Life in Moments

When my grandmother—my mother’s mother—was dying, she was in and out of consciousness, not always lucid, and she often confused my mother for other people from her past: her own mother, a cousin, one of her sisters. She said things that must have come from memories and had no place in the present. And although sometimes my mother seemed hurt when she wasn’t properly recognized, I found my grandmother’s jumbled mental state—a series of moments, people and places, in no determined order—well, I found it to be of some comfort. It’s what's meant by “her life flashed before her eyes,” the most indelible moments rising up to illustrate who you have been.

 

Long ago, I had a wall hanging that said “Life is not lived in hours, days, or years, but in moments.” And I thought that to be a very deep concept, and I still do. Think about when you meet someone at a party. You don’t sit down and begin a linear introduction: Hello, my name is Mary and I was born in Los Angeles…. What organically happens with people is that we find things in common and we tell stories about our lives. For almost two decades I have been friends with a certain woman who recently told me something about herself I had never known, something that seemed so fundamental I couldn’t believe we had never discussed it. Such are life, and people, and the ways we can know them or never will know them.

 

I’m telling you all of this in a roundabout way of talking about Bellflower, my “novel-in-moments,” which will be published next month, and to perhaps give you some help if you decide to get a copy of the book (thank you!) and might be perplexed by its form. These musings about life and its moments (among other things) pointed me towards the method of the novel. But let me give you an illustration of what I mean.

 

Let’s say I want to tell you about a character, a person. I’m making him up now, as I type this. His name is David Price. I will tell you five brief things about him, five moments from his life. 

1.      When David was 41, he had a nervous breakdown. He was out of work for two months, and along with therapy and medicine, he took up woodworking. He made beautiful wall-to-ceiling bookshelves for the den in his house.

 

2.      David’s mother often tells the story of when he was four years old, and she came into his room to find him arranging his picture books into straight columns and rows on his carpeted floor. He explained the ordering of them, which had something to do with animals and also, children with and without both parents.

 

(Now, I’ll take a pause here to ask whether you are already drawing some inferences from these facts? Perhaps that David was an orderly sort of guy and maybe his breakdown had something to do with his sense of order, or perhaps from missing a father? This is the way our mind works, filling in the white space when we are given clues.)

 

3.      For David’s 70^th birthday, his three children threw him a surprise party. He’d been quite antisocial for many months after the loss of his wife of 41 years; he hadn’t been in his wood workshop, or reading, or going to the gym regularly as he had most of his life, and they hoped to cheer him up.

 

(Are you thinking: Oh, good, he had a nice wife and a full life, despite that breakdown? Or did he? How did the wife handle his mental state? And were books a big part of David’s life?)

 

4.      When David was 54, his book about Vietnam was published by a university press. They threw a launch party for him but he was unable to attend when he developed a bad stomachache. David’s father had died in the war, and David had majored in history, eventually became a history teacher, because of this fact most likely.

 

(And now we have a timeframe, and can fill in some details about when David was born, etc. We can start thinking about what it meant to grow up without a father, the breadth of this loss.)

 

5.      David met his wife, Jeanette, at a faculty party, when he was 28. She was a science teacher, environmental. He brought her a glass of wine and told her about his mother’s recent marriage to a pastor. She asked if David believed and he said he’d have to think about it.

 

(Ah, this Jeanette. A scientific sort of person, serious and straight to the point. How did they counteract each other? And the mother remarried—how did this affect him?) 

Five moments and somehow, a pretty full sketch, at least, of David Price. And this is the method of Bellflower, which tells stories from the lives of three main characters and the family and friends in their orbit. The moments and stories can range from a few paragraphs to many pages. You may read the chapters, and the sections within them, in any order. And there is white space, plenty of it, and sometimes the characters reach across it to touch each other. I hope, if you decide to give the novel a go, you’ll let me know how you decided to read it and of course, what you thought.

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Where Writers Live

Let me tell you something about writers that you may not know. And by writers, I can only speak for those of us whose main commodity is human emotion. Other writers—those who deal in history, or intricately woven plots, or fantastic, created worlds, or other goods—are certainly appreciated neighbors, but for my purposes today and what I’m going to tell you, I’m speaking of writers whose primary and main obsession is people, and what they think and feel.

