Hefting A Weight Equal to the Novelist's

The simple pleasure of amassing a novel, or holding pieces to it and knowing its design...each piece examined, the inextinguishable flames of text must operate as fully as the entire text, with equal attention to each and the desire...behind each to report and convey or incite. Action, dialog. Warned, the hauling of the entire text, this hauling can cause harm to a body of text. Like weight lifting, the lifter can focus on each muscle group with reasonable weights, strengthening parts of their text and encouraging the whole to be strong, or the entire body can be put under strain and when the entire weight is lifted the novelist must have the strength to endure the pieces and entirety and manipulate each piece to react and balance the whole. Gardner warns against this kind of mass lifting, explaining that to wash over a text may allow the ignorance of smaller issues; primarily anachronism at the sentence level, or grammar, or ignoring overwritten non-active non-dialog swaths of text. To subject each individual piece to scrutiny allows this, surely, the cleaning and strengthening of the text, but once these chores are taken care of the novelist must engage the entire text and this can absolutely complicate the role of the weightlifter. Some, Goethe, needed absolute quiet, to the point of zero floor-board creaking, and their writing places became absolutely their own. Hughes and Plath both needed their white walls and small rooms with just the simple chair, table and text. Now the novelist can slap on some headphones and sit in a cushioned chair with legs up and barely notice anything past the screen, page, notebook, or notecard. Still, here's the book and here's the song of love, the need for the individual to heft the entire text and examine the beast in its entire weight. Ways of doing this range from parsing out the text in its chapters, sections, voices, swaths, what have you, and seeing them in their ordered way. Next we conceive of each and evaluate their value, their characters, the essence of each, and we wonder what we've missed. Another way of seeing allows the text to become a forwards and backwards piece, a Barthes text, of machinations relative to beginning and end thrown where the artist judges them to effect the heaviest objective correlative. Order, disorder, choices all, but meaningful in their own ways complementing the entire text as a massive weight supported by individual muscles in the hefting body. After all, the tonnage is not the novel, but the holder of the tonnage... Just then critic realized this text in his hand may have held one possible flaw, depending on the order of the text, but it was not his concern to guess, but find the truth in his impression of the text without searching through and finding if he were just an idiot. Surely, to look back meant absolute insecurity and to him, this was an unacceptable way. He examined the text in his breathlessness as a consumed piece, an entire experience, but as mentioned he could only remember the bits, not the vast empire.