With sincere apologies to Todd and all of you, here is the complete and unmolested version of his essay for your reading pleasure.
If you’re lucky enough to get paid to read, then you’re probably unlucky enough to feel that reading has become a job. You might like what you find yourself reading, but even so, if it’s for work, then you’re reading in ways that make this once simple gerund anything but the stuff of simple pleasure: with a pen or pencil in hand, you ask yourself after every sentence, “Is this good?” “What does this mean?” “How would I teach this?” “Do I even understand this?” You read your reading, constantly making sure you’re drawing meaningful conclusions or making suggestive connections, because in one way or another you’re going to be accountable for what you read. Otherwise, why would anyone agree to pay you?
Now as far as making a living goes, one could do much, much worse. But still, if you wind up in a read-for-pay career, it’s likely that a) a love of reading played a role in your decision to pursue this career in the first place, but b) this career of yours has complicated this love in ways that make the word “regret” not entirely ungermaine to the topic at hand. Sure you avoided selling radio time to advertisers or strip mining in West Virginia, but remember when you just loved reading?
I mention this in order to present what was for me an exceptional reading experience: Jose Saramago’s Blindness. I liked this novel from its very first long sentence, and my fondness for it only grew as I continued. About 100 pages into it, I reached a happy place I had not visited for some time. I knew I was there when I looked at my watch, saw it was nearly midnight on a weekday, and said to myself, “Okay, just one more chapter.” Here was a book so good that it finally silenced all the bothersome yammering steadily broadcast from those professional, related-to-the-reader parts of me (teacher, scholar, writer). I was simply and purely reading this book, by which I mean that I was unusually present in the reading experience, by which I mean that I was crossing some boundary separating what I already knew a book could teach me from what I was then happily discovering lies just beyond.
After I finished the book (a couple days later, which for me is fast, since who completes a chore quickly?), I started trying to make sense of what made Blindness such a powerful reading experience. What I quickly realized was that this novel isn’t just a great book in some necessarily meaningless objective sense. Indeed, I know people who did not like it at all. Rather, it was a great, nearly perfect book for me at that moment, because it had all the elements of the kind of fiction I most liked, but it had more, too. And as much as this might seem like it contradicts all the reader vs. writer/scholar stuff I posited in my opening, it was this “more” that eventually showed me how to write a novel.
I first decided to read Saramago after a fellow writer told me (online of all places) that my writing style reminded him of Saramago. I figured, well, I ought to see who this Saramago guy is (yes, I had never heard of him before). And the similarities between the voice in my debut story collection and that of Saramago’s narrator—highly authoritative, deeply analytical, shamelessly long-winded, and given to seemingly endless asides—were hard to miss. So I read Saramago from that first sentence the way you read a writer whose style and technique, however impressive and overall unimitable, still makes sense right away. Because there are writers (e.g. Faulkner, for me) who you read and admire, but whose writing is so utterly mysterious and off-the-charts good that you can’t even think about writing for weeks after your encounter. Even though I was humbled by Saramago’s writing, I felt like I got him right away.
But it wasn’t what Saramago was doing that I already could do (again, albeit on a smaller, decidedly less nobel-prize-worthy way) that made reading Blindness so educational. Rather, it was a certain, very unSaramago-ish quality of this novel that makes it both Saramago’s best novel and the one that opened an until-then locked door for me. The thing that makes Blindness so great isn’t just the writing (by which I mean the local language, the way the sentences (even in translation) unfold in perfect rhythm, the sharpness of the each and every individual insight, the brilliance of all sorts of small technical choices (like not giving any of the characters proper names)), which is so mind-bogglingly good, but the gripping, unrelenting nature of the novel’s forward-facing plot.
Saramago has so much to say about absolutely anything that he can take 300 pages to narrate a very simple story, which is what he does, for instance, in The Double, a novel about a man who discovers his exact likeness in a movie he rents. There’s a bit of a story there, as the man tries to locate his double, etc., but not much (to Saramago’s credit, the very ending is truly brilliant). The long sentences are reliably interesting, but I couldn’t help noticing an occasional this-is-less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts feeling. Blindness, by way of contrast, introduces a man going suddenly blind in the first paragraph, spreads this contagion quickly, and then patiently follows the nightmarish outcome of this epidemic through to the very last page. There’s no meandering, there aren’t even any flashbacks. What Saramago found in this novel is a premise so potent that it imposed its own discipline on his often playful narrator.
And this is precisely what I needed, and maybe that’s why my reading of the Blindness was so powerful, even if I didn’t realize it at the time, even if I was sure I was only (as in exclusively) reading. When I started writing fiction, I was most interested in the words themselves. I gave very little thought to my plots or my characters. I just wanted to locate compelling moments and investigate them in order to see what I could do with language. I once told someone that writing a good short story involves writing a sentence that doesn’t suck, connecting another, somehow related and non-sucky sentence to the first one, until after, say, 40 sentences, ta-dah!, you have a short story. I wouldn’t now say that’s inaccurate, but it’s more than a bit incomplete. More to the point, unless you’re relying on the generosity of some very generous readers, you’re going to have a hell of a time finding an audience for 1000 somehow related, non-sucky sentences strung together. Like it or not, novels need some structure, which is another way of saying they need a plot (plot, after all, being the way a story is arranged).
Since I was a beginner in the practice of constructing a novel-length plot, Blindness was particularly useful, since it employs the simplest of all plot structures: one storyline, transmitted by a single narrator in chronological order. You need a hell of a premise to make this work, since there are no plot-related tricks or POV-related gimmicks to hide behind (not that I have anything against either of those in general), but on the bright side, it certainly simplifies what for me was the daunting task of figuring out how to tell organize my story. After the lessons of Blindness settled, I had my guidelines: the plot needs to move steadily, or better yet relentlessly, down a single line, and any chapter or even any scene that doesn’t contribute to this progress is not allowed. In this regards, at least, I think I succeeded.
Two bits of advice (one fairly obvious and arguably useless, the other better all around) for writers, by way of conclusion. First, it’s not a bad idea to read writers that write like you, only better. Second, when you find yourself trying to write in a way you’ve never written before, avoid the urge to simultaneously stop doing what you already do well. This urge is understandable, informed as it is by both the desire to not be accused of repeating oneself and the dream of being the object of that most coveted double negative, “There’s seemingly nothing Writer X can’t do!” Starting from scratch, in regards to style, technique, etc., is asking for trouble, if you ask me. Instead, go from strength to strength. You can thank me (and Jose Saramago) later.
