My Bohemian Summer: or, Current and Upcoming Projects in World-Romanticizing

The world must be romanticized. -- Novalis

Well, the summer of 2015 is shaping up to be an artistically productive one for me. As I described in my last post, in addition to continuing the production of Rainbow, I am now also planning to do a bit of rewriting and even to write an entirely new scene for The Bluebird of Happiness, the draft of which I wrote three summers ago. In the month that has elapsed since that post, however, I have begun to see in my mind's eye an increasing number of other new scenes and images for Bluebird, and I suddenly find myself feeling a renewed inspiration for my earlier story, while not losing any of the inspiration for my follow-up novel, Rainbow.

The upshot is that I am now planning to work on two novels simultaneously. Oh, did I mention that I am also beginning to get back in the mood to write poetry?

Okay, before I get too far ahead of myself, let's take these projects one at a time. First of all, Rainbow. On April 28 the manuscript reached the milestone of 30,000 words. Keep in mind that I began writing in June 2013, almost two years ago now, so the production of my second novel has been proceeding at, let's just say, a leisurely pace. That is actually rather appropriate considering the nature of both the main character, the nonchalant and drifting artist Martin Lane, and the story itself, which could be described as a seemingly plotless wandering back and forth all over the span of Martin's life, not propelled by narrative thrust so much as reverie-like free association.



I should note, however, that the pace of writing has picked up this year. In the last 7 months of 2013, I managed to write just 10,000 words; in all of 2014, only 11,000 words; in the first four months of 2015, I have already written 9,000. I also did a very rough estimate of how much writing I have left to do, based on the number of discrete scenes in my outline, and concluded that the novel may very well extend to 150,000 or more words (in a printed book, this would likely come to 500 or 600 pages). That actually sounds about right judging by where I am at in the story. In any case, I know that I have much more writing ahead of me than behind me, and I hope to really dive in and make much further progress on the story this summer.

***

Now for Bluebird. This development truly surprises me, but then so did Rainbow when the idea first began to develop in my mind two years ago. As I recounted last time, my quiet but nagging misgivings about (and therefore delay in seeking publication of) the Bluebird manuscript finally led me to the decision to rewrite one section of the story, consisting of a very long letter from the novel's protagonist, the poet Thomas Fairchild, to the object of his hopeless love, Alexandra Grey.

However, in March of this year I conceived of a scene that I liked so well that I decided I wanted to add it to the story. This was a fairly radical decision for me to make, considering that I had considered the story pretty much completed (except for editing and revision of the existing text) as of August 2012, when I finished the initial draft.

And now, in late April and early May, I have found the new ideas for Bluebird continuing to present themselves to my imagination. And not only new ideas, but renewed passion for the story. This is very welcome indeed, especially since I had been putting off and somewhat dreading the rewrite of the letter due to perceiving it as a necessary chore more than an act of inspired writing.

Now, I am actually feeling an excitement similar to what I felt in the summer of 2012—in other words, the passion that drove me to write The Bluebird of Happiness in the first place and that also brought my poetry writing to renewed life at that time. Three years ago, both my fiction and my poetry rose to new heights of inspiration and accomplishment. Essentially, that summer of splendor and suffering, as I call it, proved to be a literary renaissance for me.

Of course, that does not mean that my current enthusiasm is exactly the same feeling as what I felt then. Moments in life can never be fully repeated, nor should they, and one important difference between then and now is that this time my inspiration is much less painful. I noted three years ago that the sometimes tormenting, sometimes ecstatic passion I was experiencing was being caused by private emotional upheavals not directly related to the breakup of my marriage which had occurred that spring, but seeming to be precipitated by that event.

It is not entirely clear to me, however, exactly what the source of my renewed passion might be this time. In a sense it does feel like a partial recovery, or perhaps a revival in a slightly different form, of the strange but powerful inspiration that enabled me to finally blossom as both a poet and a novelist three summers ago. And, as always, it would be difficult to explain what this sublime and inspiring vision is in any words other than the stories and poems themselves. Indeed, the vision propels me to write the things I do because these literary works are the only ways by which to communicate it.

So my plan for Bluebird right now is not only to rewrite Thomas's letter to Alexandra but also to write a number of entirely new scenes. More than that, I intend to read through the entire manuscript again (I have only done so once before, in May 2013, when I edited the initial draft) and further edit or revise wherever I may see fit, rewriting the letter (which is near the end) when I come to it and adding the new sections wherever it seems best to place them.

In this way I hope to complete what will essentially be a second draft of the novel, one that brings the work even closer to fulfilling my vision of the story and that helps my first novel to become as powerful and haunting a work for the reader as it has been for me. Whatever else it may be, The Bluebird of Happiness is a story of infinite longing.

Despite their differences, the two novels are informed by the same dreamy Romanticism shared by their respective protagonists, Thomas and Martin, as well as by the two young men's similarly bohemian values, attitudes, and lifestyles. Each expresses this bohemian Romanticism in his own distinctive way, but it forms a common intellectual background to the two novels.

Both stories are quests of a sort. I sometimes think of the two novels as being my own personal Iliad and Odyssey. The Bluebird of Happiness is a conflict (emotional rather than physical) of tragic grandeur and seemingly cosmic proportions, while Rainbow is, as I alluded to above, an apparently never-ending wandering in search of some place (or person or thing) to call home.

Both Thomas and Martin, ever since becoming intimate friends in college, are inspired by Novalis's myth of the Blue Flower. Novalis was a German Romantic poet who created the Blue Flower as a symbol of "some kind of infinite longing, or longing for the infinite, or something to that effect", as Martin expresses it in Rainbow. The symbol comes to have deep personal meaning for both young men for different reasons.

Novalis asserted that "the world must be romanticized". He explained that "to romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery, and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite". Novalis also stated that "philosophy is properly homesickness; the wish to be everywhere at home". In my understanding, philosophy (i.e., the search for wisdom or understanding) is, in Novalis's view, part of the attempt to romanticize the world: which is to say, to see it as a place where one may feel at home.

