But that there must be yearning the genre writers never forget. We do.
Desire is the driving force behind plot. The character yearns, the character does something in pursuit of that yearning, and some force or other will block the attempt to fulfill that yearning. The character will respond to the force in some way, go round or through or over or under it, and continue the pursuit. This dynamic beneath the story is plot: the attempt to fulfill the yearning and the world's attempt to thwart that.
Most of the time, good fiction comes out of an inspiration that includes an intuition of yearning. In your unconscious, in your dreamspace, a character presents herself to you. She is a product of your own deepest white-hot center, but she is an other. When she presents herself, there will probably be a place involved, or an external circumstance, perhaps even a moment in our history — a crash, a war, the death of a mother — not your mother, understand, but the death of this character's mother. There will probably be an event that comes to you somehow, which summons her up. This character is summoned into your unconscious. You recognize her there, those luminous events and places surround her; but however vivid she seems to you, you may not yet be ready to write her story if the yearning is not there. For me, the thing that triggers the moment in my unconscious when a character is ready to speak or be spoken of, ready to be a story, is a flash of intuition about that character's yearning. What is it at her deepest level that she yearns for?
Until a character with yearning has emerged from your unconscious, I don't encourage you to write. Again, I emphasize intuition. It's not that you come to some intellectual understanding. It's an intuition of her wanting, a sense of her desiring. And then you're ready to write.
But perhaps you have a character pressing himself upon you and you don't feel that intuitive connection to his yearning. Try to wait for it. But if it's just not coming, you can begin to write in the way you have done in most of your manuscripts so far — moving around in the problems of the character, trying on the voice of a narrator, exploring the character's attitudes and opinions and reactions. However, it is crucial you understand that this isn't the work of art you've commenced to create. It is a kind of line-to-line rumination. A working exercise. You must realize that all you're doing here is keeping your eyes and ears open for that whiff of true, dynamic yearning in your character. At the moment you get that whiff, you stop writing this thing and put it away and never look at it again. You'll hear these words again from me in a later context. It's equally important here. Once you have that link to your character's yearning, only then does the real work of literary fiction begin.