Aimee Bender is one of my favorite writers ever. Her stories were foundational in my education as a writer, particularly “The Rememberer”—about a slow motion breakup between a woman and her boyfriend, who is experiencing “a reverse evolution” from human to ape and so on. Her stories are casually strange and deeply humanistic, exploring themes of cruelty, hope and self-actualization, and for all their prose they often feel like works of poetry: thoughtful, elegant, crystalline.
She has a new essay on Lithub tackling the idea of “writing without a plan” and quoting a great line from Iris Murdoch, “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”
Not just some books. Every book. And by extension, every piece of art.
…But there is a very important implication worth examining that is tucked inside his statement, upon which it rests: if the thing on the page does not match the thing in the mind, then there must be an actual thing in the mind that is perfect and whole. What appears the page, then, is just a weak, disappointing copy.
But is there any such thing in the mind? Is it even a thing?
It’s a thought worth mulling over. I’m working on a book right now and I’m struggling with plans and failsafes and perfect structures that I’ve laid out in a spreadsheet, a kind of notional scaffolding which has (worryingly) begun to bend and crack under the weight of reality. And I’m only 10% done with pages.
My limitations as a cartoonist, my lack of time, the limits of my resources—all of these things have begun to put pressure on my perfect plans, and every page that comes out feels malformed, taunting me to double-back.
Aimee seems to have gone through something similar:
Soon after that lunch, I felt myself struggling with a novel that I later drawered (and later than that, pillaged). I wrote a sign on a piece of printer paper with a Sharpie and stuck it above my computer that said: There is no book in your mind.
What I wanted to tell myself, and to tell John, and what I would learn in the future from Iris Murdoch, was just that: There isn’t necessarily a perfect image or story or moment you are transmitting to the page. I kept trying to force that novel into a shape I had imagined for it, and it simply didn’t work.
I love that thought: “If there is no book in my mind, then the only way I can find a book is by writing it.”
Read the full essay HERE.
Blogging this now as a reminder. I’m going to MoCCA Arts Fest today to buy rare euro comics and minicomic treasures for inspiration, but it’s back to the salt mines in the morning. Happy Saturday!
Andrew Drilon / New York / 4.2.2022