Both stories, as well as my poems, are, among other things, my own attempts at "romanticizing the world". However, this romanticizing, this striving to see the ideal within the real, is accompanied in my novels and poetry by an unmistakable strain of melancholy, if not pessimism, and an aching sense of perpetual lostness in the world. This tension is perhaps born of my attunement to both the wonder and the sadness of the world, and of my attempt to arrive, through literature, at some deep understanding, if not intellectual then at least emotional, in realms where not philosophy but only poetry can reach.

In any case, I feel that I am about to embark upon my own quest, my own bohemian wandering and Blue Flower seeking, this summer. It will not be an outward journey but one that is inward, across the uncharted wilderness of imagination, intellect, and emotion. Like my fellow poets Thomas and Martin, I may not know exactly what it is that my heart seeks, nor that I will ever find it in this life. But, like them, I have no choice but to undertake the journey, "seeking what truth and beauty may yet be found", one word at a time.

Bluebird Briefing: April 2015

First, a preface about my second novel, Rainbow, which has been in production for about two years now (concept development started in February 2013, the actual writing that June). The manuscript currently stands at 28,000 words. That's about half the length of a short novel, but I have much more writing ahead of me than behind me, and Rainbow will not be, never could have been, a short novel. Like our protagonist Martin Lane, whom one character emphatically declares cannot be contained, the novel that tells his story seems boundlessly expansive and is not readily delimited.

The writing has been progressing slowly but steadily (isn't that the kind that wins the race?), propelled by a relatively low-key yet sustained stream of inspiration. Unlike the interior cosmic drama that drove me to create Bluebird in a six-week fever (or perhaps something more like a visionary trance), the fire which fuels Rainbow is not usually quite as blindingly bright, but has proven remarkably durable, and the project is still deeply, if a bit more quietly, exciting.

*

Meanwhile, developments have been occurring with my first effort in novelistic art, The Bluebird of Happiness. One thing I have realized of late is that, even though the novel was written during that aforementioned six weeks almost three years ago, it is, even today, not really finished, and indeed the production of the novel has been a process far greater than those six glorious weeks. Yes, the novel was essentially written during that time period, but it had a long history prior to that, and, despite having felt that the manuscript was polished and ready for prime time two years ago, I have come to feel that there is more work yet to be done before my debut novel is all that it can be and is, well, ready for its debut.

For background, here is a brief outline of the history of Bluebird:

1999: I first conceive the idea for the novel, at the time titled The Terrible Blue, set in a decadent near-future America and centering on the character of Thomas Fairchild.

2003: I reimagine the story as set in the present day and revolving around the lives of three characters: Thomas, Martin Lane, and Aurora Nightingale. Martin, who was actually first imagined back in 1997, becomes the lead character.

2004: I write several pages of the story, some material from which ends up in the eventual novel.

2007: After setting the project aside for a time, a viewing of the movie Velvet Goldmine provides me with fresh inspiration for the story.

2009: Early in the year, I decide to abandon the novel altogether. By the summer, however, I have taken up the idea once more. I change the title to The Bluebird of Happiness.

2010: I make yet another start on the manuscript, writing the first few pages.

2011: Late in the year, I decide to make Thomas the main character once more.

2012: In early May I receive a powerful new inspiration for the story, which now centers on the seemingly impossible love of Thomas for Alexandra Grey (with Martin and Aurora as important supporting characters). On July 3rd I begin writing; on August 17th I complete the 100,000+ word initial draft of the manuscript.

2013: In May I edit the manuscript, believing it at the time to be ready for submission to agents and publishers.

2014: I decide that I wish to rewrite one section of the novel, consisting of a long letter from Thomas to Alexandra.

This last development was significant for me because it entailed reversing my decision of the preceding year that the novel was in fact finished. It has been a bit difficult to deal with too because it means that the novel is taking much longer to complete than I had previously thought. However, I have also come to realize that this is normal and good; however inspired, however wondrous, however powerful that blaze of literary creation in the summer of 2012 might have been, however important and central a part of the creative process that is producing The Bluebird of Happiness, it is still only a part of that process. The above timeline amply illustrates this fact. The writing of any novel must be a combination of passionate inspiration and arduous toil.

I have also, in recent days, come to a greater acceptance of the need for diligent and careful revision, editing, polishing, and not to be afraid that this will tamper with the purity of the initial inspiration. The two processes are complementary aspects of the same greater process of artistic creation. I know that other authors have put years of effort and work into their novels too, and that this is okay. It is crucially important that I do not release my Bluebird into the world until it is fully ready for flight, until I feel no nagging reservations about any part of the manuscript. Of course it will never be perfect (it is questionable whether any literary work, particularly a novel, can ever truly be "perfect", even more questionable what "perfect" might mean), but part of my hesitation about marketing the manuscript has been due to misgivings about certain parts, especially the letter to Alexandra, which I feel could (should, considering its fictional author and the nature of the novel) be much more poetic. As it stands now, it feels too prosaic and explanatory whereas I feel it could and should be a more mysterious and sublime expression of mysterious and sublime emotions. In short, I didn't write that part quite as well as I could have, and that needs to be fixed, I think, before the novel is everything it was meant to be, before it becomes the one true Bluebird.

Sometimes I feel a bit of trepidation about undertaking such a task of rewriting (which I have yet to begin, though I have been developing ideas for it). The major reason is that the fiery inspiration that produced the initial manuscript was a passing phenomenon. I suppose it is possible that the muse may seize me again as I begin to rewrite Thomas's epistle to the object of his undying love, but no author can completely control things like that. The muse may aid the poet, but the poet serves the muse. However, if the task must be done, then it must, and I can only trust the muse to guide me as she has so faithfully done before. (I realize that for non-writers all this talk of muses may sound a bit mystical, but it must also be understood, as it is by poets, that some things can only be expressed poetically.)