 

We live in houses, all of us. The houses were built by blueprint, or piecemeal, by necessity, and the framework of each is comprised of memories and stories. Note: these two building materials are scarcely discernible from each other most of the time. We can hardly tell them apart ourselves. They’re both strong, though, and keep the roof over our heads. Our houses have windows, of course, but we can only look out. You can try to look in; you can put your face right up to the glass and strain, and you may catch a glimpse of something shadowy, but that’s about it. We like the windows but sometimes forget they are there. In fact, we may shut the blinds for hours, days, weeks at a time. We like the dark in our cozy house. We are fine; don’t worry about us.

 

You may have noticed that every so often, we swing the windows open, propping each with a piece of wood chiseled from the frame. We let some of the musty air from the house out; we take some of the fresh breeze into our lungs. On special days, sunshine streams into the windows so brightly, we have no choice but to dance. Often we need a period of closed windows after these events.

 

Next to our houses runs a creek. Yes, next to every house, all of them. The official name for this creek is Melancholia—that’s what it was called long ago when such things were named—but I’ve heard it called Sentiment, Sadness, Sorrow, and many other names starting with other letters too. Our friends and loved ones may whisper “Crazy Creek” to each other, but we know they mean it with love. It’s a gentle creek most of the time. Within our houses, all the time, you can hear the low murmur of rushing water, a sound we usually forget is even there. We like the creek, though, and feel it even when we don’t know we are. On occasion, we confront it straight on. We go outside and get our feet wet, step right in and let the cool water up to our knees, our waists. Sometimes, we lie on our backs and let the water rush over us; we like the way the world looks through this blur of watery movement.

 

Once in a while, a storm comes, the water rises, and the creek floods into our houses. We’re used to this and in some ways, welcome it. You can still visit during these times. You may not want to, and we understand that too. If you do come by, we’ll welcome you right in but you should be aware that we may be busy rushing from room to room, filling buckets. We may not have time to talk, or much to say. We do appreciate you stopping by though.

 

Why did we settle in houses next to creeks that flood? You might as well ask why some choose to live in the forest where wild animals dwell, why this old woman prefers the hot desert and that young man the boisterous city. Without the creek, we wouldn’t appreciate dryness nearly as much. Without the creek, we wouldn’t feel connected to people in other houses, next to other creeks, or even to the man in the city, or the woman in the barren desert. We like the creek. We like to rest in our beds at night, hearing its music, imagining its path, surviving its chill. And then we get up and try to remember all of it for those of you in the forests, next to farmland, in high-rises, where perhaps you can’t hear water at all, or have forgotten to listen.

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Book News: Bellflower

 

 

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”  --Willa Cather

 

I was thinking about this quote a few years ago, when a character occurred to me: a middle-aged man, attending the 50th birthday party of the husband of one of his wife's friends, when he meets a woman who will unexpectedly alter the course of his life. A classic Boy Meets Girl scenario, only complicated by modern times and circumstance. I started writing about him, just for fun. When scenes occurred to me, I wrote them too. Other people in his orbit soon appeared, people whose classic human stories may have turned out just a little differently than they had imagined. Eventually, this project, started just for fun, began to turn into something, something about three families living in southern California and weathering what life had to throw at them, those times when events go off script.

 

If there’s such a thing as a novel-in-stories, then maybe this could be called a novel-in-moments. And this week, I signed with an exceptional indie publisher to bring the finished product, BELLFLOWER, to print. More about them, and the novel, in the coming months (not too much, I promise!), and more about why this might be a book unlike others you’ve read, and about what influenced it and how it came about. Life throws many curve balls, and it’s a good time for me to delve back into this project so close to my heart.

 

We writers know how amazing it feels to find someone who believes in you and your work, and I’m thrilled to have this unique novel find a path to readers. Details soon.

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Writing Affirmations

Tell yourself you’re doing it for humanity. Teeming, varied, rushing life. What binds us here in this place? What makes us pass each other in the street and pause, looking into another’s face to notice: I see you. I understand. Something like that happened to me. I felt like that once.

