The narrator

Still thinking about voice

For years I’ve been trying to pin down what, exactly, is working — when it does work — about the voice in my novel so that I can fix it everywhere else. I keep coming back to this idea of a gossipy voice, but that’s not exactly it, though it’s perhaps adjacent.

I just read this lovely long interview with James Schuyler. Peter Schjeldahl conducted it in 1977 for the biography of Frank O’Hara he never wrote (which his daughter Ada Calhoun then tried to write from the interview tapes, making her own thing that is not a biography). This particular interview tape was lost, but Nathan Kernan had transcribed it in the 90s, and the transcription was published in the fall 2024 issue of The Paris Review.

The tone here is not gossipy — nothing like Joe Lesueur’s Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara — but Schuyler has so many stories and is the authority on those stories and is quick to correct his interviewer’s assumptions. (Ada writes in her book about how horrified she was listening to her father’s interview style on these tapes — interrupting people, guessing at their answers, always failing to follow up on interesting things they said. I don’t remember if she put it exactly this way, but the idea I came away with was that the tapes revealed an insecurity on her father’s part, a need to come across as if he already knew anything they might say, which in practice resulted in a tragic lack of curiosity — tragic because for some of these people, this was the only chance we had to learn about their time with Frank O’Hara and it was squandered.)

The tone is patient and gracious, yet also confident and determined to get the facts out, to set the record straight, not because Schuyler cares how he comes across but because he cares how his dead friend’s life is documented. He keeps trying to direct the conversation back to Frank (“I feel this is getting to be too much about me and not enough about Frank”), but it’s really him I was interested in the whole time, because of the way he talks about other people and the past, because of the way he recalls his memories.

This is what I’m going for in the voice of the novel.

I workshopped half of the first chapter a couple weeks ago, and the general consensus among the group was that the narrator is wonderful and people could read her go on about whatever all day but the plot needs to be more propulsive. I have been getting this note my whole writing life.

This week in writing

I continued with my plotless novel.

That’s not really fair; there is a plot, but it was only touched on at the end of the twelve pages I workshopped. It’s hard, and perhaps unadvisable, to workshop a novel in chunks.

But what actually made me feel very good is that I left workshop feeling even more certain of my project, more sure of the voice, and yes also the plot. I have gotten better at telling myself: keep going, keep going, keep going.

This week in reading

I am reading so many good things!

I finished Women by Chloé Caldwell and am still reading My Lives by Edmund White. I started Naples 1925 by Martin Mittelmeier, translated by Shelley Frisch. And Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik just arrived in the mail…

Online, I’m halfway through A Novel's Hidden Diary: Writing Exhibit by R.O. Kwon and this interview with Kate Zambreno in The Believer, conducted by Danielle Dutton.

This week in Leave news

Today, my assignment is to read through the galley one final time before the book goes off to the printer.

Then on Thursday,

Jiordan Castle

is interviewing me for The Rumpus. I am really looking forward to talking about the book with Jiordan, who is incredibly generous and insightful and fun — the ideal combination in a conversation partner.

December is so short but hopefully so bright. Today is the new moon.

Sending love to you all,
Shayne