The quality of suffering
I’ve been listening to Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks a lot. The second track, “On the Nature of Daylight,” has become the cornerstone musical piece of my new novel. Its beauty touches a deep well of emotion within me. Though it occasionally makes difficult material even more difficult, it’s worth the struggle to create literature on a level I’ve never reached before.
The album also contains a quotation from Franz Kafka:
"Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”
It’s been my quest with this work to help the reader hear the rattling mirror in the room at the book’s heart. If you listen, you can hear it.
When I wrote the first chapter, I handed it off to two readers and told them nothing about the novel, its characters, or anything. I asked for their impressions, as deep as they wanted to go. They picked up on every subtle hint layered into the text, and one was able to extract deeper themes from that chapter alone. I was thrilled. If they could see it, that means I put it there successfully, and that's always a delight.
A truly challenging and rewarding piece of fiction doesn’t come along in a writer’s life very often, especially when they’ve rolled around in the gutter as much as I have. It’s worth grabbing when it comes.