 

We don’t always get it right. Sometimes the right word, the right phrase, slips through our grasp, bobbing and submerging into the green stew. We try. We describe its slippery surface, the feel of it. We gaze into the murky depths, looking for clues, for context.

 

Testimony: evidence or proof provided by the existence or appearance of something.

 

It’s important, what you do. Never lose sight of that. That a-ha moment, empathy, recognition—these are the best parts of humanity. It’s wonderful to be loved but oh, to be understood.

 

Keep at it, scribes. What you do is important. Not everyone has the patience to stop and look, to try to articulate what it means to be here, right now. Pen to paper, fingers on keyboard, keep gazing towards the horizon, continue excavating memory, and feeling, and hope. Spill it out, profess, recite. What you do is important and so necessary.  

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On Currents and Writing and Focus

 

For the past few days, I’ve had an image in my head of a flowing creek, with a large but smooth rock sitting right smack dab in the middle. Currents flow around it, the water streamlined and purposed; this implacable boulder gives the appearance of being, by all rights, an integral part of the flow rather than an obstacle, as one would tend to think of a huge rock in the center of a moving path.

I didn’t come up with this image in a vacuum. Recently, the writer Lauren Groff tweeted about celebrating her 20^th anniversary of “taking writing seriously.” She clarified: “By taking writing seriously, I mean that a thing happened that made me decide to make writing the immovable boulder at the center of my life. Everything else—family, friends, other work—has to find a way to flow around writing.”

Have I done that, I wondered, either consciously or subconsciously? In the creek of my life, what does writing look like and has that been working for me? This image stayed with me, her words lingering until I was forced to come up some vision of my own stream, my own boulder. And what I think is that for me, for now, writing is more like a collection of smaller rocks, haphazardly arranged. The water still flows, around and over these less-imposing obstacles, but it’s harder for a person to navigate, should she choose to swim or walk downstream. If she had a small boat—a canoe maybe—it would be very challenging to steer a clear path.

If your stream looks like mine, others can visit and they will experience it much like you do. They, too, will have a hard time navigating around those smaller, randomly-placed stones. But if there's just the one, large boulder, if you have made writing a central, essential part of your stream—well, that’s pretty clear, isn’t it? They can see what to do, how to proceed.

One day, I’ll have to put on waders and some sort of sturdy backpack. I’ll have to gather those smaller rocks and stack them in the very center. Over time, with any luck, this mound of craggy stones will become smooth and unified by the currents. And if I’m very, very fortunate, the new, imposing structure will be big enough to climb and rest on, high enough to see around the next bend or further towards the horizon, but still low enough to dip my toes in, allowing for an easy transition back into the water.

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Lives of Quiet Desperation

We’ve all seen memes like this circulating social media, encouraging us towards kindness. We’ve read stories about the waitress with a sick child at home, the elderly neighbor who has no visitors, the special needs child excluded from dance class. These nuggets of inspiration and these stories, be they true or not, serve to remind us of our shared humanity. They remind us to take a real look at that person at the gas station, in the park or restaurant, and to imagine what struggles they may be facing, what heavy burdens they might be carrying.

Running is a mostly solitary endeavor and when I’m out on the sidewalks of my neighborhood, most of the people I pass are alone too. I find myself often thinking about a phrase—lives of quiet desperation—and I’ll come home and look for the quote again. It’s from Thoreau, the literary world’s expert on solitariness.

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."                       –Henry David Thoreau

This is, of course, from Walden, Thoreau’s writings about his two-year experiment living in the woods near Walden Pond. His goal: “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” What Thoreau found, after comparing life in the city to that of the country, was that men were basically the same everywhere. His “quiet desperation” refers to man’s desire to accumulate more and more material things, which requires him to work, worry and want, and to lose touch with not only the natural world but also with any chance for inner freedom.

This seems reasonably argued, but I think the whole idea of a life of quiet desperation can be embraced in a much larger context. In a universal, meme-worthy context. And while empathy is certainly a useful human function, it’s essential for a writer. When I pass an older woman walking, head down, hands shoved in her pockets, I imagine what types of problems await her back at home, behind closed doors. When a driver speeds around a corner, tires squealing, I wonder what drama is about to unfold when he gets where he’s going. What has he forgotten? Whom is he angry with? Whom is he avoiding?

