García Márquez on “Formal Simplification”

I’ve been reading Gabriel García Márquez’s memoir Living to Tell the Tale for months now, and I’m enjoying the feeling of being leisurely. Some books you tear through because you become so engrossed in the action and the characters; others you savor. García Márquez’s books have always fallen in the latter category for me. They’re written deceptively simply — not in the Hemingway sense, though. García Márquez uses surprising metaphors and similes, he works in tiny details the re-appear throughout the text, and he gives his world such solidity and the intangible feeling of being there that you want to linger; you want to find out as much as you can about his world, and if you read slowly and savor it, you feel a greater part of it.

Reading his memoir is like listening to the recollections of a wise relative. It reminds me of how my mom has encouraged me to sit down with my Nana and “write down all her stories.” I haven’t really done that — though I have recorded her a few times telling me about her life — because that process is so artificial. I’ve heard my Nana tell me stories about her life all my life — her stories are woven into our conversation, and when I’m with her, I want to experience her natural self, not to check out incidents from the  repository of her memories.

So as I read Living to Tell the Tale leisurely, it seems as if I come across stories from García Márquez’s life or what he has he learned in a natural way. There is so much to learn from a writer like him, and to barrel through his book would be to miss crucial lessons. Because a lot of times something can sound banal or useless if it comes too quickly, words piled on words — like Polonius giving advice to Laertes in Hamlet.

As I’ve been heavily revising my novel, I came across the following passage. It occurs when García Márquez is describing how he and some friends started a literary magazine called Crónica:

Alfonso, a specialist in every genre, placed the weight of his faith in detective stories, for which he had a burning passion. He translated or selected them, and I subjected them to a process of formal simplification that would help me in my work. It consisted of saving space through the elimination not only of useless words but also of superfluous actions, until the stories were reduced to their pure essence without affecting their ability to convince. That is, deleting everything unnecessary in a forceful genre in which each word ought to be responsible for the entire structure. This was one of the most useful exercises in my oblique research into learning the technique for telling a story.

This is what I need to do right now. I’ve been fairly brutal in my cutting and rewriting as I’ve discovered the structure I want to pursue, but it has felt good and purifying. There are passages in the original version of the novel that I love, and that I will always keep so I can read them, but don’t add to the structure. They’re passages from another kind of book, a kind that my novel didn’t end up being. I had ambitions to write the family epic, to be García Márquez or Steinbeck, but what my story yielded was not an epic but the story of a few weeks, of experiences that alter two young girls. It needs to shed the layers of my ambition and emerge, pristine and clear and unencumbered, as what it actually is.

Related Posts:

• García Márquez’s Reading List
• Pushing forward.
• A crack in everything.