NaNoWriMo Snacks: Gleanings From Marina Abramović

Performance artist Marina Abramovic has always fascinated me. I've never had the pleasure of viewing her work in person. (My New York life was far too crammed to get to the museums more than half an hour before closing, what with drinking to excess and loathing myself all the time.) What I know of her I know from various videos and interviews, and, most recently, the eponymous documentary chronicling her 2010 retrospective, The Artist is Present. 

What can a performance artist teach us about writing? More specifically, what the fuck can a performance artist teach us about surviving in the trenches of NaNoWriMo?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. Much like her work, Marina's manifesto is simple and radical. So much so, in fact, that I'm still mulling over the first precept.

"An artist should not lie to himself or others." 

Pretty simple, right? Prosaic, at first glance. But say it out loud, let it roll around on your tongue and in your brain a bit. 

She's asking us to tell the truth. Ain't no thing. Except it is. So many writing problems stem from not telling the truth. The overly descriptive sentence is an effort to truss up what's unimportant or uninteresting to us. The passive voice, when used excessively, becomes a way of whispering "I don't know, and I don't care." We write characters that we want to be lovable, full of adorable quirks and vim and vulnerability. When it's time for the big battle, we're not really sure they'd win, but we make them win, because they are us, and we write our wishes instead of our fears. 

These problems are annoying on a practical level. They make it hard for us to stride forward with our sentences. Editing is akin to untangling an exceedingly delicate necklace. Our protagonist becomes completely unbelievable, but we're too in love to change anything about him. 

All of this (or at least some of it) can be avoided by telling the truth. If it's the moon that strikes you in your story, then don't wax on about the soft velvet of the grass and silken wind. Just tell us about the moon, and leave the rest a sparse frame. 

Make every character in your book real and hurting in a way that you understand. Don't let them get everything that they want. Give them what you think they can earn. 

I'm about to sound really new-agey here, but it's unavoidable. If you tell the truth, I guarantee you that your voice and what you have to say will be utterly unique. If you are honest with your thoughts and by extension, your writing, you will never be a cliche. Don't stare deeply into your beloved's eyes, fixate on the freckle that lives on their eyelid instead. If you must stare deeply into their eyes, tell what that experience is for you. Are you looking at your reflection? Critically examining broken blood vessels? Analyzing the level of pupil dilation to determine whether or not they're still attracted to you? Imagining they're another planet, and wishing to go there?

There are a million possibilities, and one of them is yours. Your job is to tell it.