Can you get it just right the first time? Colm Toibin and John McPhee reflect on the editing process

The reason it can take me so long to write a single sentence is because I care so much, even in the very first draft, about that single sentence.

This, many might say, is a writerly handicap. Just get the story down, they say. Return to it later, they say. Trust the process.

I do return, later. I do write over that sentence, away from that sentence, disappointed with that sentence. But every single time I write a sentence, or rewrite it, or reclaim it from the trash can, I am hoping for nothing less than sentence that is excellently good.

Writing well, every time, is an eternal hope of mine. I have not cracked that egg.

(Even at the very end of the process, when the book is in galleys, I discover sentences that don't work. Or, an editor with a keen eye questions me about passages that had long seemed set in stone. This just happened, in fact, with THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU. We were in galleys. We thought (after finding several troublesome galley matters) that we were done. But Taylor Norman, reading the book with fresh eyes, stopped, thought, and asked: Do you want your "really" here? Is that double "rappel" intentional? Can't we relax her speech on this page? What do you mean, the wind is incidental? Can she call her mother "Mom"? Look. I wrote this book. I'd read it dozens of times. And I didn't see this stuff. It's an ongoing process, refining one's work. And I suspect we're never really done.)

Over the last 24 hours I've read two favorite writers—novelist Colm Toibin and nonfiction genius John McPhee—on the art of getting it right the first time, and then looking again. I share their perspectives here. I learn from both.

Here Hope Whitmore interviews Colm Toibin for the Barnes and Noble Review on, among other things, process:

BNR: I’m interested in your writing process, because much of the power, particularly in Nora, comes from what isn’t said. There is a lot of inference — with her relationship with her mother — for instance. So I was wondering how you refined this, what is your editing process like?
CT: Oh, there’s no editing process. I mean, you just write down what’s needed — what you think is needed. And while I may change words, or pluck things, I mean not much. There’s no actual editing process.
BNR: So you don’t write then cut?
CT: No, you see, that won’t work, because if you don’t get it down right the first time, I mean — it doesn’t mean you don’t have to do editing or re-reading, re-writing, but not editing; meaning I’ll write this long and later on I’ll make it short, that won’t work. That won’t work.
I mean, well, there are writers who do drafts, knowing there will be later drafts, and that works for them, but I don’t do that. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be later drafts, but I write as though I will never get another chance.

Now here is John McPhee in a New Yorker piece called" Omission: Choosing what to leave out." He too is talking about the importance of selection, in the first paragraph. In the second (non-contiguous) paragraph, he is reflecting on greening, a process he teaches his students:

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way....

Green 4 does not mean lop off four lines at the bottom, I tell them. The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed. Easier with some writers than with others. It’s as if you were removing freight cars here and there in order to shorten a train—or pruning bits and pieces of a plant for reasons of aesthetics or plant pathology, not to mention size. Do not do violence to the author’s tone, manner, nature, style, thumbprint. Measure cumulatively the fragments you remove and see how many lines would be gone if the prose were reformatted. If you kill a widow, you pick up a whole line.

Toibin and McPhee—two writers working two genres—are, in different ways, talking about the same thing: caring. There's a discipline to writing that may not seem so glamorous. There's more to this than just concocting story or throwing out an inventive phrase. We select, we refine, we work to get it right. Perfection may be out of reach. But we're lost when our commitment fades.

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Where does the short story take you?

The New York Times Book Review has been doing a lot of things right lately—like, for example, giving my friend Robb Forman Dew's Being Polite to Hitler a stellar review—and I'm intrigued this weekend by the trio of short-story collection reviews that have been grouped under the heading "Small Moments."  Here the new collections by Colm Toibin, Charles Baxter, and Edith Pearlman all get their due in essays penned by Francine Prose, Joyce Carol Oates, and Roxana Robinson, respectively.  I particularly love the juxtaposition of these two opening grafs, the first by Prose and the second by Oates:

Why does the short story lend itself so naturally to the muted but still shattering sentiments of yearning, nostalgia and regret? How many William Trevor tales focus on the moment when a heart is broken or at least badly chipped? Though Mavis Gallant’s work bristles with barbed wit and trenchant social observation, her most moving stories often pivot on romantic ruptures and repressed attraction. (This is Prose, who then goes on to note the exceptions to the rule while returning to her theme that the "short story has the power to summon, like a genie from a bottle, the ghost of lost happiness and missed chances.")

