Alphabetical diaries

Worried about productivity? Planning to get that book finished by doing a daily six impossible pages before breakfast? Don’t. Sheila Heti took ten years to write 165 pages. Ironic to readers from this corner of the globe, given that “heti” in Finnish means “at once”.

Heti boiled her journals down and rearranged them in alphabetical order. Manuscript completed by spreadsheet, but not by algorithm. A decade of honing followed.

Reading them, out of sequence, names recurred and I got a sense of relationships with certain characters. Perhaps the problems with a particular person beginning with a P? On this microlevel, as the sentences within each chapter are in alphabetical order, you notice pronoun shifts. From I to we to you. Or chronological shifts. From first to next to then. So by the time I got to the end, I had a sense of a life so far, and of the people in it.

Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries reminded me of 101 ways to kill your husband. Of course the content, as this book is often about relationships with men. But especially the form. The technical straitjacket,* or corset, pushes and pulls the text in particular directions. It’s an exercise worth trying, but if I was doing it with a writing group, I’d want to start with something less personal. Even with all that rearranging and perhaps pseudonymising – I did wonder if Heti chose names to keep the moving through the alphabet – I’d be scared. It might reveal too much.

* I misspelled this initially as straightjacket. Hardly queer-friendly, which is probably why I found it so constricting. A new word, you’re welcome!

new retreat dates – seuraavat retriitit