Gary Indiana’s controlled uncontrol

The late writer on stumbling through projects, putting things in proximity to one another, and how not to write about Warhol

One thing all writers probably struggle with from time to time—not just writers but all creative workers, of whatever discipline—is explaining Why the Thing Is Taking So Long.

You know what I mean. The project that you thought would be done by now, that you thought would be done well before now—people, eventually, are going to ask about it. And they mean well, mostly. But the question can feel a tiny bit loaded. It can feel like they’re not only asking Why the Thing Is Taking So Long but also When Will It Be Done and also, perhaps, Why Are You Being So Difficult?

Or maybe I’m projecting. In any case, I love how the novelist and critic Gary Indiana talked about these issues, in a 2015 Bookworm interview that I listened to last week, after the sad news of his passing at age 74. Indiana was talking about his 2015 memoir I Can Give You Anything But Love, which took him four years to write—much longer than he expected. As someone who budgeted eighteen months for my current book project and is currently entering month forty-eight (oh god), I felt buoyed by Indiana’s matter-of-fact attitude to his project’s sprawl:

It took four years, about. . . . All along the way I kept stumbling, because I didn’t know what I wanted the book to be. And I think at first I had this extremely Protestant idea, or Catholic idea—I can’t even say what it was—that you have a duty not only to just tell the truth, strictly the truth, or not embellish anything that you don’t remember, but that you have to tell everything. And of course that way is madness. But I kept not being able to figure out how to do it. . . . I wrote a lot of chapters that were just garbage, and then other chapters that dealt with things that, later, I discovered I didn’t want them in the book.

Gary Indiana photographed by Sean Donnola for a 2023 T Magazine interview that is very much worth reading

Indiana is talking about problems particular to memoir writing—how much to put in, how strictly truthful you have to be, how to even know what’s truthful when you’re relying on your own memories—but he’s also talking about the problems of any large creative project: that you can’t know how to do it except by trying to do it and, a lot of the time, doing it wrong and only realizing that it’s wrong after you’ve done it (and then redoing it).

I used the word sprawl above—maybe a bad choice for Indiana, since the work he published was so rigorously controlled as to make every other writer’s prose seem flabby and imprecise by comparison. For a sample, be sure to read Indiana’s review of Blake Gopnik’s 2020 Warhol biography—it is both an insightful mini-biography of the artist and a devastating takedown of a book that Indiana felt missed its mark (and of the wider culture that spawned such a book).

Indiana’s prose was controlled, but when it came to structuring his books he didn’t try to control things too much. Here he is in that same Bookworm interview, talking with host Michael Silverblatt about the collage-like nature of his memoir:

I was happy to discover as I was reading the memoir that it’s a collage. You’ve taken things from here and there; they are chosen for the rhythms of the book. . . . What we’re watching is a book coming into shape as a juxtaposition whose meaning is meant to be constantly elusive, constantly on the horizon. Yeah?

Yeah, that’s really exactly true.

Why? What is it about meaning that makes you queasy?

Well, I think that I don’t like to try to overdetermine things or over-control things, but I like to put things in proximity to one another, because of the suggestibility of them and because of what they might evoke from a reader or viewer. I like to leave some things enough open-ended that people can take what they need from it, in a way. In other words, I don’t like to tell people what to make of anything. Maybe in an essay or a book review or something, I might be a little pushy. But I think that meaning is generated by the reader or the viewer as much as it is by the author or the artist.

Isn’t that great? It gave me courage to keep working last week, when I felt for the millionth time that my book project was too anecdotal and wasn’t really saying anything about my subject, but just presenting stories around it. But maybe that’s enough. I like the idea that, at the end of the day, it’s the reader who generates the book’s meaning as much as the writer, and it’s the writer’s job to start that transaction but not necessarily to finish it.

Gary Indiana, 1994 (Thomas McGovern/Getty Images)

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MONEY + ART SURVEY

My never-ending book project is about money and art, so this week I’m very happy share my friend

Anna Brones

’s Money + Art Survey. Anna has “heard from numerous people that this year has felt financially strained for artists and small businesses,” and she wants to hear from more artists about their experiences. If you’re someone who makes the majority of your income from creative products, please take Anna’s survey before November 15th and she will write about the results in an upcoming essay for her excellent Creative Fuel newsletter.

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WHOA, VOL. 1

If you’d like to read even more about me not being able to figure out how to do my next book: Over the summer I talked about the process at some length with

Alex Dobrenko`

, in a conversation that’s just been published in a very cool print zine that he put together with the folks at Sublime. Ironically, when I spoke to Alex I was convinced that I had finally found the right way to structure my book, and that I was in the home stretch of realizing that vision—and, wouldn’t you know it, since then the structure has changed yet again. (But I’m still in the home stretch, I swear!) Anyway, you can order the zine here.

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WORM ZOOM

Every weekday morning, a group of us gather on Zoom to say a quick hello and then get down to work. It’s the slenderest form of virtual accountability—but, wow, it actually works. Here’s a testimonial from one participant:

To join us, become a paying subscriber and find all the Worm Zoom details right here.

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RELATED ISSUES

From the archive:

Get rid of what your project needs

Three tales of creative slowness

Three tales of creative incompetence

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