It can be read in any order, anti-chronologically, and still fit together. You can pick up an essay collection, read one, and then ditch the whole thing. There is overlap, sometimes so unconsciously that you don’t see it until you’ve finished writing it, as you flip through the flimsy-spined galley. Each piece is discrete and self-contained. We do not judge it, but encourage said fragment to stop dancing on the table at 2 a.m.Ī collection of essays is by its nature, already in fragments. “Look at me! All out here all on my own!”, it shouts. The fragment is often guilty of wallowing in its own existentialism. If anything, I’m like “fuck the grout! More grout gaps! Less tiles!” I don’t subscribe to the idea that a piece of writing that is in fragments is like tiles without grout. Form is content, content is form.Ĭomposer Stephen Shannon has written music for some of these essays, and I think about notes as fragments, and how sentences should have their own musicality. With micro essays, you can-as short story writers are always told- go in fast. A just-born republic, gleefully declaring its independence. But on the page, the fragment is standalone. A remnant on the end of a roll of fabric, a shard, a thing that only exists as a component of another object. Outside of writing, a fragment suggests that it’s part of something else. The shape (there’s that word again) made sense to me only when I’d finished it. This book was born out of fragments of time, so its methodology mimics the way it was written: fitfully, out-of-synch, in snatched scraps. I wrote on trains, on my phone in hospital waiting rooms, in the time before my children woke, before the world burrowed into my brain for the day and creativity was postponed for another 24 hours. Perhaps there’s a feint line in each of her fragments, invisible under the text, of a different shade of blue for each of the 240 fragments. To talk about the multiplicity of her focus, her myriad subjects-love, death, sex-Nelson requires another form. Just as Bluets is, and isn’t, a book about the color blue. If one talks of a color (“Suppose I were to tell you I fell in love with a color?” she begins), there is no singular version of a color. Often its via other writers-the quasi-religious ecstasy of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant Bluets. Sometimes the world steers you towards the broken apart, the work that refuses to be glued together, that basks in its un-ness. It just didn’t work for what I wanted to say. Some stories couldn’t be told in an amorphous chunk of text. I didn’t think about the shape of the book, but I was interested in the shape of the individual pieces. He didn’t try to tell me what to write, or what shape the book should be (“shape” is a word obsessively used about essay collections, I’ve discovered) and left me alone to chisel my way in. When I had three or four of these tiny boulders, I was shortlisted for a work-in-progress prize and signed by an agent. I thought of these words whenever I managed to grab an hour to write essays that felt like small, standalone rocks, not the boulder of a book. Before I was a writer, before I stared at an unfonted screen, before I grew to like/then hate/then like again the blue bubbles of track changes, before I became an expert in online faffing when I had two hours to write before collecting my children, before I talked about writing but didn’t write and felt the words slipping away from me… Before all that, I interviewed an acclaimed writer who declared: “Writing a full-length book is like pushing a fucking boulder up a hill.”
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