Chekhov and Motivation
In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose’s lively and lovely ode to the written word, there’s an entire chapter devoted to the awesomeness of Anton Chekhov. I haven’t read anything by Chekhov myself, but, as soon as I saw this quote, I immediately wanted to:
It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees — this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.
I wouldn’t say that nothing in the world makes sense. If you let go of an orange at the top of a ten-story building, it will always (a) decide to fall downward; (b) pick up speed as it falls; (c) become a splat of pulpy orange as soon as it stops. These things are predictable. Inversely, we can be fairly certain the orange will NOT (a) turn into a porcupine; (b) write Hamlet; or (c) find religion. There are rules.
But I’m being pedantic. Chekhov’s point is that, in the human universe, events often deviate sharply from the rational, and with this it’s hard to disagree. Our bodies may be subject to certain laws, but our conduct, our emotions, our actions, are not. Or don’t appear to be, at any rate. And so the best we can do — the only thing we can do, if we’re being honest — is document the insanity, as faithfully, and meticulously, as we can.
Or, as Francine Prose says:
For, as anyone who has ever attended a writing class knows, the bottom line of the fiction workshop is motivation. We complain, we criticize, we say that we don’t understand why this or that character says or does something. Like Method actors, we ask: what is the motivation? Of course, all that is based on the comforting supposition that things, in fiction as in life, are done for a reason. But here was Chekhov telling us that, as we may have noticed, people often do terrible and irrevocable things for no good reason at all.
I really love this idea, because — quite frankly — it makes me feel better about the giant meandering plotless mess that all my stories start out as. And, occasionally, finish as.
This seems like a good time to describe my writing technique. Here’s a capsule summary:
- Sit down. Bring up a text editor. Stare at the empty page, dyspeptically.
- Bring up a browser. Find the internets. Do “research”.
- Stop “research”. Switch back to text editor. Type a word.
- Stare at word.
- Erase word.
- Bring up a browser. Do “research”.
- Switch back to text editor.
- Type a word.
- Sandwich time!
And so on. The key thing I’ve slowly begun to realize about this terrible process is that, while I am basically sitting around wasting time getting nothing done, I’m also waiting for my brain to stop trying to think of something to write about, and just start looking around for it. Because the best ideas aren’t created. They arrive. Where they arrive from is something of a mystery, but the point is that, when a character appears out of nowhere and wanders into a graveyard to dig up her dead brother and comb what remains of his hair — a ritual she apparently repeats every week, at precisely 2:00 am on Monday morning — you shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about her motivations. What you must do, however, is describe the scene as perfectly as you can: the way she walks toward the grave, rapidly, slump-shouldered, without a glance left or right; the way she handles the shovel — clumsily, jerkily, with the inefficient strokes of an aristocrat unused to hard labor; the way she draws the comb across her brothers’ desiccated head, gently, with her nose wrinkled and her mouth curved into a small, absent smile and her eyes fixed on the tarnished gold buttons of his best suit. Because, really, that’s all you have. You have the scene, you have the person, you have the details. Anything else is speculation.
Motivation may come later, which would be cool. All I’m saying is that you can’t really start with it. Not that you shouldn’t — you can’t.
Chekhov said it best. Once, when someone asked him about his method of composition, he picked up an ashtray. “This is my method of composition,” he said. “Tomorrow I will write a story called ‘The Ashtray’.”
1 Comment