Can one achieve both at once?

{500 words — 3-minute read}

A beta reader of A MEMORY MOSAIC called it “ambitious AND understated.” My ambitiousness came in creating a vast picture for the reader, in taking the reader on an unusual journey, taking a 10-day trek in the Himalayan foothills. It came as well in taking one brief episode and connecting it to a multitude of points in my life as well as beyond my lifetime, with reveries entering other people’s lives. I even take flights of imagination encompassing our entire “pretty planet,” and even escaping our world. My being understated involved allowing you the reader the opportunity to see with your own eyes as you walk with me. It involved as well the room to ponder and sometimes answer questions both tiny and vast that I raise instead of feeding the answers to you.

A MEMORY MOSAIC is about inspiring the reader to ponder — about exploring the world, about writing a memoir, about exploring the mysteries of memory and time, about exploring one’s own life or at the least thinking about those many meaningful moments in your life.

“Ambitious AND understated” was in fact a conscious aim on my part as I wrote A MEMORY MOSAIC. I developed that aim well before the beta reader made that remark, when I was still just halfway through my first draft. So, hearing this description of my book was gratifying.

My inspirations were two-fold. First was Denis Johnson’s TRAIN DREAMS, a sprawling, epic tale covering a man’s whole life, told in 116 pages of spare prose. Other short, ambitious works that inspired me were SILK by Alessandro Baricco, GRENDEL by John Gardner, and ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell.

The second inspiration came from my previous writing history — my two novels. The first is INCOGNITO, written in my late 20s. (I’m repeatedly surprised to realize how recurring motifs in my life were foreshadowed in something I wrote 4 decades ago.) In the novel, a character, nicknamed Pick for his slim stature, has written a messy, sweeping, out-of-control novel of medieval knights, kings, bishops and castles — 3,000 handwritten, barely decipherable pages. When the lead character in the novel, Walker, reconnects with Pick after nearly a decade, Pick’s body has ballooned and his novel has constricted, evolving through 7 drafts, each smaller, tighter and neater than the last. It’s something between a Faustian bargain and a reversal of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

INCOGNITO was much like Pick’s 2nd or 3rd draft — still messy, still sweeping, but under control though just barely. The book was at first 480 dense pages, later shaved down to 450 via some editing and a lot of reformatting.

MONHEGAN WINDOWS, my 2nd novel, published in 2009, is 325 pages (285 pages of text if you take into account the photographs and art works that are part of the book), intentionally kept shorter than my first novel.

And A MEMORY MOSAIC is 199 pages, again intentionally.

What I’ve learned through writing these books is that the impact and density of thought does not have to equal volume.