What Asks You for Language

A craft essay from a known craft hater

This past Saturday marked twenty-five years of The Fragile, the third studio album from Nine Inch Nails. It felt different from the thirtieth anniversary, this May, of The Downward Spiral — I suppose because I was really there for The Fragile in a way I wasn’t for Spiral. I’d waited for it, and when it arrived in 1999 it changed what music was for me — no small shift for a boy on the cliff of fifteen. Music was the world.

Thematically a “sequel” to Reznor’s breakout album, The Fragile is a musical departure — airier, longer, icier, more experimental, and far more impressive. If hearing Spiral felt like logical extremes of familiar patterns — the nineties pop song squeezed through ten distortion pedals — The Fragile was new territory, mixing ambient soundscapes with harsh, staggered drum work and classical piano, and on top of it all pure noise turned into its own melodic instrument. At that time I lived in a basement bedroom and had an enormous set of headphones tethered to the receiver by a long, tangled cord, and I eschewed sleep on school nights to listen to it on repeat until three or four in the morning.

I understand how much I owe, as a novelist — in terms of structure and pacing and texture — not only to an album like The Fragile, but to music generally. I rarely teach, but when I do my instinct is to reach outside the novel, and I think this is why. My reasoning here comes with two assumptions, which are admittedly a bit flimsy. The first is that anyone taking a class on writing fiction has read a lot of fiction, and enjoys reading fiction. At the very least, this person wants to read a lot of fiction. The idea here is that language should already be in the blood, because without this there’s nothing to learn — aside from advice on what to read, which one hardly needs to pay a professional to receive.

The second assumption is that pedagogy is a visual discourse. Sixteen centuries ago, Augustine observed that, despite our variety of senses, we primarily expresses ourselves in metaphors of sight: “We do not say, hark how it flashes, or smell how it glows, or taste how it shines, or feel how it gleams; for all these are said to be seen.” Clarity, blindness, being left in the dark, missing the mark — it would, in fact, require immense precision to write about knowledge and ignorance without using these metaphors. (Points, though, to “grasp” for reaching in a different direction.) Because of this, it’s always made sense to me that works one can “see,” intuitively, are more useful to students than those one cannot — or at least those which require great effort to see. This intuitive capacity to visualize is related to time, specifically to how long it takes to transform something which unfolds over time into something that occurs in space, something one can assimilate and take with them. Teaching a narrative art thrives on the transformation of that narrative into something one can take in at a glance, something one can “watch” repeatedly — that is, an image.

Relative to other forms of art and entertainment, novels are extraordinarily difficult to transliterate into images.¹ They unfold over hours and hours of our lives, and — unlike movies and albums — generally are not something we repeat immediately after experiencing them.² They resist easy assimilation, which is part of their magnetism.

All of this is to say that, for me, it’s easier to understand certain extra-language aspects of fiction by looking at photographs and paintings, watching movies, or listening to music; and because of this it’s easier for me to help others understand fiction via these same texts. And it’s music, above all else, that has helped me see fiction — the way fiction moves, how it’s structured, how it’s textured. Music (especially the album or the symphony) transliterates for me not only how fiction works but how fiction is. And I owe this, I’m sure, to those years when music was the world — when The Fragile, maybe more than any other album, enlarged that world.

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Though my best friend at the time encouraged me to start a band with him,³ it was Reznor’s project that seemed a better model for a tyrant like me — working alone, learning to do everything yourself, exerting full creative control. Despite a lack of talent and a wretched singing voice, I was tirelessly creative, and spent the next several years experimenting with pirated software, a few microphones and pedals, a spiral notebook, and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever bought with my own money, a Les Paul. I turned nocturnal every summer, mixing and recording until seven in the morning, going into work at two in the afternoon. I relished the intensity of this solitude, though in retrospect it handicapped my technical development — a warning, apparently, I still haven’t learned to heed. Still, by my senior year of high school I’d written and recorded two full albums, one of which I still have on my computer (and no one will ever hear). Then, in college, where I began to read more seriously, those lyrics started to become poetry, which eventually became short stories, which eventually became four or five started-and-abandoned novels, which eventually turned into a finished novel, which eventually sold to Graywolf Press. How tidily it all works out.

