It's All About Me

The subject of a future autobiographical novel?

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, “I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.”

As more of life goes by, the more I realize that one of the questions which fascinates me the most is that of how much we can know another human being, and indeed how much we can know ourselves. I think of it as the ultimate mystery of the human soul. We can never fully know the vast, dark reaches of our own interior being, the murky, mysterious inner space of our memories, dreams, imaginations, and subconscious and unconscious longings, fears, and desires—let alone that of another human being.

Nevertheless, knowing ourselves and knowing others are two of the most fundamental projects of human existence. But these are not projects that can ever be completely fulfilled. When we think that we fully know who someone else is, or even that we fully know who we ourselves are, we are hopelessly deluded.

This mystery of the human soul, I am realizing, has become one of the major themes of my writing. It was more than suggested in The Bluebird of Happiness, and will be even more fully brought out and explored in “Rainbow”. In the latter novel, I am also attempting to explore the ways in which our conception of others and of ourselves is based on our own perception and imagination. But the question might also be asked: is there in fact anything more to our identities than this?

As with Bluebird, I will not attempt to provide any definitive answers to the philosophical questions raised by the story. And, as with the former novel, I do hope to provide some intriguing suggestions and possibilities that readers might wish to further explore on their own.

One thing that is an ever-present challenge to the fiction writer is getting inside the head of another human being (or, in some cases, another sentient being, even if not human). In reality, we only have access to our own inner experience, and to write about a fictional character (no matter how autobiographical the character might appear to be) requires a tremendous act of the imagination.

To some degree, however, writers can only write about themselves. That is to say, even when writing about purely imaginary characters who bear little resemblance to themselves, the character’s thoughts, feelings, and experience must be imagined by the author, and this imagining must necessarily occur through the filter of, and must necessarily be informed by, the author’s own thoughts, feelings, and experience. After all, our own experience is the only experience to which we have any access.

So, even though some of my characters may appear to be more autobiographical than others, in some sense they are all autobiographical—and, at the same time, they are all perfectly imaginary. Whether I am writing about young passionate poetic men, or old dour disillusioned men; about beautiful baroque women, or wide-eyed little girls; about misunderstood man-apes or vampiristic voluptuaries; about bizarre business executives or perfectly ordinary Martians—in each case, no matter how fanciful the creature, he, she, or it is always, inevitably, a reflection and expression of its creator, even if only of its creator's wildest dreams or darkest fears.

Everything Old Is New Again

I have decided that the "Rainbow" novel is definitely about Martin Lane, who played the main supporting actor role in Bluebird. The idea of writing a novel with Martin as the protagonist is actually far from a new concept.

My original conceptions of Martin go back to 1997, although it wasn't until 2003 that he emerged as a definite character that I intended to write about. At the time, I imagined him as the main character in what was then called The Terrible Blue (eventually The Bluebird of Happiness). This was part of a radical re-imagining of the novel that up until then had been the story of Thomas Fairchild. Martin actually remained the main character as late as November 2011--only six months before my final grand vision of Bluebird--at which time I decided to revert to the original idea of having the novel revolve around Thomas.

However, while there is nothing new about the basic idea of writing a novel with Martin Lane as the protagonist, "Rainbow" is for all practical purposes an entirely new conception, and bears little resemblance to my earlier ideas of Martin's story. As I mentioned before, when "Rainbow" began forming in my imagination not even two weeks ago, I at first wasn't even sure if it was going to be about Martin. However, as time has gone on it has become more and more clear to me that it is about Martin, and that it can only be about him. That realization makes so much sense, has made everything fall into place, and is also just a very exciting idea to me. I feel that I am seeing a fuller and richer vision of who Martin Lane is, and there is so much there to explore.

I mentioned earlier that "Rainbow" bore a close resemblance to Bluebird, which initially made me concerned that I risked falling into the predicament of writing essentially the same story again and again. I am no longer worried about that. True, "Rainbow" and Bluebird do share many similar features and qualities, not the least of which being that they share some of the same characters. However, even though it involves the same fictional world, "Rainbow" has its own very distinct feeling. I think this is because each story reflects the "soul" of its main character. In Bluebird, one gets inside the head of Thomas Fairchild; in "Rainbow", one will get inside the head of Martin Lane. Because of this, each novel has its own unique vibe--emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic. In short, each novel has its own "personality", reflective of the personality of its main character.

