Playing With Blocks

New New Journalism excerpt, from an interview with Lawrence Weschler:

Are there any activities that help at this point? Two things. One is that I read a lot of novels. Writers like Larry McMurtry and Walter Mosley are especially good. I'm sort of like a bicyclist riding behind a truck: I want to get into the slipstream of that other narrator's narrative. To get the feel of narrative, to be on the road, to remember what it feels like to tell a story. The second thing I do is play with blocks. I have a very large collection of wooden blocks. Some of them are my own invention, and some of them are just rectangular.

Theses blocks belong to your daughter? No, my daughter is not allowed to play with these blocks. They are mine.

And what do you do with these blocks? Well, my wife, who is an important human rights monitor, and my daughter, who has been off at school, will come home and see the elaborate cathedral I've built on the kitchen table. And they'll say, "We see you've been busy today." And I have! Because although I'm not thinking about the material at all, I am thinking about structure and rythm....

And how do these block structures get translated into writing? I'll be playing with my blocks and find myself thinking, "Hmm, I suppose if I put this part of the story in front of that rather than after it ... That might be interesting." And gradually I start to find formal issues of sequencing. Then I start to notice rhymes that I hadn't noticed before. For instance, when I was writing about Breytenbach there was a key moment in his story when he is being arrested at the airport and passes by a window in which he sees himself. I thought about what it might have been like to see himself at that moment. And then I remembered that in one of his poems he had a line about "South Africa is like the mirror at midnight when you looked in it and a train whistle blew in the distance, and your face was frozen there for all eternity, a horrible face but one's own." And I thought, hmm, if I put that quote next to that scene ... Now this gets really interesting. This is fun. And at a certain point everything flips around: I'm suddenly magnetized north rather than south, and everything else in the universe except the blank paper before me is north. I'm at my desk, and wouldn't even notice if the house was burning down around me. And yet, I'm not interested in the material, I'm interested in the form. And the thing that is totally mind-blowing is that elements I put side by side for purely formal reasons turn out to be true about the real world. And this is because beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. It is the same kind of satisfaction that a mathematician gets out of an elegant proof.