I have also been troubled by the thought that any addition or substantial revision I make now to the Bluebird MS seems, inevitably, like a later interpolation to the "real" text that I produced under such effulgent inspiration three years ago. After all, it was written at a particular moment in my life, and as the philosopher Heraclitus says, one cannot step in the same river twice. But if anything is mystical, it might be the belief that only what I wrote during those six weeks can possibly count as the "real" Bluebird. No matter how romantic I might be in some ways, I am also worldly enough to understand, as I alluded to above, that literary creation is always a cooperative effort between the heart, the head, and the hands.

So, while it is true that I might never be able to recapture the full power of the vision that so ravished me during that summer of suffering and splendor, it is also true that I am still, in a deeper sense, the same person, and it is also true that any literary work is produced over a period of time, whether it be a single day to write a lyric poem or very short story, or many years to write a great novel. As I mentioned at the outset, Rainbow has already been in production for two years, and I am not precisely the same as I was when I began its composition--and I will surely be different still by the time I finish it. And of course Bluebird itself existed as a concept for 13 years prior to its writing, so it is not as though it sprang fully formed from the ether, however much it may have felt that way at the time. (As I mentioned in the timeline, a small part of the text was actually written several years before. So why not some of the text written a few years after the main event?)

On February 5th of this year, I actually did make a small but significant revision to one passage in Bluebird (not the letter), because I wanted to leave certain things about Thomas a bit more mysterious and ambiguous than they otherwise might have been. This was the first time since the edit of the manuscript in May 2013 that I made any changes at all to the text. I am thinking now that I would like to reread and re-edit the entire manuscript, in addition to rewriting the letter. For a novel that I have always intended and hoped to be an enduring work of art, it is well worth the time and the effort to make it as close to perfect, as close to my highest vision, as I can possibly make it.

On a final note, only yesterday I thought up an entirely new scene for Bluebird. This scene, once written, would constitute the first substantial new addition to the story since 2012 (I have hardly entertained the notion of making any actual additions to the text, as opposed to revising or rewriting existing parts of it, until now). Thomas, Martin, and Aurora, as well as a number of other characters from Bluebird, reappear in Rainbow, and some of them may possibly appear further in other shorter works of fiction, but this particular scene that occurred to me yesterday struck me as being especially suitable for Bluebird itself.

It is a scene that I believe would fit the tone and spirit of the first novel perfectly, while also standing out in a rather striking and bold sort of way, and thereby adding a single but important note to the entire symphony. I am quite excited by this, as this development has made me feel more than anything else that my first novel is not yet complete, and that its final completion need not be entirely tedious, but rather may involve fresh inspiration. One of my hesitations about rewriting the letter is that it seemed more an act of obligation, a chore, than the act of passionate eros that the initial writing of the novel was; but that task, too, as time goes on, is being fueled more and more by new ideas, increasingly more by desire than by duty.

The new scene for Bluebird, incidentally, involves a certain piece of music by Purcell which was referenced in my 2013 novella Angels Are Lonely on the Earth. That novella is set a hundred years in the future but the three main characters share a passion for the poetry of Thomas Fairchild, making it not so much a sequel to Bluebird as a story set in the same fictional universe. The new scene in Bluebird will provide a further connection between the two tales. It occurs to me that future readers may see the scene in Angels involving the Purcell piece as making reference to the scene in Bluebird, even though in reality the passage in Bluebird was not written (or even thought up) until two years after Angels was written. Thus do I weave a complicated web among the various works of my literary oeuvre.

I read somewhere the other day that poetry is an act of daydreaming. And so it is. The worlds I see in my head, those worlds that seek realization in works of fiction or of poetry (literary fiction being, ultimately, a form of poetry... you might say, poetry by other means), are essentially dream worlds. That does not mean they are not real. They are of course not real in the same sense that the empirical world is, but they are realities of the mind, of my mind, and, through the concrete expression of art, may also become realities of other people's minds as well. And, like all art, these constructions, these made-up things, help us to see reality more deeply and more fully. Art may not be life, but art helps us live.

Why I Write: A Confession

 

When did I first know I wanted to become a writer?

 

For me, the question, upon even a moment's thought, becomes strangely unanswerable. I realize that it is perhaps not even the right question to ask. For in my case, I can say that I have always been a writer. As soon as I learned how to write, it seems, at the age of about six, I began writing my own stories. The activity just seemed to occur naturally to me, as though it were in my blood. I was a born storyteller.

So, for me, writing is not something that I see, first and foremost, as a "career", much less a "profession". It is just something I do, as inextricably bound with my being as the color of my eyes.

Nevertheless, writing is something for which I have long felt a sense of aspiration. I am a writer; I aspire to be a great one. But why? And what does it mean to be a great writer?

Let's start with the second question. For me, being a great writer certainly does not equate to being a financially successful one. Anyone possessing even a passing familiarity with literary history knows that many, perhaps even most, of the world's great writers—which is to say the ones that we still remember today, even though long dead—were not necessarily commercial or popular successes. In some cases, true enough, they may have achieved fame, and perhaps even fortune, but in many other cases, they labored in obscurity, never to enjoy the rewards either of money or of admiration, sometimes having very little of their work published during their lifetime.

It should seem obvious that only a certain type of writer would engage in an arduous, lifelong pursuit of the craft of writing regardless of what worldly rewards may (or may not) come. Many writers, especially in today's world, very much strive for "success", defined in commercial and popular terms. And there is certainly nothing wrong with doing so.

But there are other writers who regard their writing not so much a career as a sacrament, and who see the integrity and creative freedom of their work as sacred, money and popularity be damned. There is nothing wrong with that either.

As I have already indicated, I am the second type of writer. This type of writer cannot be overly concerned about achieving fame and fortune, indeed must be willing to give up all hope or expectation of ever achieving such measures of worldly success.

Then, one may well ask, why be a writer?

Well, as I said at the beginning, for this type of writer, writing is not so much a choice—certainly not a career choice—as it is an innate drive to express oneself, to give form to one's own idiosyncratic ideas and imagination, through the medium of language. (I am certainly not saying that more commercially-minded writers do not also feel this same desire for self-expression, and that that is not an important part of the reason they choose to pursue a writing career; but I would suggest that, as evidenced by the conventional style of most commercially successful fiction, and by the prioritization of values that commercial success itself implies, the drive to achieve an almost sacred purity of unique and unrepeatable expression is not as intense for these writers as it is for the more literary-minded ones.)

