Last week, I attended an author talk at the University fo Minnesota. The pulitzer prize nominated author, Elif Batuman, give a short reading from her work in progress, excerpts from a chapter in her forthcoming third novel. It was an exhilarating experience watching a published author move through a work in progress in real time, critiquing herself and eschewing sections as she read. Her piece (moving and comedic) was about the search for patterns in a narrative, especially in how one might connect their own personal/fictional narrative, the world/lives of the narrator/protagonist, to historical events and historical dramas/traumas like World War II or the Holocaust, and how this was in fact a means to making meaning out of the chaos of one’s life. The narrator/protagonist of her book had hoped to find these connections in order to validate her own in experiences in terms of being a worthy subject for a novel. Her reading continued in this vein until the narrator/protagonist realized that it’s possible to make meaning out of anything, tie up loose threads where you will for whatever reason, the more you look, the more you read, the more there is to work with and you can connect the dots to the ends of the universe.
It got me thinking about my own revision process and how easy it is to go off the rails when adding depth to your story and world. How does one refrain from going down too many rabbit holes? We as humans all bear the ability to make meaning out of chaos. The technical term is Pareidolia:
a psychological phenomenon that causes people to see patterns or recognizable shapes in random or ambiguous visual stimuli
This undoubtedly applies to narratives too, whether it be thoughts and ideas or the endless stream of words on the page:
Into Usnelli’s mind came words and words, thick, woven one into another, with no space between the lines, until little by little they could no longer be distinguished
-Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
Having some means to anchor or distill this meaning, funnel it perhaps, is the essence of my recent editing experience. Random tables and dice seem one approach, perhaps even some kind of elixir in the chaos of the world, particularly as more and more bad generative AI floods our senses. I just need to keep my focus, halfway through the slog of current draft. All in good time.