Selected Cronicas

THE MAKING OF A NOVEL

I can no longer recall where it began but I know I did not start at the beginning. It was, in a manner of speaking, all written simultaneously. Everything was there, or appeared to be there, as if within the temporal space of an open piano with its simultaneous keys.

I wrote with the utmost care as the narrative began to take shape inside me, and only after the fifth version had been patiently drafted did I become fully aware of the text. Only then did I begin to understand more clearly what was waiting to be expressed.

My great fear was that, out of impatience with my slowness in understanding myself, I might arrive at some meaning with undue haste. I had the impression, or rather felt certain that the more time I gave myself, the more spontaneously would the narrative begin to surface.

Increasingly I find that it is all a matter of patience, of love begetting patience, of patience begetting love.

The book came together simultaneously as it were, emerging more here than there, or suddenly more there than here: I would interrupt a sentence in Chapter Ten, let us say, in order to write Chapter Two, which I would then abandon for months on end while I wrote Chapter Eighteen. I showed endless patience: putting up with the considerable inconvenience of disorder without any reassurance that I would finish the book. But then order, too, can bring a sense of disquiet.

As always, the greatest difficulty is waiting. (I’m feeling rather odd, a woman will tell her doctor. You’re going to have a baby. And here was me thinking I was dying, the woman replies.) My deformed soul growing and swelling, while I remain uncertain whether something is about to come to light.

In addition to this tiresome waiting, it requires infinite patience to reconstitute in gradual stages that initial vision which came in a flash. Recovering that vision is extremely difficult.

And to make matters worse, I am quite hopeless when it comes to editing. I am incapable of narrating an idea, and do not know how to ‘embellish an idea with words’. What I write does not refer to past thought, but to thought in the present: whatever comes to the surface is already expressed in the only possible words, or simply does not exist.

As I write them down, I am convinced once more that, however paradoxical it may sound, the greatest drawback about writing is that one has to use words. It is a problem. For I should prefer a more direct form of communication, that tacit understanding one often finds between people. If I could write by carving on wood or by stroking a child’s head or strolling in the countryside, I would never resort to using words. I would do what so many people do who are not writers, and with the same joy and torment as those who write, and with the same bitter disappointments which are beyond consolation. I would live and no longer use words. And this might be the solution. And as such, be most welcome.