Reflecting our dazzlingly diverse culture, the contemporary American short story is virtually impossible to define. Where once the “well crafted” short story in the revered tradition of Henry James, Anton Chekhov and James Joyce was the predominant literary model — an essentially realist tradition, subtle in construction and inward rather than dramatic — now the more typical story is likely to be a first-person narration, or monologue: more akin to nonliterary sources like stand-up comedy, performance art, movies and rap music and blogs. Such prose pieces showcase distinctive “voices” as if fictional characters, long restrained by the highly polished language of their creators, have broken free to speak directly and sometimes aggressively to the reader — as in boldly vernacular stories by Junot Díaz, Chuck Palahniuk, Edwidge Danticat, George Saunders, John Edgar Wideman, Denis Johnson and T. C. Boyle, among others. (Yet Edgar Allan Poe, as long ago as 1843, brilliantly gave voice to the manic and utterly convincing murderer of “The Tell-Tale Heart” — perhaps genius is always our contemporary.) (This would be Oates)

What, I wonder, do you expect when you read a contemporary short story?  Where do you expect it to take you, and by what means?  Where do you hope it will leave you? Who is, in your opinion, the best practitioner of the short story today?
 

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Looking for Home in Colm Toibin's Brooklyn

I didn't buy Colm Toibin's Brooklyn because it was on the Newsweek list. I didn't buy it because others were speaking of it, though that always helps. I bought it because Toibin can be a transporting writer, and I needed to be taken somewhere.

Brooklyn took me somewhere. Oh, it did. It's a straightforward-seeming story that is anything but—a chronologically clear progression that hardly dawdles for flashbacks, that doesn't go in for psychowonder, that doesn't delight itself with literary pyrotechnics, that doesn't foot the bottom of the page with a rash of clever footnotes. Brooklyn is a story. It brings us Eilis Lacey, an Irish girl of no great beauty, who finds herself in Brooklyn, New York, following the behind-the-scenes maneuvers of her gracious sister, Rose.

Eilis isn't sure she should be in Brooklyn. Not sure she is the sister who should have been given this chance, in these post-World War II years, for this strange new lease on life. Not sure she'll survive the early homesickness and loss, and yet she does—taking a job, enrolling in night courses, allowing herself to be cared for by a priest and a nosy landlord, and falling—she thinks—in love until she imagines a future in a foreign country with a light-skinned Italian man.

Tragedy calls her back home, to Ireland. Choices must be made.

How brilliantly Toibin arranges Eilis on the page. She is sturdy, reticent, sometimes prickly, profoundly reliable, curious, insatiable, thinking big thoughts and keeping them to herself. She has ambitions, but most wouldn't know it. She has desires; they are at times in conflict with what she knows to be kind or right. She has, she suspects, a dark center. She envies those who live within clarity and light.

I loved Eilis. I know her. I loved the decisions Toibin made with this book. I loved how he allowed a simple story to build toward high, breathless tension. There are no crimes here. There is no violence. There is only what happens when a good woman in an odd circumstance is faced with possibilities and cannot bring herself to choose (to go through one door, to close another) until it is nearly too late.

Or is it too late? For Eilis will always wonder, I think, about the path from which she turns.

Read Brooklyn.

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This is Me (and the books I should be reading)

The books are stacking taller and taller about my tiny house—beckoning, desired, and unread. No One You Know (Michelle Richmond), which I won from Presenting Lenore, who lists it as a favorite book. Halfway House (Katharine Noel) and Home Schooling (Carol Windley)—gifts from a certain editor at Grove. John the Baptizer, by Brooks Hansen, a long-time friend and an Alane Mason author, Alane being my first editor. The Language of Things (Deyan Sudjic), also an Alane book, and The Little Strangers (Sarah Waters), because I adored Waters' The Night Watch and because I trust the independent film producer who suggested that I add Strangers to my list. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery), because everyone is talking about it. Brooklyn (Colm Toibin) and Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann), because they are books by two of my favorite living writers.

I have been out, I have been dancing, I have been taking photographs, I have been Body Pumping and Zumba-ing and walking the streets of Philadelphia and running this business of mine. I have not been reading, and I have barely been writing, and I've gotten that ache in my bones.

It is 6:40 AM, a Sunday.

Today I read.

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First-person Intimate

These instructive thoughts from Colm Toibin, in his New York Times Magazine (5/3/09) profile. The author of The Blackwater Lightship (one of my favorite books) and, newly, Brooklyn (on my list) avoids, he says, describing his protagonists, and this is why: "If you describe them physically, you actually remove them from the reader, you distance them. By not describing them, you begin to make their perception so intimately involved with the reader's perceptions that it allows the reader to enter into their spirit and become them. It's first-person intimate rather than first-person singular."

My deep thanks to the adorable Steph Bowe of heyteeanager.blogspot for her interview with me this morning.

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