Analog

or, How to Write a Novel About Eating a Car

Dear Republic,

Frequent ROL contributor Grant Maierhofer is finally on Substack; but also—inspired in part by Tehching Hsieh—he's been writing his new novel by hand.

-ROL

ANALOG: OR, HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL ABOUT EATING A CAR

I’ve long felt that for certain writing projects I was meant to shift to writing by hand. I’ve jotted things down in notebooks, and fetishized writing implements for as long as I can remember, but the more saturated we become with the internet, with phones, with laptops, the more I feel it’s not only a gesture to myself to do my more serious written work by hand, but to potential readers saturated in chatGPT.

It’s often shocking to discover the ways in which writing is difficult. Writers who show any early promise in classes are usually frustrated to find out the ways in which they now need to devote themselves more seriously to something that initially just felt pretty good. What I’ve started to recognize in choosing at certain times to write by hand is that it’s not unlike consciously doing things in practice for a sport that make the work harder, such as wearing weights, so that when it’s time to play a game you’re slightly lighter, freer in a sense to play the game in that initially passionate, innate way you came to love it.

What phones and laptops are good at is making us feel as though our thoughts and interests are innately interesting. How could they not, when every prominent site is filled to the brim with examples of people just like us whose thoughts and interests, seemingly dashed off like nothing, are earning them tens of thousands of dollars. When you’re writing a book, however, your thoughts and interests are only part of the exchange, because at best they’re only likely to line up with like .1 percent of the population’s thoughts and interests, so finding ways in which to slow yourself down, to embrace the notion that you are actually doing difficult work that warrants serious attention, will benefit you endlessly.

I knew that I wanted to write a book I’ve long dreamt of writing, about an artist enacting a performance that was deeply immersive. Ever since I heard the premise of Harry Crews’ novel Car, and probably even before that when I’d seen Ripley’s Believe it or Not and heard of the man who’d eaten a small airplane, I dreamt of writing something about such an act. I also thought of Tehching Hsieh, one of my favorite artists, who did these performances wherein he lived in a cage for a year, punching a clock every hour on the hour, or lived outside for a year, or lived for a year tied to another human being. I believe in novels as a performative art form in the way Roger Ebert believed that all films, fictional or not, are effectively documentaries of their actors’ experiences in the making of them. To write such a work, then, I thought the physical form, writing by hand in notebooks, was the appropriate thing.

I bought two smallish notebooks from Target, of I think one hundred pages or so, and sat down one morning in summer to get started. I quickly found myself caught up in a feeling I recalled from elementary school, of writing and pushing myself to fill pages, and I’d write on both front and back in an anxiety over writing enough material to really be a novel. Every day I sat down with a pen, varying between a fountain pen, rather heavy, and these plastic clear pens I’d ordered from Japan, finally settling first on the Pilot G2, a great pen, and then on the Pilot G2 mini, which to me is the perfect writing instrument.

I quickly found myself reconnected to the physicality of writing, pushing myself further and further instead of agonizing over sentences to try and fill out the consciousness of this person as they ate. What’s more, I felt myself pushed back to the place that first got me interested in writing, the basement in my father’s house, writing on a Brother typewriter from the 80s and becoming addicted to filling pages. Those older pages, typewritten, were not particularly worthwhile, but the process of amassment addicted me, and it’s something I’d lost sight of in trying to really do something sentential, unique, consequential as a writer. I’d gotten used to thinking of the big and the small, of trying to make any flight of fancy I had into a book; but I’d forgotten this feeling of labor, of toil; and what’s more I found myself thinking too of sentences, of style, of language, feeling like maybe I’d merged my initial efforts with the more purely technically engaged person I’d become after reading writers whose sentences captivated me.

As I worked I found myself visually stimulated by the notion of words filling pages, which in turn seemed to let the actual difficulty of writing a narrative about a person in a warehouse eating a car less apparent than it otherwise might’ve been. Instead of thinking about the mechanics of such a task, or the logic of it, I looked down at the simple white page and touched my pen to it and continued this daily narrative of this person’s efforts. It felt, in retrospect, not dissimilar to the brief attempt I’d made at The Artist’s Way, wherein one writes Morning Pages, effectively amounting to daily free-writing sessions that are meant not to be creative, or associated with work, and are simply an opportunity to dump out one’s unconscious. You do these in the morning, like Paul Valery did in probably the greatest book ever written, his Cahiers, putting maximum effort and thought into them so that he could (I’m paraphrasing) be a dumbass the rest of the day. I found that having my primary writing project in this physical notebook made my days similar, wherein I’d work quite hard for a sustained period, amassing material, and then I wouldn’t do anything else “literary” for the rest of it. When I’m working on my laptop, which I still do, I find that the best approximation is to hop between projects, but even then there’s never a sense of a day’s work really being finished, there’s only exhaustion.

I often find that discovering some angle to a longer project sustains me far better than an idea itself carrying the day. With Ebb it was writing a 50,000 word novel without the letter A. With Flamingos it was writing a narrative about madness from a sprawl of voices who’d all been influenced by the same psychiatrist. With Peripatet it was writing a memoir around my father’s death with Tan Lin’s approach to ambient literature. With Cybertruck, since the little mental incentivizer was the mere act of writing longhand, it seemed to break down certain barriers I sometimes feel when working—very often, after a book is written, I either will or I’ll be tempted to rearrange everything randomly, splicing in language from elsewhere because I’m so sick of my thinking about the work. With this one, after letting the notebooks sit for a couple of months (it took three notebooks to write it, spanning a summer and into the fall) and I began to transcribe it, the effect was almost the opposite. It felt wrong to change all that much, and though I sometimes felt tempted to rearrange things, it was always apparent that this was just muscle memory, that for better or worse what I’d written was going to stay pretty much how I’d written it.

I mentioned that I still write with my laptop, though I sometimes still write first drafts on index cards. It became clear to me that although I definitely needed to write a book longhand after writing several on a laptop, and even one on a phone, but having finished I felt pretty confident that I hadn’t unearthed some secret dimension to my work, some hack that would now make everything Dostoevsky. Instead there seemed to be a mood I kept tying to what John Maus said when he’d built modular synthesizers to make a new album; it had felt entirely necessary before he’d done it, a process of discovery, but since this was well into his career the work felt more or less calcified in the mode of his older efforts. This can be true, while there being a lingering truth beneath this stuff that every project further calcifies the reality that it’s all discovery, that like Jack Nicholson’s Frank Costello quoting John Lennon, presumably after his method was firmly established: You give me a fuckin’ tuba I’ll get you something out of it.

Now well into a manuscript that will take at least five more years to pull off, having spent weeks moving sections and sentences up and down in different configurations—and really loving every aspect of it—I’ve realized that the shape of the work itself will only really change if I decide, or God compels me to decide, to change it. In writing the thing by hand I was convincing myself of something, which was necessary on a personal level, but it would genuinely surprise me if someone read Cybertruck and anything else I’ve written and felt they were eons apart, if that were the case I’d assume they were simply more partial to hearing about the mouthfeel of the 21st century’s first dumbass locomotive.

Grant Maierhofer is the author most recently of Societyspectacle: the Eye in Don DeLillo (Erratum Academic), and Synecdoche, New York (Bloomsbury). Cybertruck is forthcoming from Fiction Collective 2.

Image: Heather Neilson Art