Abandoned Work
& a book I hate, deep cut Renata Adler, a huge project I want to finish (somehow!)
At one point while I was teaching a class last month, I admitted to my students how my laptop is crammed with things I haven’t finished, essays I’ve avoided, dead ends, half-baked ideas, or stories I simply forgot I was trying to write. For years I’ve told myself it’s finally time to clear out the unfinished work, to either finish it, or to delete it, or to accept that these documents will never be finished and put them all in a folder titled “ABANDONED,” which would be the more honest solution.
Recently, I started this probably impossible task.
On December 19, 2020, I made some notes toward an essay I thought I would write about why I’ve long felt more interested in the way any work of fiction is told rather than the plot itself. The style of a text, the syntax, the tone—all of this has so much more of an impact on me than the plot.
In the document I was trying to work out some kind of argument to back up my prefe…