I’m Writing a Novel?

You know, your average college course.

Well, right now I’m just writing many beginnings to novels. The point of the workshop is not to finish anything but to start something I don’t want to stop writing (or so I’ve been reassured). To help us proliferate our beginnings, our brilliant good-natured teacher has assigned bits of novels—which are so exciting they have to be finished in my spare time, of which I have none. A stolen hour of Nabokov’s Pnin after an evening shift of college applications...lying in a hammock like Professor Pnin himself (only mine on a just-balmy-enough desert winter night and his at the mosquitoed Hudson Valley summer house of Russian expats).

In the last class we took a cue from Madam Bovary. The pieces we wrote “lack senses!” guffawed our genial prof. The task then was to take something we’d already written and in class—under time pressure, with a dozen other writer-aspirants tapping their toes and staring off into space waiting for the idea to come—to give that single line or paragraph a new life of its own, guided by (stealing from) Flaubert’s powerful use of taste, temperature, smell, light, color.

I started with this line from my most recent piece about growing up in New York City: “There was the diner at the corner where the cops all got oversized blueberry muffins, split and chargrilled in liquid butter…”

For me that line had a world behind it that I didn’t have time to study in the space of the paragraph it was embedded in. But given the freedom to Flauberify, the blueberry-muffin diner world emerged and detached itself from the original story.