How the Prospect of Publishing Can Paralyze the Writing Process

The dream is to create a book that will also be a tonic: not a course of study but a course of treatment. “I’m beginning a new book to have a companion,” wrote Hervé Guibert, “someone with whom I can talk, eat, sleep, at whose side I can dream and have nightmares, the only friend whose company I can bear at present.” He had been reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon in the country. Shivering with cold, he bit into an overly salty biscuit. I copied his words and sent them to you by email, including his parentheses: “(Living with a book, even when one isn’t writing it, is altogether marvelous.)” That’s what we were looking for, the altogether marvelous . I wrote to you of a writing method: Take notes on index cards and put them in a shoebox. When the box is full, the book is done. This method seemed to me comforting. We were searching for a writing method that was less like writing and more like living. I really want to write my next book that way, I wrote to you, as notes that can take in everything: a Compleat or commonplace book, a companion text. It would be a handbook, I wrote. The book you keep ready to hand. A circadian practice, a gentle dependency. You’d live with this dream text as with some necessary daily drug. You’d sit up with it—or it would sit up with you—as one sits up with the dying. “This is what is diabolical about prose, it is never finished,” said Flaubert, cooling his cheeks with the palms of his hands, then cooling his hands against the iron knobs of the tall andirons. But we weren’t afraid of the diabolical; on the contrary, we desired it. I, for instance, was inspired by Aimé Césaire, who published at least three versions of his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land between 1939 and 1947. Perpetual magic: a never-ending book. A sustained delirium of rotting straw, obsessive bells, and rain. You, too, you wrote, were entranced by impossible projects, […]

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