Sometimes this tendency to look for trouble feels pessimistic, even condescending. What if that older woman is perfectly content, basking in some wonderful memory as she walks along? What if the driver is hurrying home to see his newborn daughter? It’s what we do, I guess, we writers. We’re constantly on the lookout for human problems, for people whose lives we can imagine as quietly desperate. Does that make us empathetic or selfish? Insightful or unrealistic? I’m not sure. If Thoreau were alive today, he’d most likely be using terms like centered and presence, and he certainly would be writing about taking time to observe the world around us. Maybe some of us just have a peculiar way of doing that.

"I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.” ---also Thoreau, from Walden

 

 

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The Suggestion of Color

I saw one of those quizzes on social media the other day, where you’re led through a series of seemingly innocuous questions until something is revealed about your true nature. This one had to do with color and how you see it. There was a square of a cool gray and the first question asked: What color do you see: gray, blue or green? And I immediately thought that I might have chosen gray, but now that blue and green had been suggested to me, those hues were apparent in the sample. It wasn’t green enough to be called green though, and certainly not blue enough to be blue, but now the gray was infused with these more lively tints and couldn’t really be seen as mere “gray” either. The fact that choices were offered had made me unsure of my perception.

 

It occurred to me that writing is an exercise in the offering of choices, in the suggestion of new or nuanced ways to view the world. Isn’t that what we’re doing by inhabiting a fictional world or the mind of a character, especially one who may see blue where we see gray?

 

Recently, I was inspired by an article about paint colors in a home decorating magazine. We’ve all wondered about the people who come up with the inventive names—because, certainly, there’s a quintessential human element in these names and their visceral modifiers, obscure historical references, and strange evocativeness. In fact, here’s an amusing article about what happened when a non-human tried to name paint colors. To me, color can infuse an entire setting, such as the endless green of a forest or the far-reaching blue of an ocean. It can be an intense character feature—a rancher’s dust-covered figure, a red-faced curmudgeon. It can set the mood for a story, such as all the feelings yellow brings to mind. Thinking this way inspired several stories in a collection I’m still working one; some of the stories take a color title: “Resonant Blue,” “Cadmium.”

 

Some people are born color blind, or can only see limited color. We’ve all seen the viral videos of a color blind person looking through special glasses that allow him or her to see color for the first time. How strange that must be, we think, a whole new world.

 

In Chekhov’s story, “Gusev,” a soldier returns from service, dying from an illness. He dies at sea and is tossed into the ocean. The men who remain on the ship watch stoically, Gusev’s body passes schools of fish and a large shark, and Chekhov’s narration then turns very inclusively omniscient:

 

“And up above just then, on the side where the sun goes down, clouds are massing; one cloud resembles a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors . . . A broad green shaft comes from behind the clouds and stretches to the very middle of the sky; shortly afterwards a violet shaft lies next to it, then a golden one, then a pink one . . . The sky turns a soft lilac. Seeing this magnificent, enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but soon itself takes on such a tender, joyful, passionate colors as human tongue can hardly name.”

 

Gusev’s experience, such as it is, the ultimate, unknown perception—death—is relayed with colors and strange sights. Imagine, Chekhov seems to be suggesting, imagine the unimaginable. Surely there are colors we’ve never seen, colors we’d hardly know how to describe. As writers, this is a quest we embark on joyfully, time and again, hoping to bring at least a few along with us.

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On Potato Eyes and Story Ideas

Do you know how to grow potatoes? Maybe you watched Matt Damon do it in The Martian. Actually, it’s not rocket science. A potato will start to grow on its own if you leave it in the cupboard too long. To grow new potatoes, you just cut an existing potato into sections, making sure each section has at least one “eye,” which is the little, sprouting nub, then you stick the sections into the ground.

 

I thought about this yesterday when I went out to bring the trash cans in. I’d been thinking about two stories recently finished. Well, finished for now. I was thinking about how I’m getting dangerously close to having enough stories for a collection, and how I should stick with this cycle (which seems to be about loss, and perception, and maybe even, colors), for at least a couple more. But I’ve never been one for brainstorming story ideas; I mostly wait until they announce themselves.

