Release the Kraken! - Why I Write Such Excellent Books

About the Author: Ms. Valente was born in a small town of dubious population whose residents are prone to fits of unrest and regularly scheduled, radio broadcasted social revolution. Her early achievements earned her great accolades when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (her first of seven to date) for her second grade written report "How I Spent My Summer Vacation." Sadly, her prodigial childhood success, and the early exposure during her impressionable youth to the morally degraded life of literature and authors, led Ms. Valente down a spiraling road of self-destruction and she began experimenting. At first, it was only with short poetic forms. Soon, however, this gave way to large-scale poetry and the sad life of a back-alley novelist. Sometimes her binges lasted all night and into the next morning when friends and family would find her collapsed in a semi-conscious heap across her word processor still warm with the previous night's orgiastic typing. She was last seen writing seductive couplets in a small house of ill repute in darkest Japan, slipping through the fingers of the businessmen and into the deep silken recesses of the geishas' inner chambers, peddling her cheap smack to the impressionable young maiko. This is her last known address. About her Bi-weekly Column: The Kraken sweeps through the dark sea, placid, silent. Until her wrath is provoked by the vagaries of human culture—then, beware her vengeance! View all articles by Catherynne M. Valente, 2HC Columnist...

In every writing workshop I have attended in my life, the class begins with the same round-robin discussion: What’s your name? Where are you from? Who are your favorite authors?

Why do you write?

When my turn came, even though I knew the question was coming, even though I tried with the earnestness of the perpetual good student to have a pithy answer ready at hand, something replete with quotes from Plath (Poetry is the blood-jet), sub-divided after the fashion of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (Why I am so wise, why I am so clever, why I write such excellent books), something that summed up both my compulsive reading and my love for the act of writing in itself and for itself, when the student before me had finished extolling the virtues of Allen Ginsberg and writing poetry as a therapeutic substitute, I had nothing. I blinked in blank perplexity, unable to answer that last and most important question with anything like the erudition and self-knowledge my expensive education should supply. I have done this dozens of times, and all I have ever been able to eke out is a whispered:

What else is there?

It is fashionable these days to revolt against the mystification of writing, to treat it as a craft and skill no less than carpentry and masonry, to, when asked to discuss one’s “process,” to break writing into nails and boards and mortar and fat red bricks, characterization, plotting, pacing, world-building, to deconstruct it before it can be deconstructed by others, to present it as practical and essential as pouring concrete in order to build a house. I have heard any number of answers to the workshop-question, from the separate and tangible drives of characters to escape the minds of their creators to personal catharsis to the obligation to share stories with others.

I have never been able to do this—perhaps it is a failure of awareness. It sounds even to my ears naïve and precious, but for me there is nothing else. I have written since I knew my alphabet, and I don’t know how to not write. There are no characters in my head screaming to get out, and I have never cared about creating other worlds complete and linguistically faithful from the ether, although both of these things are valid approaches and amazing acts. All I have ever been able to offer is that silly, histrionic Plath quotation, because I write, have always written, by opening a vein, and the second self, the immund, the other-than-quotidian self bleeds out.

It is, I suspect, a poet’s approach rather than the novelist’s, specifically a confessional poet’s, whose central character is always themselves. For me, language is the key element, that which lies close to the bone, that which is capable of breaking the reader open and affecting the peculiar alchemy of which the novel is the catalyst—when the reader dissolves into the creation of the writer, in some sense becoming the writer, as the book becomes part of their interior landscape, becomes theirs, and no longer the author’s at all.

As I have progressed from reader to writer to author, (though still, obviously, a reader) I have seen that activity played out from every angle, and as my books have gone out into the world, I have had to let them go, to become the property of their readers, perhaps in exchange for the books I have taken as part of my own psyche. As a reader, it has always been the books whose language was unearthly, strange, baroque, that I have loved passionately. Works written in “transparent prose,” which is much the goal of the majority of contemporary authors for whom story is paramount, have been strictly vehicles for ideas, interesting, but never intimate and irrevocably “mine.” It has been language that breaks apart and recombines English which has broken me apart, shaken me out of my entrenched patterns—a satori of reading accessible only when the book is, as Kafka said, a pickaxe to shatter the frozen sea within. There is a satori of writing too, the state which leads to endless philosophizing from Plato on down concerning the poet as mere vessel, as one who channels god, or a muse, or a character. I have never been comfortable with that idea: the car may shift gears automatically, but I’m still and always at the wheel. For me, language has been the avenue into satori, into alchemical writing, into axe-prose, blood-poetry.

But to say that I write because I want to use language in new ways sounds hopelessly intellectualized, heartless, calculating. It does not begin to encompass what I feel about writing, and of course, by the time a book has finished, it has grown beyond language to include those very necessary nails and boards and mortar. But to talk about bloodletting, about language as blood, as electric current, seems equally hopeless: a mystification, a facile metaphor that is inevitably “feminine,” over-dramatic, insufficiently professional for market distribution.

This is why I stay silent in workshops, why I rarely partake in the ongoing salon on “craft”—I have no sufficient answer for why I write except the books I write, and it is considered gauche to pass out copies in lieu of a single-paragraph response to a question all teachers are accustomed to asking and all students are accustomed to answering. Like quantum universes all authors are unique unto themselves, in how they answer that question which means so much more than it seems, all authors relate to their work and the work of others in their own ways, and those ways are necessary to the creation of the multi-variant Schrodinger-corpus of literature. This is my coin-toss, and I will own its overwrought and sentimental, possibly even pretentious, mint.

Of course, this level of self-reflection usually results in a descent into syphilitic insanity, so perhaps it’s best for all that I stop here.

Catherynne M. Valente is a poet and novelist with a mouth like a Salad Shooter and the deadly aim of a freakishly attractive postmodern biomechanoid Annie Oakley. In a word: Duck.