From its first track, The Fragile is a testament to the do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want school of making art. Each layer, introduced measure by measure, seems at odds with those that came before; and each verse, delivered in an almost banal sing-song simplicity, gets louder and harsher. But right as it gets tedious, everything shifts, the verse structure dissolves, the lyrics open up, and the vocals seem to abandon the music altogether — another layer of destabilization. It’s a fearless way to open an album, and at the time it taught me how easily a person could just stitch things together, to collage a song out of pieces that don’t harmonize but that fit nonetheless. So I tried it. Using samples of every noise I could get my hands on — including stomping on an empty juice box and using it as a percussive slap — I made something out of all these nothings, this sonic detritus and aural garbage. I learned, quickly, that anything could be an instrument if you made up a few rules about how to play it, and that any instrument could serve as noise if you took those rules away.

To be successful at this is, of course, another matter; no matter how creative you are, eventually you need talent to support it. Sort of like loving something you’ve painted just because you took the time to paint it, I can admire the music I wrote for its creativity, its sense of risk; but none of this changes the fact that it’s something no human being should have to hear. In this way, I guess, those two albums (and hundreds of junk tracks) turned out to be notebooks — the scrawlings and ramblings of a young, ambitious, naïve mind. When it was time to shore up my skills, I’d already drifted into my first undergraduate writing workshop, and began to hone something else entirely. But I took with me the instincts I’d picked up over all those years of arranging tracks with the unit of the album in mind, of layering bizarre sounds upon each other, of placing vocal or piano melodies at odds with driving percussion and simplistic guitar riffs — a kind of pop-industrial counterpoint that gave my poems and stories (which were still awful, don’t get me wrong) an edge they wouldn’t have had, I don’t think, without this experience.

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Talent and creativity: In thinking about art and the way it’s made, I arrive often at this distinction, something Cher once articulated in a comment about Madonna (“She’s unbelievably creative [but] not unbelievably talented”). Madonna stands out, I think, because most successful artists who lean toward one extreme or another are talented but not creative (to stick with pop stars: Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Beyoncé).⁴ That Madonna can’t really sing or offer any kind of technical virtuosity doesn’t stop her from being interesting, even fascinating. Most artists, on the other hand, are entirely competent — and profoundly boring.

It’s this threat of the boring that I think I’m trying to get under writers’ skin when I show them a photograph and ask themselves how it works, as fiction, or when I assign the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde and ask them to imagine what it would take, in a novel, to arrive at that startling, unresolved dissolution after so much crescendo. We live, of course, in an extremely technical era. With very little effort, you can pirate or cultivate talent. At low cost, you can event put this talent to work. Widespread access to consumer technology means it’s easier than ever to fake mastery. Meanwhile, this same technology rewards a variety of standardized manifestations of talent; it steers us toward believing there is a good or successful way of working, which is what “craft” has become, in fiction, or what “lyrical” means, for an essayist — and even, I suppose, what “political” means, if you’re a poet. What I mean is that it’s fairly simple and straightforward to study how other writers use verbs and adjectives, how they pace their sentences; as I said earlier, it’s a great way to get language into your blood; but in transliteration there’s a leap one has to take from one medium and another, and this itself is a creative act. It adds a shock to the process of thinking about fiction.

In an overly technical era — an era where talent is cheap, easy to imitate, and rather rigidly defined — these are the lessons I try to give because they’re the lessons I want to receive. Listening to an album or watching a film challenges me to write, whereas reading a great novel — even with professional guidance — is generally its own fulfillment, its own satiation. (Which is how novels are meant to be enjoyed!) In working with these other mediums, I’m looking not to showcase language for other writers, but to solicit it. I do this because, as a novelist, I’m always in search of that same solicitation, the reason to put one word after another until the words have a motion of their own, a texture, a presence — in short, a life. This life is what creativity offers, I think, on top of talent. You can’t teach it, but I think you can teach how to solicit it, how to go searching for its call. It reminds me of what David Lynch, in describing his daily meditation practice, calls “going fishing”: Yes, you have to wait, but you also have to know how, and where, to cast the line.

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1. In my view, incidentally, this is why so many newer American novels prime themselves, desperately, for this kind of transliteration, including a kind of mania for the photogenic paragraph.

2. As for photographs, they are virtually impossible to experience without repetition; that fraction of a second repeats as long as we look.

3. We never once performed a single song, and in fact were less friends than enemies who shared a sense of humor.

4. I’d cite Marilyn Manson as another artist whose immense creativity sustained his career for well over a decade, despite a dearth of talent.