 

So I was thinking about those two stories and what I might possibly work on while I’m trying not to work on them, and I looked up to see a piece of paper stuck in a nearby bush. Also, a chips wrapper. Both were escapees from the now-mostly-empty trash cans. Immediately, I knew it was a scrap from a story draft, which I had marked up to the point of needing to print a new copy. In dramatic fashion, I thought: I’ll write a story about whatever it says.

 

And this is what was on that scrap of paper, that potato eye:

 

 

"She's never done anything for herself."

 

I knew immediately where these words came from: which story, about which character. It was quite a good scrap, I thought. First, I started thinking about potatoes and did that for a while. But then I refocused on the found fragment, which started to grow in some possible directions and suggest possible rooms, and people, and problems. And I thought that maybe it’s not such a bad approach, growing something from a piece of something else. Sometimes the universe gives you signs and they're hard to recognize and interpret. Sometimes, they’re pretty direct.

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Birth of a Story

The story comes in the wee hours, the witching hours, the stuck-between-night-and-day hours of three and five. It plays like a movie. There she is in her sweatpants, the main character. She’s anxious, unsettled (as you are), looking through the windows of her house. The rooms are nice and orderly. Out back, there’s a creek, nestled amongst the tall grasses and low-growing trees that often bend and surrender to its flow. The woman thinks about that creek and wants to make a change; she can’t keep on like this.

In the other room: the sturdy presence of her husband, like an old couch with a pattern in the fabric you haven’t noticed for a long time. There’s another man, a traveler. He’s a different sort; she doesn’t recognize him but sees something of herself in him nevertheless. He shows her passages.

Perhaps Jackie (that’s her name, suddenly) has trouble sleeping too. She worries about her ill father, her son, her daughter who lives far away. An entire cast of worry, marching around the room as she tries to sleep (as you try to sleep). The quiet desperation of the house after Les (that’s her husband) goes to work. The murky idea that takes hold.

It’s all there, the people, as real to you in this hazy time of early, early morning as real people are in daylight. Between the stark hours of three and five, the story spins on the ceiling of your real house, this story of Jackie and her house, and her husband, and her choice. In the morning's white light, she’s still there, a shadowy presence swirling in your tea, the flutter in the green leaves outside. Sit down. Rewind and watch it again. Notice.

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My NaNoWriMo Results: Deadlines, Diversions and Determination

Somebody needs to tell the NaNoWriMo organizers that Thanksgiving week is in November. Do they know that? Children are home from school and food must be cooked and/or ordered, eaten, packed up, unpacked and eaten again. There’s unavoidable socializing and the naps caused by it, afterwards, the inevitable food coma and/or trudging through the local mall. These last two do not go well together, I can tell you.

The thing is, I started off very strongly. I posted about my first week here, and I was shamelessly proud of myself. After months (years!) of thinking about a certain novel, I was finally out of the gate. The first chapters spilled out almost effortlessly. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get 1500-2000 (or more!) words down each day. It was almost embarrassing, like when you procrastinate something like shaving your legs and then afterwards, can’t believe how long you let it go. I had missed the process of writing every day, the single-mindedness of it, the intensity. I cruised right through the second week. I had a hard time reading fiction during this time. By the end of the day, I couldn’t focus on anything beyond silly television shows or non-fiction magazine reading so I gave up. The third week was tougher still. I was now into the second part of a planned three parts, new terrain that I had outlined but hadn’t deeply contemplated. I kept writing, day after day, but it felt less inspired. And then I had a previously-planned three-day trip with a girlfriend to eat, shop and hit the spa. I was not unhappy to go. After that, Thanksgiving week bore down. I haven’t written since November 19^th.

What I’ve learned: there is a definite benefit to immersing yourself in that single-mindedness. Elements of your writing cross-reference themselves nicely, effortlessly. The growing word count is ego-enhancing. But the experience is all-consuming, at least for me, and I'm not sure I could have kept it up. Perhaps without the real life distractions, I would have, or maybe I’m the type of writer who would’ve needed to come up for air. For certain, it became easier, day after day, NOT to write.

