The great and terrible thing about graphic novels is how fast they go. Since there are sometimes only fifty words per page, you can take your time to see the subtleties of the artwork and still burn through a hundred pages without even trying. I hoped that Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor, which is heavy enough to give you a concussion if dropped from the proper height, would keep me occupied for a few days, but I went from cover to cover in a single sitting. Still, as beautiful as it was and as much as I wish it had kept on going, it’s fitting to the story that it all went by like a dream, over before you can quite tell what’s happening.
The story is about a struggling artist who gets sculpting-specific superpowers in exchange for a death date less than a year away. It sounds like the most generic “Wish with a downside you really should’ve seen coming” story, made to fit an aging artist’s autobiographical struggles and fears. And it sort of is, but within that archetype McCloud makes a personal story that feels real, even as he uses the rules of the format to play with reality. Maybe it won’t sweep along everyone the way that it did me, but it hit on my hopes as a writer and existential anxieties perfectly.
It was around noon when I finished it, and after lunch and a run I fell into that weird kind of boredom you get when you’ve seen or experienced something so deeply moving that it feels wrong just to continue your day as if nothing had happened. The most fitting things I could think to do was ride my bike to library and work on my novella.
Over the past month or so I’ve been working on revising a novella I wrote a year ago. Since I like being able to physically cut and add to and rearrange my writing rather than doing it all on a computer screen, my weeks of work have turned a nice stack of printer paper into a mess of loose sheets covered in ten pens worth of ink. Aesthetically, I like having an artifact like that to show for my work. But it’s been a real pain to type it all up.
Typing at the library the day I finished The Sculptor, I had to move into a private room when people around me got annoyed at how often I muttered, “This is so stupid,” to myself. I spotted three plot-holes in a single paragraph. The dialogue tried so hard to be quirky that it lapsed into incomprehensibility. And the whole story suddenly seemed ridiculous. Had I really spent a months writing and planning this mess? No matter how bad the first draft was, it couldn’t be any worse than this.
And all the time I couldn’t stop dwelling on how much worse than The Sculptor it was.
Maybe part of it was that I picked a particularly bad chapter to start out on, but part of it was a fallacy in my thinking, something so obvious that any grade-school writing book would discredit it but that I’d only recognized recently. I always assumed that writing a great book was a lot like reading one, that some newly unearthed creative organ in your brain takes you on a journey you never could have imagined. In a way that’s exactly what it’s like, at least in the planning stage, but then you have to transfer it all onto the page. And in that transfer inevitably something gets lost and you have to clean it up and reorder it so someone other than you can understand it, and that process takes time and skill.
When I was a kid I thought that when I grew up I would invent a machine that could let people project their imaginations into others, so anyone could create stories without having to know how to write or draw and everyone would see them just as perfectly as the author did. I think I’m still a little stuck on that idea. And, fittingly enough, it’s an idea that McCloud investigates in The Sculptor by letting his protagonist trade his life in for that very ability: to make art without time or skill.
But, in the end, not even that is enough. The titular sculptor still struggles to make his art into anything other people can understand. The only work he makes with real worth is a representation of the life he lost in order to make the art.
The applicable point here is that creation of any sort needs time and skill and revision, that it’s unreasonable to expect that anything will turn out perfectly the first time. The more abstract point is that art never has worth in its own right, only in how it relates to the real world. But actually, the two points are really the same. It’s ultimately a good thing that I never got around to inventing the imagination-telepathy machine (one more reason why a psych major wasn’t for me), because the process of revision, frustrating as it may be, slows art down and gives life a chance to work its way in. Which, in the end, gives the whole thing meaning.
No comments:
Post a Comment