So, again, the question is not exactly the right one to ask. Literary writers, in a very real sense, do not have much of a choice about being writers. They may choose to use their talents, or to neglect them; but for them, the neglect of their gifts would be far more tragic and unbearable than would be arriving at the end of their life without ever having sold a single book or having won a single fan.

This is because, in a particularly deep way, writing is intrinsic to their being, and is a fulfillment of their being. I very much feel this way myself. For many years I did not make nearly as much use of my writing talents as I knew I was capable of doing, and this caused me to live with a quiet but profound sense of desperation. No matter how successful I may have appeared in other aspects of life—getting married, earning a graduate degree and embarking on a professional career, buying a house, becoming a parent—somewhere inside I felt deeply unfulfilled because I was not writing.

This was of course no one's fault but my own. Two years ago, after my marriage fell apart (but in a way that was only indirectly related to that event), I experienced a renaissance of my literary talents, and began composing poetry and fiction in a way that was more intense and inspired than I ever had before. I found that an idea for a novel which had been lingering in my head for 13 years suddenly exploded into brilliant life, and I was amazed to watch it flow through my fingers and onto the screen, complete, in just six weeks.

The moment after I typed the last sentence of my first novel, I felt myself overcome by a rare sense of breathless euphoria. It was not simply that I had at last written a "real" novel; it had nothing to do with feeling myself that much nearer to literary fame, much less fortune. It was not even the fact that I suddenly felt, for the first time in a lifetime of writing, like a real writer, proving at least to my own satisfaction that I had some genuine literary potential. It was, rather, the fact that I had given concrete form to my highest and truest personal vision—that I had just told a story that felt, to me anyway, powerful and beautiful and original, a story that only I could have told. The emotion was uncannily similar to what I felt when my daughter was born—and indeed, in some sense, I had just given birth—I had brought into existence something that was, in fact, unique and unrepeatable, just like a human being, and that had the potential (in whatever large or small way) to change the world into which I had brought it.

In a very real sense, the writing of the novel was its own reward. Of course, novels exist to be read; if not read, they might as well not exist. And this points to what is perhaps one of the defining features of literary writing—it is, above all else, not a commercial product, but a deeply meaningful and significant communication. I write because I wish to communicate, and because I wish to communicate something important. I am much better at expressing myself in writing than in speech, but that is not why I write. As I keep saying, I cannot help but write. It just so happens that writing is the vehicle through which I can most effectively express what I think and what I feel, and to show other people who I really am inside.

And I think part of my elation over completing The Bluebird of Happiness in the summer of 2012 was that I had at last given voice, in a much more powerful way than I ever had, to who I really am. That certainly does not mean that the novel is autobiographical. It just means that, no matter how fictional and imaginative it may be, it expresses something deeply real and vital about who I am. My goal was not to write a bestseller but simply to express myself in the truest and most powerful way I knew how. And when I reached the end, I knew beyond any doubt that I had done just that; and, for that reason, I felt immensely successful, and I exulted in my success. I had done what I had always dreamed of doing.

*

Almost two years have passed now since that glorious day, and the novel remains unpublished. This is largely because I have made hardly any effort at all to submit it to publishers. A small number of people have read the manuscript, and I know that at least one or two of them have been sincerely, strongly affected by it. I do not think it is a matter of pride as much as a sense of responsibility to my talents that makes me feel it is vitally important for me to have the novel published, to get it out there in a place where as many people as possible can have the opportunity to read it.

I am aware, perhaps too aware, of the novel's flaws (or at least what some may regard as flaws—I suppose it is a matter of artistic judgment and taste), but at this point I do not wish to attempt to change them, even if they are flaws. I do not mind having certain types of flaws in my novels to the extent that they may be seen as revealing flaws in the characters themselves, who I allow to tell most of the story in their own words, in their own way. Or, to the extent that the flaws in the novel can be regarded as my own, I do not entirely mind letting them be—as someone who has battled the crippling disease of perfectionism his whole life, I have become something of a champion of the strange beauty and power of imperfection in art.

But, while I cannot discount the fear of criticism and rejection (even as proud and cocky as I can sometimes, half-jokingly, be about my own talents), I do not think that is the fundamental reason for my procrastination. I think that, more to the point, I have a deep lack of faith in the publishing industry as it exists today. It is not even a matter of doubting that I will ever be able to make a living as a writer—no matter how talented I may be, no matter how well received by critics and reviewers. It has more to do with feeling that I, and my work, do not fit in anywhere in the current publishing system (other than, possibly, the relatively underground exposure of an indie publisher, or the oblivion of self-publishing).

On the one hand, I feel that Bluebird is perhaps just a little too strange and idiosyncratic to be truly popular (and therefore to seem like a good bet for a major publisher to take a chance on in today's bestseller-driven publishing climate). On the other hand, the story may seem perhaps just a little too narrative and emotional to satisfy many in the literary avant-garde. At least that is my own perception. I did not write to satisfy any particular audience, only to be true to my own vision. I expect that each of my succeeding novels may very well appear a bit more outré than the last; Rainbow, my second novel which is currently in production, is already a shade or two stranger (even to me) than its predecessor, and I feel that many of the other ideas I have for novels may very well prove, once written, to be outright bizarre, perhaps even incomprehensible, to most readers. I am not trying to be weird just for the sake of being weird; it is just that writing the kinds of stories I really want to write, and being true to the stories as they develop in my mind, turns out to be quite unlike most other stories that are being written, and certainly unlike the ones that are popular.

For this reason, I do not expect ever to become a popular (and therefore not a commercially successful) writer. But that has never been my goal. As I stated above, my goal is to be a great writer. And the fact is that great writers, though they may seem conventional to us (but only because we are familiar with their names and are taught them, sometimes, in school—not because we have actually read their works, which would no doubt shake us out of our complacency), are great in large part because they are strange. "Strange", of course, simply means that which is not familiar to us. And great writers are great because they write something new, something that no one else has ever written, something that no one else ever could write. So, for that reason, although I would never be so unseemly as to pronounce myself a great writer (I only said that I aspire to be one), I do feel that I at least have the potential to become one, if I continue to develop my talents and remain faithful to my gifts (and true to my vision). If nothing else, I feel that I am far more likely to become a great writer (meaning one who is read long after I am gone) than a "successful" one, if successful means selling a lot of books and having a large fan base.