The good news: I wrote over 33,000 words in basically, eighteen days. This week, I’ve been reading through what I have so far and it’s not entirely terrible. So that’s good news too. I think the best part of the experience for me this year is the relief of finally beginning the story, for better or worse. And I’m not giving up. I’ve set a new deadline for mid-January, by which time I hope to have the first draft done, or at least, about 60%. There are the holidays to think about, after all.
 

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My Love/Hate Relationship with Writing Guides Continues

How are you with museums? Avoid them? Love them? I happen to love the idea of museums very much, and I do enjoy going to them and wish I went more often. But I have a definite time limit where they’re concerned. Maybe an hour-and-half to two hours, that’s it. I go in with all receptors primed but by the end of that time frame, I usually hit a wall, when I can’t see/read/hear any more. Just can’t take it in. Sensory overload, I guess. I have a similar threshold where socializing is concerned, but that’s beside the point.

 

I was an English major in college, which means that I read and wrote about fiction. As opposed to a creative writing degree, which seems to have its own benefits. I learned to write by reading. From time to time, I do like to pick up a book about writing, in the interests of gathering information. I’d like to think I’ll remain open to learning, no matter how curmudgeonly and resolute in my ways I become. This week, I read Into the Woods by John Yorke. I’ve no idea how this book came to be on my shelf; I’m assuming I read about it someplace. It’s a writing guide aimed towards screenwriters and most of the references are film ones, but that was okay with me because a good amount of my personal references are film ones as well. The original subtitle of Yorke’s book was A Five-Act Journey into Story, and I can only assume the publisher issued the alternate subtitle How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them after it became clear that a) the book was appealing to writers of things other than scripts and b) there is some division between the 3-act camp and 5-act camp, and no reason to alienate either one from buying the book.

So. I have to share that the cover, as you can see, couldn’t be more awful. I mean, I get that we’re in textbook mode here, but aside from the look of it, it also has a strangely plastic feel and the black ends up with scratches, marks and smears. It’s the book equivalent of those black pants you never wear because they attract every piece of lint and hair in the room. My favorite Amazon review of the book, titled “A five act journey into utter tedium!” agrees with me on this point: “Oh, and the paperback has a horrible plain black cover that is faintly repellent to the touch.” Very true.

 

If you’re starting to think that the rambling nature of this review is an early indicator of my engagement style with writing guides, you’d be right. Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes, the actual text. I started out as I do in museums, totally engaged, neurons firing. I had a pen and was underlining things. Here are a few I like:

 

“What an archetypal story does is introduce you to a central character—the protagonist—and invite you to identify with them; effectively they become your avatar in the drama.”

 

(I like that bit about the avatar.)

 

“Niceness tends to kill characters. Much more interesting are the rough edges, the darkness.”

 

“Three-dimensional characters have both a want and a need, and they are not necessarily the same thing.”

 

There were more, but you’ll have to get the book. Yorke talks about early forms of story, and how the overall structure has generally stayed the same over centuries. There are refreshers on Aristotle and Campbell, which I liked. He differentiates between the three-act structure and the five-act structure (spoiler: they’re sort of the same!), and gives examples along the way. I will say that some examples seemed more shoehorned into the structure than others; it started to seem like a diagram you could argue anything into. But I enjoyed the early sections, the more historical and theoretical parts.

 

The middle section of the book really gets down to details. The chapters had names like Exposition, Subtext, and Character Individuation. If I had been at a museum, this would have been when I started to think about lunch/dinner/nap. There were charts and figures.

 

By the last section, the charts became more complex and I was fully in skim mode. There were lengthy breakdowns of particular films, and long examples of dialogue. There are all sorts of people in the world, and I’m sure some would really enjoy the specifics given, the many, many pages of Notes at the end. But I was already out that museum door.

 

Was the book a loss? Definitely not! I took away some new knowledge, some reminders of things I’ve read before, and several things to think about. I still hope to keep learning new things about writing as I go along, and it’s never a bad idea to break up your routine. I’ll keep this book on my shelf and perhaps refer back to a few sections. After I finished, I had an overwhelming urge to pick up something written by one of my idols, and I can’t help but think that in the end, it will be more inspirational. That’s the way I learned to write, after all, and it would seem I can’t really be retrained.