(This makes me wonder about the exact relationship between my characters and myself, which is beginning to seem all the more fascinating, perplexing, and mysterious to me now. But that is a topic best saved for its own separate post.)

In the same way that Bluebird possessed, in my imagination, a strange power and mystery (which I was hopefully able to convey in the work itself), "Rainbow" has its own strange power and mystery, different from that of Bluebird. Like its predecessor, "Rainbow" is, in my own mind, a work that is musical, visionary, and ecstatic. It is a different music, a different vision, and a different ecstasy, and will express a different myth than the one told by Bluebird.

Oz, the quintessential American fairyland, was a prominent motif in Bluebird, but "Rainbow" will further develop that motif. Long before I actually wrote Bluebird, I had begun developing my own private mythology and symbolism of Oz in relation to the story. However, this was brought out only partially in the first novel. One thing "Rainbow" will allow me to do is more fully to explore and express my personal Oz mythos.

I am beginning to realize, too, that one thing I am very interested in doing as a writer is to show the endless mystery of human beings. Although much more will be revealed about Martin Lane than in the first book, he will not really be explained. In fact, if I am successful, he will seem even more mysterious at the end than he does at the beginning. I hope and believe that Thomas Fairchild and his experience were left more mysterious at the end of Bluebird, and I hope and believe that the same will be true of Martin Lane at the end of "Rainbow". As with all knowledge, the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know. This is truer of nothing more than it is of human beings.

"Rainbow" is largely about Martin Lane coming to know himself. Like the reader, he will know much more about himself at the end, but, also like the reader, one thing he will have learned about himself is what a wondrous and mysterious, and never fully knowable, creature he really is.

A Tale of Two Tales

Okay, I feel like I'm going somewhere again. First of all, "V" is not lost. It was like a star that got too big, too massive, and finally collapsed in upon itself. But the core remains, and it now seems purified. What I realized is that many parts of that grand construction were not essential to that particular story, and began to feel like so much dead weight, making the task of writing it feel unnecessarily burdensome. And that's the opposite of inspiration. I realized that many of those individual parts might work better elsewhere, and some were perhaps not necessary at all, mere filler. I made a list of what I felt to be the essential elements of "V", and after looking at it, I felt much better. It now seems much more clear, a simpler, smaller-scale, but more aesthetically unified idea.

I had always thought of that story as being one of my mid-length fictional works, perhaps a novella or a short novel at most (it was originally, in fact, only a short story), not the overblown epic it was somehow evolving into. I already have two ideas for truly epic novels, stories which can only exist in epic form because of their very nature, and I don't need to give myself more work than is necessary in this short and distracted life. After all, Homer wrote two epics, and that is more than most authors have done. I'll feel incredibly grateful and fulfilled if I am able to complete my two epic novels before I leave this earth.

(I should note that I have described Bluebird as an epic, and I suppose it is in some sense, but it is of fairly standard novel length and would be dwarfed by these other two works.)

Now for the new novel idea... its working title, as I have said, is "Rainbow". This is a reference to The Wizard of Oz. I'm not sure yet if the actual title will contain the word "rainbow" or not; we'll see.

The idea of this novel being a companion piece to Bluebird is becoming stronger. I am thinking that the protagonist may very well be Martin Lane, the best male friend of Thomas Fairchild, Bluebird's main character. I can't help but think of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and how the best friend of the first novel's protagonist became the main character of the latter novel.

It would not be a sequel, nor a prequel. It may overlap in time. But I am actually not overly concerned with continuity. In fact, I'm not particularly concerned to go out of my way to avoid apparent contradictions or irresolvable, differing accounts. I am thinking of these stories as myths, and my characters as mythic figures. As in ancient myths, many varying tales were told about gods and heroes, and it would have been difficult if not impossible to put them all together into a coherent whole. That's okay because myth is poetry, not history. It tells truth in a symbolical way, and by circumventing the literal accounts of science and history, it can access aspects of reality and truth otherwise invisible or incommunicable.