In one of my blog posts from 2012, as I neared the end of Bluebird, I mentioned a certain philosopher named Gadamer who spoke of reading as producing a "fusion of horizons" between the author and the reader. That idea really speaks to me because, as I said, for me writing is primarily my way of communicating with the world. (As Emily Dickinson so beautifully put it, "This is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me.")

According to Gadamer's view, when I read, say, "Ode on Melancholy", a fusion is created between my "horizon" (or experience) and that of a certain Englishman named John Keats. In other words, despite the fact that we are separated by 200 years, Mr. Keats and I, in that moment, arrive at some shared experience, some shared understanding, of the world, and of life. To put it in (quite properly, in this case) poetic and romantic language, you might say that John's soul meets mine, and we have a moment of shared humanity, of brotherhood, of friendship in the dark world. That is indeed the true magic of literature. Writers you love are not just distant celebrities; they are friends—which is true even if they can never know you.

I often think, more than I do about any fantasy of having an ardent but small group of fans in the present day (as I have always imagined myself becoming a cult writer more than a literary superstar), those who may read my stories in future centuries. I imagine some other solitary soul, perhaps feeling lost in the world, coming across an old beat-up copy of The Bluebird of Happiness (or, perhaps more likely—though who really knows?—an electronic edition), and setting out to read it.

I imagine that she (I say she because, if the future is anything like the present, the majority of fiction readers will be women), this lone reader, as she quietly but raptly listens to the story I am telling her, will come to see something of the truth, and the goodness, and the beauty, that I, this man long since vanished from the earth, like a ghost bearing a message from the mists of time, am attempting to communicate to her. She will no doubt find the story a little strange, perhaps even more than my contemporaries did; but that is part of the experience of reading true literature. It expands you, startles you, makes you see things in a new and fresh way. I imagine that she might, at moments, and despite the distance in time and culture, laugh, and at other moments cry—both responses evidence of our common humanity, despite whatever separates us.

But most importantly, in the process of reading my long and complicated story about a group of imaginary people (who will nevertheless come to seem very real to her), her soul will be moved, and ultimately transformed. And when she reaches the end—perhaps finding herself emotionally devastated, or perhaps only quietly but deeply touched—she will feel that she has known me, and that I have told her something that is of vital and profound importance just for her. And, even more than knowing me—this stranger from the 21st century who has somehow, mysteriously, become her intimate friend—she will know herself just a little better; and she will feel just a little bit closer to understanding the strange, fearsome, but beautiful world we have the privilege of sharing; and she will feel, wonderfully, not quite so lost in it.

It is for her that I write.

I Saw The Best Minds Of My Generation Say "Nevermind"

River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Having made my first appearance on this earth in 1970, I fall squarely in the heart of a generation that has come to be labeled as "X". Let me tell you a little about us, in case you don't know.

We grew up watching lots of TV. Many of us were the children of hippies, far too many the children of divorce, all of us the children of a tomorrow that never quite arrived.

In our adult lives we have been accused of not growing up, of not showing up, of not making a contribution (especially in our country's economic and political life), of rejecting the American Dream and retreating into a world of nostalgia, irony, and cynicism.

Yeah, whatever. Never mind.

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Of course every generation is made up of individuals, and many of those individuals, consciously or not, give voice to their generation's experience through art. Perhaps I have thought about this more than most of my fellow Gen X creative types since I am one of those odd writers who has the gall to harbor "literary" aspirations, but over the years I have often wondered whether and how my writing is a reflection and an expression, not just of myself and my own life, but of my generation and its collective experience on this earth. I certainly do not consciously think of myself as a "Gen X writer". But of course I am one by default, and, like any person near my age who is making any type of artistic work, someone in the future who happens across my writings might rightfully view them as an example of my generation's artistic expression.

All good and well, and not really saying that much. But what I wonder sometimes is this: is there any particular way in which my stories (to focus on just fiction here) will communicate to any future readers something essential and important about what it was like to be a member of this lost American generation?

When I first conceived of the novel that eventually became The Bluebird of Happiness, back in 1999 (it was originally titled The Terrible Blue), I thought of it as being a sort of postmodern epic. I did not think of it as being a "Gen X novel", whatever that might mean. In fact, at first it was going to be set in the future, perhaps sometime in the middle of the 21st century. However, by 2003 I had decided to set it in the present day, perhaps realizing at some level that it was actually today's world, and today's people, that I was interested in writing about in this particular story.

Even though the story is about people close to my own age, I did not set out to write a novel for or about my generation. If anything, I thought that the characters would prove too idiosyncratic and eccentric, too much the exception to the rule, to stand as Gen X everymen and -women. On the whole, they do not very closely resemble most Gen X characters you've seen in movies, all the flannel-clad slackers, all the tattooed, pierced, and hair-dyed punks, all the drifting postcollegiate clueless types.

But it's not like they are entirely dissimilar either. My characters may not be stereotypical Gen X-ers, but they still share much of the experience, outlook, and mindset that characterize many of the people close to my age that I've known, including of course myself. It was rather inevitable that they would.

I did not even realize this until recently (a realization that inspired this blog post), but I can see now that one way in which not only Bluebird but almost all of my stories and story ideas seem to reflect my generation is in a sense of lostness, and the related experience of longing for and searching for home.

In the last decade I have noticed how this idea of lostness and home-seeking is a recurring theme in my writing. For a long time I thought of it as something deeply personal, which it is, but now I am beginning to see it as also being something that is deeply generational (and at a further level, of course, it is also deeply human, but I had already guessed that).