 

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White Space

 

Remember that Bob Seger classic, Against the Wind? It’s all about youth and “living to run and running to live,” existing in the moment, not worrying about paying or how much you owe, “breaking all of the rules that would bend.” But then Mr. Seger has to grow up, doesn’t he? He finds himself “further and further from his home,” “searching for shelter” against that wind he used to love so much. And then, this pivotal verse:

 

Well those drifters days are past me now
I've got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in, what to leave out

 

and it occurs to me that this is just like writing and then, later, editing your work. Right? No worries when you’re writing. Just get the thing out, everyone will tell you. Break rules, don’t worry about it. Lose yourself in that heady wind of creativity.

 

Editing is a bit different, isn’t it? It’s your grown-up self, making some tough decisions. Maybe you have a deadline; maybe you’ve got commitments to yourself, your outline, your intentions. It’s all about deciding what to leave in and especially, what to leave out.

 

It’s been likened to sculpting, to whittling away until you have only the best bits left. Ernest Hemingway famously called this process “The Theory of Omission.” He talked about an iceberg and the underwater, supporting parts that often should remain hidden.

 

In a recent New Yorker, John McPhee put it like this:

 

Be that as it might not be, Ernest Hemingway’s Theory of Omission seems to me to be saying to writers, “Back off. Let the reader do the creating.” To cause a reader to see in her mind’s eye an entire autumnal landscape, for example, a writer needs to deliver only a few words and images—such as corn shocks, pheasants, and an early frost. The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters. The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space. Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost. Give elbow room to the creative reader. In other words, to the extent that this is all about you, leave that out.

 

You can read the rest of the essay here, and it's well worth your while.

 

It was a timely read for me, as I’ve been doing the grown-up work of editing lately. It’s a puzzle of sorts, deciding how much to show and how much to keep close to the vest. From the other side, as a reader, I’m often annoyed when a writer tells too much, doesn’t trust my ability to figure things out, doesn’t allow me the pleasure of filling in certain blanks. That elbow room that McPhee talks about, the “white space.” And that’s, basically, what’s on a page anyway, isn’t it? Some sort of balance between black and white, and it’s our job to make it a balance that feels right.

 

 

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Editing: Time Travel, Telekinesis and Leaning

 

 

I’ve been editing something this week. Not a close, line by line edit; I’ve already done that to this particular thing recently. This was the kind of edit where you try to step back and see it as a whole. Structurally, looking at construction and flow. But you still have to read it, right? For me, the way to do it is to read quickly, with maybe half your attention, not allowing yourself to get sucked into the celebration of a particular word, line or feeling. And at the end, start again at the beginning. Round and round. The effect is not unlike one of those fair rides. (Also, both will make you sick if you do it for too long.)

 

In this dizzying process, I’ve noticed a few things about my characters.

1.      They have the ability to speed up time. The scene starts and they have, perhaps, opened a bottle of wine. A few sentences later, they’re ready for a second glass. There was no talk of gulping or chugging and yet, inexplicably, they’ve finished. I think this happens because the writing of the scene takes so long it seems like they should be done. Either that, or writing makes you want to drink.

 

2.      They can telekinetically move objects through space. One of my characters took her sweater off when she arrived at a house party, then had the sweater later, then somehow lost it again by the end of the night and the host had to retrieve it. Why she was so obsessed with that stupid sweater is another whole issue.

 

3.       They say “Oh” a lot. And “well,” and “all right” (although I still think it should be “alright”). Don’t get me wrong—I think real people say these things in conversation all the time (also: “okay,” “you know,” and “literally,”) but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to see them in a book.

 

4.      They lean a lot. This is usually when they’re talking to someone. They lean on countertops and across tables to make a point. They lean against walls and cars, and sometimes, they lean into another person when they’re feeling romantic. I started to wonder about all of this leaning, and whether I had a bunch of fatigued characters on my hands.

 

To be honest, I felt myself wanting to lean against something by the time I was finished. It’s exhausting, trying to get these people in line. And now that I’m done, I feel like you do after that spinning ride at the fair—exhilarated, disoriented, and ready for a corn dog.

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