Like Bluebird (indeed, perhaps like every novel I shall write), "Rainbow" is philosophical. If The Bluebird of Happiness was primarily about, as its title would suggest, happiness and the possibility thereof, then "Rainbow" is primarily about beauty, and its significance in human life. If Bluebird was a tragedy, then "Rainbow" is more of a fairy tale. But, as in all fairy tales, there will be much darkness to overcome.

Weather Changes

So here's the deal. The story affectionately known as "V" has reached a standstill, and at this point its future is uncertain. Again, for me and my writing process, this is nothing unusual. In fact, there have been many occasions in the past when I have had to "retire" a particular story idea that I had been working on, in some cases for years. Such a retirement is always provisional, however. After all, I once retired the story concept that eventually became my first novel, The Bluebird of Happiness. It was at a point when the story idea (then known as The Terrible Blue) was already seven years old and didn't seem to be going anywhere... but in another six years it would finally emerge, almost overnight, in a supernova of inspiration. So you never know how these things will evolve. Sometimes things just have to develop in their own good time, and you can't force it if it's not the right time.

My story "retirements" are often conceived not as throwing out the story idea altogether so much as "deconstructing" it. In other words, I wish to preserve the best ideas from it for possible re-use later, either in a revived version of the same story (as happened with Bluebird) or in another story entirely (or perhaps various ideas from the original concept will pop up here and there in a number of different stories).

In any case, there is a more positive side to what is happening right now. It is not merely that "V" has lost some of its inspiration. Rather, a new inspiration has been slowly but surely displacing it. It is as though a nebulous mass of low pressure weather has begun pushing out the bright, high pressure air of "V". I sense some dark fugue arising in my imagination, still in the earliest stages of formation, taking on only dimly perceptible shapes, but with an undeniable mounting energy and the promise of great power, like the low rumbling of distant thunder. Like Bluebird in its final inspiration, it has the feeling of music and of hieratic, dreamlike vision. When I feel the story as music and as visionary image at least as much as narrative, I know it is mine.

One thing I can already say about this new story concept--it does not yet have a title, but I'm temporarily referring to it as "Rainbow"--is that it bears strong resemblances to Bluebird (to the point where I am wondering if it may in fact be a related story involving some of the characters from the earlier novel). At the very least, there are definite similarities in terms of character types, settings, themes, and feelings. This makes me worry, of course, that writing what comes most naturally to me, what most inspires me, will mean writing the same story over and over, albeit in different variations.

However, when you think about it, many great authors have carved out a niche for themselves by writing multiple stories and novels that largely involve the same general type of setting, characters, themes, etc.--one only need think of Jane Austen, for instance, or Henry James, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, and any number of other novelists whose works, despite their individual variations and unique qualities, display an overall aesthetic and thematic unity that stamps them with the distinctive mark of their creators.

So perhaps being true to my muse will mean creating a canon of works that bear the strong, distinctive mark of their author and of his peculiar obsessions, tastes, and notions, so that someday people might say, "that's like something out of a Steven Holland story". At least, that is how I like to flatter myself.

Right now, all I know is that I feel like Dorothy, having just left Professor Marvel's house, as the first storm winds begin to blow, with the promise of some wondrous and magical Oz waiting to be discovered on the other side of the cyclone.

On Coming Down from the Heights

Artistic inspiration is such a strange thing. Even though I have had a few different bursts of inspiration with regard to "V", it seems to go in cycles. I get this magnificent vision, and then my enthusiasm slowly fades... and then another grand new vision, taking the story to a whole new and previously unforeseen level, followed by yet another fade, and so on....

I actually haven't done much writing in the past month or so, and honestly I've been tempted with the idea of just setting “V” aside for awhile and taking up one of my many other literary ideas. Or maybe focusing on music for a bit instead of writing. Maybe I just need a break from it.

This more up-and-down, slow-going kind of process, unfortunately, is far more typical, not just for me but surely for most writers, than what happened last summer when I wrote The Bluebird of Happiness in a 6-week sustained burst of fiery, deeply inspired passion (which totally surprised me both in its duration of intensity and in its endless fecundity). I felt a lot of pain during that obsessive writing process, but now it seems more than worth it, because that pain was inseparable from the inspiration.