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I think that my generation has felt this sense of lostness in a particular and particularly keen way. I am not sure of all the reasons why, though many theories have been offered. I'm sure you've heard them all before. We were the children of divorce. We were the latchkey kids. We were raised by television. We entered adulthood with a pervasive sense that the American Dream was not for us. The list goes on.

These may all offer partial explanations, but only partial. I'm no sociologist, but I doubt that any sociological study could ever uncover all of the reasons for Gen X's peculiar outlook on life. History is far more complex than the easy answers would lead us to believe (whether it's the boomers saying "you're just lazy and apathetic and cynical" or their children retorting with "you cheated us out of the American Dream; you undermined your own authority; you let us all down"). Historians today still debate the causes of Rome's decline and fall, and it will never be decisively settled why Generation X was, well, Generation X.

Nevertheless, that is what we are. For better and for worse. And as a writer of my generation, though I am not consciously a writer "for" my generation, I may still find myself, at whatever small and humble scale, inadvertently and unwittingly speaking for it in my own idiosyncratic way (what other way is there for an X-er to speak?), and showing at least some of the "better" part. We've heard the "worse" part ad nauseam.

My characters, especially the major ones, may not precisely resemble most members of the slacker set. But they share with them a loss of faith in the American Dream. They share a sense of drifting and lostness and wandering through adult life, with no place to call home, with no clear conception or plan for the future, just trying to get by and to figure it all out. They share a heightened sense of individualism, of rebellion against or rejection of conventional roles and expectations about how one should live one's life and what values one should hold.

As someone in Clueless put it: "You say that like it's a bad thing!" Exactly. In my stories, I say it like it's a good thing. Not that loss of faith is necessarily good in itself, but surely, as painful as it might be, loss of faith in illusion is. Not that feeling lost is an unqualified good, but just maybe, longing for home (of which nostalgia is a primary manifestation) is a good and noble sentiment, not a disease, and one that might lead us somewhere good. Trying to get through life on your own terms, trying to build a hardscrabble existence for yourself from the scattered debris of the post-everything wasteland--that takes determination and ingenuity and yes, even faith, that belies our cynical "slacker" reputation.

The particular lifestyles and philosophies chosen by my characters will undoubtedly appear strange even to many members of my own generation. I already knew that. But what is new to me is the realization that, despite their unusual qualities, they are still in many ways representative of Generation X. I have never thought of my writing as being particularly "American" or "Gen X", but I guess to some degree my stories can't help but reflect the time and the place from which I write, the specific historical moment and generational culture in which I live, move, and have my being.

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I mentioned that Bluebird was originally conceived as a "postmodern" epic. What does that mean, exactly? Well, that's a good question. I think it gets to a lot of the heart of what Gen X's experience is all about (a pop culture image that comes to mind is the late 80s show rather redundantly titled Postmodern MTV). Besides being a fancy academic term mainly used in philosophy and literature departments, "postmodern" also describes--or fails to describe, at least adequately--a cultural condition, which in my mind includes American life from roughly the 1960s to, arguably, the present.

Today "midcentury modern" is in vogue (I'm a big fan myself, as are many members of my generation and many of our Millennial counterparts). As I elucidated in an earlier post where I described it as a sort of American Classicism, midcentury modernism reflected and expressed a more optimistic time in American history, a time which anticipated a bright future despite the dark clouds that loomed over the cold war-era U.S.

As a child in the seventies, I basked in the twilight glow of this already fading vision of tomorrow, full of wondrous notions about the futuristic world that lay ahead when I was all grown up in the year 2000--the year Two Thousand! So far away... yet I would live to see it! When the year 2000 actually arrived, however, I looked around at the world and said, "What the hell happened to the future?"

Modernism, not just of the midcentury variety but the very concept, implies an idea of historical progress. It contains the notion that the present is, at least in some ways, better than the past, and that the future will be better still. America lost much of this faith starting in the sixties, just as my generation started coming into the world. We, the children of this era, bore much of the brunt of this collective loss of faith.

I don't think it happened all in one moment. It happened incrementally, in a thousand little ways and a few big ones. Perhaps one such moment, if you're one of the older X-ers, was when you saw Richard Nixon waving goodbye, the first President in American history to resign in disgrace. Perhaps another was when you saw the helicopter airlifting people from Saigon, and feeling, in some childish but painful way, with an unreasonable sense of shame and humiliation, what it meant that the United States of America had just lost a war, a war that most people had stopped believing in and for which all too many members of our parents' generation had been sacrificed.

Or perhaps it was when, after all the scary arguments, your parents did the scariest thing of all and announced that they were getting something called a divorce, and you felt the fabric of your universe ripped apart forever. Or maybe you were one of the lucky ones whose parents stayed together, but every time they argued you couldn't help but wonder: Will my family be next?

At some point along the way, amid the steady stream of TV shows and pop songs, people stopped believing in the future. We felt somehow, deep down and in ways we could neither understand nor explain, that something immense had been lost. The old America, whatever that was, was gone. We simply couldn't believe in it anymore, as much as we might have wanted to.

It wasn't that we were unpatriotic. We were disillusioned. Disappointed. We may not have fully realized that we were, at least not until much later, but we were. It was in the air we breathed. People became increasingly cynical, jaded, too cool for school. When I say people I mean especially 70s and 80s teenagers. Nirvana made such a big splash in 1991 because they expressed so simply yet eloquently what teens had been feeling for some time, summed up in the phrase: "Whatever, nevermind."

*

It is easy to see now that we were children who had been burned. Even those of us, like myself, who had mainly happy childhoods could not help but be affected by the social and cultural climate in which we dwelt. Even if our own families remained intact, our world did not. It was a time of unraveling. The old certainties were disappearing fast, like yesterday's flowers.

And, like all children who have been burned, we went into self-protective mode. We weren't going to be burned again; we weren't going to be fooled; we were too smart for all that. Grow up and get a life? Ha! What a joke. Get real.

