Empathy from the Impossible

I interviewed award-winning novelist Julia Glass (to read that interveiw, scroll down to "Writing on the Web"), and among the many illuminating things she said about writing, one thing in particular has stuck with me: "To my mind, this is the greatest power of fiction: to teach us empathy where we could not have dreamed it possible."

Naturally, that set me thinking about the books I've read in which this magical transformation happens. Patrick Suskind's Perfume (Knopf, 1986) was the first to come to mind. Suskind paints a dark and utterly sympathetic picture of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man born with an "exquisite nose," and "phenomenal memory," a man who is so utterly controlled by his sense of smell that he goes about murdering women for their scent, alone. Sounds diabolical, doesn't it?

But we get glimpses into Grenouille's tortured infancy in a fetid 17th-century world--a world where the stench of decay is constantly assaulting the faculties of normal people--but not his. And already, he is hated for being different.

And there's this, from the book, just after he murders his first young woman: "He had found the compass for his future life. And like all gifted aboninations, for whom some external event makes straight the way down into the vortex of their chaotic souls, Grenouille never again departed from what he believed was the direction fate had pointed him. It was clear to him now why he had clung to life so tenaciously, so savagely. He must become a creator of scents. And not just an average one. But, rather, the greatest perfumer of all time."

From these few words and what came before, the reader is already helplessly sympathetic to this man, this murderer. Suskind has done his work well (as did John E. Woods, who translated this novel from the German). This is more than "loving evil." It's seeing past the evil into the motivations of it. This is where understanding begins to germinate. And in a world like 17th-century Paris--or 21st-century America--the need for understanding each other better cannot be underrated.

Glass is oh-so-right.

It's a Go!

German academic publisher VDM Verlag has agreed to pick up my 2003 masters thesis project Depending on the Light: Writing My Change in Sexual Orientation. I am excited about this news, as I mentioned earlier. For one, I believe there's a significant audience for it, and two, I am hoping it will lead to a U.S. release. The climate in Europe, so far as I can tell, has been increasingly secular over the last 50 years, even moreso than here in the States, so VDM Verlag's decision to acquire this project still strikes me as odd, but fortuitous. I will update a few sources before I submit the manuscript to them late next week.

I make no bones that God was the primary agent in my drift out of lesbianism, and in fact dared Him to change me, since I had no desire (or resources) to do so. That's the crux of the project: the documenting of my process through journal entries, poetry, fiction, and essays, along with a somewhat fictionalized narrative that spans adolescence through my college years. I also add the voices of other women who have experienced this same drift, either with or without God, writer Jan Clausen among them. I do not know what the future holds for this work, but it has languished since its completion in 2003 despite my efforts to place it with numerous houses. Good news comes from the strangest places.

Too Much on the Bone

I sent the masters thesis project off the VDM Verlag on Tuesday. Thanks to revsions and reformatting, I cut 43 pages and nearly 1,000 words out. Now I'm in a waiting game (How else do writers get through life?) Having combined the poetry, fiction, and essays into the narrative feels more "reader friendly," and it is this version I hope VDM will take. I may need to do some updating on the "gay gene" issue and in the APA and NARTH sections, too, but that's all assuming the manuscript is picked up.

Revising Depending on the Light accomplished another thing I had hoped: it's given me the impetus I need to get back to more revisions on the novel Resistance. Passive voice, dead words, etc.

Which brings me to another musing. Language seems, by its nature, to tend toward verbosity. We want to communicate, so we use more words. Problem: they take away from the communication. So we must pare down. It's a never-ending fight with writers. If we all pared down exactly the same way, would we end up with essentially the same writing voice? And what about matters of style? I've been thinking about these things in my own revising process, and how easily dead words and passive voice creep into the text. (I'm sure there are some instances here, like this last sentence.) Like slowing metabolism, language tends toward the "extra" on the bone, the roll of fat against the day of famine.