This reminds me of something Nietzsche said: "Indispensable ... to the lover is his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference." I don't know if I'm exactly indifferent to the passion that inspired Bluebird, but it does feel now like I was on top of a mountain last summer--alone in a vast, cold emptiness, yet in possession of a sublime and ecstatic vision--and that since then I have gradually come down from that high, sometimes slogging through black swamps of uninspired depression, barren fields of numbness, and finally arriving on a plain of gentle calm.

The calm is more conducive to functioning in the "real" world and being able to focus on all of my many interests other than the relatively narrow range of obsessions and passions that drove me to write Bluebird. But it is far less conducive to writing something that feels as truly inspired and powerful as that felt. I suppose it is unrealistic to expect that writing can always be like that. I knew at the time that it was highly unusual, and that many writers perhaps never experience that level of inspiration at all. Perhaps I should count myself lucky that it happened even once.

But in a way I think I will always long for a repeat of that experience. I already feel a sense of nostalgia for that story and its characters, which may seem funny because it hasn't even been published and most people haven't read it yet. When I look back on it, it feels comforting and deeply satisfying, to know that I accomplished something of which I didn’t quite know I was capable, and which stands as the greatest fulfillment of my talents thus far. But it is a source of joy also in that it reminds me of something I discovered myself to be, a vision of my best and greatest self, and it helps me remember who I really am. As I said at the time, it felt like a distillation of my soul, and like I was exploring and expressing the heights and depths and breadth of reality as I knew it, my grandest ideals of truth and beauty.

I think that this quality alone will make The Bluebird of Happiness one of my personal best no matter what else I write. Not every work can be on that level, I know. Artists' work, at its best, is about trying to express their most dazzling vision, the extremes of what they are capable of perceiving, knowing, experiencing, and feeling. It's a constant struggle to climb that mountain of inspiration and vision, to see something wondrous and majestic and to communicate it to others. Sometimes, as happened to me last summer, the muse carries you up there with her glorious wings and doesn't let go till you've bled your last drop, and then returns you slowly and gently to the mortal realm. Maybe I just need some more time to recover before I'm ready for another such journey that near to heaven.

The Strange Evolution of Tales

Well, V has been in holding pattern for awhile, but for good reason: the story itself, that is, not in its details but in its very essence, is still evolving. But it is indeed evolving, rapidly and dramatically and in quite unexpected directions.

If there is one thing I have learned as a fiction writer, it is that stories, the truest and best stories I am capable of writing, must write themselves at least as much as I write them. This is definitely what happened with Bluebird, and it is what I am allowing to happen with V. Bluebird sat for two months between my latest and greatest vision for the story and the start of the actual writing. What I have discovered in the last month is that V is not quite at the point of being ready to be written. It is in the process of letting me know what it is.

And I can tell you that this unfolding revelation is nothing if not surprising. The story as I imagine it now bears only a minor resemblance to the story I originally conceived six years ago. That story was born at a much different time in my life and reflected my life at that time. Out of necessity, it is being drastically reshaped to reflect my life at this time, and this process is being guided not so much by my conscious effort as by the powerful gravitational force of the world in which I currently live.

The science fiction element of the story is becoming far less central, although it will undoubtedly remain important, since the whole concept of the tale has to do with eros and cosmos. But the space travel elements are moving more into the background, as a sort of underlying context, giving a greater stage to the earthbound, human aspect of the story.

In fact, one critical item I am still not sure about is the exact relationship between the two parallel narratives: on the one hand, the space exploration program, and on the other hand, the protagonist's life story. As in some postmodern novels, I am starting to feel that perhaps the two narratives will exist in different orders of reality that bear an ambiguous relationship to each other and to objective historical truth. I also am starting to feel that, whatever the relationship between the narratives might be, I don't need to be overly concerned with attempting to explain it, or even fully to understand it myself. After all, it is not history I am writing, but poetry.