We distrusted authority, all the government, business, religious, and parental authorities who had let us down, who had dropped us when we needed support. To make matters worse, in the late 80s and early 90s, as most of us were coming of age, we began hearing dark prophecies about how our generation was basically doomed: The first generation in America not to do better than its parents. We would never own a house. We would, in essence, struggle to get by all our lives and then die. Great. Awesome. Not that we were necessarily shocked. I mean, it figures, right? (This was, not coincidentally, when the media began labeling us as "X". I like to think it makes us sound mysterious, but I digress.)

U.S. economic history since the end of the cold war has done little to prove such prophecies false (despite a rather good run in the late 90s). Of course, we are not the only generation to have suffered from the country's ongoing economic woes. But it seems to have hit us, from the early 90s recession to today, in a way that has made it incredibly difficult and frustrating for many of us to get our lives off the ground, as much as we earnestly try.

In saying all this, I am not saying that Gen X's woes are "all your fault" (baby boomers, the world, whoever). I am only outlining some of the ways in which we have been shaped by our experience. Like any generation, we can rightly be faulted in many ways. There is no need for me to go into those ways here since, as I said, they have already been loudly proclaimed ad nauseam. My whole point in relating this sad history is to help illustrate what I perceive as the direct relationship between Gen X's experience and life in postmodern times.

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What does postmodern mean, in this context? It means post-faith in progress. Post-faith in America, or at least in its much-vaunted Dream. Post-faith in authority. Post-faith in you name it: marriage, love, career, money, success, politics, religion, changing the world, making a difference, having a good and fulfilling life, happiness. What's the point?

Cynicism and irony became the order of the day. Everything was said with an attitude of "Yeah, right." We became skeptics par excellence, coolly playing with the surfaces and signs of pop culture (a postmodern trait if ever there was one), remixing, reviving, doing it ourselves, going all indie and alternative on everything. Many of us adopted a punk outlook or some variation thereof, adapting the style and expression of an earlier British generation of disaffected youth to our own circumstances (Generation X had, in fact, been the name of an English punk band, though that is not the term's ultimate origin).

Underneath this apparent nihilism, however, I believe there lurked, and is slowly emerging, something more sincere. Yes, we were burned and we crawled into our self-protective holes, but within those holes we felt, as much as we might like to deny it, the yearning to emerge, to believe in life, to dream big. It is only human to do so, and even Gen X-ers are human.

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The phenomenon that I think most powerfully and tellingly belies my generation's seeming nihilism is its nostalgia. Of course, in the 90s especially, this nostalgia was viewed and was indeed experienced as being ironic. We were just having fun, making fun of all the cheesy elements of past pop culture eras (I am guilty of this myself, having recorded in the early 90s a number of faux disco songs in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way). We pretended to like Tony Bennett. I mean, Tony Bennett. How much more ironic can it get... right?

Well, slackers, I hate to tell you this, but maybe you're not being as ironic and clever as you like to think. Maybe, deep down, you actually like this stuff. Sure, it can only be taken so seriously, but it is pop culture, after all. It's meant to be fun. But why can't we just admit that Tony Bennett, and disco, are fun? And just leave it at that?

Oh, that's right... because we're too cool for school. Or for enjoyable, happy, heartfelt music. We're too cool to believe in things, to really believe. All that's left is to laugh--at ineptly produced and directed b-movies, at ridiculously sentimental and overproduced lounge singers, at giddy, over-the-top disco music and fashions. Sure, you can laugh. It's healthy to laugh, because human beings are pretty funny creatures.

But we're also serious creatures, creatures that feel real and really deep needs and desires and longings, and it's okay to feel those things too. It's okay to admit that maybe you actually do want things like love and home and happiness... but that would require believing in them. And that lack of faith, I believe, that lack of faith in the possibilities of life--individual, social, or political life--is exactly what has held my generation back, more than anything else.

We have registered this lack of faith in a million little ways, ways that are particular to each individual. Faith in various things has certainly been a tremendous struggle for me, and I am far from alone. Even at this late date, when we are entering or approaching middle age, many of us still find it a struggle to believe--to really believe--in the possibilities of life. We are too used to withdrawing in despair and in contempt of the dreams that society offers us, and putting on a tough face, a jaded resignation to our fate.

I admit that it is a struggle for me even to write such words--do I really, truly believe that such faith is justified? I expect that many members of my generation will never overcome their lack of faith in life--we often find ourselves stunned and perplexed at the optimism and idealism of many Millennials--like, what world did you grow up in?--but I, for one, would hate to see our lack of faith come to be the final word about my generation. Or about me.

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What I see below the surface irony of our nostalgia--often, but of course not always, directed toward the era of our childhood, centering on the 1970s--is something more sincere. I think that, at some deep subconscious level, we long for home. The word nostalgia actually means something like "longing for home"--a painful, aching sense that one has been displaced, and a deeply felt, if not always fully conscious, desire to return there.

One of my favorite literary critics, Sven Birkerts, once wrote an essay called "American Nostalgias", in which he put forth the notion that our endless recycling of the past--in movies, music, advertisements, clothing, you name it--essentially functions as a salve created by (post)modern capitalism on the wounds that it has itself created. That is to say, since multinational corporatism has been busy "effacing the cultural memory of entire nations" (in the words of Tom Frank, quoted by Birkerts), it offers us the drug of packaged and consumable nostalgia in order to divert us from the real pain we would feel--real pain that might pose the threat of real pain to their profit margins--if we squarely faced the cultural emptiness and devastation created by the march of materialistic "progress".

What I am getting at is that the nostalgia of Gen X--indeed, one of our defining features--is far more than just another exercise in "smart", knowing, winking, nudge nudge, pop culture irony. It is, I firmly believe, the symptom of a profound longing. And this longing, as is the case with all nostalgias, is for home.

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What is the home for which we long? Perhaps it is the home we never had. Or the home that was exploded to smithereens by divorce. Or perhaps it was an older America, one that we never quite knew but only saw the last dying vestiges of as we moved forward into an uncertain and unknown future.

I had a pretty stable home life, but my family moved around quite a bit. We always stayed in the same area, but there is no one place that I can remember definitively as "home"--to this day, I am not even sure what my hometown is (other than Tampa, the city in which I never actually lived as I was growing up, but around which my life orbited). I have always been deeply impressed somehow by those few friends of mine who grew up in the same house their whole lives.

