gullybogan

Dear Reader,

I’m a little way into Anaïs now (so to speak), and she seems to spend a lot of time talking about the writing of the Journal itself, and how she might leverage it.

October 13, 1927
…as usual, i am bursting with thoughts: useless thoughts, fantastic thoughts, illogical and incredible thoughts. As for example: Why not put my Journal into a book? I am tired of writing just for myself. It is like talking to a wall, like smoking in the dark. I know i could make others cry and make them infinitely, desperately, divinely alive. I know i say what they wish to say and cannot say, And some, if my writing reached them, this writing that i have done walking alone, would know that there are several of us walking alone, and that it is good to know it.

Here, at least so far, her impulse is philanthropic: she’s not looking for a book deal so much as using publication as a way of connecting to other ppl.

Anne Frank, while closeted away in that Secret Annexe of hers, was very conscious of the marketability of her memoirs. There is quite clear evidence that she had already started re-writing sections of her little checker-bound diary so that they would be suitable for publication. Had she not died of disease in that Nazi concentration camp, she would certainly have gone on to publish her diary as a book, and would no doubt have gone on to other projects, seizing upon her somewhat questionable luck in being who she was, where she was, and when she was.

Sylvia, too, was embarrassingly (to us if not herself) aware of the monetary value of her diaries and correspondence. She made regular trips to “drop off some papers” to the archives of her favourite campus library, for example, and her attitude to that act seems ambiguous as to whether she was just aiming to profit from their sale, or if she wanted to (also?) ensure that posterity would be enriched by her legacy. Further evidence: she made one snubbed suitor iridescently angry when she requested copies of the typescript letters she’d sent him over the course of their then-broken relationship, as she had foolishly neglected to carbon copy them for her own records, and eventual publication.

So what is this impulse to write a diary? Is it just vanity, or is there a Missionary sense that your life is somehow able to give an insight into the Larger Concerns of the World, of life, love beauty, and so on?

Let’s spend a moment dwelling further on Sylvia and her Ted.

Ted wrote because he felt the words had to be written. He didn’t care if nobody ever read what he wrote, but it had to be gotten down on paper. The words and stories, in themselves, had a life, and that life could not be denied, but it was a life independent of the need for dissemination. Once born into the world, his writings could sit in a box under his desk for all he cared (his cramped desk in the hallway closet, the one that Sylvia forced him onto so that she could do her writing on the Proper Desk in the Study), so long as they were out of him.

Sylvia, by total contrast, *had* to be in print. If her stories weren’t read by someone, it was as if they didn’t exist. She was all about being out there, and if being out there meant that sometimes she had to take a shitload of pills and hide under the house in the hope of dying, to bring attention to herself, then so be it. Both of her suicide attempts were arguably (i.e. undoubtedly) staged and calculated in such a way that she would be rescued. Had her maid turned up for work on time the day she gassed herself, then she would probably still be alive today, writing a blog for Vanity Fair, still trading off the Personality that she had promulgated through not only her “fictional” (i.e. semi-autobiographical) works like The Bell Jar, but her actual diaries and correspondences themselves.

It’s a cruel irony that Ted destroyed the last diaries she was keeping at what turned out to be the end of her life, to “protect her children” from her thoughts.

That was a real Ted thing to do.

So, me? I want, one day, to write something. You know, a book. A novel. That sort of thing. I’ve written plenty of widget manuals, and they’ve been well received, but i want to be able to write a sustained narrative that doesn’t involve instructin ppl how to click buttons on a computer screen. In some ways, this journal you’re reading at the moment, dear Reader, is fulfilling that need. Like Anaïs, i’m writing about my daily grind in little stories sometimes, complete with dialogue as per a novel.

Making the leap to fiction is another thing altogether.

Almost every writer (i.e. commercially-endorsed author) i’ve ever heard speak about character and plot says that essentially the writing is a chimera of real life events, ppl, and insights. The implication being that if they didn’t think they’d get sued for it, they could just turn their diaries into their “novels”.

Yet i also remember a scene in The Gilmore Girls where one of Rory’s ex-boyfriends has written a novel, and her current boyfriend is putting him down with words to this effect:

« So you just write down all the cool, intelligent, witty things you and your friends say to each other in your university coffee shops, am i right? But you also stick in “he said” and “she said” every so often, and that’s the writer’s craft? That’s what makes you an author? »

Which i take as a personal criticism.

Yours,
Gullybogan