To further complicate matters, a third narrative is suggesting itself to me. What makes this one particularly interesting is that it involves Thomas Fairchild, the protagonist of The Bluebird of Happiness, thus creating a link between the two novels without making V an actual sequel. I had already been thinking that Thomas's poetic masterpiece would be referenced in the fictional future of V, but now that element is becoming much more prominent. I am starting to think that part of the story will entail the protagonist conducting research into Thomas's life and work and the relation between the two, in an attempt to understand his own situation.

In any case, what I have realized the most is that I am not so interested in the science fictional elements as I am in the more earthly, realistic, and human elements. This is perhaps because I have discovered in recent times that real life is far stranger and more fascinating than any fantasy we can devise.

It Helps To Know People

The first draft of the beginning of V has found its way to the scrap heap. This is hardly surprising; I half expected it. It's just part of the writing process. I made a new start the other day, just typing up a few opening lines, but it was enough to give the opening of the story a new feel and the novel itself a new start. Of course, it remains to be seen whether and how long this version will last.

This novel has gotten off to a very slow start, despite the sudden new vision I had for it recently. That in itself is nothing unusual either (the speed and ease with which I wrote Bluebird was indeed the unusual, almost freakish, phenomenon). What is more remarkable at present is the specific reason I have discovered that the novel has gotten off to such a slow start.

It is something incredibly basic and simple, something to which in hindsight it seems amazing that I had not given more thought. That element is characterization. One thing that made Bluebird so easy to write was the fact that the characters were so vivid and real to me, as well as so particular and highly individualized, perhaps even to the point of being eccentric. I felt that I was writing about real people that I knew, and was merely reporting what they did and said and thought and felt.

This new story, on the other hand, has never had very highly developed characters. It has always been more abstract in terms of the people populating the story. I probably did not give this more consideration earlier because, unlike Bluebird--which, for all of its experimental flourishes and jumping around in time and different modes of reality, remains essentially a conventional narrative--V has been conceived from the start as more highly experimental in form. Basically, I had never even considered characterization to be as important for this story as it is for more traditional novels. The same has held true in terms of plot--V has not, and is still not, conceived as displaying what most readers would consider a coherent or easily comprehensible plot, although one is present under the surface and will no doubt be gleaned by the perceptive reader, though more intuitively than rationally.

So, going in, the fact that I did not have highly developed characters did not concern me, because, being the type of experimental novel that I intended it to be, the conventional elements of the traditional novel I did not regard as essential as they normally might be. It was to be written from a more purely subjective and psychological point of view, in which the first-person consciousness of the narrator blurs into more objective styles of writing such as news articles and scientific reports. This, in fact, is part of the theme of the story, i.e. the relation between subjective and objective views and descriptions of reality.

However, I came to realize just the other day that the new inspiration I had would work much better, and be more truly inspiring, if I were to have characters who were more real to me, who were more developed as characters. Their characterization in the story would occur in a different manner, perhaps more ambiguously and mysteriously, than it did in Bluebird or in most other novels, but it would still be helpful if I, the author, knew who these characters were. This is similar to the plot, which, though it will be ambiguous and mysterious to the reader, is something that should at least be known to me.

If I know who the characters are and what the plot is, I can choose to reveal them in whatever way I please to my readers, in whatever order and to whatever degree of coherence. The fragmentation of our experience and knowledge in the modern world is something that has been of great interest and concern to me, and this is part of the reason why I am choosing to take this approach to the story. I seek to explore the relationship between our fragmented experience and the possibility of an underlying unity or coherence to things.

In any case, I came to see recently that if the protagonist in particular, the male cosmonaut, was more concrete and defined and partially drawn upon myself, he would be much easier and more intuitive for me to write. This is true of the other characters as well, though not nearly to the same degree, since the story is to be written for the most part from the protagonist's point of view and has much to do with his attempts to know other people, who always remain to some degree mysterious.

And one thing that is quite silly is that the protagonist, as of this writing, does not even have a name. Again, in experimental fiction, this is not always a requirement, but in this story I have no reason to leave him anonymous. In short, I've realized I want to know more about who this guy is. I need to sit down and have a few talks with him, perhaps, so that I can then be better equipped to tell his story, and to make V a far more human and emotional tale, as it was already becoming, than a purely intellectual and conceptual exercise.