I was also in touch with the deep Florida roots of my maternal relatives, who had been in the state for several generations, but I feel now that I experienced the fading remnants of an older way of life, one that was even then being marginalized by the inexorable march of "progress".

The art historian Germain Bazin wrote: "Only when men sense the waning of a civilization do they suddenly become interested in its history." In one of my library school papers, I referred to Bazin's notion of the historical sense, based on the notion of time passing (as opposed to older communitarian notions of cyclical time), which brings with it a sense of displacement or lostness, of which nostalgia is a primary manifestation. This temporal homesickness makes us feel "like atoms lost in vast empires, no longer citizens but subjects". This, to me, indicates the primary cause of nostalgia: a sense of loss.

Generation X indeed feels, perhaps more than most generations even in the modern industrialized world, a sense of loss, of "temporal homesickness". Our nostalgia, though superficially ironic, is actually one of the most visible symptoms of our sense of what we have lost. It is hardly coincidental that our nostalgia has focused so heavily on the era of our childhood. Though often merely for fun, our nostalgic forays into the 60s, 70s, and 80s may sometimes lead us, if only in private moments, into the realm of bittersweetness, of inexpressible longing, of what the Germans call Sehnsucht, a deep and aching yearning for who knows what--something we can't name or describe, but a longing which we nevertheless feel viscerally and painfully. 

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We are all creatures of our time and place more than we realize. Although I think there is something universal in my characters (a universality that coexists with their eccentricity), they are also, at one level, symbols of my generation. I did not intend for them to be such, and did not think of them as such until lately. But I am starting to see that my almost obsessive focus on the theme of lostness and home, not just in these two related stories (Bluebird and "Rainbow", both of whose titles reference The Wizard of Oz) but in my writing generally, is at least in part a result of being born in the particular time and place I was, and perhaps marks me to a greater extent than I realized as a "Generation X writer".

The fiction produced by my generation has been called "X literature", and has also been linked to the concept of the "post-postmodern". (Yes, that's two posts.) Postmodern fiction was primarily the domain of baby boomers and even older writers, but Gen X inherited and lived the ethos of cultural postmodernism more than any other generation. It was a sense that all the old values had gone out the window, and that we now lived in a world that was, in a very real sense, meaningless. We felt ourselves to be living, so to speak, after the end of the world. You know... post-everything. The only thing that was left to do was party, using the leftovers of American culture and recycling them in our own individualized and creative ways.

But "post-postmodernism", other than being a highly unwieldy and unfortunate term, may actually indicate the way forward for, and the saving grace of, Generation X. It has been a standing question at least since the 90s as to exactly what shall succeed the colorful but ultimately arid world of postmodernism. My generation is in a unique position to supply an answer. Some attempts have already been made--the post-postmodern has in turn been linked to such concepts as "the new sincerity", for example--but no dominant cultural movement, or moment, has yet emerged.

One popular book on postmodernism concludes that the only cure for postmodernism is "the incurable disease of Romanticism". Romanticism, if nothing else, was sincere. Sincerity would indeed seem to be the best and only answer to the spiritual emptiness and cool, ironic detachment of postmodernism. Romanticism was all about believing in things--as my character Thomas Fairchild says, "I’m a Romantic because I believe in all the things that no one else believes in."

I think that, despite our reputation, Generation X really believes in things. We have ideals. The cynic and the pessimist are only idealists who have been burned. Gen X has been burned, but the core of our being, the hopeful children who were disappointed and disillusioned, remains.

The crisis of my generation boils down to a crisis of faith. It's really that simple. We didn't deserve to be born into the crazy time that we were. We didn't deserve it when our families, or our communities, or our country or our world, broke apart. We can be forgiven for losing faith, for having doubts. But we can't stay there. Not if we want to make the most of our one and only time on this earth.

I know that many of my peers, now facing middle age, will never recover from those wounds and will live out the rest of their lives in pessimism and cynicism. But I hope, and I dare to believe, that that is not the fate of most of my generation. I have seen too much potential, and too much beauty, in us to be okay with that. It's not like we have to buy the old dreams, the ones that are no longer viable in the 21st century. We can create new ones... diy, indie, alternative dreams that are ours. Many of us are already doing that, and we have become adept at doing that. We still have a chance to leave behind a legacy other than saying, "Never mind."

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When it comes down to it, my generation has never really felt at home, and we often feel like we will never really be at home. It's hard to even know what home means, though we know it somehow, intuitively, in our dreams. We are trying to create home in our lives right now, modeling our efforts after some vision that we never saw in real life. Perhaps we saw it on TV. But our efforts give away the fact that, somehow, miraculously, we haven't completely lost our faith.

As for me, I will continue to write stories that express my own experience of life, which will naturally reflect at least a small part of my generation's experience. I will continue to seek home, largely through telling stories about seeking home, and hopefully my stories might awaken just a little more of the dreams, and the faith in dreams, of at least a few of my homeless wandering cohorts. The Gen X-ers I know are creative, intelligent, resourceful, and strong people. And they are beautiful. It's been a hard journey for many of us. I don't know where we are going, or even really where there is to go, but there's no generation I'd rather be going there with.

We are somewhere in the middle of our story right now. It hasn't all been written. Yes, we are the disinherited stepchildren of post-everything America, or at least we have always felt ourselves to be. That has been our narrative thus far. But we still have a chance to create, and tell, a different story, or rather to take our story in new and unexpected directions, to give it a better ending than the bleak gloom-and-doom tale of woe that we have often felt fated to live out. In my mind Generation X possesses a sleeping grandeur that may yet awake. Call me a blind optimist, but I like to think that our best days are still ahead, and that, late bloomers that we are, our finest hour still awaits. All the people who didn't believe in us, who left us for dead... we will show them. We will show up. We will do it ourselves, in our own unique way, the way that only Xers can do.

Something in me wants to qualify what I've said above, feeling a tad embarrassed that maybe I'm being too sincere and sentimental.

But you know what? Whatever. Never mind.