“All books dissolve a genre or create one.” – David Shields

I was excited to see David Shields scheduled to give a Hugo House evening Word Works lecture, speaking on collage. They described the lecture as one that would change your life. My skeptical interest was piqued and I did my research on this David Shields.

He is a well know writer and professor at the UW. His recent book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, was highly acclaimed as the best book of the year in 2012. It questioned the current use of genre, form, and originality in literature. I watched videos of David lecturing and having discussions about his work. And I learned that he gave up on traditional novels.

Now this was interesting to me. I understand everything he said about why he turned away from novels; he got bored, they didn’t portray reality, etc. While I have not completely given up on literature, I feel this is partly why I don’t read as much anymore. It is a legitimate criticism.

And as I watched these videos of David, he said that he believed that Proust was the greatest western writer. But he had just said that current literature is too long and boring! I had to attend the lecture to ask him about this duality.

Going anywhere for writing always makes me excited. Bookstores make my heart flutter, classes make my stomach flip,  but anything at Hugo House, especially events, make my body, mind, and soul sing.

This particular event really got to me because I had no idea if I would actually get to attend. Tickets were sold out, so I went early, in the hope that maybe they would have an empty seat. I was excited, hopeful, and very nervous. I saw David walk in and I knew it was almost time, and I wasn’t sure if I was even going to see it.

Suddenly, one of the staff poked their head into the open cafe space outside the theater where I and others were sitting. They had open seats for sale! I jumped up and ran to the counter to get one. I grabbed a seat in the second row, feet from the podium and got out my writing notebook.

Looking back at the notes I took tonight, I can barely read my own handwriting. But they are imbued with the incredibly exciting things I learned and the almost spiritual experience of that vigorous learning. Some things I learned are:

• You can’t just work in one “drawer” of your “consciousness and understanding desk”; the drawer underneath has to sneak open too.
• Each writer has to find their own form that plays to their strengths.
• Write the way your mind thinks.
• The ultimate test of a book is whether the writer is able to slip in everything they want to say; this makes it alive.
• To put reality in quadruple quotations: truth is unknown or relative, reality is subjective.
• Form evolves to serve the culture.
• Collage is a wisdom seeking form of thought.
• Collage works are about what they are about; they manifestly explore the subject in each paragraph.
• All definitions of collage imply that meaning is not just in each scene or shot, but in juxtaposition.
• Collage, like mosaic, flaunts the reality of what it is made of.
• Fiction either helps us escape real life or teaches us how to live, but is mostly a bubble-wrapped retreat.
• Collage tries to get as close to real life as possible.
• Collage lets you tell a thousand stories at once (because plot is less important).
• Collage wrestles with the crazy way our lives today are made up of so many non-linear threads.
• Collage is anti-linear, anti-mastery, and anti-narrative.

Whoa.

When question time came around, my hand shot up to ask about Proust. How do you reconcile your belief that Proust is the “author of the greatest book in the history of Western civilization” (quoted from his video) and your statement that the novel is too slow and boring?

His answer both astonished and thrilled me. He said that Proust dismantled narrative, which allowed him to create real psychological information. He is not ashamed of his meditation on life and, indeed, revels in these meditations. David said that he read Proust at an important moment in his life (I assume around the time of his transition to collage) and it allowed him to see that you don’t have to stick to the classic novel, that you should write in the way that fits you best.

And this is exactly what I am experiencing now in Proust. In every page I find ideas and inspiration for how to tell a story and what makes it compelling. It pushes me to understand the unreliable narrator and the mystery of half-known characters.

Proust has been pushing me towards viewing writing differently. David has finally inspired me to shed the need for the classic novel formant and encouraged me to branch out into the wide world of experimental writing. Where I was afraid, now I am inspired. And I think that perhaps that is the point of writing.